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Feedback Request - Margin trading and accurate market UI

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Shoogie
Serious Pixels
#681 - 2014-07-29 16:50:03 UTC
I don't like the idea of having players push an extra button to verify the validity of a market order. It is an extra needless step. New players are either not going to know about it, or use it much more often than they should.

Here are my criteria:
* The UI should not lie to players.
* The skill should continue to be useful to the players who have trained it.
* Performance should not be degraded by too many extra database calls.

My solution:
* When someone looks at an item in the market window, check the top buy order in the region.
* Calculate how many of that item the buyer can currently buy. Display that number in the quantity box rather than the full amount.
* If the number is 0, do not display the line at all, and check the next highest buy order in the region. In this way, players are guaranteed the top buy order displayed on the market is legitimate. (Not necessarily all the rest, though.)

Note, when someone has insufficient funds in their wallet, their buy orders are not cancelled, they are merely hidden until they can add more isk.

One could still do a verion of the margin trade scam by putting up a scam order in Jita, and also a slightly higher legitimate order in a low sec station elsewhere in the Forge. When someone finds your Jita order was false, will they fly out to your low sec station? Will you be able to shoot them and take their high-value cargo before they can sell it?

If guaranteeing one order per region is not enough, this could be expanded to check the top two or three orders. However, I don't think that would be worth the extra database calls and server-side calculations. Guaranteeing the top one is probably all that is required.
Gizznitt Malikite
Agony Unleashed
Agony Empire
#682 - 2014-07-29 17:07:09 UTC
Shoogie wrote:
I don't like the idea of having players push an extra button to verify the validity of a market order. It is an extra needless step. New players are either not going to know about it, or use it much more often than they should.

Here are my criteria:
* The UI should not lie to players.
* The skill should continue to be useful to the players who have trained it.
* Performance should not be degraded by too many extra database calls.

My solution:
* When someone looks at an item in the market window, check the top buy order in the region.
* Calculate how many of that item the buyer can currently buy. Display that number in the quantity box rather than the full amount.
* If the number is 0, do not display the line at all, and check the next highest buy order in the region. In this way, players are guaranteed the top buy order displayed on the market is legitimate. (Not necessarily all the rest, though.)

Note, when someone has insufficient funds in their wallet, their buy orders are not cancelled, they are merely hidden until they can add more isk.

One could still do a verion of the margin trade scam by putting up a scam order in Jita, and also a slightly higher legitimate order in a low sec station elsewhere in the Forge. When someone finds your Jita order was false, will they fly out to your low sec station? Will you be able to shoot them and take their high-value cargo before they can sell it?

If guaranteeing one order per region is not enough, this could be expanded to check the top two or three orders. However, I don't think that would be worth the extra database calls and server-side calculations. Guaranteeing the top one is probably all that is required.


But the UI doesn't lie to players now. If you are honest with yourself, the only issue is you incorrectly ASSUME that a buy order is guaranteed to fill. This is obviously not the case, and your proposal is simply to "make it that way".

And verifying the order isn't an extra step most players need to take. It is a step you take only if you are unsure about the validity of the order, usually because it is too good to be true.

Careby
#683 - 2014-07-29 19:20:18 UTC  |  Edited by: Careby
Gizznitt Malikite wrote:
But the UI doesn't lie to players now. If you are honest with yourself, the only issue is you incorrectly ASSUME that a buy order is guaranteed to fill. This is obviously not the case, and your proposal is simply to "make it that way".

And verifying the order isn't an extra step most players need to take. It is a step you take only if you are unsure about the validity of the order, usually because it is too good to be true.


