Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Right now, there is a fairly straightforward scam that is made possible by the margin trading skill. It is unique among scams in that it can be made to be completely invisible and unavoidable, even for seasoned trading veterans who know all about it. It goes like this, in one incarnation (there are other ways)

1) You find some product with a low amount of global stock but moderate turnover.
2) You buy all of it, and then relist it all in a sell order for some artificially high price.
3) You then move most of your isk to a corp wallet or alternate account.
4) You place bogus buy offers in a nearby system for an even MORE artificially high price. Make sure you have less than the amount of money it would require to cover that transaction in your wallet (using the margin trading skill)
5) Somebody sees the potential for profit, buys your stock, moves it to the other location, and then tries to sell it, but the order cancels automatically since your wallet can't cover it. They are left holding a bunch of inflated stock that they can't sell without taking a loss, and you made however much profit you artificially inflated it by.

The problem with this scam as opposed to other scams is that it can be set up so that it is literally completely invisible and impossible to detect, even if you're looking for it. The person can set up multiple buy or sell orders that differ by 0.01 isk or whatever, to simulate a normal set of goods with multiple healthy-looking buyers and sellers. And since they lose nothing other than their broker's fees on the buying end, they can profit handsomely and still run the scam with a margin as small as 3-5% or so (just anything higher than broker's fees).

Thus, the scam would totally blend in. Same margins as almost all other legitimate transactions, same healthy looking spread of offers, same everything. And it could even be a trusted product that you as the victim have trades just 2 days ago for a reasonable profit successfully.

Personally, I think this is unacceptable and needs some sort of nerf to make it not work. I fully support scams that require the person to be dumb or naive or to take somebody at their word to fall for (for instance, "i'm quitting the game" scams or pyramid schemes, etc.). But the market screen is supposed to be a secure third party brokering system:
1) It is advertised as a secure medium. The trading tutorials say "When you place an order, you'll get that much isk." They DONT say "When you place an order, you roll some dice, and you may or may not get that much isk..."
2) A trusted and secure market is crucial to a healthy game economy. If more people were to do this scam, then trading would become virtually dead, because nobody would be able to make a decent living hauling things, without losing all their profit margins to undetectable scammers every 20th trade.
3) If somebody wants to trade on credit, they should be allowed to riskily do so. But trading on credit should never be crammed down somebody's throat unwillingly and invisibly without them having ANY way of knowing that they are in fact trading on credit.


How to solve this? Well there are only three ways I can think of to fairly solve it, without simply removing the margin trading skill (also an option...).

SOLUTION 1) Simply make it so that any buy order on the market screen that does not have enough escrow to cover it is color coded to indicate this to the trader. E.g., all orders with less than 100% of their list price in escrow show up as orange, or have an icon next to them with an exclamation point or something. This still allows people to place such orders, but it fairly advertises that they are risky investments, that might be bogus or fall through. [bAgain, people have the right to know whether they are trading on credit or not.[/b] Bonus points if the market screen specifically lists how much escrow has been placed on the trade.

SOLUTION 2) Make it so that IF somebody attempts to sell you the item that you placed a buy order for, and IF your wallet + escrow cannot cover the cost, you forfeit all the escrow that you did pay. With maximum margin trading skill, you still have to pay 25% of the escrow, which means that you would lose a lot of money if you tried to run this scam. And it would mean that traders could confidently trust any trading profit with a buy/sell spread of 25% or less (which is almost all trades). Ideally, the forfeited money would go to the person who attempted to fill the buy order. But it could also simply be destroyed forever ("goes to the brokers") if that seems more fair.

SOLUTION 3) Add information about the true dangers of market trading into all of the newbie trading tutorials. Specifically advertise to everybody that you cannot trust the market orders to actually go through. And see how well that affects game sales... (hint: it will go over like a lead balloon). Not telling anybody that this is possible, and also not changing the mechanics to make it visible or cost more than 0.5% broker's fees to run the scam, is to straight up lie to all new players about a "secure" third party broker system that is not actually secure at all. PLAYERS lying to other players is great. CCP lying to new players is not so great.

IRL there are consequences to failing to meet a margin call, I think that failing to make a margin call in-game should cost you skill points.

At least you can learn how to use search button, 3 threads before yours there was whine about very same thing. But reading is hard, right?

As I said in that thread, I never felt for this scam but I know how it works. Does it mean I just won Eve?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding how the market mechanics work. If a person put up an order for 1000 units with a minimum of 1, and didnt have any money in their wallet, and only 25% escrow with margin trading, and you tried to buy all of them, which outcome would happen, mechanistically?:

A) The first item can't be filled, so all 1000 units of order cancel? OR
B) The escrow is pooled, and the seller successfully sells however many units the escrow can pay for (25% of them), then the remaining items are canceled?

Even if B is true, there are at least TWO entirely distinct ways that you can still run the scam just fine, which I will explain in a little bit if that's the case. But can somebody please inform me which of these happens first?

