Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Please train 'forum searching' to I before posting in here. This gets suggested literally every week.

Best solution I have heard from other threads:

Require the margin trader to have enough isk in his wallet at all times to cover the remaining 75% (or whatever was held back with the margin trading skill) of his one largest buy order (if it ever dips below that, all orders larger than the amount you have are auto-canceled).

This would have no affect on legitimate margin traders, because it doesn't give out any extra information about them or their trades, and it's generally already true for them right now. At most would require a couple extra percent from most legitimate traders in "escrow" kept in their wallet, because out of their 30 margin buy and sell orders or whatever, covering 75% of one of them is a small amount. HOWEVER, it makes scamming vastly more annoying/difficult



Alternative solution that is based on information, not any extra money: Simply print "43% of escrow covered" or whatever number it is, in a column on the market screen next to any buy orders that do not have 100% of escrow covered. This is more foolproof, but probably a tiny bit more controversial.

Alternatively, don't fall for the margin trading scam.

Margin Trading is extremely useful and essentially required to run a decent market trading alt to make ISK. I don't scam with it either so I stop putting up orders when my ISK remaining in my wallet is approximately half of the ISK I have left to cover. It has never happened that I log back in and all my orders have been filled in all cases some have been, most have not. The key is that I can float much more ISK than I actually have in order to capitalize on as many orders as possible. People wanting to make any real money off a market alt require the skill and the legitimate uses should not be removed because people can get scammed. Just like you can't outlaw fertilizer because someone can use it to make a bomb meanwhile you're all starving to death because you don't have enough food.

The biggest thing to look at to spot margin trading scams is items that are rarely used and require a minimum quantity greater than 1 to sell to that player. See an 100 expensive spur epsilon implants on the market and a buy order that is greater than the sell price AND the order requires 100 units to fill? It's fake, 100%.

Someone links a contract for 100 talocan stasis inverters and you check the price and the only buy order requires 100, that's a scam too. How lucky do you think you'd be to have someone contracting AND linking 100 of those things at 6 million each when the buy order is 10 million/unit? It's tempting to believe that they contracted it without checking but you'd be a fool to accept it without checking yourself.

If it looks to good to be true, it is. The first time I saw someone link an item in chat saying they wanted to buy it, I looked at the item and the buy order was greater than the outstanding sell orders by about 40% and there was just enough of them on the market to fill the outstanding buy order. I stood to make 400 million instantly and for no effort. It seemed to good to be true so I sat and stared at the screen for about 15 minutes and actually managed to reverse engineer the scam just looking at it. Why this guy would want to buy these items and wasn't interested unless I could provide them in large quantities didn't make sense. I could understand wanting to setup a region wide order for a stupid amount of Tritanium where the minimum quantity is 250000 units because you'd have to do the leg work to pick it up and Tritanium is commonly used and easily sold to someone else in quantities less than 250000 so even if that is a scam it's hardly a good one and you won't have any trouble unloading any Tritanium you have. But when you only need 100 units why would you only accept 100 in station and not accept whatever I might have to give you?

Prior to that incident I had not heard of the margin trading scam but it smelled rotten from the first whiff.

If so, then you should have no objections to the following solution, suggested by multiple people recently:



^ I really cannot think of any reason why any legitimate margin trader would actually object to such a change. Can you? The only good reason to complain about it is "but I want to scam people more easily still!"




Everyone says this, but it will absolutely NOT protect you from margin trading scams. Just the badly made ones.

For example, if you put up an order for 3 units with minimum buy order of 3, and you have margin trading V, then a single item will require more than the 25% escrow you have to put into the order, so you wont end up selling any of them. Ta da! Scam, but no minimum buy order of 1. Your rule ain't good enough for that.

As yet another example, if you set up a trade with more than about 30ish% deviation from market history, then you can also run the scam with ANY minimum buy order, not just 1-3. You will be forced to sell 25% of your stuff, but still make guaranteed scam money on the remaining elbow room. You may say "lol, well don't buy anything 30% off of market history" Well that's nice, but that rules out trading like... 50% of all the items in the game. Anything that sells in low volumes like named modules, etc. usually has routine 100-200% swings in market history with no scamming involved. Just natural fluctuations / lack of data.

So to 100% guarantee avoiding the scam, you have to:
1) Never buy anything with a minimum buy amount of less than 4, regardless of total order size. This includes order size 2, minimum buy order 2, etc. (i.e. you can never trade in rare ship hulls or blueprints or anything with volumes that ever dip below 4 at a time from a single seller)
2) Never buy anything that deviates from market history by more than 30% to resell (good luck doing any trading near Jita or in any named or meta modules or whatnot with inconsistent history graphs)

In other words, don't touch about half the trades in the galaxy... <--- That is not a reasonable response to people for how to avoid a scam. Healthy (for the game) scams are scams that punish people for doing dumb things like not reading the text of their contracts. Not scams that prevent intelligent people from trading vast swaths of the market, for fear of margin scams that are completely indistinguishable from legitimate trades.

i think the best solution is that for any buy order they need at least the amount of isk for 1 time the min amount of items of the buy order

No no no no. You are confusing two very different concepts:

A) One concept is "avoidability." The margin scam is very avoidable. For example, if you just dont trade anything and become a PVPer, you would be avoiding the margin trading scam. Or if you restrict yourself to trading only items with minimum orders of 4 or more and with stable trading histories (avoiding the other half the items in the game that might be scammed).

