Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Because most games don't have a mechanic similar to Margin Trade. The result is new players often don't comprehend that trades may fail do to insufficient funds. A little warning doesn't hurt anyone, and helps to eliminate ignorance (which is a good thing).




I made a more detailed post about this earlier in the thread, and apologize leaving out a key detail in my post: To avoid hurting legitimate margin traders, the "Verify Order" function does NOT verify that you can complete the ENTIRE order! Instead, it verifies you have sufficient funds to complete your minimum purchase. Then it will have absolutely no effect on legit buyers, and the associated fee (1m isk or so) ensures people won't be spamming it on all orders (just fishy ones).

Final note: I regularly trade, and have never fallen for the margin trade scam. I think it is a brilliant use of game mechanics, and honestly think it is fine as is. However, I also think it is a tax on those ignorant of how the margin trade mechanics work, and since most players aren't exposed to the appropriate information until after they have been scammed, I think this desperately needs addressing. The reason for the "Verify Order" suggestion was simply to find a middle ground for all players, which is much more reasonable than CCP's original propositions.

*edit* I also love this idea because it still allows players to fall for margin trade scams! And when they come crying to the forums everyone will ask why they didn't bother to verify the order first.

Apologizes if this is a repeat, I have in no way read every page in this thread. However, here are my ideas:

1) Tweak UI to highlight buy orders with minimum buy quantities above 1.

2) Margin trading is a bad skill. It should be removed from the game or retooled to only affect items up to a reasonable amount.

If you retool I'd say margin trading only comes into account for individual items less than....say 1M. Anything above that requires you to pony up the full amount.

If you remove the skill you still have the problem of stifling those newbie traders. You need a way for other players to give them a loan. Of course the problem is collateral. The only thing the newbie has is game time. Would be interesting to make loans using days of game time as collateral. Let people negotiate the terms freely. 100M loan to be paid back within 30 days + 2M. If not paid back in full by so and so date then 5 days of game time will be deducted and transferred. The UI wouldn't allow someone with 14 days of game time left to accept the loan. Only someone with 35 days or more could accept the terms of the loan. And of course no trial accounts could participate.

EVE has such a great economy. I'd love to make loans to people and if those people defaulted on the loan I want CONCORD to be my own repo-man and confiscate their game time...for a modest fee.

So the market window should be cluttered with highlighted orders because a barely noticeable part of the population is scared of being scammed? How about looking at the minimum buy quantity before you go snapping up stuff to sell to it?



No, it's not a bad skill. It's a misunderstood skill.



Margin Trading isn't really geared toward newbie traders, though. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea. The skill is designed so you can splash out a big order that you don't anticipate being filled all in one shot, and still have the liquid cash available to handle other investments at the same time. This is a trading technique that will most benefit experienced traders with deeper pockets. Newbies with tiny bankrolls are much better off going for faster trades that will give them quicker, more immediate profits. That way they can quickly reinvest and get their bankroll snowballing.

Okay, I've read through until the arguments became repetitive, and here's what i've got.

People that support the current mechanics say that, like in real life, buy orders do not always go through.

People that don't like this method point to the fact that this is the only lie in eve that is supported by the interface, where you cannot obviously tell that one individual is lying to another, or have information on the person you are buying from or selling to immediately available for review.

People also state that they pay taxes on the market, and that cost infers honesty among the market.



On the first reason why people want the machanic to stay in place, besides being scammer themselves, if you own a business, and tell a bunch of other businesses that you are going to buy X product from them, THEN move all your money from the account that should AUTOMATICALLY pay them, I think they call this imbelzelment. Not sure, but I think this practice is considered immoral in a legal setting, ie, illegal.

I would like to also reinforce the point that, unlike every other method of scamming in eve, this method is clearly stated to exist in the market GUI. If someone shouts buying PLEX for 1.2 billion each, you click on the contract, and it's only 1.2 million, it is clearly stated and reitterated in written out words that the price that they are going to pay is 1.2 million.

