Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How about, "No"?

Read the post I wrote at the end of page 24.

This change would essentially make the skill worthless for all of its legitimate users (this is, by the way, the vast majority of people using the skill). Getting blown up in a T3 is a far more predictable circumstance than losing weeks of skill training because of the vagaries of the market. Furthermore, it's a punishment which doesn't come anywhere close to being on equal ground with the supposed harm to the seller. Yes, I understand that a handful of people get scammed into buying stuff at massively marked-up prices. But the most common situation where a Margin Trading order fails is not because of that scam. It's just because the trader honestly didn't have enough to fill the order, and the seller can just go on and sell to the next guy because he didn't buy the items at an inflated price. So essentially what you're arguing is that the vast majority of Margin Trading users should have to pay an exorbitant price just so a tiny minority might be disinclined to set up failing buy orders. It's a prima facie stupid "solution."

Well, unless you can figure out some way of differentiating between scammers and non-scammers when it comes time for the punishment to be doled out, this change would be punishing loads of legit people. I don't see how anybody could consider your suggestion workable, unless they don't really give a crap about traders in general. I can see how the idea might pick up steam, though, because a lot of people are under the illusion that Margin Trading only exists to allow people to run this scam. It's one of the most boneheaded complaints I routinely see in EVE, and it just won't die because it's largely based on total ignorance and lack of reason.

I agree, many people would love to see it removed, personally I can't imagine getting to where I am now without the 'Fudge Factor' Margin Trading afforded me at the start, and removing it will make a tedious career path even more difficult. The effect of scamming on the market is negligibly minor at best when considering the whole, and the health of the market is in no small part due to the additional Double Virtual currency available through margin trades.

So how do we guarantee a 'Contract to buy' without actually making good on that 'Contract' beforehand? No answer needed just typing (Thinking) out loud.

As I said a page ago, allow a prospective seller to convert the buy order (or a portion of it) into a contract- this subtracts the full amount (not just the escrow) and locks it into the contract, meaning the funds are now guaranteed at the point of contract creation.

Margin scams do affect traders who operate in low-volume niches and there's no reason there can't be valid trade in those niches. The whole insidiousness of the scam is there's no way to tell whether it's genuine or not (if someone wants to pay that much for an officer mod, why not?) ahead of trying to fill it- the fact that the margin is high does indicate that it may be a scam, but does not make it certain.

The reason reason the scam sucks is if you had the module they happen to be using for the scam on hand, you can't scam the scammer- the buy order is entirely false and impossible to fill. The only good solutions to the market doing this is to either a) hide such impossible buy orders, and/or b) allow them to be locked in via contract so a seller can guarantee the buy before they engage in risk.

I concur that low-volume niches are hindered by Margin trade scams, that utilize the same items to complete the scam. If you want to protect these low-volume niche traders, the optimal method to do so is to add a "verify order" function. Right-Click on a buy order, select verify order, and for a 1m isk fee, the "broker" will verify the seller has enough funds to cover the minimum purchase order.

If you are a niche trader, and you want to surprise buttsex margin trade scammers, you'll want to add a "isk % of order currently held in escrow". This allows you to sell the item for however much they have in the escrow account if you can do math.

If you want to help the new player that usually falls for this scam, they need to be educated on the scam in a market tutorial. Essentially, they need to be informed that buy orders are NOT guaranteed to complete, and can automatically fail if someone doesn't have the funds to cover the purchase.

Removing the Margin Trade skill will hurt marketeers. Punishing failed margin trade scammers should be a player activity, not a game mechanic. Add some type of "Agent" that allows you to follow large isk transfers so you know who to extract your revenge upon.

Okay, I'd just like to step in with a few points:

1) Somebody said that serious traders are hurt by the Margin Trading scam, but that is an absolute load of crap. No serious trader is hurt in any significant way by the presence of this scam. Can it potentially throw a wrench into the process of price discovery on less abundant items? Sure, in edge cases mostly. But the point of trading is not for it to be easy, and serious traders know how to detect and ignore noise in their data. They also know that they will be hurt immeasurably more by a nerf to Margin Trading than they are by any of these scams, which only affect people who haven't learned their basic lessons about the reality of trading in EVE.

