Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I had a GM explicitly tell me to post about the scam once a good while ago, when I fell for it after playing for a week or so and submitted a report thinking that it was a coding bug (for the buy order not to go through).

He made it pretty clear that he thought it was an abnormal scam and that it should not be endorsed like other scams, due to its illogicalness and difficulty to detect.

Although he didn't explicitly comment on the current thoughts of the devs, asking me to post about it to change their minds and the way he asked it made it seem pretty likely that they are either ambivalent and haven't thought about it much either way (thus publicity might sway them), or there are one or two devs that agree, or something like that. Certainly didn't act like it was a lost cause.

That is just a GM though, for whatever it is worth.




The problem is how it is implemented. There is at least one painfully simple fix, that would squash the scam (or at least make it much more difficult), and yet not cause any harm or inconvenience to people who use margin trading for its intended purposes:

All you have to do is require a player to have at least enough isk in their wallet to cover the entire cost of their ONE largest buy order. If and when their isk falls below that amount, that largest buy order is auto-canceled, and their wallet is compared to the next largest order. If it can't cover that, then that one is also auto-canceled, etc.

This stops the scam, because any one given buy order is guaranteed to go through as long as it is still actually visible on the market. The only way the scam would continue to work would be if the scammer sat there and watched until somebody bought the goods, then manually removed the bait. Which almost nobody would do (usually it is a passive thing with bait set out for days at a time)

Yet at the same time, normal margin traders are unaffected. If you are margin trading legitimately, you should ALREADY have enough money in your wallet to cover your largest buy order. If not, then why do you have that order posted? It's just going to get canceled anyway when somebody tries to activate it. So there would be no point. Thus, this would just be hard-coding something that all non-scamming margin traders should already do on their own.

This solution also does not provide any extra intel to competitors or anything like that that a legit trader might object to.

Margin trading is fine as it is.
It helps legit traders manage a large amount of items without needing absurd amounts of isk to cover ALL buy orders, which are never going to go through before someone outbids you anyway.
It also helps scammers liberate ISK from greedy people who dont deserver to have that ISK in the first place.

This is a problem though not in the way the Op says.
The problem is the lack of consequences for the scams, since they are always station alts, so never undock, so you can't ever exact any kind of payback on them.
How to solve this, I don't know, but it does go against Eves theory of actions have consequences, since these market scams (& some of the other scams) don't have consequences.

Easy solution.

Dont complete the market order if not enough money is present.

the idea of Margin Trading isnt to be used in scams, its more like a credit to make bigger buissness possible. Maybe if you use the abilitie of margin trading you should pay a loan as well. First to be an additionalmoney sink on the one hand and to be not a free credit for persons with the skill.

I am forced to disagree with you here. There is no damage because of the failed market order. Had the "damaged party" in your scenario not significantly overpaid for the items in question, he could easily sell them to another interested party on the market at a reasonable profit.

Any damages that are incurred, real or imagined, fall squarely on the shoulders of the person who failed to do some basic research to determine if the items they were dealing with are really worth as much as they're paying for it. This simple fact is what makes the scam work - people investing money in something they don't understand and don't take the time to research in the hopes of a quick profit.

And why would you think they're "entitled" to that ISK? They made an investment in a commodity in an attempt to resell it at a profit. Not all investments pay off, and only a fool invests in something without knowing as much as they can about what it's really worth.

You apparently do not even understand how the scam works. Let me explain it to you:

I in this example am the scammer:

Step one - I acquire a ton of.. Scourge heavy missiles, say 3,567,284
Step two - I place these on the market for 10%-40% over priced tot he lowest sell Order.

Step 3 - I then log on another character (which has L5 Margin trading skills) and place a buy order for ... 2,756,892 Scourge heavy missiles. With a minimum buy amount of 2,756,892. At 10%-20% above the current highest "buyer" listed (Top Pane).

Step 4 - I transfer every bit of remaining cash in my wallet to my main character.

How it works:

The victim looks through the market and sees an order buying the 2mil + scourge missiles at a good price and notices he needs all of the quantity to sell at once in order to complete the order.... he goes.. wow thats a lot of missiles, must be an alliance or something....

Then he looks around some more and sees an order priced reasonably selling 3 mil + so he buys the exact 2,756,892 required by the buy order thinking hes about to make a decent profit.

Upon selling the missiles to the order It completes and deletes itself, only he realizes he has no extra money in his wallet and still owns the missiles.

---

Conclusion:

* The Victim just lost all the ISK he bought the missiles with and the scammer now has it.
* The Victim is now stuck with a massive quantity of Missiles which he can only sell back to the market for a 30%-50% loss on what he originally paid for them.

So not only does the victim loose the ISK he paid in, he also Looses any profits he might have made and is forced to only recover about Half of the actual Value of said missiles upon resale.

* The Scammer however is now rolling in the dough and laughing his rich little ass off.

The victim can never prove the Buyer, and the seller are the same person. Retribution is impossible. Especially if the scammer only scams a 5%-10% profit ratio, which is small and not a noticeable amount in the orders and within range of the markets averages in rise and fall.


How do I know all of this? Well, I am an Investor. and I play the market on a regular basis. This in fact does fit the definition of an exploit, as you are taking advantage of a player who can do nothing about it. Yes its his choice to accept the orders, however its also the scammers choice to set up the scam. Just as its the Scammers choice to lure concord to the WH before attacking carebears int he same system who "Chose to Mine there"..

Following this logic, it is indeed an exploit and against the terms of service and Eula. However:

CCP likes the fact that people can get scammed and ripped off and exploited, as long as such are not "Game Breaking" or interfere with their agendas. Just look at Goonswarm and everything they do.

Actually, it is entirely relevant. Had the seller not paid an over-inflated price for the goods, he could easily sell them for a profit to any one of a number of buyers. Remember, in order for this scam to actually work (i.e. the scammer to make any money), the seller has to actually buy the over-priced items the scammer put on the market in the first place. So the act of acquiring the items is absolutely relevant - without that crucial first step, the scam falls apart, and actually ends up costing the scammer money (in the form of brokers fees for the cancelled order), while the seller still has the items to sell to another buy order (or on the market in general).

The scam cannot work correctly UNLESS the seller purchases those items from the scammer in the first place. The fact that the items are over-priced (by a significant amount) should be the first clue that something is very wrong. The fact that someone else is willing to buy them at an even GREATER over-priced amount should be clue number 2. The odd quantities (really, who buys exactly 2,347,897 missiles in one lot?) is clue number 3. That's three things that should send warning flares, IF the seller chose to understand what he was doing, instead of being focused just the two numbers in those two orders.

True, but it is relevant to the scam, since if the seller didn't over-pay for the goods in the first place, they would still be able to move them at a profit, just not as large a profit as they had anticipated.

Also, don't misunderstand, I think margin trading is fine as it is. The real problem is not the skill, or the mechanic, it's the people, as you pointed out.

I can't help but feel that you guys have never done any margin trading scams. There's actually costs associated with it - and people don't always fall for your scam. You got greedy and fell for a scam that preyed upon your greed... wheeeeee.

-Liang

Isn't it such a shocker that he only called up the parts of the EULA/TOS that he thought would benefit his argument the most?