Discussions about margin trading always seem to degenerate into arguments, usually over either semantics or "if it's too good to be true then it isn't". You say the UI doesn't lie, I say it does. It isn't about whether the order is "guaranteed" to fill. No order is guaranteed to fill, since it can be filled, expired, changed, or canceled between the time you see it and the time you try to sell to it. For me it's about the orders that are guaranteed NOT to fill. When the UI displays an order that cannot possibly fill under any circumstances, then I say it has lied. At the very least it has not presented the best information available in the market database.
Shoogie
Serious Pixels
#684 - 2014-07-29 21:49:06 UTC
CCP Rise wrote:
I want to make another thing clear about this issue which came up when talking with the CSM:

This isn't about scamming or whether or not it's okay for people to trick other people, which is obviously extremely EVE and we have no problem with. The issue here is that the client (via the market interface) is essentially lying to the player by showing an order which can't actually be filled.


"Lying" was CCP Rise's word from post number 1 in this thread. I just re-used it.
Decarthado Aurgnet
Imperial Combat Engineers
#685 - 2014-07-30 06:32:02 UTC  |  Edited by: Decarthado Aurgnet
After further throught, a wild idea appears!

Don't remove the skill, but do create a "debt" balance which appears in the wallet beside one's actual balance. Whether it'd be interest-bearing is moot, but with a debt balance comes a 90% tax on all income (payable prior to paying corp taxes, which then subsequently tax the remaining income amount) until the debt is paid. In this way, the market and legitimate users remain unchanged. People who try to scam and people who screw themselves in the market can still have a dribble of income so they can pay additional market order fees and buy some ammunition or fuel in order to slowly and painfully grind themselves back out of debt.

Characters with debt should not be able to be biomassed or sold.

Edit: This would also open the window for lenders, and it could be tied into the contract system being reworked (since that's also under discussion).

Remove T2 BPO's or make them inventable at extreme cost.
Ryan Leonard Thorne
Pointed Sticks Improvement Inc.
#686 - 2014-07-30 15:35:37 UTC
Careby wrote:
You say the UI doesn't lie, I say it does.


I also say it does. If this isn't going to be fixed, CCP should at least try to balance things a little better and introduce misleading UI displays in other places than those related to trading. I'm thinking of asteroids that show up like containing valuable ore while being totally worthless, mission agents that send you to empty deadspace pockets and LOL as soon as you arrive there, empty planets that show high concentrations of PI stuff, ship wrecks full of billions of loot but inaccessible even when you turn your safety down to somewhere below red, security status for systems displayed too high so that those Concord guys have something to do...
Decarthado Aurgnet
Imperial Combat Engineers
#687 - 2014-07-30 18:18:06 UTC
Ryan Leonard Thorne wrote:
Careby wrote:
You say the UI doesn't lie, I say it does.


I also say it does. If this isn't going to be fixed, CCP should at least try to balance things a little better and introduce misleading UI displays in other places than those related to trading. I'm thinking of asteroids that show up like containing valuable ore while being totally worthless, mission agents that send you to empty deadspace pockets and LOL as soon as you arrive there, empty planets that show high concentrations of PI stuff, ship wrecks full of billions of loot but inaccessible even when you turn your safety down to somewhere below red, security status for systems displayed too high so that those Concord guys have something to do...

That would be an amazing April Fool's stunt.

Remove T2 BPO's or make them inventable at extreme cost.
James Amril-Kesh
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#688 - 2014-08-08 03:26:44 UTC
CCP Rise wrote:
A second possibility, which emerged from the discussion with the CSM, was built around marking orders in the market interface based on whether or not they were placed using margin trading.

If you do this, then you should refund SP in margin trading because you're going to get a lot of players who trained it for legitimate reasons no longer having their buy orders filled because other players won't trust them.

Enjoying the rain today? ;)
James Amril-Kesh
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#689 - 2014-08-08 03:28:47 UTC
James Amril-Kesh wrote:
CCP Rise wrote:
A second possibility, which emerged from the discussion with the CSM, was built around marking orders in the market interface based on whether or not they were placed using margin trading.

If you do this, then you should refund SP in margin trading because you're going to get a lot of players who trained it for legitimate reasons no longer having their buy orders filled because other players won't trust them.

