Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There are some major issues with contract market at the moment which not make it function as intended.

The main issue are auctions, me myself is very active on the contract market and also bid on auctions, what took my eye was that I am winning a lot of auctions I am bidding on, and getting the items way under priced is very common for me at auctions.
Sometimes I even feel sorry for people doing so much work on blueprints for example, and I win the auction for 1.3 million because none else placing their money on it.

Now you can say well ain't that some good profit for you? yes for sure it does.
But I can't place auctions my self because I know chances are they will go out for to low under priced, while auctions are meant to be the perfect way to get the right price for you wares in a big extend.
There are so many items you have no idea what the actually value is so you put it on 1 million, to get as much as possible entrees and bring the price automatically to the current demand price in the economy.
If I link my contract to people in local and chat people block me because they think I'm a scammer (good job CCP)

My suggestions for the contract market are:

Bar indicators which indicates: (in the contract)
1. How much an items is being sold in compare with other items
2. The price you are paying for it, how much it compare with others pilots have paid for it.
3. The amount of contracts the contractor has put on the market in compare with others.

These 3 status bars presented in colors in the contract.

Edit:Forgot to mention to most likely exclude multiple item contracts, although they can have indicators they will not update towards the pricing data base

Edit:When an item is sold, a blueprint of a Condor for example, which has 10 runs, and is 10/20 it will update the database about that type of item.
It will not update the 9 runs 10/20 or 10 runs 9/20 for example of a that frigate type Condor because that is a different type yes.
This will also will drive people to create contract types which are most mainstream to get better indicators, which is just a side effect of such a mechanic.


For auctions you should be able to set a minimum for what a contract may be sold, and this price amount is not visible to other people.

A auction contract will fail to complete if the minimum price is not achieved in the contract (maybe to prevent issues with planning these auctions should be max. 2 day)
And yes these rules exist in very professional auctions exactly for those reasons, a contractor can cut the auction anytime if it's minimum price it had in mind was not reached.

More filter options when looking for contracts

It should be possible to filter out cruiser blueprint copies and battleship blueprint copies for example, and everything else.
Just like in overview settings you can set each and single objects yo be shown for clear overviews.(and saved configures)


Additional suggestions

Contract's linked in chat will have their font color based on the 3 status bars

Maybe red is bad (scammer, or shouldn't post that in locals with such exclusive stuff)
Yellow is lower than average.
Green is good and average.
Blue is very good.

You can post max 1 contract a min in local and only the same every 10 min.

Or something like that in that direction, just so you are able to see on the eye what the status is of a contract in local chat.

@grgjegb gergerg

What do you exactly mean with storing history?

About multiple contracts I forgot to mention in the post is:
1. They are excluded from the status bar system
2. Some different kind of system to identify the multiple items inside the contract about their status

These scamming people can be flagged easily, CCP can set up a market watch, people who put serious spam contracts in local will be notified by a message they should quit doing that and their contract will be market in red.
If they keep doing it all their contracts will automatically be in red.

Players can put up filters not to show red contracts in local chat (and maybe contract market)

Seriously if these kind of sht happened in BETA, so much people would complain about it and CCP would have counter measures on it with the release.

The issue you outlined is that sometimes you feel bad that you are getting items at way lessnthan their normal market value.
Are you proposing that you should have a harder time finding underpriced contracts?

Your proposal seems to be meant to take thinking out of the contract market via automatic price checking.
Why should we idiot-proof contracts?

This is *way* more complicated than you think it's going to be. Your explanation here basically amounts to "nah, this isn't so simple, you just do the thing!" which is glossing over all of the actual gritty details that have to be dealt with.

The biggest, but by no means the only issue, is multi-item contracts. If I sell 10 blueprints for 10b does that mean each BP is worth 1b, or was one of those worth 9b? On top of that contracts aren't like normal market orders, quite often the things being sold are being sold at a discount intentionally because of their circumstances (trapped in a station, low sec, ect) and by definition this would be comparing everything from all points in the game since contracts aren't region restricted like orders are. All of that's without getting into sample size, if something gets sold on contract for 1m that's now the new base price for that item, and since contracts are low volume that means low sample size. You see the same problem with niche or small volume items where the price in one region can end up drastically skewed according to the regional market's value estimation. There's probably more issues that I haven't thought of here as well, that's literally 5 minutes of brain storming and doesn't get into any of the potential back-end code issues with actually gathering all of this data.

