Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Although I am aware that a game (any game) is somewhat different from real life, still I would like to point out a few discrepancies between what happens in EVE Online and what the whole developed world has considered a norm for decades if not centuries.



I INTRODUCTION

I am talking about the Market of EVE Online, which in my opinion might be significantly improved. Below you will find how I view the current situation as well as my suggestions how to make EVE Online even better.
In fact EVE Market represents an exchange similar to New York Stock Exchange (https://nyse.nyx.com/), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (http://www.cmegroup.com/) and many many others across the globe.
Let's see step by step how it all works if you trade stocks or futures or other financial instruments:
1) a person places an order;
2) the market system looks for an opposite outstanding order to match with;
3a) if the market system finds an opposite outstanding (not yet fulfilled) order with the same or better price a deal happens immediately;
3b) if the market system doesn't find such order as specified in point 3a, the order is placed in the Order Book for everyone to see.
That's exactly how EVE Market works, so the Market system in EVE Online is effectively the same as employed by exchanges around the world.



II ORDER BOOK

Now just in case i'd like to specify what an Order Book is. According to Investopedia it is "a current list of public market or limit orders for a given exchange" (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/orderbookofficial.asp). Simply put it is a total of all outstanding buy orders displayed from above and a total of all outstanding sell orders displayed from the bottom. And again that is exactly what we see in EVE online. The Market window looks almost exactly like an Order Book


III THE SPREAD AND WHAT IS WRONG

The difference between the best buy price and the best sell price is called Spread (i.e. the difference between the cheapest piece placed for sale and the most expensive piece placed for purchase).
1) there is spread
2) it is ENOURMOS
3) why?
4) because price has to be changed by only 0.01 ISK to outbid competitors
The 0.01 ISK I am talking about is called tick and it is also present on Exchanges. Tick is "the minimum upward or downward movement in the price of a security" according to Investopedia (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tick.asp#axzz2EjVGAYr4). On Exchanges expensive instruments generally have larger tick size than cheaper ones and it makes sense. It allows to avoid situations like we currently have in EVE: a bunch of traders change the price of a 100 million ISK worth ship by 0.01 ISK every minute with the price remaining ultimately unchanged after hours if not days of such activities.



IV SUGGESTION

So I suggest employing the world trading experience and introducing a differentiated tick for different instruments just like Exchanges do. My estimate is that tick size of 0.01% off the current price should do the trick.

Example: if there is a Raven selling at 100 000 000 ISK and you want to place a better price you'll have to place an order at 99 999 990 ISK or 10 000 ISK better (100 000 000 * 0.01% = 10 000). Since there are a lot of sellers the price is being changed almost all the time (by 0.01 ISK). It means that if both buyers and seller start changing the price by a material amount the spread would narrow greatly and that means in turn that buyers would buy more and sellers would sell more because a compromise would be reached sooner. I know these are just words so here's an example of my own: I make and I sell Rigs. The cost of producing a Large Core Defence Field Purger II is about 185 000 000 ISK, Jita buy price is 190 000 000, Jita sell price 215 000 000, which means the spread is 25 000 000. Buyers don't buy because it's too expensive, sellers don't sell because they can't make profit. For the 30 minutes I spent in-game competing with my fellow industrialists the price changed marginally 5 times. If it had changed by 0.01% every time it would amount to roughly 100 000 ISK change of price, not some 0.10 ISK. It means 200 000 per hour. And it does make a difference. With introduction of differentiated ticks I would expect the spread to narrow from 25 to about 2-3 million ISK with the price somewhere in between of 185 and 215 million ISK (say 205), both the buyers and the sellers would be satisfied.

Pergaps it's time to move from this 0.01 ISK mastur... self-pleasuring.

Rather, make the min price change dependent on the current price of the item in question.

How can we help implement this idea?

+1

This is needed and as the OP says is exactly how real-world exchanges work.


The 0.1isk game is lame.


+1