Player Features and Ideas Discussion

And what I'm saying, for the billionth time now, is that this information DOESN'T TELL YOU ANYTHING about whether a scam is in play or not. A buy order can have less than 100% in escrow and still be covered by funds in the player's wallet. The primary evidence of the Margin Trading scam, however, is incredibly damning. By this I mean that the prices in question are not at all in standing with the norm (people can use EVE Central to look up global prices for any item in the game), and that the minimum quantity of the order is outside the norm (i.e. is greater than 1 and not for minerals or ammo). Just these two red flags should be enough to say "Nuh-uh, not getting involved with that." If people need an extra column peddling useless info to them, then I believe they are the sort of people who are looking for reasons to fall for the scam, not the sort who are trying to enlighten themselves and avoid scams. I don't see any other way a person could look at existing info of the sort I described above and still be like "Ehhh, I don't know! I just don't have enough information to make a clear decision!" How could somebody be that dense? And let's say it does happen to you once. The healthy take-away from this is that you don't fall for it again. You look for the warning signs, and you turn off that impulse to instantly accept any deal that looks superficially profitable, and inconceivably convenient. If you follow this path, you have now learned an important less about the markets in EVE. Or, you know, you could come crying to the forums about the injustice of it all, and demand for the game to be changed so that the same thing might not happen to anybody else.

This is, by the way, why the Margin Trading scam works. Because people aren't looking for reasons to avoid a potential investment when they consider making it. They're choosing wish-fulfillment as their driving mentality. Hey, there are some items on the market over here, and there's a nice convenient buy order over there for a healthy profit! Don't ruin the buzz by treating the situation with a healthy level of skepticism, right? Go for that immediate satisfaction of thinking you caught onto a deal that nobody else saw. A deal that many would consider "too good to be true," but hell, you know better, don't you?

A rational player would try to learn from falling prey to a situation of this sort. I find utterly pathetic, however, those who REFUSE to learn from it, and instead seek to ruin the game for tons of other people just so they can get vengeance on those who scammed them. These people don't even understand how or why they were scammed. They convince themselves that it wasn't their own fault, that a skill in the game constitutes an "I Win" button, which scammers need only press in order to have ISK removed from one wallet and put into theirs.

How does that even make sense? If the escrow being less than 100% is supposed to be a sign that a scam might be in the works, and a majority of buy orders (which are almost all legitimate by the way) have less than 100% escrow, then the novice player comes to imagine that every buy order is possibly a scam, when that's absolutely not the case. Again, it only adds noise to the equation. You're talking about CCP wasting their time adding a column to the market interface whose only acknowledged existence, as far as you're concerned, is to alert players to the basic fact that a Margin Trading skill exists. In reality, most novice players would look at that column and perceive it as yet another impenetrable thing, like the Donchian Channel overlay on the market graph. And of course, there would be vultures such as yourself waiting in the wings to spread the entirely false interpretation that an order with less than 100% escrow is probably a scam. This would actually spread ignorance, not abate it.

So it's just about education? They have to add an entire new column to the market interface for that alone? Seems like a rather inelegant way to go about it.

And as I've stated many times, it's not the Margin Trading skill that does this to you. It's social engineering pure and simple. The amount in escrow, or even the fact that this is less than 100%, is inconsequential. Knowing this will not help you avoid the scam.

The sad thing about all of this is how the people who so vehemently claim to want to do something about the Margin Trading scam still mostly don't even understand what makes the scam work. They end up, as a result, spreading misinformation, keeping others who could potentially be helped in avoiding the scam ignorant.

But anyway, you keep on thinking that enlightening players about Margin Trading is the main element to helping them avoid the scam. The longer people such as yourself keep believing it's the skill that does it to you, the longer you'll be taken in by it. It's sleight of hand. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is the reckless point of view that allows the Margin Trading scam to continue in the first place. I'm not sure if this is a new trend or whatever, but when I first encountered the markets in EVE, I made sure that I was properly cautious, and didn't make any major moves until I had some reasonable idea what I was getting myself into. Has the average player lost that level of inquisitiveness completely?

Any serious trader in EVE can tell you that it is absolutely not the nature of the market to be "the secure way to do business." There is an inherent risk any time you buy something with the intention of future profit. For any number of reasons, that margin could disappear. The market mechanics never suggest otherwise.