2) I feel like CCP Rise needs to be taken to task for introducing this notion here that the UI is "lying" to players. No lie is occurring. Not to any greater extent than it would be if I mined a bunch of Veldspar, tried to sell it to a buy order, and somebody else got there before I could. The big difference is that I didn't pay an inflated price for the ore, so selling it to the next buy order won't be any big deal to me, most likely. Players who get caught up in the Margin Trading scam are not pissed off because the order disappeared. They're pissed because they now realize they overspent heavily on a bunch of items that they'll never be able to profit from, much less break even on. If the system never guarantees any individual player exclusive access to an order he/she sees, then the system can't be lying, even by showing an order that has been set up to fail. All the system ever says is, "Hey, there's an order over here." It never guarantees that you will be the one who accesses it, nor does it guarantee that all of the conditions of your situation and the situation of the order are congruent. For most people, when an order set up with Margin Trading fails, it's not a big deal. They can sell to the next guy. You protect yourself by knowing the market, not by nerfing a skill that large numbers of others find useful for totally legitimate, day-to-day operations. For CCP to come out and propagate this notion that the UI is "lying" is, I think, irresponsible, and only fuels the overall irrational following that the "Margin Trading scam" issue has built up around it.

3) Most people don't realize the service that market traders perform on a constant basis in EVE. By finding profit in the margins between buys and sells, we are regularizing prices for those who buy off the markets. We are the reason why you know that item X won't cost Y today and Y*2 tomorrow. If you nerf the Margin Trading skill significantly enough, to the point where we know we either have to splash out all the money for a buy order up-front, or keep it on hand all the time, that's going to hinder our involvement in areas of the market with slower volume movement. Fewer of us will want to be involved, which means less regular prices for retail shoppers, and likely far higher prices overall, since these would become exclusive seller's markets. In other words, the people who complain about Margin Trading--instead of taking responsibility for, and learning from, their own failures, as they should--will only end up hurting themselves and loads of players who've never done them any harm whatsoever.

Response in the quote in bold. Seriously, don't crap on my suggestion in a thread about suggestions made by CCP about what would be the best way to address the issue of this scam.

All I am suggesting is making the fact that escrow exists visible to players in an obvious way. I'm not suggesting changing how the marginal trading skill functions. I'm not suggesting to penalize marginal traders. All I'm suggesting is make it visible so that normal people, 90% of the players in eve, every new player who just starting running lvl 4 missions, etc etc, will not so easily fall for a silly trick that exists in a system that, as taught by any other mmo or game that they have ever played, must be correct simply because it is in the actual UI of the game.


Also, effing forums keeps eating these after typing 2000 characters.

You are welcome

When have I stated that the marginal trading skill is what makes the scam work? Most people that know what escrow is don't have any issues with it. It's the majority of players that don't know that the skill even exists that is the problem. The easiest solution is to give this fact that the skill exists more visibility. Adding one column with a tool tip that says something about or links to marginal trading skills would make the skill visible, and everyone would know it exists.

The suggestion is minimal, does absolutely nothing to how the game mechanics function, and makes falling for any sort of scam relating to the marginal trading skill inexcusable in any way. The column in no way lies or misleads players. It is simply information. Having no information and having information that you don't understand are two different things. One will result in people wanting to gain information, the other results in hundreds of GM requests about people who go to sell things and the order simply dissappears, with them being left with 10,000 random modules.






Just in case you forgot already, There seems to already be a change in the works. Does my idea have less impact or more impact than his second possibility? I think it has more impact on the visibility of the skill, and less impact on how trading occurs. I think it will result in less people making GM petitions regarding this issue, and less people falling for this scam, in general. What do you think? It's not an issue of whether you think this is an issue or not. It's not an issue of whether you think Rise is right to want to change this aspect of eve or not. That is a different discussion. This discussion has a stated premise that something WILL change, and that the change is currently one of two varieties, but they want to take a look at what other possibilities exist. Why don't you try replying to the topic with that premise stated by Rise, instead of calling everyone whiners and ****.