Warfare & Tactics

I know this sounds weird, but the market can be as vicious of a battle as any PvP sometimes, especially on the fringes of highsec where there are fewer people competing. I've long since been in competition with a billionaire who monopolizes literally EVERY single ship I've viewed in the entire region. I won't go into the details of why this person is destroying the ship market of my region, but I need a way to retaliate. I can't blow this sucker up because he sits in station all day long (literally, never logs off) and has literally hundreds of billions of ISK. If I compete with his lowball bid schemes I wind up purchasing product in dangerous places in lowsec and get ambushed trying to pick it up.

I would gladly showdown with this guy, or hunt him in highsec and make myself a criminal blowing him to shreds. But this sucker can hide in a station forever and even a massive bounty on his head won't have an effect since no one else can blow him up either.

We need ways to become aggressive to people that play inside a station throughout their entire Eve careers.

As Froggy says, if the other trader is willing to work on slim margins to force all the competition away there isn't alot you can do about it.

It also means that the market is working efficiently and customers are getting a good deal - why would CCP change the game mechanics so that customers get stiffed because you feel that you can't compete? Let alone how they could do this without breaking the game.

The reason he stays logged in so that you can't watchlist him and undercut him when he is offline. Staying logged in 23.5/7 is a viable tactic used by others such as cyno alts, station campers etc.

What you can do:

* Is he buying and selling remotely? Nothing really if you can't afford to play him at his own game

* If he is building or paying others to build and/or transport you might be able to cut a deal or gank his haulers

* Try selling something other than ships? Depends on whether he has alts that are covering all the other popular items but even then he is limited to ~300 order slots per character

* Move somewhere else maybe

You might get more comments posting this in Market Discussions sub-forum.

Yeah you say the ship market, some of it going in to low sec, and I think someone must be hauling goods.

A 100% station trader just flips items, you can only fight that by out trading them.

What's the problem? If he is selling at low prices, then that's a good thing. If he's buying up all the stock and reselling at high prices, then use it to your advantage.

Ship 100 ships (or mods, whatever) to the hub and release them on market 5-10 at a time 1 isk below the lowest sell price (which should be at a decent profit if he's trying to manipulate prices). He'll buy them up, and you release another 5-10 ships on market the next day. If he drops his price to undercut you, then drop your price the next day. He'll likely have hundreds on sale, so the cost to him dropping his price will be much higher than yours.

Eventually, you'll either win by making lots of isk, or win by driving the prices of mods to a more reasonable level.

Also, with cheap courier services like Red Frog or the in-game Haulers Channel, it should be really easy for you to move mods to a more reasonable location if he is actually selling at very low prices.

You don't need hundreds of billions of ISK to dominate markets. I don't right now, but I have in the past *dominated* the market for mining ships in all of Sinq Laison save the Dodixie hub itself, while only having 3-4 billion invested in it.

If you want to mess with this person, import ships en masse from buy orders in another hub and undercut them.

Make a decision, however - is it your goal to drive them out of the market, or is it your goal to make ISK? If you just want to watch their world burn, deep undercutting to a revenue-neutral price (i.e. you make nothing after hauling costs and market fees but lose nothing) with large stacks of goods will make them rage.

It has to be very large though (about a month of local demand) and you better make sure that your own costs (buying+hauling) are very low, else he'll just buy it all and thank you for doing the logistics for him.

Personally, I'm pissed off when someone dumps a big stack at a price point that is around a third of the way from my costs to my desired sell price. His price is too low to make it worthwhile to undercut, but too high to make it worthwhile to buy.

In these cases, I just keep my stuff listed at my ideal price, and accept I may not sell that particular item for a while. Sometimes after a couple of days the other dude realizes he's not making much money either and raises his prices to a level at which I feel like competing again.