Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I know I listed this as an exploit and in my opinion the way it is abused to create order the buyer has no intention of completing is really bad.

The Market Buy/Sell orders is where players get 99% of the goods they need, and they have learned that through experience when you go to buy you GET and item and when you go to SELL you get isk for items.

This is not a 'stupidity' scam as in not reading the numbers or counting the 0's in a trade this is using the market itself and looks 100% valid and there is infinite transparency to this scam.

Literary as far as i know there is no way to see this until you have acquired the good and try to sell them.

Yes its the game design to cancel the order if not able to be filled. But the scam/buyer looses nothing for this fake buy order.

I don't care how CCP decided to fix this but it need to be fixed. I understand the uses of Margin Trading but there needs to be a penalty for purposely abusing the system. Off the top of my head if the Buyer makes a 1.000 unit order then they need to front the money for 250ish units. Why not instead of canceling the order if the funds are not sufficient for the 1.000 then have the buyer still buy the 250 units then after that cancel the order!

I feel this would improve the eve community. Thanks.

Skydell thanks for the input.

Easy to spot if you know what you are looking for. If no-one told you about it, and it has never happened to you then you have 0 idea and there is no way to find out until it is basically to late.

And I thought the skill did have basic use for traders dealing with large quantities of buy/sell?

I'm just suggesting that it gets modified. :)

Its a scam like any other trying to trick players into buying overpriced items, or selling them at a super low price.

This scam goes as follows.

Buyer sets up 1.000 unit order (for arguments sake 1 mill isk per unit base price) but set want to buy each at 3 mill(1.000 units min).

Buyer then sets up sell orders for 2 mill, so they make 1mill profit on each, on another account.

To a standard player it looks like if you have 1.000 units of X then you get get a great deal. They then buy 1.000 units from elsewhere, or from the scamer's account for 2mill each(expecting to make a 1 mill profit). When they try to complete the Buy order of 1.000 units, the Buyer does not have the isk to pay for it, as it is listed so the order is canceled.

At this point the player now has 1bill worth of X item and either has to sell it all over or complete buy orders of 800K which the scamer may have set up. As the player can try to make his money back slow listing it as a sell order or fast and loose money.

This is all assuming that the player did not buy the product at 2 mill, which the scamer set up as overpriced merchandise to stick to a player. In which case it is near impossible to make up the lost money.

Several points:
1.) Do some research before posting.... this has been brought up many times, and many people have tried to "fix" the problem. However, this problem is NOT easy to fix....

2.) You can spot a "margin scam" by looking at the minimum amount column... If it's greater than 1, it's typically a scam.

3.) The Margin Trader Character has a net loss when the trade fails. They are charged a .75-1% brokers fee. Additionally, you don't lose anything on that trade either. You don't give them anything and they don't get anything.

4.) While you can lose some time and effort, the only way you lose isk in a margin trade scam is if buy goods above their market worth. If you buy goods at or below market value, and the trade fails, you can then sell those goods at or below market value, and no real losses occur.

5.) The only way a Margin Trade Scammer makes ISK is if you buy their overpriced goods. Don't buy overpriced goods... and you won't lose isk.

I can understand the frustration at this.

Is the minimum amount on a buy order vital to the scam? Does anyone else use the minimum amount for genuine trading, and is there a justifiable reason to keep it in the game (balancing the cost of a prolific, hard to detect without experience scam against the benefit of such a feature). Seems to me if you can defeat the scam by taking out minimum amounts and it's an otherwise unused feature- as evidence by the wisdom 'if it has a minimum quantity greater than 1, it's a scam'.

My point is unless this happens to you you WILL NOT KNOW! All other times in eve expect under this 1 circumstance when you use the market you Get what you see.

1. Yes this has been posted, and I was told by a GM to post a sugestion here about this issue becasue it is truely sad.

2. How can you spot something if you dont know what you are looking for?

3. 1% loss is nothing.

4. Whenever you do any marketing in EVE you buy goods where you can make profit, if you buy over to sell for more thats good! that is what trading is!

5. You buy goods when/where you need them. Everyone in EVE has bought overpriced good in 0.0 or lowsec, or for convince at some point in time. This point is mute.

Jessica Danikov thanks :)
And yes Iris Bravemount Im not saying remove it complete, because it can have uses like you said, it just needs to be addressed.

this is not a 'stupidity' scam. please read some points about it. It is transparent, and is not due to a players 'stupidity'

This is Lazy? I have played for what, 2-3 years? Every and i mean every purchase I have made. When you BUY on the market tab you get the number of items you want for the price listed. EVERY time you sell you loose X items and get ISK = to X value.

This is not something that sometimes happens, this is EVERY time on thousand upon thousands of purchases. How do i read the forms looking for something that i did not know existed? Did you know "planet HD 40307g, has at least seven times the mass of Earth"????? It may even host life!

"That was a case with aggro mechanics at start, with trading, missions, lowsec, piracy, corps"
In all of these cases the mechanics work the same, across the board other then Agro, which this normal AI and WH AI. This is far from using the normal basic market function.

So what would be a reasonable fix for you?

A.) Given how money is pulled from escrow, the only manner to limit the Margin Trade scam is to remove the minimum buy amount. This personally wouldn't bother me, but someone complained when I suggested it in another thread and posted a mediocre-but-reasonable reason why they should retain the minimum buy amount.

B.) Perhaps add a Tutorial on common eve scams, how they work, and how they can be spotted/prevented. This should include the station trade window scam, the margin trade scam, and common contract scams.

I'll repeat the most important thing I said in the other thread....

Margin scamming doesn't need to be fixed.... It doesn't harm anyone.... And YOU ARE AT FAULT if you lose isk to a margin trade scammer.

There needs to be two points made very clear in the tutorial, and then it's 100% solved.

A.) Buy orders are NOT guaranteed to be fulfilled. They can fail if the buyer doesn't have enough isk to cover the purchase.

B.) Since buy orders are not guaranteed, there is NEVER a guarantee that you can sell goods above what you bought them for. As such, whenever you buy goods to resell, you are taking a RISK you cannot sell them for a profit.