B) The other concept is "detectability." The ability to be able to look at an individual situation and reliably identify it as a scam or not a scam, if you know what to look for and look carefully enough.

In order for a scam to be a "healthy" scam for the game, it needs to be both avoidable AND detectable. Avoidability by itself (which is the only thing you are arguing) is not good enough. Imagine, for example, that every time you entered a POS, you had a 50% chance of having your entire wallet being transferred to the owner. That would be an "avoidable" game mechanic: simply don't ever visit any POS!

But it would not be healthy for the game, because it would effectively make POSs useless. Due to it not being detectable when you lose the 50% and when you don't, nobody could ever influence their own fate, so they would be forced to simply never dock at a POS, which removes a huge section of gameplay and makes Eve less fun.


The margin trading scam is similar. It is avoidable, yes. But in the process of avoiding it, a responsible trader has to avoid half the entire trading game, for no good game design reason at all, which makes the game less fun and less intelligent. This is because the scam is not fully detectable. There are thousands and thousands of buy and sell orders out there that no matter how smart or how knowledgeable you are, you CANNOT positively identify them as scams or not, because the scam is able to operate within %ages and margins that are normal and common for many many legitimate trades as well.

Which makes it unhealthy for the game, because it automatically punishes ALL traders, no matter what they do. If they avoid the scam entirely, then they are locking themselves out of trading half the legitimate items in the game, which is a huge punishment. And if they decide to chance it, then they are punished at random for nothing more than being occasionally unlucky, and choosing trades that happen to be scams, but which nobody had any way of knowing ahead of time.

Rewarding blind luck over skill and knowledge is simply bad game design. Which is why it needs to be fixed. Slot machines are not as fun as games of skill.



Not sufficient. This doesn't save you from scams with orders that have a total amount of 1-3 (thus, to avoid those, you have to never trade anything with a total order size of 1-3, which is a huge proportion of legitimate trades for things like ships and deadspace/officers modules, blueprints, rare skillbooks, etc.)


That's a nice theory you have there with absolutely no proof or logic to back it up. If I were a margin scammer, I would absolutely make a dozen small scams for 5 million each at the same two hubs. It would catch victimes much more quickly and reliably: the exact people who are following your type of faulty advice. And yet still net me the same profit for only a few minutes of work.


Again, yes, it is easy to check this information and use it to AVOID a scam, but not to DETECT which ones in particular are scams. Which means that you are forced to also always avoid any of the many many legitimate trades with any decent profit to them, that are not scams and that fall under the umbrella of volatile market histories.


It's not about fairness. Everybody has a fair chance to avoid half the market or not. It's about rewarding foolish and lucky people instead of shrewd, intelligent people. that's backwards game design, and makes the profession of trading a dumber and less fun game than it should be.


TL;DR: Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a good thing.

How do you figure?

Right now, if you are legitimately using the margin trading skill to actually trade things on margins, then you should already have at least as much isk in your wallet as 75% of the cost of the most expensive buy order you have out (25% is already in escrow). Otherwise, they're all just going to cancel when people sell you stuff, so what was the point in posting them?

The proposed solution at the start of this thread was to make it so that a buyer must have at least enough isk to cover any one single one of their buy offers at any given time (they auto-cancel if it falls below that).

That would, at worst, require you to have 33% more isk in your wallet, therefore, than you do now. That's at worst. More realistically, you have enough to cover 2-3 of your buy orders, and you wouldn't experience any change at all.


Perhaps, but you can make money off of manipulated goods still. Just because some dude bought everything up and is selling it at monopolistic prices doesn't mean you can't buy them and still sell them to some missioner elsewhere who is willing to simply pay the 30-50% more anyway.

You can't make money off of a scammer, though. So you're still giving up all such legitimate (if risky) deals just to avoid the few scams (which can ruin the profit of a dozen legit deals in one swoop)

The fact that you have to completely avoid all the risky deals, in fact, is precisely WHY the scam dumbs down the trading game. It makes it so that you can only work with watered down, 5% profit mineral hauls and stuff, and can't touch anything interesting or daring.

I have been reading up on the Margin trading and realized that there are two things that can probably help with preventing this:

1) If someone goes to post an order, they must hold the Escrow of at least the minimum order or the normal % (whichever is greater). This means that if someone posts 500 items with a minimum buy of 1, then they need to put of the normal Escrow amount since that would be greater then the value of the one item. If someone puts up 500 items with a minimum buy of 500, then they must put up the Escrow of the 500 items.

2) In combination of the first note would be the idea of any order where the seller does not have the available ISK to handle the full sale of the order then the order should be grayed out, or have a strike-through over the text to show that it is not a valid order. This would mean that if someone posted 500 items and put a minimum buy of 100, and they put up the normal 25% Escrow, once they reached an insufficient Escrow balance to handle the sale of the last 200 (assuming the player had no ISK on hand) it would mark them as Invalid orders as described.

one o f the best solution is from my opinion, the minimum buy for the buy order need to match the escrow they put, example is:

i put buy order in jita 10 mill tritanium @100 isk
example my escrow skills allow me to put 25% from total fund i need, 250 mill isk, so the minimum buy order in my order shall be 2,5 mill trit since my escrow only covering the 25% of my total buy order, it more make sense since legitimate margin trader would put mostly minimum buy order fill