Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I mean undetectable as in "completely indistinguishable from a legitimate trade."

It's not ALWAYS indistinguishable. Often, greedy people set it up in a way that is blatantly obvious if you know what to look for. But it can potentially be indistinguishable, if the scammer is more skilled and more patient.

For example, if there are three of some rare item for sale in your station for a modest 9% more than the recent market average, and there are three buy orders, in different nearby systems, one for 10% more than average, one for 17% more than average, and one for about average. The item is not very volatile, but at the same time, 10% swings are not unheard of for that item. The minimum buy order for the 3 items in your station is set to 1. Is that a scam?

You have no idea if it's a scam or not. It might be. A scammer could easily profit from that enough to make it worthwhile, depending. But then again, it could just be an item that somebody legitimately wants at the moment slightly more than people normally want that item for. I buy **** for 20% more than market all the time. Hell sometimes even 200% more if i'm especially lazy.

If you go for that trade, you are rolling dice, nothing more. There's no skill in rolling dice. There's just luck. And luck is less fun than skill.



ANOTHER example, this time totally different:

There's 10,000 units of item for sale in your station. The item is not so common that everybody deals in it, but it's not at all "Rare" either. For instance, perhaps some sort of faction ammunition, in an out of the way region. The minimum buy order is 1. The item in question is especially volatile, and recent history has it spiking and crashing several times in the last couple of months, sometimes suddenly. Currently, it is selling for 40% more than the 5 day average. However, you can see that this has happened before, and that it was a real shift in the past. Some other station in another region is buying the stuff for 60% more than the 5 day average.

Is that a scam? Again, you have no idea. It is quite possible for a margin scammer to make money off of a situation like this, even though the minimum buy order is 1. Yet it is also quite possible this is a legit trade. I make trades like this often, and they turn out to be legit.

Again, you're rolling the dice here, because no amount of knowledge or skill will tell you for sure if that's a scam or not.


Your simplistic set of rules:

would not save you from either of these potential scams, if they were in fact scams.

Sure, this particular skill does make it easier, but increasing the damage on T1 ships also makes it easier to suicide gank. Is this a problem? Would you thus also vote for T1 cruisers to be removed, because CCP is giving us tools to grief you?

The problem lies not within the skill itself. Players might as well be putting contracts up, and regular buy orders, and cancel them as soon as the contract gets completed. So the idea about the skill is pointless.

As for the identity/retribution part... well. Just use the name of the contractor who sold you these items in the first place. Those are the same people who put up the margin buy orders for the same items. Either you haven't thought this through clearly, or already realized one important thing:

People who scam use alts. People who do trading/contract/market scams most definitely use alts. And more to the points: these alts never undock. I'm really not sure what you are trying to accomplish, other than venting steam because you apparently got margin trading scammed, and did not bother to check price histories and assess the value yourself.

If you let a single player tell you how much an item is - be it verbally in a chat, or indirectly in the market window - and take his word for it, you deserve to be scammed.

The main problem I have with the MT scam, is that it requires someone to perform a certain specific set of actions, in order to cause the market to fail. It's a really iffy grey area, and there's past history with CCP not liking that sort of thing. If you're aware of the "tracking exploit", it falls in the same book to me. Players perform a specific set of actions to cause the system to fail, for their benefit. To continue the analogy, there's no reason anyone should die from people using the tracking exploit, because it's really obvious if you see someone using it, so you can just avoid them.

The easy solution to it already exists in game, just allow a wallet to go negative on margin trades.

That doesn't make much sense. Pretty much everything requires you to perform a specific set of actions to cause something to happen. Sometimes it's to succeed at something and sometimes it's to cause a failure. It's a terrible thing to use to judge things, since it's incapable of making any meaningful demarkation lines between the actions you want to include and the actions you want to exclude. The tracking exploit allowed infinite tracking, which shouldn't be possible in any circumstance. With margin trading you have a market order failing due to insufficient funds, which is exactly what is supposed to happen in such situations. It's a clever use of a working as intended mechanic, which causes issues to people who don't know the proper value of the items they are trading in.