In fact I'd much rather you just remove the skill entirely than go this route because nobody is going to train it anymore. Nobody will trust margin traders.

Enjoying the rain today? ;)
Jessica Danikov
Network Danikov
#690 - 2014-08-08 04:12:41 UTC
It'd be useful to get some feedback from CCP Rise about what ideas have been considered or dismissed as a non-starter. There's a lot of repetition here (some about ideas which are, quite frankly, idiotic and short-sighted... but that's just, like, my opinion, man) and at 35 pages I'm starting to wonder if anyone's bothering to read much of this any more- be it CCP Rise or people making new comments.

Either CCP have a solution they want to try, have a small number of solutions that are worth a second round of focused feedback upon (which probably needs a new thread to reduce noise), or have entirely forgotten about addressing this for the moment.
Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#691 - 2014-08-08 05:01:30 UTC
Decarthado Aurgnet wrote:
After further throught, a wild idea appears!

Don't remove the skill, but do create a "debt" balance which appears in the wallet beside one's actual balance. Whether it'd be interest-bearing is moot, but with a debt balance comes a 90% tax on all income (payable prior to paying corp taxes, which then subsequently tax the remaining income amount) until the debt is paid. In this way, the market and legitimate users remain unchanged. People who try to scam and people who screw themselves in the market can still have a dribble of income so they can pay additional market order fees and buy some ammunition or fuel in order to slowly and painfully grind themselves back out of debt.

Characters with debt should not be able to be biomassed or sold.

Edit: This would also open the window for lenders, and it could be tied into the contract system being reworked (since that's also under discussion).


Hold on while I use my open character slot to loan my main a few hundred bajillion ISK before letting this characer to rot until the end of time. If you do not have a free slot, then creat a trial account and PLEX it for the low price of under 800 million so you can loan yourself a few more hundred bajillions ISK and then let the account lapse to never EVER resub it.
ViciousVip3r
Neo Anarchy
#692 - 2014-08-08 06:01:49 UTC  |  Edited by: ViciousVip3r
Frostys Virpio wrote:
Decarthado Aurgnet wrote:
After further throught, a wild idea appears!

Don't remove the skill, but do create a "debt" balance which appears in the wallet beside one's actual balance. Whether it'd be interest-bearing is moot, but with a debt balance comes a 90% tax on all income (payable prior to paying corp taxes, which then subsequently tax the remaining income amount) until the debt is paid. In this way, the market and legitimate users remain unchanged. People who try to scam and people who screw themselves in the market can still have a dribble of income so they can pay additional market order fees and buy some ammunition or fuel in order to slowly and painfully grind themselves back out of debt.

Characters with debt should not be able to be biomassed or sold.

Edit: This would also open the window for lenders, and it could be tied into the contract system being reworked (since that's also under discussion).


Hold on while I use my open character slot to loan my main a few hundred bajillion ISK before letting this characer to rot until the end of time. If you do not have a free slot, then creat a trial account and PLEX it for the low price of under 800 million so you can loan yourself a few more hundred bajillions ISK and then let the account lapse to never EVER resub it.




I admit I am no trader so I do not have experience in how large ISK amounts out of margin trading legit trader gets so this whole thing might be limiting to much for legit traders but here is my idea:

Skill should be like "allow 10% of average PLEX price per lvl" debt to be made (only in case it is actually needed - buy order gets paid from standard wallet 1st and debt is used if wallet fund is insufficient) and not be trainable on trial account.
Then you do not have issues of new account created only to draw ISK from and then abandoned.

"90% tax on all income" part should apply to all "green" numbers in your wallet - no matter the source of ISK gain - it is gain so you can pay from it (including ISK from player transfer, not only trade / rewards / contracts / etc)

Going negative ISK is still doable for someone who intend to use it as leverage not as scam (from my understanding - legit player would rarely plan to go negative, it would happen only with buy orders filling faster than sell orders) and at the same time it limits scam attempt.
Cearain
Plus 10 NV
#693 - 2014-08-08 15:14:43 UTC
I appreciate this is a difficult problem. But here are my thoughts:

1) If someone did not have the funds to complete the buy order couldn't it turn red?

