Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I just figured out how to still margin scam with the various order suspension, cancellation, or marking in the market as "unfulfillable" schemes.

1) Set a sell for five of the item some distance from the trade hub. Sufficient that you can expect the Mark to only want to make one trip, getting all five items.

2) Set five buy orders at the hub, each for a slightly different price, each for one unit. At this point the funds in escrow are sufficient to cover one order. Any given order can be covered, just not all five at the same time. So they all look OK.

3) Set another buy order for four items at a low price, using an alt.

3) The Mark buys your five items. He sells one to you, and the other four high priced orders go away. Oops.

4) Mark tries to minimize losses by selling the remaining four items to your alt's low buy.

5) Repeat

There will probably always be some way to work around the rules and generate a margin scam unless the margin trading skill is crippled to the point of being virtually pointless. Unless we give up on margin trading altogether, we can only find a balance between utility and scam-ability.

Though could this particular case be plugged simply by saying that the minimum isk threshold applies to an aggregate of orders for the same item type in the same location, so it can't be worked around by spamming lots of small orders?

It would still allow the potential scammer to spam his bait orders across a number of different stations, but this starts to become more work for the scammer and a less attractive proposition for the potential mark.

Add a new player tutorial entitled "Its always a scam...". Explain in dept and with great detail the various scams that new players will meet during their Eve careers and make a special effort to explain the mechanic behind the margin trading scam.

I don't think anyone will be able to complain then.

Basically repeating what other people have said, this is how I expect the Margin Trading skill to work:

• You have a minimum expected escrow, as defined by the skill (100% on down to 24%)
• When you sell an item, it bills out of your wallet until either your wallet runs out or your escrow amount gets above the minimum required escrow.
• In effect, your escrow is pinned at the %age of your total to cover all your buy orders. If your wallet runs out, it will effectively replenish it by billing your wallet instead of the escrow until it hits the right number. If you're feeling really aggressive, it could eat donations and sales until brought back up to requirements, too.

This won't stop the margin trading scam, but it will make the Margin Trading skill make more sense, IMO.

In order to stop the scam, I would get behind either hiding or cancelling orders where you either can't buy your minimum buy quantity or where you can't buy the entire buy order. I suspect hiding orders would be a lot more work to implement, so unless informed otherwise, I'd vote for cancelling orders where you can't cover the minimum sale unit. This could easily still turn into a massive margin call for a legitimate trader if someone sold a whole ton of stuff into one of their buy orders, but only in cases where they literally couldn't cash any checks anymore. Users will just have to be careful in thin markets to only sell the minimum buy quantity at a time if they suspect the order might turn into a pumpkin.

This is an excellent idea. The tutorial could go over some common scams, and let the player practice scamming an npc

This is basically what I was thinking. The other option instead of displaying actual color changes is to just add a column that contains fillable units, and have it only update when you click on the purchase order. It won't stop the scams that consist of the person selling the item high and forcing the person to make x amount of jumps to fill the purchase order because the person can just dump the isk from the account quickly, but it would still be a solid tool for most people.



Filter option?

Because that'd let people scam CCP out of ISK, by placing humongous margin orders, filling them with an alt, and than being happy and smug over their ill-gotten gains.

Any suggestion that includes cancelling orders is bad. Especially large orders are VERY expensive to set up. If its just taken down by the system it adds a lot of unnecessary overhead.

Also lets say you're buying 20 items of 500m each.
You only have 4.1 billion in your wallet.
You're not expecting all of them to get filled any time soon.
So with the suggestion from OP, once you get 8 orders filled, the remaining 12 get pulled down for no reason

Margin trading is part of EVE. Just like ganking in highsec, afk cloaking, awoxing and other beautiful things that make me tingle below my belt.

I think any solution which requires constantly monitoring the wallet balance of all characters with orders on the market is insane. Wallet balances change often and can fluctuate a lot. It sure as hell would be very annoying if you lost all your orders as you are juggling your ISK between characters / wallet divisions / market orders.

I believe the best solution - if a solution really is needed - would involve making the broker actually do some work. At the moment my broker only requires an escrow when my order is created and once the escrow has run out he'll just sit there and hope I will have ISK to cover the rest of the order. What if the broker said to me "I'm sure you're nice, but this is EVE so I trust no one. I will require you to have in escrow at least enough to cover the minimum buy quantity at all times."

This would mean that once a part of my order is filled and my escrow has dropped, the broker will check if there's enough ISK left in escrow to cover the minimum buy. If there is not, the broker will take ISK from my wallet to top up the escrow to the amount needed to cover the minumum buy. If I don't have enough, the order is cancelled.

Advantages of this system:
- Sellers are guaranteed to be able to sell at least the minimum amount.
- Buyers can still leverage the full 76% of the buy order value, as long as they have ISK coming in faster than the order is filled.
- Wallet balance is only checked after a transaction is made, instead of constantly monitored.

I think adding marketing into the NPE would be most beneficial. Whilst it is covered briefly, the fact that people do not know about how to sort the market (which is the cause of most over priced buys) indicates that there is a need for what for some is the most complicated part of Eve.

As all eve players, whether they like it or not, interact with the market (unless they do all their buying/selling via contracts), it seems that even though only a small % of players are full time traders, there should at least be a proper guide to market stuff.

At present, the Business tutorial is just Industry with slight text changes (or at least last time I did it a few months back), why not make the business tutorial actually about business? With players buyiung from NPC orders during the course of the tutorial (As this is, again, one of the things many players are unaware of), explanations of inter-region trading (getting them to go to the next region to sell to a buy order), margin trading could be covered in a pop-up, although many won't read it, at least it would be there

As I have said on other threads on this topic, the only thing that would change if margin trading were drastically altered would be the margin scammer would be at their keyboard, or waiting for notification of their sell order / contract being filled, then pulling the buy order.

There are some good suggestions on this thread, but, it is difficult to do many of these without affecting the legit use of margin trading. When making new market alts, margin trading is a life-saver when starting out, and less useful as you become more established.

I think that making sure players have the option to actually learn about margin trading is the best way. We have popups for trading in stations, we changed the contract layout so it is in big red and green letters, and people still fall for station trading and contract scams, cancelling buy orders if there is not enough isk in the wallet seems to be a bit....over the top.

My early traders have often had less than is required if all buy orders fill simultaneously...however, the sells make sure that I have never had an order cancelled due to being lack of isk.

It is a very tough situation, which I do not see an easy solution to. At present, there is no way of telling why your order failed..it could be because someone else filled the order while you were rushing to pick it up, or even just got in faster on the click and sell, it could be that the player pulled their order just before you sold to them.

Margin trading scams, at their root, come down to the same thing as contract scams, people think some idiot has placed an insanely high buy order, and then some other idiot is selling stuff incredibly cheap, and that they can get free isk by swapping between them. Are we sure we want to prevent greed in Eve? (Also, omg I cant believe I am arguing for margin scams!)