Your easy solution is like most easy solutions. Absolutely god awful and would make the situation much worse then the marging trading scam ever even theoretically could. A negative wallet isn't like having some debt. It's practical incapability to do almost anything in the game and would mean the system creates ISK out of nothing to pay the seller. You could easily manipulate that free payout to be huge, which means infinite free money for anyone who does it. You would be risking breaking the entire game for everyone in order to address a minor inconvenience in the market system.

CCP Isn't going to change anything. This thread is totally dead. Just a bunch of people running in circles.

Luck on who's side? Because if you take your time and check before hand, you don't fall for this. I never have, never will. Simply because I do my homework first, before thinking something is great and I'll make a large profit on it.

But let's face it, luck has no relevance here and is merely an emotional response. But if you insist on saying it is a part of this, then the scammer relies on it far more than the buyer.

Your first example, already involves obvious risky trading from the start. You cannot blame the MT skill, for not getting more information over a longer period, or believing you have enough and simply going for it. Risky trade, is risky trade. A prime example of buyer beware, even without the MT skill.

Not sure what you're going on about in the second example. Too high a price, is too high a price. This scam relies upon you buying something, at an inflated price. If there is a buy order that is even higher, then alarm bells should start ringing. But instead people that fall for it, think it's cash tills they can hear.

Lack of knowledge on the real average price of an item, is NOT the fault of the MT skill. It's the fault of not finding the information. Then there's simply either not having it or accepting you don't have all the facts and going for it anyway.
None of which, are the fault of the MT skill.

The thing that drives this and always will, is peoples greed. People still spam Jita with the double your ISK scams. Why? Because even though they are so obvious, people's greed gets the better of them and they still try it.

But you can identify if these are scams when you understand why the price is varying.... In these cases, you need more metagaming knowledge than you get from the Market history window. Price spikes are caused by shortages of materials, changes in demand, market manipulation, and more... If you don't understand why the price varies on volatile item, then maybe you should stick to buying and selling stuff you do understand. That's my point... You want to buy/sell volatile goods without understanding their volatility. You want to turn making a profit off of the market into a very simple buy-goods low, sell goods higher system. I personally enjoy the nuances and complexities of the EvE market!

Speaking of which, prior to ever hearing of the margin trading scam I reverse engineered it by staring at my screen long enough and learned a few potent indicators in the process.

Was the item linked in local? Yes, first thing that triggered both the initial interest and suspicion.

Are you dealing in an item rarely used? In my case a Talocan Stasis Inverter.

Is there some available for purchase on the market with a price lower than the buy order? Yes.

Possibly the easiest to spot indicator, is the buyer only interested in large quantities of expensive items?

In this case the order was for 100 units with a minimum quantity of 100 units. Asking for a minimum quantity of 500000 units of tritanium on a region wide order makes sense because it cuts down the legwork required to pick it all up and you're not going out of your way to pick up 1 tritanium. If that was a margin trading scam it would be a very poor one as well, as the tritanium is very easily sold to another buyer but requiring 100 units of Talocan Stasis Inverters on a region wide order where the buy price is 40 million looks very suspicious and leads to follow up question.

With Talocan Stasis Inverters being so uncommon why would the buyer not accept whatever I had and insist instead on me filling the full order?

The answer is because the money he has to put up front to place to order would be enough to buy several units and he doesn't want your items just your money from buying the rarely used item from his alt in the first place. I may be slightly off on how the money is removed from the margin trader's wallet but it makes no difference, my reasoning on the the desired outcome still leads me to the correct side of the scam from my perspective.

This was the process my mind went through seeing something too good to be true and using the knowledge I had from my own market alt, though since I hadn't ever used it to scam in this way the scam was not immediately obvious to me (took about 5 mins), which leads me to the fact that my market alt has not ever been used to scam and the margin trading skill greatly amplifies my ability to make money with it. The legitimate uses of margin trading justify it's continued existence regardless of the fact some people will get greedy and bite instantly when presented with the "opportunity" to make XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ISK instantly and for no effort.

Margin trading is a relatively expensive skill with a bit of skills behind it. Throwaway alts for this purpose would be difficult to make, but that would still count as 'printing ISK' if the ISK was created in order to fill the debt. If the player who got their items 'stolen' by margin scams got ISK back when they player paid off the debt it would be workable.

CCP does not gain profits from taxes. They are effectively providing an isk sink to balance inflation by destroying isk.