Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi!

First of all I want to point out that this is not a whine-post, but I do write from experience

I come from PvE and thought I might move into markets as I find the idea fun, now, I bought a few plexes and started dabbling in the market, purchase low, sell high.

Now, one day I came across, and fell for, the infamous (it seems) margin trading scam. I bought a pricey item, and was going to sell it to the highest buy order, only to find the buy order being yanked from the market and I was stuck with a pricey item I couldn't move.

In the help channel they referred me to a margin trading scam and I started checking it out. Now, with the margin trading skill you can reduce the amount of ISK placed in escrow by as much as 75%. While the thought is good, in EVE where most dual-wield (or even more) accounts it opens up a great opportunity for manipulating the market in my eyes.

I take that the whole point of the skill is to bind up as little as possible of your money so you can keep trading and earning money while having some huge long-term orders in the market. The whole problem begins when people transfer all their money (including the 75% that was supposed to pay for the items sold to the buy order) to an alt so that the sales to the buy orders bounce because there is no funds to pay for it, and the buy order gets removed by the system.

In real life, margin trading works like this: You have 10.000 ISK, you want to buy stocks for more than that and you open a margin trading account with your broker giving you, say, 15.000 ISK to buy for in total (borrowing 5.000 ISK). In real life, Margin Trading is actually loaning money from your broker and paying it back with the proceeds of your sales - short term credit if you will, which is very different from the way this works in EVE.

In EVE you can put up a buy order for an item not often seen in the market at a high price, say 1.000.000.000 ISK, you only put 250.000.000 in escrow when having margin trading V. you do have to have 1.000.000.000 in your wallet at the time though. Then you put one of the same item up for sale at, say 900.000.000. Now the purchaser would have get 100.000.000 profit if the item is purchased and then sold back to you. But of course, that doesn't happen, because the seller knows that if the 750.000.000 ISK needed to complete the order is moved out of the wallet and to another alt, there will be no way to complete the order.

First of all - this isn't margin trading, not by real life standards at least, there is no loan involved.

Secondly, I highly doubt this is was intended from CCP when making this skill in the first place - or at least I hope it was not.

Thirdly, I can only speak for myself of course, but I find this seriously off putting regarding playing in the markets, and I really cant see why it should be this way? One thing is not being fast enough and the buy order being filled before I get to sell to it, fair enough, my bad, but as I see it, abusing game mechanics to screw people over should be stopped.

I propose this skill is either removed, this type of behavior is deemed an exploit, the skill is changed profoundly into an actual margin trading system (with loans and so on), or should come with some kind of drawback, say - if you cant fulfill the payment, you will have to pay an x % fine of the total amount you failed to pay.

At present time there is no way of knowing which buy orders in the market are fake and which aren't, which ones will bounce and which wont.

Playing EVE I have always been reminded "don't trust anyone, everyone will screw you over the first chance they get". I have lived by this rule, and have done so successfully, but I did think I could trust the market as is is based on game mechanics, not actual people - boy did I get proven wrong

First off, please don't look to real life as example of how things are or should be. This is a game where scams are actively promoted by CCP.

Next thing is, no. This skill should not be removed for one simple reason. You need to buy the over priced item first, before even attempting to sell it. The fact that you didn't do your home work and took the buy order as a legitimate price check, was not the fault of the skill. It was your fault.

If you want to speculate in the market, you need a certain amount of knowledge. If you go ahead and make an investment without researching for information first, then you only have yourself to blame.

TL:DR. Don't blame this skill, for your poor judgement and investments.

Several Points:

1.) This has been brought up many, many, many, many, many, many, ...., ...., ..., ...., many, many, many, many times... What new thing are you bringing to this discussion with this thread? Did you bother searching or reading up on the other discussions threads on this?

2.) There is no such thing as a guaranteed buy order in EvE... If you keep this in mind when buying/selling goods, you'll never fall for the "Margin Trade Scam". And you can make, lots and lots and lots of iskies...

3.) The Margin Trade skills has nothing to do with why you lost money.... You lost money because you bought an item at an expensive price, and cannot find a buyer for it. You should ask yourself, why did you buy an item at an expensive price?

4.) Now, we all know you looked at a single buy order and used that to estimate the value of an item... And now you know that wasn't very smart of you... So, you should ask yourself... how can I estimate the value of an item so I can have confidence in my ability to buy low - sell high? Hint:
--- Look at the item's sales history: On every item in game, when looking at the market tab, you can look at the sales history (in chart or table format), where it shows you how well items move, and what prices they've historically had... And not some weeklong history, but up to an entire years of data.
--- Understand your product: All products go through ups & downs... A good trader attempts to understand why prices spike and fall... be it shortages of building materials, game changes that make the item in higher demand, convenience, etc...

5.) Does the market research identify all margin trade scams?
--- It's not 100% foolproof, but it gives you an estimate on how risky an item is. If the sales history is volatile, and the sales volumes are low... it's a very risky item to buy/sell for profit (there's greater profit potential, but greater risk). When you understand this, you can decide how much risk you're willing to take.

6.) Is there any cost to Margin Trade Scammers?
--- Yes... margin trade scammer's have to pay brokers fees. Someone can easily disrupt their scam too.... either by undercutting their goods (basically being a margin trade scammer themselves while pushing the risk on the original scammer), or by continually selling items to their margin trade buy order (costing them brokers fees each time).

