Market Discussions

Margin trading is already broken, that's what this discussion is highlighting, the purpose is to make it less broken.

How is it broken? And please don't say "Because you can put up an order that will never fill!" That scam only works if you buy the bait items, which is not at all a certainty or something that is forced upon the "victim." Nobody is entitled to have an order be there when they intend to sell to it. All the Margin Trading scam does is trigger the ephemerality that exists all the time in EVE trading. If you don't buy the bait in an attempt to sell it--and a cursory amount of market research should always tell you that the prices are suspiciously out of wack--then you don't get scammed.

Meanwhile, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of players like me using the Margin Trading skill for the wholly legitimate purpose of large-scale, region-wide trading, or for ordering low volume, high price goods. So yeah, let's break the skill for those people just to "fix" it for the few idiots whose eyes are too big for their stomachs and can't help falling for a scam.

In other news, it was also unfair for those pirates to bubble my Dominix on the other side of that gate in Stain. There should have been a message at the gate telling me what was on the other side, so I could choose to take another route.

So margin trading should be changed because people who aren't terribly clever are more important than the legit traders? Margin trading is extremely useful.

How about people stop asking to cater for the lowest common denominator in every game feature?

If you can find a way to "touch" this scam without changing the way the skill works, go right ahead. I don't care about the scam. I care about being able to continue doing business the way I have been, and not having to change that just to appease lazy, greedy morons who can't be bothered to perform even the slightest market research before they go buying any old thing they see for sale. Funny how those people never face an ounce of criticism.

You do realize this doesnt remove the scam just turns how it will be handled? People will use remote set buy order(1) to place them at behind lo-sec gates and/or lo-sec/hi-sec empty systems. Then they will setup second order(2) for some "normal" good that they have in abundance in the station they sit in, pref for worse price then average but yet higher then highest local buy order with volume big enough to cover the "100 m" in the order. Using another alt they setup the scam sell(3) at higher price. Whenever someone buys the scam sell, they have two opinions, either sell right away sell to themself with the other alt to the normal order (2) or camp at the gate entrance to the system where (1) is located and pop the guy. In neither 1 or 2 the guy who bought 3 will manage to get his money back. If margin trading is removed, the scammers will still keep using 1 and ensure they have same good that they are trying to scam with 3 on hand at 1's location. Easy done by first clearing the region of sell orders, then setting up buy order (1), waiting for x amount of minutes, enough to provide adequate response time, then put the scam (3) up. Someone buys the overpriced goods at (3), the scammer can either gank at gate or sell to himself the pre-placed goods/kill the buy order.

So yes, you will at most achieve couple days perioid when nobody is scammed, then the new FOTM variant catches on and the fool and his money keep on being parted.

EDIT: As for coloring the order differently, well lo-sec has huge warning signs before entering it, still new guys get daily ganked in various lo-sec systems because they found good "shortcut" that saves them time. It might cut the amount of people that fall victim but it wont remove the issue. Again even for coloring my previous explanation still shows "valid" market orders that people will bite into. The only *fix* is to have huge warning text when buying items that "this item is priced 3000% higher then market average for last month, are you stupid or what?"

Yes it will move to "being active" same way as spamming contracts in local is "active" work. Blimey, perhaps the same guy who has to "watch" his orders will start to spam contract to get most of his scam time out, we wont know but it's more then likely.

I recommend you sir, read the actual "wall-o-text" and notice the cancel order has been mentioned there. Here, let me highlight;
"Someone buys the overpriced goods at (3), the scammer can either gank at gate or sell to himself the pre-placed goods/kill the buy order."

And last I checked I answered that "fake" order part, if you remove the "fake" orders, they will just put up real orders that are possible but hugely improbable to be finished, but 0.01% likelihood for success is better then 0.001% right? The 0.001% success atm means when someone spots the scam, they bring in the goods from another region/wherever and setup to more readily available system at 0.01 isk below the scammer. Hence some fool buys from them and not the scammer and both the scammer and the scammee are left without iskies but the third person walks away with the cash.

Same ofc works for any future system, people are always able to undercut "scammers" with their own "scam" order, thus doing the only possible counter to prevent scammer from gaining isk. The only safeguard for the victim is to see when something is a scam and when not and, well, human gullibility. BTW, want to buy Navy Raven, I need a money for timecode and have to sell it at very sensible price, only 200 mil isk, trade now, now, now :P

No need to login if the margin trading char is the same who spams the contract, after all the scam contracts are similar, they con people to give isk to the scammer, and the scammer has to clear the iskies somehow out of the wallet to other.

As for cancel order, that is the "/kill the order" part, note however that setting up buy order and cancelling is subject to the 5 minute timer, hence to be near 100% safe the "fastest" reply the scammer has is to sell to the order, thus being able to leg it even before the 5 minute timer is over.

Fake buy orders are no more bad thing then any other undocumented feature. Again I have no personal gain/loss if this thing gets whacked but it's moot use of development time. I would much more likely to see storefronts, + rep system for successful sales etc as time where development assets are used market wise. Yes those will in time get their scams too, scamming is like cancer, you can nurse the symptoms but unless you nuke the cancer cells they will continue to spread their crap. And that nuke certainly wont be margin trading fix nor will CCP start to ban the scammers.

Highlighting orders that cannot complete due to funds would probably be a good middle ground.

Alternately, just hide those orders (but not cancel them) from the market window whenever the ISK in the wallet is less then what would be required to fulfill the minimum qty order. Basically, without the ISK to buy even the minimum qty, they become a null entity for the duration until the issue is fixed.

I see you posted a lot of garbage in this thread. The simple rebuttal is that we for the most part don't care that it's a scam. It's a fundamentally broken aspect of the market. Namely, someone offers something for trade that won't go through when the trade is attempted.

My personal view on the matter is that no book order should ever promise something it can't deliver, such as buy offers that can't be covered by the funds on hand. If I put a bid for a billion trit, no minimum, but I don't have funds to cover the maximum amount, my order should cap at whatever size I can currently afford. I recognize that would be a little bit of work for the Eve servers to do, but that's really the way to do it. And the consequences lead to some fine market pvp.

OK dude, but you seem to still be skirting the proposed fix of hiding or flagging orders that can't be fulfilled. I can see no reason to object to this, and if technically feasible, I don't know how anyone can be against this. Could you respond to this idea for a fix, instead of going off on tangents? I really think we could all agree to this.