So in the example where you have 7 mill and need an extra 5 mill to cover the vexor order and 5 mill to cover the rupture order=, if the vexor order is filled then the rupture order would turn red until they get the funds to cover it.


2) The player could lose skill points in margin trading if someone accepts their buy orders and they can't complete them. It would be minor at first and more drastic if it happens again. Once the margin trading skill is completely erased all the orders requiring it would drop - I would assume.

Make faction war occupancy pvp instead of pve https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=53815&#post53815
Pelorios
Absolute Order XVI
Absolute Honor
#694 - 2014-08-08 15:22:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Pelorios
Ah good ol' Watto (no money, no parts, no deal!)

It would be nice to know what was the initial motivation of the skill and its intended functionality.

So yeah i can find a dry market, put a sell order for an item that i have, at 10x its value and go in another
region and place a margin order to buy it back for 12x its value.
The unsuspecting trading noob buys it off me at 10x its value [i make a killing] and gets stuffed when he tries
to sell it. You can do that if it gets your rocks off...

Morals of the eve-lesson : (a) dont trade for more than you can lose (b) dry markets are riskier than liquid ones.

Scam notwithstanding, what are the effects of this in the EVE market? Its a way to artificially inflate prices? Does it work? Up to a point. If it was ever to collapse, it would collapse even faster with margin trading. But do you really worry about the black swan? You can spend your life doing that and never actually see it. And if EVE were ever going to die a sudden death the market would be the least of your worries anyway.

Leave it as it is is what i'd say.

Now if you absolutely positively have to kill every mf in the room errhm have to change it then this is what margin trading is:

(a) its used for trading only i.e. a round trip that means that...
(b) no goods change hands..only isk.

Do you really want to go this way?

So what can you do? read Part 2
Pelorios
Absolute Order XVI
Absolute Honor
#695 - 2014-08-08 15:25:51 UTC  |  Edited by: Pelorios
Part 2
Enter Tom Cruise : Collateral

Before we go into it, lets answer the first question. What was the original intention? To artificially inflate
prices? too devious. Think carebear on industry.

Lets say I run a business making ammo.To make them, Some stuff i make some stuff i mine, some stuff I buy. Now, within this workflow i pay for materials and i sell ammo. This buying and selling is subject to my balance, i cant buy more stuff unless I sell the product. Enter leverage via margin trading. I place my orders which might not get filled immediately via margin trading this leaves me more money to buy more, to make more, to sell more.

But to do that i will need collateral. So i place my 120mil isk implant that i haven't used or sold, its just sitting there, or one of my ravens for collateral.
As long as its in collateral, i cant use it. <- this is deemed as multo importanto.

But the money i get from placing it in collateral, allow me to margin trade. Its my margin. Now it happens that
one of my big buy orders gets filled. And uses up some of my margin. Now, i can either cover it (just pay x isk
against it which increases my margin again , or leave it. As collateral-margin gets eaten away, if i don't cover
it, and it reaches zero, then my collateral item(s) get sold at market prices. I.e. I lose them.

So that's it. You don't need to color the margin orders, and the seller to a margin buy order always gets his
money.
Problem solved.

So this would allow for leverage. The more assets you have the more you can leverage but be careful if you
don't make good, you lose them.

To delve on the nitty gritty stuff: How much collateral do i get for an item? What price would I be able to
sell it at, when i place in collateral. This changes every day as the market changes. Of course you don't want to put illiquid assets as collateral (so If I use as I said in the example an implant for collateral I need one
that has some buy orders in there, not an offer at 120mil and a bid at 10mil, because the collateral i get for
it is the bid, i.e.10m and it gets adjusted every day or real time). I could place ore as collateral or minerals.