7.) Is there any recourse you can take against Margin Trade Scammers?
--- Unfortunately no.... but if you go support this thread: Financial Analysis Agents and Market Analysis Agents perhaps CCP can implement some tools that allow you to track where your money went. This will potentially allow you to get vengeance!!!!

I really think they should add some kind of icon or change the color for Buy Orders that use Margin Trading and that does not have enough funds to follow through with the transaction. A Buy Order that cannot be completed should not look the same as a Buy Order that can actually be processed.

In my eyes, the Margin Trading skill is a game mechanic that could be used as a scam because it exploits the fact that 1) it uses the legitimate in-game market system and 2) nobody, let alone honest newer players, can see that that Buy Order will bounce.

This type of thing is not without precedence. EVE developers have and continue to add many tools to help newer players enjoy the game more... Like in the case of contracts: warning messages and pop-up boxes, bold red-colored text to show what I am paying, bold green-colored text to show what I am receiving, and adding the price in actual words "millions" and "billions" to match the numerical price... Why would the Margin Trading skill not receive the same attention? Especially since there have been numerous complaints and more-so because it uses the core system (the market) of EVE (or of any mmorpg for that matter) as a weapon to target novice investors and has zero visual feedback...

People will argue with the same, "oh you were just too greedy" or, "you should have done your research" ... well, then a little color change won't bother you if you were a legitimate market trader. And then people will argue further with something like, "the servers will overload and crash if it needs to check each Buy Order" ... do people seriously think an online 3D intensive game that serves to over 30,000+ international players at any one time with an infrastructure that connects live in-game content to out-of-game tools (API or EVE Gate just to name a couple off the top of my head) cannot implement a few simple "if-then-else" checks on some Buy Orders? Really... sounds like excuses a scammer would try to use...

TLDR: Add some kind of indication (icon or different color) to show that a certain Buy Order uses Margin Trading and/or does not have the funds to complete.

*sound of 2 pennies hitting the table*

These scams are super common, I'd say even more common then the actual usage of the skill in honest situations.
So for me, they should make it do something else and just remove the current functionallity.

Either you have Isk for your orders, or you dont. simple as that.
People can still scam by placing orders in low-sec to try to prey on them as they come to collect and/or sell.

So the scammers will still have plenty of ways to operate, but this is bordeline exploit because it uses ingame functionality in a way that is not intended and is not possible to defend against and identify.

As said above, it is impossible to detect what orders will bounce.
So mid way would be to mark orders which will bounce in red, but I assume that is a much more complex integration then to remove the skill or redesign it.

While this scam is a pain, I can see no game mechanic that can defend against it. It takes no time at all to train a toon to have MT4 and set up a scam bid.

Penalising this toon would be a wasted effort; biomass and repeat.

Showing the bidder as having MT would be a waste of time as I would think a large percentage of traders have the skill; especially station traders.

Showing the bidder lacks the funds would be a serious load on the server. He has, then he hasn't, then he has again. All requiring an update to whomever is watching the market for that item.

Having to borrow the difference from the broker wouldn't work; biomass and repeat.

I have had a bid fail due to lack of funds, but it wasn't a scam; just over-stretched myself. The game can't tell it wasn't a scam.

Allowing customers to see whose trade it is breaches the brokers' client confidentiality. This is not a good thing.

While there are probably a lot more good reasons why this scam can't be stopped by the game itself, I think those reasons suffice.

Then I just deliberately margin trade scam myself, and create free isk from nothing with disposable alt accounts.

The solution to this 'problem,' if you're scared of the margin scam, is to not sell things to buy orders. Set up your own sell orders.

You do realize the whole point of margin trading is, that you don't tie up as much assets when you do trades. Altering it so, that you're going to be forced to tie up even more assets than normal goes against the whole point of the skill. Not to mention using a collateral system would be pretty cumbersome making it even less attractive to use.

The simplest solution is simply to have the market not display an order with insufficient funds to back it up when the player polls the market for info.

That would probably be hellish on the database though.

There is no excuse for this skill to be in game as it is, other than to facilitate scamming. They should change the skill so that it can only be used in Null or Low Sec station orders, as the higher levels of oversight perfomed in the market houses of high sec prohibit this sort of shady marketeering.

This would move higher trader profits out of high sec, giving more life to Low and Null sec, as well as setting up the backbone of the idea that markets in differing areas of space are themselves different.

I think it would also be good to restrict the use of these skills on the corporate level. To use these skills you would have to both be out of high sec, and in a corp that allowed their use. Back that up with the ability to see who owns a Margin order, and what corp he belongs too. That way a trading firm could build a solid rep and use the skill as intended to make more profits, lower sec space would make more profit possible, lower sec space would be the natural home of these sorts of scammers...

I'm sure I'm missing something, but I really don't see much downside here.

If someone sells an item that you can immediately resell (at same or some other station) for big profit - that is 99.9% scam. Delving in market play without researching for possible scam schemes on forums will eventually lead to situation OP is in.
Dont be lazy and greedy, do your home work and you would be able to determine if order is scam or not. Simple as that.