Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It makes a difference to the entire market since it isn't a real order.



What a wonderful leap of logic. Now an order that can't be performed on is the same as one that might be changed soon.



Please explain how eliminating fake orders from the system makes the entire market inconsistent and ineffective. It seems the opposite would be true.



Please point out what "guarantees I asked for" besides the one where if an order is placed, the person placing it has the ISK to execute it while it is in play



Again, an order that can't be performed on by the owner has nothing to do with orders that have already been executed or are gone because of lag or anything else. Those are all normal market functions. Fictitious orders generated by clever use of game mechanics are not the same.

So because a tiny % of the market orders are margin scams, you suggest making sure that you always have isk to cover (aka removing margin trading)?

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record....surely it is better that people actually understand what happens on the market? As in, maybe there should be some sort of tutorial which goes into how the market works.

This would also remove other sources of frustration, such as mis-sorted markets (because the game default setup is not by price) causing 100m rifters to be sold.

The buyer loses fees when the margin trade fails....the seller? They have items still to sell.

The outcome is no different than if they arrive at the hub and the order has filled and the one below it is much lower. Everyone talks as if the "victim" ends up losing all their isk.

So what we want is

1. Margin scamming to still be possible but to have a risk attached to the scammer (which it doesn't currently).
2. The margin trading skill to do pretty much what it does currently for traders.
3. If interesting new gameplay can be generated this would be good.
4. Less bots spamming in local.

From reading most of this thread , stealing some ideas and adding to them i suggest the following.

1. Make sure the minimum escrow is 50% of what it would be with margin trading if you were setting it up now.
ie at max skills 12% of outstanding order is the lowest the escrow goes topped up from wallet.
2. If through player manipulation / lack of isk in wallet this isn't possible then the order shows up red in the market and an extra warning added.
3. It is possible once per day to query (for a fee) an order to see if there is enough isk in the players wallet to cover it.
If there is enough isk to cover minimum trade volume but not enough for whole order then it is flagged yellow. Your 1 check/day is not consumed.
If not enough for minimum order then it will show red (to you).
At this point your market contact in gratitude at your discovery of a dodgy order will let you buy the info for that chars other active buy orders and colour codes them green to red.
If you try and fill a yellow or red order and it fails 75% of escrow is taken as npc market fines and 25% to person who tryed to buy as a reward for finding it.

Now it should be possible to goto another region buy the scam item for a normal price and liberate some isk from the scammer.
cautious and subtle scammers should be able to continue almost as normal.
In addition overstretched market players will be vulnerable to other players who take down their market orders and steal their escrow. This will only be possiible if the wallet depletes enough that their is a single order from the many outstanding that can't be covered AND that someone finds it.
New skill INSIDER TRADING allows for one extra market check a day with margin trading and a social skill as prereq's.

Sure it is.
It is as real as every other order out there. It's an order you can try to sell to. With a bit of luck, the conditions that will make it go through will have happened by then; with a bit of bad lack, the conditions that make it fail will be in place instead.

In what way are they different? Both are orders that you will fail to sell to. Both are orders that will cost the buyer, not you. Both are orders that will sit on the market and be inaccurate or not real. Both lead to the same outcome for both you and the other party. Functionally, there is no difference whatsoever.

Because there is no such thing as a fake order — none that can be determined mechanically at any rate. There are simply orders on the market that may or may not be possible to fulfil when you press that sell or buy button. Eliminating orders because of some arbitrary definition of “fake” means that the market is just as — probably more — inaccurate than if the orders are displayed. Without them, you have no clue what orders are actually available for you to try. I lose out on tons of cash because I sell to a lower price than someone is willing to pay, if they get the money in time…

But that guarantee already exists. What you wanted was that “buy orders should be guaranteed, […] You don't have a market without binding buy orders.” In other words, if I see it, I should be able to buy or sell to it — no ifs or buts. That would require tick-by-tick updates on every order in the databse and tick-by-tick updates of the market interface for anyone having a market window open. That seems like an awful lot of needless work compared to just accepting the fact that, no, the order you see might not be there when you try to execute it and that they are only processed when someone actually tries to call in one of those offers.

…aside from functionally being the exact same thing for both buyer and seller, and aside from both being normal market functions. Why are you trying to create a distinction that doesn't exist? How is an order that currently can't be paid “not legitimate”? How do you determine that the buyer isn't trying to get the money in before the order is called?

Again, why are you trying to impose arbitrary mechanical restrictions on what people can and can't do, and wilfully displaying incorrect data on the market, just to fix a problem that is all about people not understanding how the market works; how investments work; and where to find the information they need to make intelligent decisions. Why are you trying to solve an education and information problem through game mechanics rather than by providing education and information?

In fact, I have to ask at this point: what is the actual problem you're trying to solve here? “Orders not being completed when I try them” is an unacceptable answer because then we have to remove all order manipulation functionality and all time limitations from the game since they will all create that problem.