How could you possibly call the Margin Trade scam an "exploit" if you can't even functionally tell the difference between it and an order simply being filled before you got to it? People need to face the fact that the market simply allows orders to exist. It doesn't mark any specific order you see as under obligation to you and you alone. At any time, somebody could remove one of their own buy orders, another player could fill it before you, it could be legitimate and fail because there wasn't enough cash to cover the total minus escrow, or yes, it could be rigged to fail with the help of the Margin Trading skill. At no point is anybody forced to set aside their critical faculties entirely and just "dive in" to a bad deal. You are not obligated to buy overpriced goods just because there's a buy order sitting there ever-so-suspiciously, apparently ready to buy them at an even more overpriced rate.

You have control. The only thing that's being exploited is people's greed and pathetic lack of critical capacity.

And the notion that, because one doesn't want to nerf or remove a skill from the game, or engage in any other meaningless theatrics regarding Margin Trading, he/she must want to "perpetuate" the scam ... well, that's one way of looking at it, I guess. Another way to look at it is that players should always try to take responsibility for the roles they have played in bad things that happen to them, before immediately jumping to the asinine conclusion that they had absolutely no agency, and that what happened to them was inevitable because of the alleged power somebody else possesses, power that must be nerfed into oblivion regardless of who else it affects.

Show me another game with a Frequency Modulation skill. Oh wait, you can't. Boy oh boy, having to learn something about a game you're playing is so onerous and difficult.

How many times have players entered into PVP and not quite understood what happened to them when they were defeated? Plenty of times. What do they do in this situation? Well, they try and learn what happened so they can develop ways to avoid it. They ask other more experienced players how they can improve their ship fittings or technique.

For the Margin Trading whiners, the response couldn't be any more to the contrary. They fall for the scam, and the first thing they do is call for a skill--which, again, isn't even responsible for what happened to them--to be nerfed or even removed entirely from the game. Barring that, they ask for "features" (escrow column, order highlighting, and so on) that only further obscure the problem and muddy up the warning signs to be added to the game, so certain are they that this skill is the functional component of their failure. They never ask anybody what they can do to avoid being scammed in the future--and let's get this out of the way once and for all, there are CLEAR WARNING SIGNS of this scam which could easily be used to avoid it 100% of the time. Instead they seek only their own counsel, determined that whining will be the best course of action, and are surprised when their ignorance pays no dividends. In other words, because a handful of newbies have chosen trial & error as their primary method of risk analysis, every legitimate user of a certain skill must suffer (or alternately, more obscure gobbledygook must be added to the interface they use on a daily basis, helping no one, but nevertheless granting some empty peace of mind to the slobbering scammed super-minority).

The real question is: Why are young PVP'ers consistently willing to blow millions of ISK in a lost fight without complaining that all sorts of combat skills must be changed or eliminated to their own benefit, but newbies "playing the market" are entirely unwilling to view their own losses in the same light?

Cooler heads have prevailed here, I think, and I don't imagine much is going to come of this issue, dev comments from months ago notwithstanding. In any case, this is a feedback thread. If anybody in a position to change things can still be convinced not to bring harm to players who leverage Margin Trading legitimately on a daily basis, I am going to do that.

@ The OP....

Why not combine the two ideas in to one.

If someone has the money, then it will show up as normal. But, if there money drops below what they are asking, then, and ONLY then, will a marker saying that they don't have the money come up. This would solve most of what your asking, bar the UI thing, but I think that could easy be done by just having the market order show up a different color when you click on it. e.g. A good market order is green (as always) and one with not enough cash could be blue, or yellow or something. Also, when this happens, the system would also message the player so they know whats going on with there order.

Now here is a partial solution to the Margin Trading scam that I would actually support.

A lot of the "great deals" that the newbies who fall for this find are from contracts advertised in Jita local and the like. Everybody knows that Jita local is useless for any form of legitimate communication with others, so why not just do away with it? No need to mess with people's skills, clutter up the market interface, or anything of that sort. A rather large avenue by which the Margin Trading scam is propagated could be cut off at its source.

Okay, so let's take two plausible scenarios:

1) I place overpriced bait items on the market, then set up a buy order for them which is rigged to fail, by means of the Margin Trading skill. A player buys the bait items, attempts to sell to my buy order, and it fails.

2) I place a buy order with Margin Trading which I anticipate will fill slowly enough that I'll have enough ISK over time to cover it. Against my expectations, however, somebody comes by and attempts to fill the entire order in one shot, causing the order to fail.

