Assembly Hall

Bumping it upto a required 75% escrow still would not add any risk to margin trading.
Id say leave the skill as is, But if the marketeer does not have the full amount of cash when someone goes to sell them the item, they not only dont get the sale, but also lose the 25% escrow they put down.

This wont change anything...

I place a buy order for 2000 units of X at 1m each, and whether I need 10% or 25% or 95% in escrow, as long as I need less than 100% the order gets put on the market as 2000 units of X at 1m each.... and as long as my minimum buy order is 2000 units, when you come along with 2000 units and attempt to sell them to me, I won't have enough funds to cover the transaction. Hence, the order fails, I don't gain any units of X, and you get to keep all 2000 units of X. No one is harmed in this process. Changing it from 25% to 75% would really only hurt legitimate traders, who have billions in both buy and sell orders that they are continually moving.

The margin trading mechanic is not responsible for the success of the scam, it's your greed. The only way to "prevent" it would be to alter the way escrow funds work: A.) You'd need to increase escrow to (at least) match the minimum buy amount. B.) You would need escrow funds to be used LAST (not first as they are now). C.) When a persons wallet doesn't contain enough to cover the buy order, the escrow is used to cover the purchase and the order is cancelled. However, this would require a serious rework of the escrow / market system. Currently, escrow funds are put into one big account, and all buy orders use up escrow funds first, and then use money from your wallet. You have to change this mechanic or you won't "stop" margin scamming. And, frankly, that would be a lot of work to change something that really doesn't need fixing. I'd much rather the dev's focus on rebalancing ships, fixing POS system, fixing sov, tweaking FW, etc, etc, etc.... The market system works very well, even if the 0.01 isk war gets annoying.

*edit* The margin trading scam is sooooo easy to spot: Does the buy order have a minimum quantity greater than 1.... A.) No, its probably not a scam. B.) Yes, its probably a scam. And the only way a margin trader makes funds is if you buy the product from them at some ridiculous price... So, as long as you don't buy overpriced items to re-sell, you'll never get burned!

Supported.

Thankfully I've never been prey to margin trading scams, but they sound frankly ridiculous. This is something that needs to be fixed. All the scams in Eve can be seen and avoided if you pay enough attention and are wary. This is the only exception.

The thing with margin trading thing I see wrong is being able to put down orders for things without affording to pay for the minimum amount you want to buy. The game should run a balance check every x times and cancel all orders that would fail if someone tried to sell stuff to them.

The thing is, that people doing margin trading scams aren't actually hurting anyone with the trade that fails. In that transaction you have the items, you try to sell it to them and the sale fails. You're still left with all your items and you didn't lose any money in the failed transaction. So everything stays the same for you. You have been exploited, but the exploitation happened before the failed trade and no game mechanics were circumvented.

Why is that relevant? It's relevant because it determines what actions are acceptable in treating such a minute problem. Minute because it in no way interferes with the well being of the market system, doesn't steal anything from the person being tricked and is very easy to spot beforehand. Any solution must therefore be equally good for the health of the system and be balanced with the severity of the problem it tries to solve.

That is partly why freezing their wallets or putting the in to negative balance seem like bad solutions. Freezing a wallet is a problem because everything in EVE demands the wallet to fuction. All kinds of small costs and taxes are involved, so you can't play the game without a positive working wallet. It doesn't seem appropriate to stop the other player from playing the game, just because he put up a market order with no losers.

Negative wallet is much worse, since it presumably pays the seller from money, that doesn't actually exist in the game. This is an issue, since it's concievable, that you can make orders, that allow you to print increasing amounts of money from nothing and you wouldn't need other people to do it. It doesn't matter if your wallets are red at that point, since you can buy PLEXs and make new accounts and continue exploiting. In case you didn't know training a trading alt is very fast let alone a character who simply needs margin trading. The trading branch is so fast to fully train, that it doesn't even warrant an attribute respec. I'm sure CCP could crack down on people exploiting such a system, but again it's potentially a gamebreaking solution for an insignificant problem.

I'm not saying there can't be ways to have consequenses for people doing it, but what you suggest as solutions are more damaging to the market and the game, than margin trading could even theoretically be. It's not a problem that must be fixed at all cost or the game can't function. It's an easy to spot scam, that doesn't do any damage to the system or the player falling for it. It's just a bait to get a greedy player to buy some overpriced items, that he can resell to recoup his investment. All I'm saying is that any potential solution to the issue must be appropriate to the nature and severity of the problem.

No, negative wallets can not be ever implemented as a result of player to player transactions. A negative wallet means that ISK is popping out of thin air. A debt only matters when it has consequences. In EVE, where you can simply biomass a character, debt is meaningless.

1) Place a margin trading buy order with your alt for 1b (250M put in escrow, 750M remains).
2) Transfer 750M from alt to main.
3) Fill the order with your main. Main gets the 250M from escrow and 750M from the game. Alt ends up 750M in the negative.
4) Biomass alt.
5) You just summoned 750M ISK into the game.


There is a way to get rid of MT scams while maintaining the intended functionality: If there is not enough money combined in escrow and in the buyer's wallet to pay for the minimum accepted quantity of items in an order, that order is temporarily hidden from the marketplace. It will not be visible in the market window, and the broker will not attempt to fulfill it. Only when the buyer acquires enough money to cover at least the minimum amount, the order is restored.