They don't. That's why the orders cancel as soon as the buyer is unable to produce the cash required for a purchase.
Remember, the whole point of the Margin Trading skill is the ability to say "I'll have the money before someone sells me the goods, so put the order up now." Whether there is money to cover the order is of entirely no consequence until someone attempts to fill the order, at which point the Broker checks, and takes the order down.



The order is perfectly legitimate. The market allows you to put less ISK into escrow than is required to cover the entire order.
In other words, whether the buyer can complete his end of the order is entirely irrelevant until there's a seller ready to provide goods.

If the buyer can't pay, the order's canceled, the seller loses nothing, and the buyer is out his broker fees.



You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Orders placed using the Margin Trading skill are placed following all the normal rules of the EVE market. That's the very definition of legitimacy.

Well I prefer the mechanic as it is. I may have 20bil in buy orders with 10bil liquidity behind it at times, but my sales exceed my purchases on a daily basis and there's just no risk of not meeting my obligation. Certainly the legitimate uses of the skill far outweigh the illegitimate.

The issue is that some idiot has paid 500mil for something worth 50mil to try to sell it for 1bil, and there's nothing in the escrow system that will get him his 450mil back, nor to provide enough disincentive to the scammer unless he's obliged to cover the order by going into negative isk.

But negative isk doesn't work because that would be an isk faucet of epic proportions, as the buyer would now be the scammer.

I think the simplest solution is to show multi-unit margin orders in red. Attempting to buy that item will pop up a big warning that the buyer proceeds at his own risk. It's the simplest code change, it educates the marks, it doesn't impact legitimate players, and it puts the scammers out of business.

Nah, I have seen A LOT of margin scam orders for expensive single unit items like limited ships and apparel, etc. And only SOME of them were me. In fact I used it as a tool to test for and fool market bots and made many billions doing it. It is actually the one tool for screwing up market bots that works.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in this topic of what the target is.

People keep going on tangents about how to fix the scams, and I'm sitting here thinking "who cares, this is eve, how does that fix their UI problems?" There is one thing that needs to be understood if you want to discuss this:

Elimination of margin trading scams is not the real focus of the discussion.

The only reason CCP is concerned is because their market UI is not representing information accurately to the users and this can be exploited. Yes, it most notably enhances market trading scams, but that is just one byproduct of the issue. If you are to fix "margin trading scams" it should be more of an accidental benefit from your solution to the real issue at hand. The focus should be on how to more accurately represent information to people on the market without gutting or gimping margin traders. It's a bit harder to tackle because you are lying in a sense about how much isk you are pushing onto an order.


You can clearly see in the discussion that people are focusing more on the scam issue than the UI issue in the various attempts to "punish the scammer" by inciting fees, taxes or obstacles in their path. This is completely meaningless as not only does nothing to improve the UI's misrepresentation of orders, but it also misses it's misguided target as scammers use throwaway alts that take their penalties with them to the garbage. Ultimately it would only impact legitimate margin traders and serve no benefit to the trade community. I would ask that you change your perspective to improve the rate of progress in this thread instead of being bogged down in nonsense.

I think something like the suggestion above would work best: a feature that would query the order as needed. I would have the feature report the following:

- "SCC has confirmed that the full order has been guaranteed by escrow funds." - if escrow funds will cover the full amount of the order.

- "SCC has determined that the minimum order amount is covered by escrow funds at this time. The full order cannot be guaranteed." - if escrow funds will cover the minimum order but not the full order.

- "SCC has found that escrow funds will not cover the minimum order. Proceed with caution." - If escrow funds will not even cover the minimum order.

This way, the feature only reports on the amount of outstanding escrow funds deposited for the particular order. This is information that is independent of the buyer's wallet amount, and is as accurate as the system can be.

If the information can be retrieved and presented easily with no/minimal overhead, no fee would be needed. Otherwise, I would suggest a fee associated with the item value, like 5% of buy order price.

Remember, we're only trying to fix a particular edge case: to keep a greedy, careless player from endangering his wallet. This feature would give him the warning that all may not be as it appears. I expect the feature would probably go unused in most day-to-day trading.

Use of this feature should also be added to a tutorial, so new players are aware that the feature exists.


Reporting escrow status on all orders is not reasonable, and not needed. Allowing players to double-check the escrow status of a suspicious order sounds like a good compromise.

So what's inaccurate about the information that's being presented?

There's someone offering to buy X item at Y price. That is the only information presented, and it is presented accurately (limited by the refresh rate of the market window). No information is presented about competing sellers, the buyer's future ability to pay, the buyer's future willingness to keep offering that deal, etc.


The issue is people confusing their incorrect assumptions about how something works with reality and then getting upset when reality doesn't conform to their assumptions.