All of this means that something like this would, at best, be a significant amount of work for CCP to develop for a relatively small and questionable benefit.

Are you maybe starting to see why this isn't so simple or easy as you're making it out to be?



This is Eve, nothing has to be done about scams. The market is a form of PvP, people have to use their brains and think if they want to avoid getting conned. That's the sort of game Eve is and CCP and the vast majority of the players in this game aren't looking for that to change. If you think it's going to you're destined to be disappointed.

If you're posting a fair contract and people think you're scamming that's their loss, especially if it's a good deal. If they're just not willing to pay what you're asking then oh well, that's the market at work.

Then you've just massively reduced your already small sample size, further reducing the accuracy and validity of the metrics you're trying to produce. The vast majority of legitimate contracts contain multiple items, whether it's packs of blueprints, ships with rigs, or someone's random hangar clearance sale.



You also need to think of problems in your idea and be willing to consider that your idea might not actually be workable. You also need to consider that even if your idea could be implemented you need to consider the viability. What's the benefit, how much work will be required, and how well will the feature work?

In this case the work required would be fairly substantial, there isn't any sort of system like this in place already, the data gathered would be relatively sparse and of questionable validity when evaluating future contracts, and as we've already determined quite a bit of data would have to be excluded further reducing the sample size and thus the accuracy of our predictions and the validity of the data gathered. All of this for a rather questionable benefit, especially if you consider that the sample size is low enough that someone could potentially issue and accept a lot of scam contracts on their alt to make their own appear legitimate.

This brings me to the regional data, something you seem to have not quite understood. Currently in Eve each regional market is insulated from every other one. When you sell a T1 LSE in Jita the percentage difference from the average price shown is *only* for Jita. If you were to sell the same T1 LSE in Rens you'd have a different average price, same for the arse-end of Delve.

Contracts are global though, so a Contract price that's fair in Jita might not be fair in Delve. This significantly reduces the validity of the metrics you're asking for because you have a wide range of "legitimate" values and no easy way to differentiate between them.




So, who am I? Someone who has played the game for a *lot* longer than you and pays a fair amount of attention to dev comments. When I say "This isn't going to change" I'm more or less paraphrasing things the devs have said regarding the presence of scamming, suicide ganking, and other "bad" behaviors in the game. The player response to these comments has been, on the whole, overwhelmingly positive.

CCP have actually looked into things like suicide ganking and whether or not lots of people quit over them. They don't, and there's a *lot* more suicide ganking than there are contract scams.

You can, and of course probably will, dismiss this. I don't have a bunch of data to cite, most of this is just my personal experience and observations. But I notice you're not citing anything at all, which suggests that you've taken your own personal experience, asked a few of your friends (who probably think like you, because you're friends) and concluded that the people who like Eve's freedom to scam and cheat and steal are a minority. I think, personally, that you'd be wrong in that. Even the people who don't do those things like that they're in the game.

I suggest you check your assumptions and read a bit more of what the devs and the players have said on topics like scamming before jumping to conclusions.




The problem here isn't one that can be solved by code because the fundamental problem here is in the data you're trying to collect. The Contract market is tiny compared to the Regional Markets which means it has a very small sample size. What this means is that the statistics you need to collect in order to make those three bars are going to have accuracy problems. This is not something that is a problem with code or something that can be magically solved by a computer, it's a fundamental problem with your idea.

If those bars you want to add aren't accurate they're worthless and a waste of CCP's time to add to the game.

I'm for more and better contracting.


+1


Would like to see a new category added as well, with the advent of citadels. Currently have public and private, but would like an availability for structure as well.

If the person doesn't have an alt or a friend bidding up their auction to make sure they're getting reasonable value, they deserve to get fleeced.