Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, I can roll a new alt, put up a buy order for 1 trillion isk, have my main sell them the item.... then rinse, repeat.

He is right. I could just make dozens of trial accounts or fewer 1 time plexed accounts and make money appear out of nowhere.

However you might be able to avoid this by making the buyers wallet go negative, without having the seller get money from no where. Any money made by the buyer from then on gets put into the sellers wallet. Possibly have the buyer unable to place any more buy orders until he is green again. This would prevebt money from magically appearing from no where, and prevents the buyer from putting out fake orders without any risk to himself.

e: after some thought that still might not solve the original problem though

How is this skill used exclusively for scamming?

Once skilled to lvl1, it is ALWAYS in effect!
It's the single most usefull skill for every trader out there!

Maybe fairly hefty fines for failed orders would work better, doesn't ruin either use of the skill but does provide the ~CONSEQUENCES~ people so love to talk about.

The skill is just too useful for new traders to nerf like OP.

Wow a lot of butthurt in here for even suggesting something like that lulz. Could it be you "legitimate" traders don't want this fixed? This is Eve. If someone breaks your toy, HTFU and make a new one. Don't rehash the same old scams. As for it being an "ISK printing scheme", yes the execution as it stands is broken, but either you've never heard of, or are hoping we have never heard the word "EXPLOIT". As in "Punishable by CCP when found". As in "Loss of isk/items and account bans". I'm quite sure this can be easily fixed with ingame mechanics already in place. How about making Margin Trading and Market Call untrainable on trial accounts? Problem solved. See how easy that was? If this goes live, give trial accounts with the skill a choice, either pay or lose the skill and the SP go into the unallocated pool to be used by the player at their discretion (as has been done before).

Eve is easy lol.

And did I really read that? < 1% of margin traders are scammers? Where did this number come from? What study was done to get this statistic? I believe you'll probably find the real number is much higher than that lolz. If you don't think so, you sir are the idiot here.

I also see this as a tool legitimate traders would welcome. "You mean my market order won't fail cuz I derped and forgot to transfer isk? Or I derped and accidentally put 11 instead of 1 for minimum required? Thank you CCP!" This would give you time to correct that mistake. After all, a legitimate trader wouldn't put up a buy order for something he doesn't really want, right?

I believe Rowells is onto something there with his idea. Why not make a little window in the wallet, like they did for your Aurum balance, with the amount you have in Margin Call. It's there. You know how much it is. You can't access it until the buyer refills his wallet. I think some sort of time limit would be in order. Maybe 48 or 72hrs to refill the wallet or trading on that specific toon stops. If an identical period of time passes, then trading stops on that account until the problem is fixed. The mechanics are already in place. Ask someone who got caught buying isk or items from a RMTrader.

I told you Eve was easy.

I think a better way than 15%/level payout, How about lvl1 gives you 50% and then 5%/lvl with lvl5 giving you 75%. This gets modified by standings with the station the order takes place in. +.99 or less knocks payout back to 50% with 5% added in per point of standings til +9.0 or above gives you 95%. The rest goes to the station as fees for recovering your money.

See how easy Eve is?

"But traders don't get standings!" did I hear you whine? How would you like to? Training Margin Trading would enable a counter, like the mission counter (every 16 missions for a faction/corp gives you a storyline) that counts your trades/contracts completed in one station. Every 16 ( or whatever number CCP picks) completed transactions (including completed contracts) gives you a storyline courier mission (traders usually not having combat skills) that would raise your standings with that corp or maybe just that station. These standings then reduce the amount you have to pay in penalties for being overdrawn on your wallet.

Margin trading lvl1 give you a base 150% deposit, 5%/lvl reduction til lvl5 requires a 130% deposit. This would be modified by your standings up or down by 5%/pt giving a range of 105% to 175% with the extra going to the station for accounting fees. Note this all only applies if the seller has Margin Call trained. If not, the standard mechanics apply and I hope the seller enjoys his stack of useless overpriced crap.

Eve is so easy.

So scammers don't really lose one of their scams. It just would be riskier now. If they don't like it, they could always go back to mislabeling Raven contracts ROFLMAO!

Did you miss the part where the funds are not accesible until the buyers wallet is refilled or are you ignoring it? You are making my point for me. What you end up with is an alt account 12B in the red and 12B in your mains account you can't access. Think maybe CCP might wonder how that happened?

Clearly you are not clever enough to see fixes for an exploit and therefore should not be posting....anything.

I have a CNR on contracts for you.

do you see how that still doesnt fix the scam? because this is only ever done on throwaway alts anyway...

if the person who got scammed doesnt have access to the "margin call wallet" until the buyer's wallet is refilled and the buyer has no intention of ever refilling his wallet how is this better?

In fact, how does this change the margin trading scam at all? (short answer: it doesnt)

The only difference is that the person now has a permanent reminder (in the form of a margin call wallet that will never be funded) of how idiotic they are.

neither of those "fixes" solve the problem...

If you cant train margin trading on a trial account, then the scammers will just PLEX their account and absorb the loss into their profit margin for the scam.

Also garnishing wages doesnt matter if they never intend to use that character ever again.

the scam would simply go on as it does currently, the only difference is that you would need to biomass the character every time you pulled a scam off.

That is why I suggested the 2 48 to 72 hr timers. If the wallet isn't refilled within the first timer, trading on the toon is stopped. By the end of the 2nd timer, trading on the account is stopped and the items are returned to the seller. No, the seller never gets his money, but neither does the scammer. The skill as proposed, being a rank 4 or 5 skill with whatever prereq's CCP would want, would take approx 2 to 3 months to train. So it would cost the scammer 2 or 3 plexes to pull the scam once, never get his money and have to biomass his toon every time. And rereading my post, I see I forgot to mention the return of the items. I apologize for that.

I never said this would end the scam. I said it would make it riskier to do it. To pull the scam, they have to put overpriced buy orders on the market to make their crap look good. If someone were to try to fill the order with this skill trained is the only time any of this would kick in. If you watch the scammers trying to advertise in any of the trade hubs, they use their main trading alt. It's never done with 1 day old toons. And yes I know anybody can make a market order, But my, and the OP's I assume, aim was to make it more difficult, not eliminate it all together. Also, I think this is a useful skill for traders as already stated.

Knowsitall, the scam usually involves the minimum quantity and the total quantity wanted being the same for an expensive sounding but generally worthless item that's traded at very low volumes. So that really wouldn't work.

OP, you need to understand that the 'scam' isn't in the buy order, it's in the sell order.

If you buy an item for double the avg market price, or worse buy an item of which you don't understand the underlying DEMAND dynamics, you're a bad trader and deserve to lose money anyway.

Furthermore, as the devs have correctly pointed out several times, only people that are hoping to pull off a scam themselves (by taking advantage of a 'fail buy order') fall for margin trading scams. So you don't deserve neither a mechanics change nor, tbh, anybody's simpathy .

Sorry to be so harsh but really, falling for a margin trading scam is 80% your own mistake, 15% your own greed and no more than 5% the 'scammer's fault'. I see no need to change useful and reasonable game mechanics just to prevent greedy people from making mistakes!