Assembly Hall

Here is a idea of how not to get scammed.

Don't deal in weird items, ever, never, ever. If you can't use it or can properly gauge what it is used for, or real value, don't buy it.

in general don't do trading unless you understand what you are doing, Going back to the first point. Also officer mods, well heck if it is a very rare item good luck finding a consistent price to begin with. Any trader worth his sack, will buy with buy orders, and sell with sell orders, and never buy from sell orders, or sell to buy orders if they out to make money.



have a feeling that this scam is considered a problem because of market bots or people behaving like them, just scanning through items, including obscure nonsense items through a program to see the largest gap in selling and buying price. I am pretty sure that is it because no way in hell anyone but someone who is not using a program will find this obscure shitzu.


Legit traders use margin trading, and to lesser extent minimum buy orders, the latter being for commonality that they don't want people selling them in quantity that are not worth their time to dock in a station to pick up.

If you treat all buy orders as possible but not garaunteed, you are much, much less likely to fall for a margin scam. The reason, you then actually look at the value of what you are buying, you look at how well it moves, and you don't buy stupidly overpriced and slowmoving items...

It's pretty simple really...

*edit* There are about 10k threads on this already.... do a forum search before posting next time...

p.s. If you buy an item, you accept the risks you may not be able to sell it for a profit. Just because you misjudged that risk does not mean there is an issue with Margin Trading...

Anyone not bothering to check the market history of an item deserves everything they get.

I brought it up because your post doesn't reference any of them... at least not directly. I have read most of the Nerf Margin Trading Threads, and feel I've contributed positively to many of them.... (although many people probably don't view it as a positive contribution when you shoot down an idea). And while the threads are started by like-minded people, the rebuttals found within are relevant.

So, here's a few questions you need to answer:

1.) Why does it matter if people manipulate the market and market data? People manipulate markets all the time, even without using the margin trading skills. Why is this a bad thing?
--- Note: If your answer is, because it becomes harder for me to distinguish between legit and illegit sales, so what...

2.) How is the Margin Trade Skill itself at fault for the scam? In reality, if I setup a buy order using Margin Trade, yet I can't afford, and you attempt to fulfill it... What exactly is the problems with the way the order fails?
-- Example: It automatically attempts to put the goods I was selling onto the market in the form of a sell order, leaving me with additional brokers fees which I didn't agree to. <-- This is a problem that I think should be addressed.
-- Example: It cancels the order, no goods are bought and sold. <-- So there are no victims here... I see no problems with this.

3.) What is the crux of the scam? It's your willingness to buy overpriced items. If you don't buy goods at an overpriced value, you don't lose money here... Why are you buying goods above their market value? <-- Because you assume you can immediately sell them... Guess what... You were wrong.... You take a risk when you buy goods to resell for profit, and when you can't resell for profit, the person at fault is you.... So why is there any problems here?
^^ You do know, that in RL, companies that buy goods to resell them (like EVERY RETAIL STORE IN EXISTENCE) takes a risk that they won't be able to resell those items for a profit. So what exactly is wrong with our game mechanics reflecting this?

Sorry for wall of text, TL;DR: Margin Trading scam is an exploit, but OP does a poor job finding good arguments for this.

I really dislike this thread cause while I feel that the margin trading scam is an exploit and something should be done about it, the OP mixes so many irrelevant issues into this and IMO uses rather bad arguments to support his opinion.

So first off, I think there are no problems with minimum buy amount, reward/risk of scamming, manipulating the market, required amount of funds for starting a scam/manipulation or any other side issue I might have forgotten that was brought up in this thread.

There is one particular problem with margin trading though and that is the ability to create invalid (by game mechanics!) buy orders on an anonymous(!) market.

There are basically 2 different kinds of scams and IMO they should require different means to identify them:
1. Purely technical scams using only game mechanics, an example would be the minimum buy amount thing described in the OP. These should be 100% identifyable simply by reading the available info. The minimum buy amount scam is identifyable cause the buy order lists the min buy amount. If someone ignores that number it's his own fault.

2. Scams that have a social component or generally require some interaction by the scammer. IMO those don't need to be identifyable just by reading stuff, it is OK that they require suspicion and common sense to be applied by the potential victim because the scammer needs to apply more or less clever interaction to make it work. An example similar to the margin trading scam would be if the scammer sets up orders similar to the margin trading setup, but doesn't use an automated way to make the order fail, but instead deletes the buy order manually after someone bought from the sell order. I'd be completely OK with that because manually retracting orders is a basic feature of Eve's market and people have to consider that possibility.

My problem with the margin trading scam is that it belongs to category 1 (being purely a technical scam using only game mechanics) but the potential victim can't identify it just by reading. You have to apply common sense (and a very specific knowledge of how the margin trading skill works which isn't available ingame) to identify it because technically it all looks legit and there's no way for you to know the wallet balance of the other guy. This would be much less of a problem on a non-anonymous market cause you could just avoid the unreliable trader who had orders failing in the future, on an anonymous market this poses a serious problem IMO. I'd be very surprised if you could find a single payment system in real life that can have automatically failing orders caused by missing funds and that is also anonymous.

Directly manipulating market data ingame would be a very bad thing indeed, but it's not possible AFAIK and I don't think you actually meant that. Manipulating the market as in supply, demand and/or price is completely fine.

By "in reality" do you mean in real life? If so I already said above you probably can't find an anonymous system with automatically failing orders there. The problem with how it fails is that on an anonymous market you can't filter orders based on the reliability of the issuer so you have to be able to trust the reliability of the order itself. And of course there usually went time and/or money into the attempted order fulfillment so there is a loss when it fails, doesn't matter really if the stuff was bought overpriced.