Also, why are we paying taxes if the interface should be good?

So, here are some solutions:


Market Escrow should be clearly visible on the market screen. There should be a collum with buy orders that states % Escrow. This means, anyone planning to sell to that person can see how much money, exactly, has been put down, so that they can accurately fill those buy orders. This also means that if someone puts an order for 10,000 units of something and only 5% escrow or what not, it is very clear that you should not attempt to fill this order.

All you need to do to make this fair is to make market escrow clearly visible to all players on the buy order section. This does not affect the buy order system as it stands.

So, there is an order that you think may be suspicious, but you want to try and fill it. You go gather the items, and as soon as you try and sell it, the buy order just disappears. you are baffled, you are not a serious trader, just a small time trader looking to make a quick buck. Now you have no idea why this is, you've never messed with the eve trading market before. You are just bewildered and upset over the loss in isk and the mountain of worthless modules on your hands.

Update happens. Now you see that there is a buy order, but that only 5% or 10% or 25% or whatever has been put down to fill that buy order. You now know that, unlike your previous assumptions, you should only buy a % of that buy order to try and fill it. If you do otherwise, you will know it will not sell. You also know that the suspicious buy order that, previously, you thought was legitimate, because it was listed on the market, is actually not going to give you that money.

If you think this small, insignificant change will have no impact on whether people can run the scam or cannot run the scam, I think you are yourself just trying to preserve the ability to scam. This small piece of information, that a buy order for 10,000 units of something, which requires you to sell a minimum of 10,000 units, but only has 5% of the isk ready to pay for those units, is in, in fact, not a worthwhile trade.

if you leave it as it is, it requires every player in eve to realize that the market, despite the assumptions, and lack of knowledge of what the marginal trading skill does, that every buy order is backed by isk, this will continue to be the biggest scam in eve. By simply adding that there is only a marginal amount of isk, in the form of a note on the right side saying either 'Escrow %' or something, with a tool tip on that column stating that this is the % of isk that the buyer has put down to fill this buy order, you have preventing the thousands of ignorant pilots from making this mistake.

Marginal Trading is not a skill that every pilot will read and wonder what it does. In fact, very few will read and know what it does. They will simply use the market, and note that if they place a buy order, that the isk comes out of their wallet, or if they sell something to a buyer, that the isk goes directly into their pocket without any problems.

The only reason this works is because so many pilots don't realize what this skill does. By adding just a smidge of awareness of it's existence, You've made it so that it is impossible to scam people through their own sheer ignorance.

Seriously, not everyone has an alt sitting in Jita training trading skills. Most of us actually play the game.

And yes, I'm very upset that you can say that this is a bad idea when it does absolutely nothing to the mechanics of the game. This changes nothing except to make players more aware that this skill exists. It keeps all the marginal traders happy, and it ruins all the scammers days, for the most part. All by adding 1 more silly column to a spread sheet. And all it does it say how much isk is readily available to fill a buy order in bulk, without giving any information about the buyer.

Again, there is no way to read everything here, so apologies for repeats here.

How would the group feel about the failed buy order mechanic working as follows:

1) Scammer sets up fake buy order.
2) Mark attempts to deliver goods, order fails.

Currently, the game stops here, scammer wins. This is not necessarily bad, however, nearly every other trap in the game can be wiggled out of (except those PLEX contracts in Jita local... there's no fixing stupid. But I digress).

I propose the following result of a failed sale into a buy order (hereafter, a "fail" for short as in RL market parlance). A "fail" should produce an "escrow deficiency" on the part of the buyer, which would have the following results:

a) the buyer's wallet is emptied and placed in escrow to cover the fail, and the deficiency is held as a "debt" to the station's corporation
b) the deficiency also "locks up" the items the seller was attempting to sell (basically "freezing" the transaction).
c) the seller can release buyer from this fail at will. The order, deficiency, and fail goes away, and items are returned to the seller.
d) a buyer with an open deficiency cannot place new orders on the market in any stations of the same corporation for 3 months.

e)... not sure of this one's technically nightmarish complexity, but it'd also be cool if sales proceeds at same-NPC-corp stations were also seized.