What distinguishes these two scenarios? It's certainly not the use of the Margin Trading skill, as that was part of both orders. In my view, the distinguishing feature is intent (as in, what conclusion did I desire to achieve?) and premeditated placement of overpriced bait on the market.

In other words, we can cancel Margin Trading out of the equation because it's a common feature of both situations. We can't say that one order's failure is bad, but the other's is good. They are, as far as either seller knows, simply just failures. Both happened for exactly the same reason (not enough money in the wallet). The main difference is that only the first seller has cause for anger, because he/she was fooled into buying overpriced things, while the second seller was presumably operating within normal market values, and can just find another buyer for the goods.

Given this reality, where are we to direct our ire? At the Margin Trading skill? At the market interface? I can't see fault in either of those places. The second case failed in the same way as the first, but the second seller isn't angry. The second seller was also looking at the exact same market interface, but isn't angry on that count either.

The key difference is that the first player made a personal error in purchasing the overpriced goods. This is an error that might have been rectified directly on his/her part through basic market research. In the vast majority of Margin Trade scams, it is evident that the scam victim acted rashly, often with non-trivial amounts of ISK, without first having obtained a proper knowledge of the market interface, or of how EVE markets function in general. This is what scam victims need to focus on. They need to stop blaming a skill, or the market interface, or whatever else, for what happened to them. They need to realize that the same exact event (a buy order failing due to lack of funds in wallet to cover it) can happen whether it's the intended outcome or not. What makes all the difference is the seller's purchasing position, and no one is forcing a player to buy anything they don't want to buy. That leaves ultimate responsibility entirely with the "victim."

A final analogy:

If I buy a big, shiny, expensive faction battleship, but am totally ignorant about how to fit it, or about proper techniques and strategies for engaging in PvP with experienced players, and I go out and get blown up ... can I turn around and blame somebody else for not telling me this might be the result? After all, I lost a lot of money, and I didn't know this was going to happen. No other MMO I've ever played functioned in this way, and losses were never permanent. And my opponent had all these weird skills and modules that would let him do things I'd never anticipated could be done.

We would laugh and point at this person, tell him to HTFU, do some research, learn from the multitude of sources that are available for that purpose, and CCP wouldn't pay the slightest bit of attention to his case.

Now, why do we somehow imagine that the story should be different in the case of the Margin Trading scam? Who is EVER entitled to feel protected when they ignorantly purchase something without doing their research, and rely on a single buy order--which could fail or otherwise cease to exist FOR ANY NUMBER OF REASONS, skill-related or not--to make things right in their wallet again? This is always an absurd proposition ... well, except now it's supposed to not be absurd when we're talking about Margin Trading being involved. What is the difference? There is none.

No abuse is happening. That's the thing. And this game is not equivalent to real life. The Margin Trading skill isn't designed to be a 1:1 analogue with reality. It's designed to be a useful skill for traders in EVE Online. Appealing to realism is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of arguments against Margin Trading.

The key difference in the two cases I mentioned is that one seller leaves angry and the other doesn't. If the failures of both orders are exactly the same (i.e. the result of there not being enough ISK to cover), then Margin Trading can't be the cause of that anger. The cause is one's own totally preventable expenditure of ISK on overpriced goods. I can understand why people would want to go ahead and blame a skill, or blame the market interface, but that's deflection, pure and simple. Nobody wants to admit that they made a stupid error, but ultimately, they need to take that responsibility.

I've not once read a case of the Margin Trading scam in which the victim appeared to exercise due caution. No, they see a "great deal," jump on it without a second thought, and rely on a single buy order to fulfill their deepest desire to make a quick killing on the market. As though that order couldn't slip out from under them for any number of reasons. Show me a case where the victim convincingly details all of the due diligence he/she went through to ensure that what appeared to be a good deal actually was a good deal, and I'll yield completely on the Margin Trading issue.

Why? The order will fail when somebody tries to sell to it. If you're not trying to sell overpriced goods (and there's no reason why anybody should be, if they do their research), then there's zero problem. And like you said, the "unreliable market data" thing is negligible. Not to mention the fact that Margin Trading scam buy orders aren't the only thing, or even the primary thing, that creates unreliable market data. You can routinely find certain items on the market in specific places where a person has clearly listed tons of them at huge mark-ups, on the off chance that somebody misreads the price and thinks there's one or two zeroes less than there really are. Mods listed for 100m ISK, rather than 1m, and so on.