These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Market Discussions

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

About Trading in Eve
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Kane Adestur
Minmatar Trading Corporation
#1 - 2016-11-16 18:00:19 UTC
Hi,

I'm playing Eve for a few months now and some aspects of trading in Eve are still looking weird to me.

First point: Broker Fees

Honestly, it's strange that the Broker Fee must be paid upfront. Imagine you want to sell your house and have to pay the Broker without any guarantee of success. Doesn't work that way...

Next thing is the weird behaviour of Brokers when I place a buy order. Let's say I want to achieve something like: "Buy 500K units of Tritanium up to 5,50 ISK per Unit".

You would expect the broker to buy from existing sell orders for the offered price, if the price is below or equal to 5,50 ISK. But no, the Eve Broker doesn't care and always pays 5,50 ISK. And because the broker is so clever, I have to pay him up to 3% for this "service".

Second point: Trading in Citadels

Ok, one of the goals seems to be that Trading should move into Player-owned structures to get away from the untouchable Hubs like Jita, which was the reason to raise the Base Broker Fee to 3%.

From time to time I enjoy to bring some basic stuff from Jita to my "home" regions Heimatar and Metropolis. Having fair prices is an important aspect to make a region worth living in. But the high Broker Fee makes it harder to achieve fair prices in distant regions. The obvious answer is to use Fortizars with low fees, if there are any around. If not, well, bad for the region.

So I tried to use citadels for some time now, but it's annoying. Most people are used to have one central hub where they get everything. And honestly, I can understand it. Even if the Fortizar is just one jump from the Hub, you really have to make dead cheap prices to sell anything.

And there are so many unknown factors when it comes to Citadels. Today I had the case that the market went down in one of the Fortizars in Frarn, just after I've placed a sell order there. No fuel anymore? Owner wants to quit? Who knows. My Broker Fees? Gone. Ok, no big deal, because I'm not placing really big orders, but I think the really big traders would hate to loose all their Broker Fees like that.

And what about Access Rights? What will happen if the owner decides to lock out unwanted traders, for whatever reason?

Sometimes the owners also behave in a strange and random way. One day they offer their service for 0.3%, next day it's 3%.

Most people seem to use citadels only for buy orders, to avoid the Broker Fee, like in Perimeter. Looks like a broken feature to me...

Third point: The 0,01 ISK game

Before I started with Eve people were telling me how good and realistic the markets are in Eve. But in the end everything sums up to play the annoying 0,01 ISK game all the time. Maybe it's too cheap to change orders? 100 ISK is like nothing. So why not raise this fee for NPC station trading? Would be one more fee where citadel owners could compete.


Any thoughts on that?
Skia Aumer
Planetary Harvesting and Processing LLC
#2 - 2016-11-16 18:54:53 UTC
Kane Adestur wrote:
And what about Access Rights? What will happen if the owner decides to lock out unwanted traders, for whatever reason?

You can activate "assets safety" at any time. Read about it in CCP docs.

Quote:
annoying 0,01 ISK game

Play 1000 ISK game instead. That's totally up to you.
Do Little
Bluenose Trading
#3 - 2016-11-17 13:50:20 UTC
The NPC trading fees in Eve are intended as a "sink" to remove ISK from the game and help balance the economy. As a trader, the absolute magnitude isn't particularly important - what matters is that CCP maintains a level playing field, that the fees don't give an unintended advantage to any group. Some advantage is intended - you'll pay lower fees with higher skills, vertically integrated manufacturers will pay lower fees than inter-regional traders, Citadel owners control their fees to attract more business.

Eve markets are competitive, they are also cyclical. You can position your product somewhere in the top half of the cycle and forget about it - it will eventually sell. Playing the .01 ISK game is entirely optional. Adjusting your price by more than necessary is irrational - it doesn't buy you any more time at the top, it simply means that you (and everyone else) earn less because the price is pushed down faster.
Kane Adestur
Minmatar Trading Corporation
#4 - 2016-11-17 17:33:00 UTC
Do Little wrote:
The NPC trading fees in Eve are intended as a "sink" to remove ISK from the game

True, and Eve really needs some good sinks, otherwise the inflation will march on.

But trading in citadels will remove this sink. Broker Fees are going to the owners instead. No sink. Only the sales tax remain as a sink.

Higher broker fees just add up for each turnover. Let's say someone produces a ship and pays 100M for the materials. The finished ship is sold in Jita, with added Broker Fee, Sales Tax and some margin. Let's say 120M for the sell order.

Some inter-regional trader picks it up and ships it 15 jumps to the next hub. Adds Broker Fee, Sales Tax and some margin. 140M or something. The next trader wants to bring it into Lowsec, and so on.

At some point the customers are not willing to pay the additional fee anymore and fly to Jita for themselves. Even more concentration, local market dead. On the other hand it might be better for local producers?

Do Little wrote:
Playing the .01 ISK game is entirely optional

I agree for sell orders, but for buying stuff it's a different story. Let's say I want to buy material for my local T2 production. I could buy from sell orders, cutting into my profits, depending on the spread of the market. But to be competitive, I'll need to buy as cheap as possible, using buy orders.

Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe it could work out the same way as for selling stuff if you place your orders weeks before you actually need the materials. I'll give it a try, thx.
Do Little
Bluenose Trading
#5 - 2016-11-17 18:36:40 UTC
Market taxes in Eve stack in a way that discourages specialization - unlike real world economies that mostly tax the value added at each link in the chain. Definitely favors vertical integration.

Spreads on advanced moon materials are so narrow I generally don't bother with buy orders: just checked nonlinear metamaterial on Eve Central: SELLING 18,144.05 5% BUYING 18,195.77 5% - not much saving there!