Crime & Punishment

Actually, you are lucky you could only afford one. If you had purchased three and tried to sell all of them to him his buy order would have been cancelled as it was set up using the margin trading skill and backed by only a proportion of the total value in escrow. If he didn't have enough in his wallet to complete the purchase the transaction would fail and his order would disappear entirely, leaving you with three of the overpriced items. This is known as 'the margin trading scam'.

CCP have announced that they want to change the mechanic but they are not sure how to do this yet as margin trading is an important part of the economy of eve. In the meantime scams like this go on. Basically, as a new player expect scams in eve and if a business deal seems too good to be true then assume it probably is and seek advice before going ahead with it. Asking about this in the rookie channel would probably have informed you of the situation.

It is the greedy that get scammed.

If you're 3 weeks into the game, why do you need that much isk?

Well I have always been good at playing the market in mmos, however I do not understand enough of the markets mechanics yet, therefore I got scammed by something that seemed to be a good deal, in most mmos scams are done by player to player not market interactions since most devs make those solid to prevent exploits.

And honestly even though I am 3 weeks old I love making in game money even if I have no use for it. I sit around and train skills, would be nice to train skills work the market and in 6 months from now have a sweet ship with plenty of high end upgrades that keep it alive.

I can use a Raven right now, but if I hop into one I have low lvl rigging and cant use most of the tech 2 mods. I would get raped! So I train up stuff and play the market. Sucks that I blew like about 30 bucks in isk.

If I was scammed by a player interaction then that's one thing. But this is stupid, it seem like more of an exploit.

I understand how you feel but this is really a player interaction, just one that uses the mechanisms of the market to effect the scam. Now, you mentioned that you would like to train up your trading skills. If you had done this then you would have learned how the margin trading skill works - basically it lets you place buy orders by putting down a deposit for the value of the order, allowing people to effectively trade in large numbers of orders that will not all fill at once rather than sitting watching a much smaller number. Margin trading in this way is somewhat analogous to real life but in RL there are social mechanisms in place that would prevent someone exploiting the system to steal money. In eve there are none and there does not seem to be any easy way to allow margin trading in the game without also leaving the possibility of this scam open. Margin trading is too important to get rid of to avoid the small number of cases in which such scams take place so we are left with the situation we are in.

Generally in eve you will frequently encounter players using their ingenuity to exploit loopholes in the system. CCP actively encourages this and defines an illegal 'exploit' quite narrowly in order to permit sandbox type emergent behaviour. You really only fell into this trap because you had an amount of isk that a player with your level of experience of the game should not have. Buying PLEXes can give you a push forward as a beginner but it is also a danger. Just as using isk from a PLEX to buy a shiny ship will make you a nice loot pinata for someone, so approaching the markets with an amount of money that is disproportionate to your experience also leaves you vulnerable. The lesson to be learned from this is that eve is a complex game, people will try just about anything to take advantage of you, and you should thoroughly research anything that you intend to plough a large proportion of your money into.

Not a great confidence boost for people looking to invest in your enterprise. Honestly though, don't sweat the small stuff. You can still recover and go on to make billions!

Yes welcome to eve



Don't like it? Stay out, we don't need you.



You got taught a valuable lesson.

The real sob story here is that that guy now has to find another plating for this to be working again! Or he adapts and changes it to 2 bought !

EDIT: And also: This, ladies and gentlemen, is why new players + ISK = set sail for fail!

Well unless your moving it to another region because I very often manage to make 2 - 3x what I pay for something, but yeah when you get up to 100's of mill's difference per item it is likely going to be a scam or your just not going to be able to shift it at that price because no one will buy it.

Market trading is one big scam any ways, although this is a little more overt.

It happens.

So first, like other people have said: If it looks to good to be true, it is.

Now with that, you have a choice:
1. You can decide that you don;t want to put up with scams like this and you can stop playing EVE.

2. You can take it on the chin, learn from it (look up Margin trade scams) and work towards recouping your loss.

Both are perfectly valid and acceptable responses to the situation, and both have been taken up by various people. I'd say that option 2 sounds like it would suit you more if you enjoy marketing in games. The economy is EVE is far more complex and far more exciting than in most games, so it you've got the willingness to learn it and press on through errors in judgement which can cost you a lot (we've all bee there, just yesterday I refined 10b isk worth of material on the wrong character and lost a huge percentage... whoops) it can be huge amounts of fun. Don't fret too much about the plex. After time you'll be able to make more than a plex worth a month and can just save on a couple of subs to recoup (or sub in plex forever mua ha ha).

same here lolz

watch list for future i think :)