Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The only thing I can think of is to impose heavy taxes on this practice.

That's already the case. People pay an over the top and heavily inflated price tax, when they assume a buy order is the only information they require when investing their ISK.

well at least we appear to agree on a plausible improvement if not the wording

I feel this is the best thing to do because it's visible, it informs players so they can help themselves, and it doesn't harm the market system or emergent gameplay. It's such a small change implementing it is no big deal, and if it didn't help the percieved problem of margin trade scamming, the change is easy to revoke. Finally, since no change was made to the skill or the market, a different solution can still be implemented at a later date if necessary.

There's no reason not to try it to see if it helps. If it doesn't help, keep iterating.

Normally I find myself agreeing with Tippia and Rubyporto on most things and I tend towards the HTFU and learn how to play side of the argument. However, ihcn brings up a point here that is relevent to the comments on buy orders not being guaranteed.

People have listed above the various ways that a buy order can fail and that is accepted by all.

The point that is being ignored is that if the margin scammer is doing it right it is impossible to fulfil the buy order because he has removed the escrowed isk. This then gives the situation where the market interface is listing buy orders that are impossible to fulfil. So in that sense the interface is misleading.

Apart from that I have nothing to add at this point *ducks* :)

In my mind, a "fake" buy order is an order that appears to be legitimate, but cannot possibly ever, under any circumstances, fill. It is useless as a means of enabling a direct transaction between the "buyer" and the "seller", although it may of course be useful to encourage other transactions between those or other players. Players are currently unable to determine whether buy orders are fake because they do not have access to information about, or assurance of, buyers' ability to pay. The supposedly honest third-party broker (the market system) verifies the validity of sell orders, but not buy orders. A real-life stock exchange operated in this way would not last very long.

As for the notion that nobody has demonstrated why improved market accuracy is desirable, while I cannot imagine why it wouldn't be, let's assume that accurate market information is of no importance whatsoever. Let's explore the possibility of reducing the load on the servers even further, by not displaying any buy or sell orders at all. When you want to buy something, you enter the item, the quantity, and the amount you are willing to pay, and see what happens. Maybe your order will be filled. Yay! Maybe not. When you want to sell something, you do the same. If there is a valid order in the system, your item is sold. No more .01 ISK wars because nobody knows what orders are in the system. You didn't really need to see a bunch of numbers ahead of time, did you? Because, you know, there is no value in having that sort of thing. And had it been there for you, it would only have misled you, because, well, somebody may have gotten there first, or the order may have been canceled or changed.

What is the purpose of the market? Is it to enable efficient trading between players? If so, then reliable information is important. If it has some other purpose, such as creating opportunities for unpredictable player interactions, or hilarious market hijinx, then maybe it doesn't need fixed. Maybe we should look for creative ways to break it some more.

…and no such orders exist on the market. There were a couple of contracts that could be formed like this, but those were outlawed and eventually patched out.

Settings aside for a moment that there are no “fake” buy orders by the stated standard, yes they do. They have all the information they need, and the assurance is the same as for any other order on the market. Again, just because you see it doesn't mean it is actually possible to fill it when you try, and just because you fail to fill it doesn't mean you've been screwed over. If one order fails for some reason that is irrelevant to you, you just move on to the next.

No. He verifies them both. That's why it is impossible to ever lose ISK or items on orders where the other party does not fulfil his terms of the exchange.

…it is a bit of a strawman argument, and a reductio ad absurdum on top of that.

Yes, and there is nothing about the way margin trading works that makes it inefficient — quite the opposite in fact. It lets people find the value of a good without having to have immense liquidity to do so. If it turns out that, no, you were not actually able to go as high as you said, then the order gets cancelled and the current price returns to a more sensible level where an actual trade can take place. If someone .01:s that order, then your inability to pay the price isn't relevant — it's obviously the case that the price can and should be higher since people are willing to put the money in (as were you, if you could muster it in time).

Suggestions that have been put forward in this thread such as hiding or cancelling orders before they're allowed to fail does the exact opposite: it make the market less efficient — it provides less reason or incentive for traders to find the correct price of an item.

Buy orders that “cannot possibly ever, under any circumstances” be filled do not exist on the market, no. That would require an order for something that does not exist as a tradeable item, but in that case, you wouldn't be able to place a buy order for them to begin with.

It means that, no, by your own definition no “fake” buy orders exist in the game.

I am well aware that there are buy orders that are not fully covered by the wallets backing them; that is something completely different to how you defined “fake”. As it happens, players do have plenty of information at their disposal to spot these orders if they need to…

…but then, that need is questionable to begin with. After all, it's just another order that will fail when you try it — something that can happen for a myriad of reason and it makes no difference to you which one it is because you're completely protected either way.

I highly doubt it.

And that right there is the real problem. Too many people don't use the tools available (either ingame or out of game), stariting with the most important one: their brain. Spent one day in any of the four big market hubs and watch local flow. People still fall for the "I will double your ISK" scam. Or the multitude of scam contracts, where one 0 is either added or missing. I mean, the financial part is perhaps one of the most safe-guarded parts of EVE (Hands up, who remembers the old contracts?).

Really, I'm one hell of a carebear and have been a victim of some of the major EVE scams (EBANK, Titans4U, D-Bank, cosmoray), but there's only one to blame: me! I was greedy, I wasn't careful enough and I didn't use all information available. But s*** happens and I've dealt with it.

I would rather see the orders hidden from the seller, rather than cancelled.

So if the seller falls below the buy price the order comes off the visible list, until they put enough money in their wallet.

This should allow small traders, to be active, without having to setup the same order a dozen times, and should protect the sellers from a bad interface.

The seller would not see the inactive order, and the potential buyer would not have to spend huge amounts of time resetting orders if they landed something big in a trade - that depleted their wallet.

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The other choice is to mark orders from toons that have margin trading capability in the market, something like "professional trader", which warns the potential seller that their may not be enough iso to complete the deal.

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Either works for me, the second puts the policing on the players with margin trading capability to keep track of good traders and bad, similar to what many barter sites do today.