I would argue against this game mechanic just as much if it weren't used for scams. Unreliable invalid orders on an anonymous market are a very bad combination IMO. If there is a standing order (which is not interfered with by the issuer like manually removing/changing it) you should be able to trust that order.

There are several possibilities to fix this issue:
1. Remove the margin trading skill.
It's the easy and clean solution, but the skill is very useful for legit trading, I have it and like it a lot, more dedicated traders probably depend on it much more. I feel it's not an absolutely necessary skill for the game so this solution could be done IMO, but it would be harsh on many players.

2. Make orders come through no matter what and give buy order issuer negative wallet balance.
This would mean the skill couldn't create losses for particular victims, but making people have negative wallet balances opens a whole new ugly can of worms. The problem I see is not so much the restrictions for the players with neg balance because it was their own fault to get there, but since there is no real way to enforce players paying back their "debt to the economy" by going positive balance again, this could be exploited to create ISK.

3. Make sure buy orders are always valid.
This could for example be done by checking the coverage of each individual buy order every time the character's wallet balance gets smaller and remove buy orders that aren't covered anymore. This would still enable players to use margin trading because they don't need to be able to cover all their buy orders combined, but each individual buy order would have to be covered all the time. Personally I'd prefer some solution like this.

cry more..
Margin Trading is pretty much the only way we have in game to buy and sell on credit. Buying and selling on credit is a thing that is real. Every time you buy something and write a check or swipe your credit card you are using your IRL Margin Trading. It's a thing and it's important. The fact that people can set things up so they are offering to buy something, then they swipe their card and go "Oops, declined! Sorry!" doesn't seem like it's even a problem.

You know what one of those schemes looks like now. Don't get caught by the next one.

By the way, it took me a few minutes to write this. You owe me money.

Two points...

A.) I think you are completely missing the target. The technical aspect of a Margin Trade skill is NOT RESPONSIBLE for the margin-trade scam. The technical aspect of the Margin Trade skill allows you to put up a buy order that you can't afford... but it in no way earns you isk (it actually costs you isk). The technical aspect of the Margin Trade mechanics is why you should NOT trust that a buy order will succeed... I have not heard any good arguments why we NEED to TRUST in that buy order, although I'll admit that the reason people fall for this scam is because they do trust that buy order when they should NOT.

B.) Paraphrasing your statement, "The minimum buy amount scam is acceptable because a player only needs to look at the minumum buy amount to identify it," to mean if the data is right in front of you, and all you have to do is take a close look at it to identify a problem, then it's alright. Guess what.... On ANY item in the game, you can look at a lot more than "minimum buy amount". You can pull up its price history for up to a year in a nice graph or table format. It tells you the average buy and sell prices, and how well that item moves... It's all right there, and if you take 60 seconds to look at it, you can spot a margin trade scam very easily. In your words: "if someone ignores those numbers, it is their own fault!!"

Yeah, these scams are head-bashingly obvious. Scams are usually pretty easy to spot. They all have to do with people going "Hey, if I do this wacky thing that's set up in some off-the-wall way for no apparent reason, i'll get rich!" Beware of these things, they aren't there on accident.
I keep trying to get various kids I know to play EVE so that after a few times of them running into things like this they will have learned basic wariness as a survival skill. The scammer did you a favor! There are people who do worse than this outside of EVE every day! The memory of this bit of foolishness, and the memory of everyone pretty much pointing and laughing because you expect the world to take care of you and keep you from getting hurt when you're the one who stuck your hand on the hot burner or whatever will stay with you forever and maybe save you from driving your family into the poorhouse or something someday.

Thanks for your detailed reply, you raised some interesting points.

Both parts of the margin trading scam, the buy order and the sell order, are technical (i.e. only using game mechanics without interaction of the scammer after setting it up).

And guess what too, you can't identify a margin trading scam with certainty by using this, cause as I already mentioned you would need to know the wallet balance of the issuer for this. You can guess that it's a MT scam but you can't know, in other words simply reading the numbers is not enough, you have to interpret them, which might be misleading and which I would like to reserve for scams of the 2nd category where the scammer has to interact.

I don't think so, and we both agree it is fine and not a problem. However I think we might have different definitions of direct market data manipulation, which in my understanding would mean manipulating e.g. the numbers of the market history after they became that data.

That's an interesting example and indeed I haven't thought of it, but at the same time I can't help noticing that this example, while it proves that such things exist in RL, is pretty much making my point. You already mentioned how easily abusable this system is and so the only reason this system might work is because there aren't enough silly school kids abusing it. But this system is clearly not what I would call sound and solid and basing an entire economy (even if it's just Eve's) on it should cause a slight headache.

quote:There are also many, many, many examples of other non-anonymous buy orders that automatically fail too

Yeah, as I mentioned it's only the combination with anonymity that makes it problematic, cause in those RL examples you mentioned the party who experienced a loss can just decide to not make business with the unreliable party again.

While you make a good point here how those typical MT scams can be called out with reasonable certainty when applying common sense to it, this is not something I ever argued. However, it's not so easy anymore if margin trading manipulation were used in more subtle ways (which might already be happening, it's not like we can know), or even just having accidentally failing buy orders if the buy order issuer didn't intend to go below coverage. As I said before, I'm not arguing against MT because it's used for scams but because it is a bad system IMO, which doesn't create major problems only because not enough people are abusing it.

Define 'greedy' in terms of profit margin on an item please.