The collateral i place since the market moves every day and to avoid getting stuffed on it, it has to be at a
lower price than the actual bid of course. You can start very low and make it a skill. Say you get 50% of its
current value as margin and if you want to add another skill that can raise it to 75%, no more.

Continued in Part 3
Pelorios
Absolute Order XVI
Absolute Honor
#696 - 2014-08-08 15:31:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Pelorios
Part 3

Aha. so obviously the items that can be placed as collateral to get margin could be a restricted list
which picks only deep liquid items in the Eve market. there is enough data to find out the liquidity and the
daily volatility of the market.

Or you could keep it free.

Example:

I place a raven worth 100mil as collateral. I get 60mil margin for it. I place my margin buy order,
worth 15mil. It gets filled. So my margin drops to 45mil. So far so good. But lets say the raven market bids
start getting given and the market starts to drop.

When the bid is at 80mil because my margin percentage is 60% my collateral drops to 48mil, i have allready used 15mil of it so in my margin window i see my margin_available drop from 45mil to 33mil (48=new margin available -15mil margin used).

If the market continues to drop, then at some point it can happen i lose all my margin. If i do then the next
order that gets filled sells my raven at market price. Whats that market price?

Lets say we are not there yet and it stabilizes for a while, and I have another 2 margin buy orders in the
market, one for 21mil and one for 12mil. Now lets say my 12mil gets filled. My margin_used goes to 15+12=27mil.
My available margin goes to 33mil-12mil=21mil. But thats the value of my other margin buy order. I am at risk
of not being able to cover it. It gets removed!

Now the market continuous to drop.The 80mil bid gets given. There are only 3 bids left at 60, 50 and 40mil! The
60mil gets filled too! the next bid is at 50mil. My margin_available is 50mil *60% =35mil, i have used 27 mil i
am still good. But *if* the 50 mil order gets filled, the next is at 40mil which would make my margin_available
40mil*60%=24mil. That's less than I have already used! (27mil). So before anyone else gives the 50mil order
CCP_collateral fills that order.

My raven gets sold for 50mil. I have used 27mil against it, i get back 23mil.
Its sad that i lost the raven but its price has dropped so i can buy it back cheaper if i want to.

That's it. I hope the math is correct. I hope its not too complicated. I hope it cant get exploited. But most of
all, find me the Frenchman...that little **** can dive a lot deeper than i can, I know it!

Naturally if all hopes are gone. Just remove the damn thing. Its the only way to be sure. Plus imagine all the
work that developers have to do to implement it. New tables, new calculations, increased cpu and bandwidth to
check all those orders real time.

Of course you could instead of checking margins available real time, you could check them daily. But that would put CCP_collateral at risk of getting stuffed. But then again its a bull market. Who doesn't want a raven if the price drops to 50mil? Point been they get to buy stuff cheap, even if they might be worth less than what they gave for them. But thats what you do. You have to act as "lender" of last resort. Oops, that's CCP_central bank, is it?

Btw the example above I would call an extreme scenario...Not a black swan, i don't believe we have seen one of those in Eve Market. but its unlikely.

Also it works the other way too yes? If the market price of ravens goes up, i can use more collateral! Risky business ;)

This is what I would do but reading form the OP it seems there are some problems canceling orders if margin cant be covered etc. With the collateral and margin this still leaves you with leverage however i am not sure if its enough.

Happy flying..
Reaver Glitterstim
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#697 - 2014-08-08 16:25:47 UTC  |  Edited by: Reaver Glitterstim
Why not just make the faulty buy orders temporarily invisible? That will have the added benefit of assisting honest traders by preventing their buy orders from getting cancelled when their ISK runs out.

FT Diomedes: "Reaver, sometimes I wonder what you are thinking when you sit down to post."

Frostys Virpio: "We have to give it to him that he does put more effort than the vast majority in his idea but damn does it sometime come out of nowhere."
Pelorios
Absolute Order XVI
Absolute Honor
#698 - 2014-08-08 16:36:24 UTC
There is another idea related to my previous post which somewhat breaks the proposed rules but might be ok.