TL;DR this would be somewhat like bankruptcy in RL. You can do it once in a long while, but not everyday. Also of note this does nothing to prevent the "minimum quantity" method of scammer from continuing to function as normal, although it would add risk to them - I'm comfortable with the position that, scam complete, the scammer should have to remember to cancel the buy in order to de-risk in that situation.

I think this would still allow what I believe to be a brilliant scam. I just think this gives the mark a chance to fight back in a new and interesting way. Just imagine the mark and scammer, forced to meet and arrive at a "settlement" (awesome pastebins in 5...4...3...).

The solution is simple, IF (Minimum quantity*item price) > escrow money + wallet money then AUTO CANCEL THE ORDER as it is just displaying false information in the market

this solution allows margin trading to keep being used for legitimate reasons but disallows its use to display false information in the market
A scammer setting a buy order for 1000 (minimum quantity of 1000) of ITEM X will not be able to do it
A trader setting a buy order for 1000 (minimum quantity of 1, 50, 100, whatever) of ITEM X will be able to do it as long as he can afford a bundle of minimum quantity

Of course this has to be checked every certain amount of time for all orders

You dont even have to cancel the orders, just DONT DISPLAY them in the market until the buyer can again afford a bundle of minimum quantity, so they dont have to remake the orders every time they run out of money, simple getting more money will get the orders relisted

So, A column that says '% Escrow" would not help anyone?

I see a large order, it looks about 30-40 days old and is set to only purchase a minimum amount of a product. I'm a noob, I go to fill that order. Currently, if it was placed with a % down as escrow and is a scam, the money is no longer on that account, and when i get to station to sell the order, the market checks and sees that there is not enough money. The order cancels itself, and I'm sitting on station with a huge amount of an item like a dumbass.

If there had been a little column that said % Escrow, and it was not 100%, I would not have bothered with the order.

Do you understand what I'm getting at here?

But you've pretty much demonstrated in your comments that you don't have any comprehension of this problem. Nothing you add to this conversation can help anybody.

The fact that, if I create a buy order of a certain quantity then buy a portion of it to recover the escrow is possible seems like an exploit to me- if the % escrow to wallet ratio is kept constant, that'll avoid that particular trick, but scammers will likely compensate by increasing their margins, so that won't 'fix' the scam and how it's used.

The core problem is always going to be the reverse nature of the scam- a buy order isn't guaranteed, so a prospective margin trader is taking risk acquiring goods based on an uncertain offer. In high volume markets, this is far less of a concern as you're playing against the market average at best, but when it comes to high value objects with low volume, it can be difficult to distinguish between real demand and scams, especially to a new face.

The solution is to give the buy order fulfiller a way to 'lock in' a buy order- that is, buy orders have a time span (say, 24h) in which they can be filled. This allows a genuine fulfiller who either has the order or believes that can obtain it to guarantee that doing so results in a sale, while testing that the buyer is genuine by locking in the entire price at that time.

The best way to do this is to right-click a buy order and 'convert to contract'- this takes the money from the escrow/wallet of the buyer, normal contract fees from the seller, and either the seller delivers or the contract fails and is returned to the buy order for free (after all, the buyer has no control over the conversion of their buy orders into contracts) while the seller forfeits their contracting fees.

In the case of a scam or a unfillable buy order, the contract conversion fails and the buy order is cancelled- nobody is left holding a worthless module.

No need to check wallet balances, uses an existing mechanism that should be easily adapted, allows current market traders to carry on as normal, everyone wins except the scammers (sorry!).

If you can biomass characters, then penalizing the "scammer" is pointless.