Market Discussions

It's an effective tactic that takes full advantage of the mechanics of the eve market, specifically in large trade hubs. It is, however, a rather annoying form of competition, akin to debating someone whose only response is "nuh-uh!". With no way to bypass the .01 isk war without devoting a lot of time and attention to market orders (or forfeiting most profits), people that don't like it attempt to take their frustrations out on the people doing it, usually without knowing the identity of those .01 iskers.

So, you'll probably burn in hell, but most people don't believe it exists, so you should be ok.

It´s not bad as such, but done excessively it has the smell of botting on it, which is a loathsome thing....

Na, but it can be a waste of time. You might be selling 500 units of something that eventually someone is going to come and buy 5000 units. There is always someone that feels .01 isk isn't enough of a cut, so they start changing the price by 1k, 10k or more each time.So while you are ensuring you sell FIRST, you are also cutting into your profits each time you reset your price. There are also the taxes and broker fees you keep adding to your overhead.

If you need the isk now then it can be worth it. But you can improve your isk/trade ratio by figuring out the trade volume and if the volume is higher than all the orders below you, the I wouldn't worry about it. Actually, A lot of the time, I post my orders much higher than the bottom of the market. This can backfire, but usually, if I'm willing to wait a few weeks, I end up doubling my profits or more.

When I was starting more serious trading I 0.01 ISKed one competitor for few weeks, every 15 minutes, several hours per day. Then he left.

I wouldn't do that anymore, but if you have time and don't know better tactic, it can be effective.

For buy orders, I think everyone should 0.01 isk, as it leads to better profits for everyone. The only time not to do it, is if you're trying to drive others off an item. The price you have to set to do that depends on what you're doing with the item yourself. Different competitors will have different price points if they're refiners, station traders, or station resellers.

I know it seems like a winning strategy at first, but the sooner you disabuse yourself of it as a viable strategy, the better.

Trading is a long term game; the goal being to get to the point where you can do whatever you want with your game time because you make enormous amounts of isk doing practically nothing.

The sooner you develop long-term sustainable trading strategies, the better off you'll be.

Precisely.

Yeah, and you wipe out your profits. People should embrace the 0.01 isk game with BUY orders. It keeps your expenses lower and gives you more room for profit. When you get upset and raise something by 100k, all you're doing is giving a seller that would have sold it to you at the lower price 100k more for nothing. Even if you later drop the price back down, you've already thrown away countless ISK that could have been used instead for something better.

Those people aren't raising the buy order by 1M isk to "shock off the competition" either ... If you're using them for manufacturing, you'd also want to keep the price down to lead to more profit on the end result. No matter how you want to cut it, the 0.01 isk game works out for everyone but the sellers.

I was actually thinking of posting a thread about a related issue - how do you determine if an item is worth making an aggressive price raise on? I worry that more often going the aggressive route will ruin your profitability with that item in the future more often than it will result in quick sales, but I have no evidence to back this up - just fear for my limited pool of money.