Items that a player places as collateral are effectively locked in the market, unless he pays up the margin used and removes orders that use margin.

So far so good. However if he expects to sell stuff by offering them instead of giving the bids, i.e. the ammo on this example, why not put these items i.e his products as collateral? He could do that. After all, they are in the right market to be sold!

So the rule would be that items that are placed in collateral can be offered in the market by the player and if the offers get lifted, the isk received replaces the collateral item in the collateral account (and ends up with more collateral because he sells at offer and collateral was bid*marginPct). This way he is not at risk of losing his margin buy orders. The collateral account therefore can end up with isk too instead of items, which the player, if he wishes, can remove, provided it is not used.
Reaver Glitterstim
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#699 - 2014-08-08 17:18:43 UTC  |  Edited by: Reaver Glitterstim
A collateral system doesn't work for a lot of honest traders because they are putting up more total buy orders than their net worth. They don't have the funds to put stuff up for collateral, and often don't have the assets for it either. They intend to get ISK from their sell orders before they run out from the buy orders.

It is also faulty because items don't have a static ISK value. The market can choose an approximate ISK value but almost every time one side will feel cheated on the amount. You just can't let the server place an ISK value on goods, and you also can't expect players to be willing to accept goods in place of the ISK they were promised.

I might be missing something here, your post is pretty convoluted. Perhaps you can offer a short version--it doesn't have to explain the post, only needs to tell the end result. Anyone who doesn't believe you can go through it thoroughly and check.

FT Diomedes: "Reaver, sometimes I wonder what you are thinking when you sit down to post."

Frostys Virpio: "We have to give it to him that he does put more effort than the vast majority in his idea but damn does it sometime come out of nowhere."
Pelorios
Absolute Order XVI
Absolute Honor
#700 - 2014-08-08 17:41:58 UTC
Reaver Glitterstim wrote:
Why not just make the faulty buy orders temporarily invisible? That will have the added benefit of assisting honest traders by preventing their buy orders from getting cancelled when their ISK runs out.


Not sure, i didn't understand why canceling orders that cant be covered is a problem, but i suspect its because

(a) it would add to the functionality load of the market. Currently bids and offers stay there and are only interacted with when someone tried to buy or sell (i think).
If CCP is forced to check every order against a players wallet, every time a players wallet changes balance..that's a lot of checks. In that sense making it invisible is somewhat of a load as well cause they still have to check *if* it should be invisible or not, admittedly less of load because making it invisible is not the same as canceling it which also involves returning the isk to the players wallet, but the'd still have to check them ever time the wallets changed

(b) Currently mass industrialists might be using huge orders to cover their materials for manufacturing needs even though they don't have the isk to pay for all of them right now. But they know they'll get them all but gradually which gives them time to build stuff offer them and wait for them to get sold.
This is done by virtue of a skill alone, nothing more which is not so hard to train.
It would greatly upset their modus operanti if they had to have the isk to back those orders.

Finally there is a trick you can use to drive up a market and force people to buy your stuff by placing huge (relatively) orders. A big buy order gives the impression that the market cant go down so people get anxious that it will rise, so they buy stuff sooner rather than later, So for example I have 10 ravens to sell. I place my offer but I also place a bid for 1000 ravens. People that want to buy ravens might think that the price will go up (because it cant go down, coz 1000 ravens have to be sold before it goes lower). So they either buy from the offer, which is where I am, or, place bids above me. In the first case i sell my stuff, in the second I am closer to selling them and I can always move my huge order up again, until my 10 ravens get sold.

Personally i don't do that, but its doable. But don't think its all evil, marketmakers (people whose job is to constantly provide both a bid and an offer - providing for the needs of the people to buy or sell) have to make money too, and its hard when a market moves fast in any direction, marketmakers can end up losing money, so a bit of market jigging is expected.