Market Discussions

Well, I think both suggestions are silly from a technical perspective, because the entire point of Margin Trading is that you can extend yourself further than you'd be able to if you had to always have 100% of the cash for a buy order in escrow.

I'm not sure what purpose the flagging would serve, since you'd still be forced to sell to that buy order first before you could approach any of the others. That's just how the market mechanics work. It's not like you can avoid a buy order, unless it's only at a station or within a limited range. Also, an order made with legitimate intentions could be marked. All I can see happening here is that the market window gets cluttered with another piece of visual garbage for the brain to compute. For 99.9% of cases, it would be ignore-worthy, and yet it would call your attention every single time to scrutinize it. It would be like the boy who cried wolf, this ever-present caution sign that makes the entire act of being cautious one of tedium and meaninglessness.

Maybe if it could be turned on or off at will, but then again, do I imagine that the devs are going to spend precious effort on creating this "fix" just to make a very niche scam slightly more difficult to pull off? Also, as others have said, it would probably be quite taxing on the servers, as it would have to be constantly checking and rechecking wallet values in order to know whether the order needs to be highlighted or not.

As for hiding such orders, that's an even sillier proposition, because it basically means that, if you use Margin Trading for its intended purpose, you can't participate in the market. It would totally break Margin Trading. That's not even a serious attempt at a solution. The Margin Trading skill entitles me to hold only a small portion in escrow and not have to maintain enough in my wallet to cover it. Yes, even if the buy order is only for a quantity of 1. That shouldn't change.

Ultimately, we're verging off the real point here, which is that the scammer's Margin Trading skill doesn't make you buy up the bait items he sets out. Nobody is making you do anything in this scam. The skill is very much secondary to the real psychological basis of the scam. Players who use the skill legitimately--and who, by the way, make up the vast majority of the people using the skill--shouldn't have to suffer a nerfing of the skill, and a greater level of annoyance with the mechanics of the market window, just because a few people fell for a stupid scam and decided to get butthurt over it.

EDIT: Also, if anything is being "skirted" here, it's an assessment of the level of culpability the scammed person has in having been taken in by it. What can you say about somebody who falls for this, other than that they were almost certainly caught in a moment of extreme laziness and greed, and that it was those two elements, not the Margin Trading skill, which were their undoing? Because if you check other markets, or know anything about the item you're trying to make a buck on (i.e. you do your research), you will without a doubt see that you're buying something that is vastly overpriced, and trying to sell to an aberrationally high buy order. That alone should be enough of a sign to keep anybody away. Just like you only fly what you're willing to lose, you should only put into the markets what you're willing to lose.

A mechanic where buy orders are hidden if their owner does not have sufficient funds in wallet + escrow to cover the minimum buy amount seems reasonable to me. In fact, I feel this would represent a buff to margin trading. Whether tracking wallets and hiding orders would produce excessive server load is another story.

How is that a buff? If you have Margin Trading, you already know you need X to cover, because it tells you right in your wallet.

I would be in for this kind of change, if it fits following criteria;

1) Margin trading skill remains, the hiding function only adds a tag in front of market order entry as soon as the wallet is unable to cover it and the tag is removed right away when the wallet has enough money to cover it, while the tag is in place, the order shows only in the owners buy window and to every other aspect regarding to market it doesnt excist.

2) The amount it will stress the servers is no more then 5% increase in current database load and even then only for systems/clients that have either the order up OR have market window open. The max 5% is to prevent lolcrew from setting wacky buy orders in jita to lag it out.

3) The coding takes no more then 80 manhours of developer worktime, that's two weeks from one developer, or spread over to multiples a sensible amount.

However all this talk is purely academic as CCP has not taken any opinion for or against the Margin trading over the years, with current lack of developer assets (hello layoffs) it's unlikely that this is high on their priority list. Without CCP we can only make assumptions of the database load or time it would take to put this in. However we do know that atm both buy and sell orders are stored in separate database and actual calls when isk attempts to change hand are done when person actually interacts with it.

So the change would be at the very least from current database that gets things added/taken away once a player makes call for it to database that checks *all* orders and wallets related to them in every, 1sec, 3sec, 5 sec, 30 sec, whatever. No matter how it's implanted that has to be big amount of code and server load. -> Why my opinion is that it's waste of developer time at this point.

Quoting this.

The fact that it's a scam, or how easy or hard it is to avoid the scam, or how it's the victim's fault, it's all irrelevant. Saying those "fake" buy orders are perfectly fine is absurd, they go against the basic rules of the market.

Like I've done from the start you mean? I've always focused on the fact that the orders were impossible to fulfill.


"If we ignore the bug, there are no bugs"

I give up. Enjoy your nerf when it comes.

Yes, I believe the ability to have unfulfillable orders on the market is a design bug.


I haven't fallen for a single scam in my life. But, historically, CCP has nerfed every single mechanics-based scam.

They removed free form and loan contracts (and loan scams were specifically named an exploit). For courier contracts, you can't set destination to Jove anymore (exploit), and you get a huge warning on couriers to player outposts. On item exchanges, they color coded the prices, added the amount in words as well as numbers, and added BIG BOLD LETTERS about blueprint types.

Trade window scams got a small nerf with the warning dialog about trading ships. And it's been a long time since I heard of the timing scams where you took the item out of the window just before the mark clicked "accept", so that probably got fixed.

All in-space aggro "scams" such as the lofty or the various incursion RR aggro tricks were also nerfed or removed.

It's just a matter of time before margin trading scams get nerfed. Whether that makes the skill useless will depend on the exact solution.

No, this should be a firm rule of a market. Book orders that are listed on the market should be fillable. For example, RL stock markets get that right for the most part (though there's gaming of some such markets at the microsecond level).

This change would prevent the scam while boosting the usefulness of margin trading for legitimate orders. However, there are two problems with this idea:

1) The performance hit taken to implement this change would be substantial. Right now the node running a market only needs to query a list of active orders from the database. Because a single node handles all market transactions for given region, and no other node alters that list of orders, the data can be easily cached to minimize load on the database. In order to filter orders that cannot be filled, every time that someone refreshes the list of buy orders, the market node would need to query the database for wallet balances for every order. The wallet balances could not be cached because other nodes could alter the wallet balance making the cached value invalid. Implementing this feature would place a huge strain on the database.

2) Scamming is a natural part of Eve game play. Scams must be avoidable, but there is no requirement for them to be impossible. While some players might be confused by the margin trading game mechanic, once they are familiar with it they can easily avoid scams that use it.

I will leave you to use you own judgment in guessing if CCP will ever implement this suggestion.

Yay for disingenuousness. As if you'd even be talking about the mechanics of Margin Trading if it weren't for the existence of this "scam." Yeah, sure, it's not about that at all.