Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One time I tried to thunk something.

But then something on the floor startled me. And I sneezed and fell over.

I thunk things all the time. It's great for not computing expensive things that you might not need :)

-Liang

Ed: It costs a function call though. That's kinda ******. But, function calls are pretty cheap most of the time.

That depends on the language in question, I think. Function calls in Perl (for example) are very expensive. Not that I'm working in Perl.

-Liang

The funds collected and put into ESCROW were originally a means to protect the market..... It ensures market orders have some value behind them, just like sell orders do.

The Margin Trade skill was designed to increase the utility of your isk. With MT V, you can place 4x as much in buy orders as you could without. If ESCROW was removed from the game, I could put up 100x as much in buy orders with my isk...

I'm pretty sure CCP did not envision the rampant creation of "false" buy orders, but players have certainly found a way to utilize them in unscrupulous ways. There are many examples of the EvE playerbase using game mechanics in innovative yet Machiavellian manners to achieve their in-game goals. Whenever these player activities threaten the game, or create major problems, CCP steps in and fixes it.

So, the question: is using Margin Trade to create false buy orders threatening the game or creating a problem that can't be dealt with?

I personally have NEVER been margin-trade scammed, despite running into it many times. I easily identify them, and I avoid trading items that I consider risky. I research the goods I buy/sell, as in learning where the items come from, what they are used for, and what their price history has been. I then estimate how long it will take me to resell it, and decide if the potential profit/day is worth tying my isk up. I have NO sympathy for people that just look at a contract in local, right click on a fitted item and see it's selling for big bucks in local, and purchase those things way over-priced thinking they are about to make big bucks....

I understand your desire for vengeance... and support the creation of Financial Analysis and Market Analysis agents to find a target worthy of your ire. I also support allowing players to check WHO is placing market buy/sell orders prior to any transactions with them. Both of these options create interesting metagaming options to identify and attack your fellow market PvPers. But I don't support making the market "safe" for the ignorant...

There's no really good reason for you to do so. If you can only cover 60% of your largest order, then why not just make the volume of the order 60% of what it is now and cover all of it?

For all practical purposes, that would have the exact same consequences as what you're doing, and it would allow you to operate successfully within the constraints of the change that I proposed.



Bottom line: nobody gets hurt by requiring margin traders to always have the isk to cover their largest order. Except scammers. Which makes it a perfect solution.


Nor should you. However, if you think the margin trading scam only works in those circumstances, you are wrong.

There are plenty of goods out there that have natural daily or weekly swings of 30-50% of their price. No matter how much you research them, you would have no way of knowing for sure whether the next swing is a natural one, or if it wouldn't have happened again naturally for 2 months, and is just a scammer this time (thus causing you to get stuck tying up your isk for months). You can EASILY make scamming profits at those percentages.

Alternatively, any trade with a total volume of less than 4 can make a scammer a profit at any %age. It could just be 5% above normal. Not exactly "big bucks."



Anyway, you may just respond "but that doesn't actually happen often." And I can't say what proportions of trades are indeed scams or not. Only CCP knows that. But it doesn't really matter. The solution is trivially simple and hurts nobody. Again: require all margin traders to have the isk in their wallet sufficient to cover their one largest buy order. Whether 0.1% of trades are scams or 5%, this solution doesn't cost any legitimate traders anything, so it's worth doing regardless.

Interesting view points


Of course there is a significant difference, sell orders (and afaik sell and buy contracts) have 100% value behind them. And buy orders? Due to MT skill and ESCROW returning to creators of buy order (I don't want to call them buyers any more ), effectively no guaranteed value (to the market)


That is correct, although I do not see why that would be bad (or good)


Given that it creates general distrust towards the market, it threatens the game, but probably not sufficient to kill it. However MT scamming seems to be focused against new/young players and they are usually supposed to the future.


Given people creativity neither your Agents nor the open order info will serve their purpose for very long. At first glance, in space commodities transfers and disposable alts will break the money trail very easy.

We don't need all buy orders 100% guaranteed. For the most part, the only market orders that are "fake" are for slow moving expensive items or for large "minimum quantity" items. 95-99% of all market buy orders are legit...



I think there are two experiences most eve players should experience very early:
A.) Losing a ship due to a gank...
B.) Getting scammed...

These tow experiences really drive home the dystopic universe we live in, and hopefully when they take hits as a young character the hits aren't sooo terribad! Like you said, they are our future... and I want our future to be self-reliant, not afraid of losses, and able to rebound when something bad happens to them. I don't want whiny nooblets that expect CCP to protect them and coddle them!!!!



Please understand, I don't want a foolproof trace method. There should be some loopholes or "tricks of the trade" to launder money.... The truth is, most people won't bother... and then you can find out who the "scammer" plays, and attack. Additionally, if you can get character info prior to buying/selling, it'll be a week or less before someone makes a website of "known margin scammers".

On the 0.0 thing, I am all for that, Not because of Carebearing, quite the opposite actually, I am for it because it will allow the smaller corps and Alliance to finally get into 0.0 and claim Sov, and possibly even become a threat to the larger 0.0 Alliances.

Well that's nice, but I don't recall ever saying that margin trading should be removed.

I suggested that margin trading remain exactly as is, except for requiring you to have enough isk in your wallet to cover the outstanding escrow on whichever your ONE single largest buy order is at all times. Which would have absolutely no effect on anybody who margin trades for the intended reasons (putting your isk to greater use). And thus does not threaten intended game balance.

(Also, side point: you're blatantly contradicting yourself. First you say that 30-50% trades are inherently risky, then one paragraph later saying that removing the scam would make these trades not at all risky, which implies they aren't inherently risky at all...)

Yup.

The point of margin trading is to let you perform more trading overall than you have the isk for at any one moment.

Making the change I suggested would do nothing to undermine that legitimate usage of margin trading. However, it would, as you say, allow traders to be confident in posted market orders, by eliminating a potentially undetectable scam. This would simply make trading in Eve that much less of a roll of the dice, and that much more of a game of skill.

And games are always more fun when they rely on skill over luck. That's why chess has survived for hundreds of years, and why nobody over the age of 5 plays chutes and ladders.

Why are you so afraid of a world where your success in the market is based on the choices you make, instead of the coins you flip?