Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First off, I agree that something should be done about the margin trading mechanics. Because having market orders fail on an anonymous market for purely technical reasons that don't involve player interactions and are invisible to the potential seller is rather silly and I would say broken.

There's nothing wrong with scamming, but scams should either require live interaction by the scammer or if they don't require interaction and are purely based on automatic game mechanics, they should be visible to a potential victim.

I have proposed the solution about automatically cancelling each single uncovered order before and I still think this is a working solution and leaves the skill useful enough for traders while fixing the problematic issues with the skill. I guess hiding the orders and bringing them back once they're covered again would work too. And it's worth discussing if it would require the whole order or just the minimum amount to be covered. I'm leaning towards the whole order, but I could live with either.

Oh come on, demanding a SP refund for a slightly rebalanced skill? You're here long enough to know that won't happen and you're better than that.

Because it's the only reason (I'm aware of, short of order duration ending) that doesn't require player interaction between the time the order query was done and the time you try to fulfill the order. In other words: it's the only reason which the broker system could've already known by the time it gave you the info, but didn't tell you.

No, the information is not right there. Not only is there no indication whatsoever that buy orders are not guaranteed in the same sense that sell orders are guaranteed, i.e. that they will be valid as long as there is no player interaction with them (or till the order duration is over), but also the information you are probably referring to (I guess market history of the region) can be easily manipulated too to suggest an item is worth more than it actually is by doing fake inter-alt sales. Of course this depends on the item in question and its trade volume. But all this is really slightly besides the point, cause IMO this whole thing is not about getting rid of "the scam".

The fact of the matter is, that even with all the knowledge you could ever have about an item and the market game mechanics, there's simply no way of telling if a buy order is fake or real. Having such a situation on an anonymous market makes no sense and IMO means the system is broken.

The scam isn't at the core of this- getting someone to buy something for more than it's worth is achievable in a great many ways. The scam can be pulled off in a more risky manner with a fully-covered buy order that is cancelled when the sale is made, so while guaranteeing the buy orders partially/fully does incur more risk on behalf of the scammer (and thus may stop the practice almost entirely) at the moment there is 0 risk as the buy order is made impossible to fill at the instant it is created.

The problem is due to statefulness, or a lack of. The buy order only considers the size of your wallet at creation, something that is easily changed after the order is created. The restriction of the creation of a buy order as some multiple of your wallet size thus is meaningless as you can transfer the funds immediately after.

While the escrow idea is attractive, it forces a lot more capital investment into each and every buy order and could be prohibitive to traders in large items- let's say I trade freighters and jump freighters, you're forcing multi-billion escrows on every buy order I make.

However, if someone does randomly completely empty my wallet by selling me 50 Rheas at a price I was willing to pay for them, I'm quite content to have my other buy orders hidden as they can no longer be filled, then revealed again once I've liquidated the Rheas. I don't even mind if the visible volume of my buy order is limited to what I can afford at the time.

The downside is you have to check and potentially update every single buy order associated with a character each time their wallet changes, which may be significant additional server load (sorry CCP programmers, but at least it's Right).

TL;DR the visibility of fillable buy orders is the way to go- must take minimum quantity into account and reduce the 'visible' volume of sell orders, or hide hide them entirely if they're entirely unfillable.

The whole concept of Margin Trading seems ******** to me (but what do I know, Im just a noob). Why would you even make this a game feature in the first place. I know the fanboys will pounce on me for saying this, but why not ditch it entirely -problem solved? (providing there is SP compensation).

Failing that -a "Display Margin Orders" tickbox that is automatically set to off in the market window.



K.S.S.

This is not a problem. There is nothing wrong in manually taking out orders or the scam per se. The issue is automaically failing market transactions that cannot be filled even though they are there.

Calling margin trading non-essential to the game may be a bit short-sighted. I tried to make this point earlier, but some of the discussion has been removed by the forum police. Margin trading allows an individual trader a way to post more buy orders, for more items, than their level of capital would allow without the skill. Multiply that times many traders, and you have a much larger collection of buy orders in the market. Every buy order executed involves two parties, the trader posting the buy order and the player selling to that order. If the margin trading skill suddenly ceased to exist, there would be thousands more items with no buy orders. Thousands of players would be affected by finding their surplus items suddenly harder to liquidate. It is not only traders who benefit from margin trading, and I would not be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It would increase inflation, which is never a good thing -- the more people trade, the more stuff is taxed and the more ISK is sinked out of the economy.