But you can avoid the market trade scam.... If an order has a minimum buy amount greater than 1, it is a suspicious order. Whenever fulfilling a suspicious order, DONT BUY GOOD ABOVE MARKET COST. To determine market cost, do some research and don't just assume what you see on the market is a good price. Markets prices are manipulated ALL THE TIME in eve, so learning to identify when market manipulation is happening is something you should learn to do....

Realize, the only way a market scammer makes money is if you buy overpriced goods from them in a completely, separate and independent transaction. You can take advantage of their market scam by just bringing in enough goods to fulfill the order and selling them for profit while undercutting their sell orders... and wallah, you just screwed over the Margin scammer and made a profit for yourself.... Margin traders are not a problem. The ONLY reason you get scammed is because you take a shortcut to make a quick buck. Don't make shortcuts and you wont' lose out....

Yes, but the scam still works, even with minimum buy orders of 1.

For instance, let's say the original market value for something was 10,000 isk. The scammer buys up all 500 units, and then relists them at 14,000 isk. Then places a buy order for 500 units at 15,000 isk, with a minimum order of 1 (NOT 500). Even if they end up having to pay out the full 25% escrow, they'll still scam you for a net profit. Because they made 2 million from the sale, and then only paid out 1,875,000 in lost escrow. Then they can still sell those 125 units they bought again at 11,000 isk each or whatever the actual normal market price is for 1,375,000. They can even do this immediately, as long as the amount of units in the scam was less than the amount that legitimate buyers wanted at the buy location (the victim will sell all their leftovers to these people, but then there would still be legit. buyers remaining for the scammer to dump their 25% of leftovers onto)

Total scam profit = 2,000,000 - 1,875,000 escrow + 1,375,000 resale of leftovers = 1.5 million isk. If you want to consider the opportunity cost of having sold them legitimately at 11,000, then it comes out to 1 million net, or 200% more profit than they would have gotten by trading the same units non-scammingly.

Definitely still worth doing, and traders who operate under the rule of thumb "don't do any trades with minimum units greater than 1" will still fall victim to it.


Never buying goods above market cost would certainly protect you, but due to scenarios like that above, you don't necessarily have any way of knowing that it's a SUSPICIOUS order, in particular.

So your only protection would be to never buy anything above historical market cost by more than about 30%, no matter what ("suspicious" or not), which would make you lose out on a lot of legitimate deals. Also, it would make you unable to trade safely in any good that has been naturally climbing in value recently, without an even smaller threshold (if it has been rising 10% a day recently, then you have to set your protective threshold at something like 20% instead of 30, ruling out even more products). Slash that threshold yet AGAIN for any product with any amount of daily volatility.

This is a silly constraint to put on all traders purely to avoid posting information about escrow % on the market screen. Such a solution would hurt literally nobody but scammers, and would make trading more sophisticated and interesting anyway.

Margin scams are the easiest of all of them avoid.
If a buy order has a minimum quantity it's a scam and will fail if you try to hit it.
Period.


Second point...
If it sounds too be good to be true, it isn't.


S

Some reasons why I'm against it:

1.) It dumbs down the market game (explained below).

2.) It gives out information on your competitors. I can use the information to estimate how much isk someone has...

3.) It ?might? require significant additional server workload. i.e. To get your percentage, the server would have to total the isk required to fulfill my buy order, subtract the value in escrow, and compare that value to my wallet value. It would need to perform this check every time my wallet changes or every time my escrow account changes. It would need to store this information next to every buy order I have, provide this addition information to your client, for every market buy order within the region, every time you check the market on an item. It might be easy to code (it might not be too), and, more importantly, there is a good chance it will result in a significant increase in overhead, especially in regions like the forge!

4.) The margin trading scam transfers money from the ignorant to the schemers... which is a GOOD THING....

5.) I'd rather the developers spend their time on fixing wardecs, or the POS system, or . . . EvE's market system is very solid at the moment, and fixing margin trading scams is a very low priority as far as I'm concerned.

I know exactly what you want. You want a tool or queue to identify which buy orders have funds backing them up. This way you can insure that a buy order is valid, and essentially eliminate the "no customer wants to buy it at price B" risks you have when buying goods to sell. Somehow, you think that since you don't know if a buy order is legit, we are "Replacing economic savvy and rewards for intelligent choices with dump dice rolling." Frankly, you are wrong.... If you see a buy order for 15k isk.... there is nothing suave about buying those items at 10k isk and delivering them to the buy order.... that just basic buy low, sell high, unintelligent monkey-see-monkey-do activity. If you look at a screen and know you can sell for 15k isk, then you're dumbing down the market system...

On the other hand, if you don't know which buy orders are legit, and which buy orders are illegit, then you actually NEED some economic savvy. A player with economic savvy knows the value of a product they are purchasing, and will know there is something fishy about an 8k isk/unit being sold at 10k / unit next to a buy order of 15k / unit. Frankly, an economically savvy player doesn't fall for the margin trade scam....

Margin trade scams, like the lotto, are a tax on the stupid. You should be happy people actually put them up because:
a.) When you see them, they create economic opportunity for you to exploit at the margin trade scammer's expense.
b.) They drive your monkey-see-monkey-do un-savvy competitors out of business...