Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm not aware if these ideas have been posted or not, so with that said here goes:

As many players are aware, there is a serious problem in the game with margin trading scamming going on. However, it is not just the practice itself that is the problem, but the fact that the continued existence and prevalence of such abuse is not sensible with respect to EVE Online's in-game world itself.

For context, lets quickly note how the act of margin trading scamming is able to occur: A player trained up to use the Margin Trading skill places an order on the market, but using only a fraction of the overall isk value of the order according to the skill's level. In order for the scam to work, the player then makes sure that the isk remaining in that character's wallet is low enough that the order(s) will fail when another player attempts to complete them.

In the real world, such an action has a single term: Fraud.

However, in the in-game world, such fraud is allowed to occur and is not dealt with in any meaningful way. In light of this, I have two ideas to propose; they are not ideas which can perfectly fix the problem, but should at least make it possible to help cut down on the abuse.

Idea 1: Penalties for failed margin orders.
Whenever a player puts up a margin buy order, they are asking for the financial trust of the in-game market system that when the order is to be claimed that there will at least be enough isk in the player's wallet to allow the order to complete successfully. Whenever a player breaches that trust, there should be real and meaningful consequences, penalizing the player for any and all failed margin trades they attempted.

The foremost idea in terms of what types of penalties to apply to the player would be fines, and in an amount comparative to the total isk value of the overall order but with a minimum amount in order to make sure that margin scamming is de-incentivised even for orders with very low values. The point of having a scaled fine amount like this is to try and defeat margin trade scamming at its heart - by cutting into the potential profits a person would make through scamming, making it not worth the player's time to even attempt such fraud in the first place. I'm not sure what percentage of the order would be an appropriate fine for a failed order - 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, etc - I assume the CCP devs would have a better idea in that regard.

The other idea I have for an additional penalty that could be applied, although possible less meaningful, would be a loss in the player's character's security and/or empire standings as a result of failed margin orders. Since such fraud would be seen as a (serious) crime in the eyes of the civilizations in question, a player should lose standing as would be befitting a criminal act (such as with other crimes like suicide ganks and whatnot); particularly since having the player's character end up in jail is sadly apparently not an option.

A further idea that could be done either with, or in place of, the above idea for standings loss on failed market orders would be to instead establish a new standing value for player characters: Market Standing. Such a value could be very useful, in theory, for the game's market system. As a player interacts with the market, probably through placed buy/sell orders, they would slowly accrue "market standing"; representing the amount of "trust" that player character has earned through honest interactions with the market system. In a sense, it'd be a similar notion to the idea of a merchant rating in the real world. Such a stat could be particularly useful for one's market settings, because you could then instruct the game to automatically filter out market orders below a certain standings threshold (default being 0). And, by having such a value available, if a person does in fact allow a margin order to fail they could incur a heavy hit to their market standings (potentially even driving the value into negative numbers?), with the magnitude of standings loss likely corresponding to the isk value of the failed margin order. Combined with the filtering, abusers of the market could end up with their market orders not being shown to the majority of the in-game player population, serving as an additional layer of protection for honest players.

Idea 2: Wallet locking based on currently active margin orders.
While possibly an idea which would partially defeat the purpose of margin trading, I do believe it could be effective for a player's wallet to be locked according to the isk value of their highest active margin order. To clarify, what I mean by wallet locking is that it would not allow the player to buy, give, or otherwise transfer isk out of their character's wallet if the wallet's value would fall under the locked value as a result of the action. The purpose of such a system is to ensure some minimum amount of isk remains within the player's wallet to at least cover the highest value margin order they have active. That would allow for there to be a buffer of isk to at least cover their largest order, but to also increase the odds of the player's wallet being able to successfully cover most/all of their lower value margin orders that they have active. That is the key point to take away from this suggestion, because it would allow for some safety to be added to the margin trading system but without defeating the overall purpose of margin trading itself.


So, there are the ideas I've thought up lately regarding how the margin trading system could be improved to function better, be more sensible, and most importantly help protect players against the overwhelmingly prevalent problem of predatory margin trading scams that are plaguing the EVE Online universe. If you have constructive input to offer on the matter, please do so; if not, please don't.

As long as the deposits don't cover the total amount this will continue to be a scam.
And full deposits would cripple market marvelously for people that don't sit on trillions.

Putting it in another way. You want CCP to add a not insignificant amount of game breaking new code into the game to prevent greedy people from having their arses handed to them?

Also this: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3587783#post3587783

CCP can foolproof the market but chances are people are going to invent better idiots.

If nothing is broken, nothing needs fixing.

Margin trading isn't broken.

I wasn't aware, please do explain the problem!
AFAIK when a margin trader "defaults" on his buyorder, your sell is rejected, meaning you retain your goods.

Am I mistaken? Are you able to order on margin, "default" and get the sellers' goods?
Is there something I missed here?

You already do, so what's the problem?


Don't buy things for more than they're worth.

The person who attempts to sell goods doesn't lose anything.

The person with the buy order loses money.

That is already the case.

What's the problem?

Why should he lose isk for an order that doesn't complete? Give me a single reason that isn't "because I'm butthurt and want other people to be punished for my greed and stupidity"

Margin trading scams only have a single obscure counter known as clicking the price history tab.