Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I hesitate to focus on margin trade scamming, since even though the issue under discussion is used for such scams, it is by no means limited to them. But on the subject of scams, here are a few observations:

1. Many, if not most, margin trade scams do not depend on minimum quantity greater than zero.

2. Escrow is common across multiple buy orders, so escrow for one can be cleared by manipulating another unrelated one.

3. Many margin scams involve items with extremely low trading volume, for which there is no useful history, let alone a consensus of value, for a potential seller to check.

I'll explain my own experience with these ebil scammers by showing where on the doll I was touched. I was a new(er) player who came into possession of a rare but not terribly useful officer item, an Estemel's something-or-other if I recall correctly. I was anxious to sell it so I went to Eve-Central, which I had happily discovered, to see what I could get for it. There were no sell orders, but there were a wide range of buy orders. The highest one was, unsurprisingly, in Jita. So I loaded it in my Iteron I and trekked over to Jita by way of Uedama and sold it. Or rather I tried to sell it, but of course the buy order failed. I didn't know the reason, but I knew someone could have beaten me to it, or it could have expired, or it could have been canceled or changed. So I looked for the next buy best order, which was in Amarr. So I schlepped through Niarja to Amarr and sold it. Or rather I tried to sell it, but of course the buy order failed. WTF, this could not be a coincidence. So I did some Googling on failed orders and eventually became familiar with the margin trading scam. By that time, the Jita buy order was back up, and I figured if I was ever going to sell this thing, Jita would be my best shot. So I took it back to Jita, and failed the buy order again. Over the next month or two, every time I was in Jita, I would fail that buy order, smugly satisfied by all the broker fees I was costing that bad man (I don't know who it was). This experience was a valuable lesson for me, because it taught me that buy orders could be fake. That's an important thing to know given the current state of market mechanics. Of course, there would be no need to learn that particular lesson if market mechanics were changed to eliminate fake orders. And the experience did not teach me how to identify fake orders, which I am still too much of a newbie to know how to do. Luckily it did not cause me to over-react and think "if it looks too good to be true, it is." That would have been a disaster, because every day I find deals that look too good to be true but are true anyway. Those are my favorite deals, and sometimes I even find them posted in Jita local.

Everything works as intended: when there isn't enough money, the buy order fails. Margin trading or not. Too many people in this thread ignore the necessary first step for the margin trading skill to work: that the victim first buys an item from an another sell order, mistaking it for a bargain. Most likely because the scammer even advertized it in local ("LOL, found fail buy order, whish I had money ...").

That's where the scam happens.

no, the scam happens before the isk is garnered, in the same way that a third party scam happens when the buyer agrees to use the third party and not when he sends the isk, as the idea has already been placed. The scam happens because the client is misrepresenting buy orders that are designed to be impossible to fill, but are made to look legit and for all intents and purposes seem to be real to anyone who isn't in the know (new marketers, new players etc) which is where the problem lies



and this story proves my above point, and my post on the previous page that margin trades that are designed to fail when the buy order is to be implemented should be hidden, not requiring a re-setup or another broker fee payment, but simply removed so as not to either mislead someone to fall for a margin trading scam, or artificially manipulate the price of some lesser-traded items

Anyways here is MY solution: CCP should have a background process(es) constantly running that just goes thru approx. top 5% buy orders in every item and doing wallet checks to see if order would fail or not.

If wallet check fails, color the order red. And when you mouse over it, have a big ******* tooltip that says something like ORDER NOT GUARENTEED.

Something like this: http://i.imgur.com/wCj7aSp.jpg

If the order is fixed, the next time the background process checks it, it turns the warning off.

This brings up another issue that could be corrected if a change is made to margin trading mechanics.

Currently if I have lots of buy orders for multiple quantities of various things, and some have executed, there is no easy way to know which orders still have funds in escrow and which have been depleted. So if I let my wallet run low, I will have unfillable orders, even though the orders window shows I have billions in escrow.

Until testing this myself, I was under the impression the escrow was pooled among orders, and that all my buy orders were good. Now I know this is not the case.

I have no experience with market trading. I will just point out that right now the NPE only touches on the market.

Given that the market is richer and deeper than that, wouldn't it make more sense to add something to the NPE--possibly even a new agent--that really introduces players to the market, and then points them to further in-depth reading? That way, the focus shifts away from "protect the poor players from this aspect of the game" to "educate the new players about this aspect of the game," which has the additional potential to enrich the market by introducing new, informed participants.

If someone skips the tutorial, or breezes through without paying attention? You've led the horse to water. That's all you can reasonably do.

No, I always want to decide myself if the bid price on the product is worth my while.

Besides that, this would urge everyone to setup market scams to get cheap product, setup ALT A with an order that has a high price, completely drained of escrow based on margin trading mechanics and then setup an order with ALT B on half price, to scoop up the sales.

As I hope the first sentence of my post makes clear, I'm not qualified to say whether it's a "bad" mechanic, or how it should be fixed.. Riffing on what seems to be broad understanding that the Market Trading skill is legitimately useful, I'm just saying, why not take the opportunity to tell new players that hey, this isn't the WoW Bazaar. This is deeper and richer and more perilous, and this is how it works and these are the tools it offers. I'm assuming that that would remain a useful initiative even if the UI or the skill were tweaked to address the lack of information that makes a particular scam possible, because you still want to educate players about how it works, right?

I've seen a couple of suggested tweaks that seem reasonable to me; I'm just aware of the fact that "seems reasonable to me" means nothing given that I have only done the most casual dabbling in the market, and I haven't so much as injected the Market Trading skill. My particular axe is the NPE.

Delete the margin trading skill. Problem solved.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with this issue is to simply hide the buy orders that can't be fulfilled with the current amount of ISK the buyer has in their wallet. The legitimate users of the Margin Trading technique would benefit from this change as they wouldn't have to re-post buy orders that have failed due to temporary lack of funds in their wallet, and would be able to resume their orders as soon as they get the necessary funds.

However, this change would render all margin trading scams impossible, as fail-able buy orders would no longer be visible on the market. As I believe EVE should remain a cold and dark place, an additional mechanic should be implemented to give scammers a way to continue practicing their craft, while also keeping the benefits for the legitimate traders.

When placing a buy order, buyers should have an option to choose what happens to their to their buy order once their wallet drops bellow what is needed to complete the order. One would be to hide the order while the wallet remains bellow the funds needed, while preserving the order expiry timer, and is something legitimate traders would use. The other option would be to keep the order visible even after the wallet balance drops, but incur some sort of penalty if someone tries to fulfill the order and fails. This penalty could be forfeiture of escrow, an escalating cost of escrow for all future buy orders which would escalate with every failed buy order, higher broker fees or something similar. The important thing is that on the surface, in the eyes of the seller, all the buy orders would look the same.

One thing that could be shown to sellers who have triggered a failed buy order is the name of the character that has set it up, as well as giving players an option to set "Ignore Market Orders" on whoever they want.