Market Discussions

As they say, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is (too good to be true).
So, yes, it "sort of" was a kind of scam.
But it was only a scam if they made you buy that many at over market usual price.
Otherwise, it was just an annoyance (which you accidentally made worse).

What you missed was two things.

1. You used advanced sell instead of simple sell when attempting to sell to an existing buy order.
...that was just an aside, by the way, you shot yourself in the foot there fair and square (and not just in this case, but constantly when you sell stuff).
So... yeah... NEVER do that. Why pay broker fees when you don't have to ?
When selling to existing buy orders, use simple sell.
Or at least select "instant" instead of the 3 months (should not have you pay broker fees, but I am not 100% sure about that, so just use simple order instead).

2. The "Margin Trading" skill.
In particular, the way the game treats buy orders that can't be covered by existing ISK in the purchaser's wallet.
Namely, the order gets automatically canceled without anything being transacted. The would-be buyer has to pay the broker fees again to put the order back up.

So how does that help these guys "scam" ?
Well, first, some guy with not enough ISK in the wallet to cover the full order sets up a large order with a huge minimal quantity (well above the usual traded volume) at a very attractive price (noticeably higher than market average). That's "the bait".
Then, other guy sells a lot of that particular stuff at ABOVE usual market price (in either batches smaller than the minimum buy volume, or in a station a bit farther away), but still at a price below that of the big buy order. That's "the switch" (ok, not really fitting that analogy, but eh, close enough).
So, people end up buying stuff well above market value, then find out they can't sell it at (what they thought) would have been a much better price, because the order vanishes as soon as somebody tries to sell to it.

Of course, if you take a look at the large order quantity (almost nobody legitimately sets minimum quantity above 1, unless it's for a regional order of something tiny and cheap, like, say, minerals) and the fact it's well above market value (plus quantity-wise a lot over usual daily transaction amounts), you could tell something's fishy and just stay away from it even if you didn't know how margin trading works.

That's because you opened an advanced sell order. If you had selected "simple" order, it would have silently failed with the bogus buy order vanishing and you could try again with another simple order to the next higher buy.

Just figured I'd point out that using the advanced sale window you can still achieve the same thing by choosing "immediate" for duration, it voids the fees in the same way and can of course never create a sell order.

Thank you for that Akita, I've been playing a while and never picked that up.

Sounds like the best way that this should be combatted is for Eve to

1. Eve mechanics should immediatedly ignore the minimum setting
2. Allow the buy order to go through in the amount that it will take the buyer to 0.00isk

That should prevent this from being abused.

So in what way can a player put up a minimal order for an item for which he/she can't even fund the minimal order be legitimate?

First off, having that additional limitation in place when PLACING the order will not do much good - all the player has to do is send out the ISK after placing the order.

And I hope you're not suggesting to re-compare ISK wallet amount and auto-cancel all orders that go underfunded every time ISK is taken out of the wallet, because that would be murder on the server database-workload-wise AND could very well lead to some legitimate orders dropping off on legitimate traders that play it a tad bit too close.

Or you CCP could do the obvious and auto erase any buy individual order that exceeds your wallet.

Umm no.

The idea of margin trading is that I can have multiple(in most cases over 100) buy orders for different items in different locations. I never know which ones are likely to be filled but the majority wont be filled in any given short time frame.

If you are simply posting one order there is no reason you need margin trading. Just repost the when its filled or close to being filled.

I have already stated the easiest most simple solution to the margin trading scam.

Make it so that the min buy amount cannot exceed the escrow amount.

So if you have margin trading at 50%. And you want to buy say 20,000 items at 50,000 a pop, you would need to put 500mill in escrow (out of 1 billion total required).

So limit the minimum buy amount to be 500 mill / 50000 or 10000 items. This way the buy order can be fulfilled completely, if it is legit, and there is no way to make it so the entire order will just fail, only the amount not under escrow.

You will always be able to fill up to the escrow amount, this is why there is escrow in the first place.



edit: made it a little more readable.