BUY PRICE x MINIMUM BUY QUANTITY > Isk in wallet + the % in escrow.
Seems good.
A guys has 10 orders up each one is minimum one, for simplicity, and each order is for 10isk.
so the minimum amount he would need is: 10 orders * buy price * minimum buy quantity. 10x10x1. Meaning AT LEAST he can fill one of each of his orders. If he happens to have less isk than needed to fill any order the ones he can't fill are maybe like put into stasis until the isk is available and are removed from the market.
Essentially, if you have stuff on the market to sell and to buy you can leverage them, and as things of yours are bought, you are then able to buy, market orders are re initiated automatically when the isk is available to cover 1.
A guy has three orders one at 500 isk, 300 isk, and 150 isk. He has each for 10 to buy. He has 500+300+150 * minimum = 950isk in wallet. When one of his 300 or 500 orders fill then the 500 order can no longer be supported by his wallet and the order goes inactive, then at least he can buy one of each or three of 300 or 6 of the 150 but each "higher demand" order is subsequently put into stasis as the isk no longer becomes available. No more cancelled orders, no more lying. But the skill is still viable and useful for those using it properly. In fact, it might even be more helpful this way, as orders will not just fail out but go on hold until you sell something sexy and get more isk.
Ok, so the scammer who has a buy up for 100isk for 10 and a minimum of 10 requires 100 * 10 isk in pocket to cover, if it's not there then he cannot make the order.
Now lets say you want to sell 50 Dolls and a dude has a buy order up for 50 x 300isk each. You have 50 so you go to fill that order, his minimum is 1. You click sell and check the price, everything looks good, so you sell, but he doesn't have the isk for all, he can only buy three. Well, the other 7 are returned to your hangar, and the three that he could buy are sold.
Seems like it could work, I mean, nothing is fool proof/genius proof but it's a start.

The margin trade scam usually does include "live interaction by the scammer". Generally speaking, they spam local to advertise their scam. But even for the scammers that don't advertise, there is nothing wrong with the orders automatically failing.



Your solution is crap:
-- It hurts legitimate margin traders that have a rapidly changing wallet. Six times in the last week my wallet dipped below the "You need x amount more in your wallet to cover your transactions" level. However, my sales came through before my purchases, and none of my orders "cancelled". No one experienced "failed trades" from my toons. And your change would hit my trade toon pretty hard.
-- It adds an enormous amount of overhead. Suddenly anytime someone's wallet changes, the game must recheck all their buy orders. That's a lot of overhead compared to the current situation.

IMO, there really has been only one acceptable proposal. That's to add a buy order query function that checks the order for available funds. They way it would function:
Right click on order & select "have broker verify funds".
--- This is player driven, making it low overhead
--- It should cost isk, creating a new isk sink.
--- The use of the margin trade skill remains completely intact, leaving it very useful.
--- It would allow you to vet a "margin trade scam" without buying all the margin trade items.



It doesn't matter if a specific buy order will fail or not. You really don't need, nor deserve, to know that! Why should you be privy to this information? If you buy an item to resell... you accept the risks of not being able to sell it for profit. This requires more work than looking at the posted buy orders, and if you can't handle that then find another profession. Your rantings about how buy orders should be guaranteed, or how the market interface is lying to you, is really just entitled bullshit. The interface says there is an offer to buy the item. It is not lying. The mechanics let you know that said buy order may fail if the buyer doesn't have funds. This knowledge needs to be more clairvoyant. When you know this, you can look at trade history (price & volume) and accurately assess the risks of trading in any in-game item. Take the risk or dont.

Seriously, why do you need &/or deserve to have market orders guaranteed?

As a trader who had 1 order failed because of temporal insufficiency of ISK in wallet and had to put it on again like 5 minutes later, I approve this solution. It woudn't damage traders by marking orders somehow as possibly insecured, it wouldn't cancel order for very large volumes or orders of traders who does interstation trade too and it would prevent margin scams effectively.

Yeah well, I don't think legitimate margin traders need to have uncovered orders. I can see how it's a convenient thing, but not a necessary one. I could use your own words: Why do you need &/or deserve to have uncovered market orders?

True, but I don't think that extra load on the market system is problematic. And of course it was suggested by CCP in the OP so I assume they can handle it.

It's an interesting proposal and combined with a changed escrow mechanic where a failed order loses the order's owner 24% of the order's value it could work out fine. The one thing about this solution that rubs me the wrong way is that on a covered order this can be used to get info about the owner's wallet size.

There are a few factual errors in here: Firstly, assessing the legitimacy of a buy order is not "more work", under the current system it's simply impossible. There is no way to tell if a buy order is covered or not.

Secondly, the mechanics don't let you know that a buy order may fail if the buyer doesn't have funds. There is no indication whatsoever in the game that buy orders can fail like this. Maybe the mechanics let you know after it has failed, I'm not sure about that, but they definitely don't let you know in advance.

Now, if you want to call the broker system lying is a matter of opinion and might verge on the philosophical, but I'd say an order that isn't covered does not actually exist and therefore the broker claiming this order exists is lying. Or at the very least being sloppy enough that the broker is not trustworthy enough to broker business.

Because the market is anonymous, so you can't filter out the trustworthy people you want to do business with. This is the reason why we have a neutral broker system in place, so you only need to trust the broker system. Of course this doesn't work when the broker system is lying to you about orders that don't actually exist cause they're not covered.

P.S. Could you tone down your wording a bit? While "entitled bullshit" might be a matter of opinion, I don't see how any of my posts in this thread would possibly qualify as ranting.