Been afk for a while (months and years even) but in Eve it should not matter…
This Toon was created for the sole purpose of scamming margin trading scammers…
And i did so successfully on many an occasion and LOVED IT!!!
Here’s an example of how it worked…
The margin scammer put up the usual bunch of sell orders of ie. 100 pieces of “rare commodity X” ranging from 1000% to 2000% of actual value.
a buy order is placed on “rare commodity X” for 5000% of value 2 jumps away with a min. volume of 100 pieces (only 23% is placed in escrow - and wallet is empty)
The mark (sucker) buys all sell orders of “rare commodity X” - hoping to sell for 5000%
When he tries to sell the order fails and cancels - since the buyer can’t afford.
The mark now owns “rare commodity X” times 100 bought for ~1500% of value
here’s the counter scam
buy all kinds of rare stuff at 0.01% of value over years… (then wait…)
Find the scammers (check rare stuff regularly [insignias, tags, faction ■■■■] and look for buy orders with min. volume)
sell 100 pieces of “rare commodity X” to 1100% [22% of buy order] - thus milking the scammers escrow - without buying a single one from a sell order…
Scammer now owns 100 more (~200 pieces counting his own sell orders) of “rare commodity X” expensively …
I’ve made 110.000 times buy price of “rare commodity X”
I think the organic sand box feel of Eve is encapsulated in this complex mechanism - and whether intended or not - it should still exist.
As I understand concepts like “Ganking” or “Mining Ops” were never designed by CCP but “invented” or evolved by players and then later embraced by developers - and the market powers are brutal and in-game scams is a given like bank robbers were in the Wild West… - marks learn the hard way…
Hard gained knowledge are the rarest and most precious weapons in Eve - and i loved perfecting scamming the scammers…
Also as director in a production heavy corp. margin trading is very useful. Especially giving smaller corps a chance to get on their feet - and scale up activity on many levels.
Making traders less effective results in less production and thus less gameplay for the gamers…
Please don’t simplify Eve to please alfa-players and protect the marks… Let the scammers scam so I can keep scamming the scammers
/CuntR sCammr
Nope… I want to scam the ones who exploit others ignorance - thereby “stealing from the thieves”…
…And HyperNet does not replace market scams - merely makes it easily accessible - and transparent that scams will happen in this lottery style trading… …not a real threat to the Eve economy IMO
Margin Trading caused a lot of support tickets for CCP about the interface being ‘wrong’, as players expect to be able to trust what the game itsef is telling them.
A few years ago CCP went the route of saying ‘you cannot scam by faking wallet APIs or otherwise causing an official data source to show incorrect data/emulate an official data source with incorrect data’; in doing so, they basically painted themselves into a corner. requiring scammers to not display false data meant CCP needed to also not display false data, and impossible-to-fulfill market orders aren’t materially different from fake API data from an end-user perspective: it’s an official system showing invalid data.
So now everyone can trust that if a buy order is present, it can be sold to, as full funds are in escrow.
In a way that makes sense… but part of the fun of Eve is the long game… What you see is not always what you get - and a huge part of the content is hidden (ie. anomalies - wormholes, DED etc…) and know-how is essential to make it anywhere…
There are not many shortcuts to quickly succeeding in this game - and the first market lesson you need is this… if something seems to good to be true…? - it probably is NOT true… (actually this goes IRL as well)
Yeah, it definitely is one of those ‘I can see both sides’ situations, but especially with the higher impact being toward new players with every reason to think the UI is being honest, I can see why CCP went this route and largely agree with it. Similar to their decision to make changes to the Trade window so the confirm action is revoked if the contents change on either side when one player has already accepted the trade.
There are plenty of other scams that rely on inattentive players, which better fits with ‘buyer beware’ lessons; minimizing the opportunity for the UI itself to mislead players is probably healthier for the NPE.
Sure… but apart from the margin scams - margin trading also made station trading more viable as a business. As I mentioned earlier this toon is not my main - and was never meant for anything but counter scams. My trading alts relied on the small margins to buy materials for production of items to sell for profit. Often with marginal revenue of 10-20%…
With the “new” relist fee and margin trading gone - the few items worth producing in hi-sec are all but gone… Why then bother with industry if trading the produce is discouraged…?
All margin trading did was let players have their capital be more liquid by being able to hold some isk back at any given time - it didn’t actually make things more or less expensive. This meant with less capital a player could dabble in more products, rather than being required to be more selective about their buy orders.
The relist fees are meant to count the ‘0.01’ isk wars that meant the trader who could be online longer always won vs the trader willing to make a research the market and price based on supply/demand rather than ‘first person to sell’. It has pros and cons outside of that space, but for the most part, the players most impacted are those who were not pricing based on demand but instead on maximum profit while also being first to sell. Basically, you can’t have it both ways anymore - either price for profit, or price for speed. If there is sufficient demand, all orders will sell up to a reasonable (market-driven) price point - someone undercutting you slightly won’t really make a difference.
Ok then… maybe to some this game is about PvP-ing in null-sec all day. But to me it’s about the trade. For the roughly 10 years I’ve played it on / off - it has been about ‘reading’ the markets for profitable business…
You’re saying Industry should just die? … or just that I shouldn’t bother with it ?
I’m saying that CCP has decided that the main isk faucet in this game should be nullsec NPC bounties and the main isk drain should be market taxes. I think their decision is completely stupid - but they have decided to eviscerate their player driven markets because they aren’t willing to reduce bounty payouts on NPCs.
You ask why you should participate in the market now that CCP has made it crappier than it was before. Perhaps you shouldn’t.
(actually this goes IRL as well)