Hi,
the current dev blog called “Broker Relations” shows an unfortunate lack of clear communication.
The main problem is the use of the term “price” instead of the proper terms “unit price” or “total price”. Also it seems that the term price is used meaning unit price in the section on market price precision and total price in the section on the “Relist Charge”.
In the section on market price precision we find the following gem:
"Currently in EVE, all order prices can be specified to a 0.01 ISK precision, regardless of the magnitude. This will be changing and will use discrete ticks to a precision of four significant figures. "
First of all, there could be obvious jokers wanting to list martian flat cats for the bargain unit price of 2.718E-281828 ISK (minimum order size of two!) - which is 4 significant digits precision by the usual standards - so please get an arbitrary precision library and make sure this doesn’t get rounded to 0 as due to an unfortunate incident I have a few planets full of them and the total price of my order will be 100B ISK.
Of course, individual orders will be rounded up as before to the next whole ISK, so in reality, if I sell retail, I will get even more…
But, assuming that the sentence quoted from the dev blog above meant to say unit price, this leads to the very real result that the single digit unit price of Tritanium now can be entered into the order system to precision of 4 significant digits as 6.391 ISK and increased in 0.001 ISK steps. Of course as before all total prices will be rounded to whole ISK.
Now you can say, wait, they surely meant total price here. But this leads to very interesting effects as now the rule abiding industrialist with a 1B trit order can now only change it in 1M increments (1,000,000,000 to 1,001,000,000) while an order of 1M of trit can be changed in 1K increments (1,000,000 to 1,001,000).
Of course an order of 1M of trit will not build a lot of ships, but on the other hand the repetitive task of setting up 1000 orders for trit with a volume of 1M can easily be automated by those with less commitment to the rules… so we would actually give bots an inherent advantage.
Since CCP stated that their goal is to make trading bots less viable, I’ll assume they meant unit price here.
Now we come to the case of the order modification fee or “Relist Charge”. Once again the term price is used instead of the more precise terms.
If we assume they meant unit price here, (and maybe for the section above on market price precision too for the sake of consistency), we get to the net result of huge minimum price increments for expensive items leading to a nontrivial relisting charges (a 1B item has a price increment of 1M and the increase from 1B to 1.001B incurs a charge 12M and change (for the values from the examples of a Broker Rate of 0.03 and 0.6 Relist DIscount - btw if you give a formula with the term 1 minus a percentage, it would be a great idea to give the percentages as decimal values…).
On the contrary our industrialist from above with his 1B trit order will be able to play the new 0.001 ISK game for 100 ISK per change (the calculation of the actual relisting charge before getting rounded up to the minimum charge of 100 ISK is left as an exercise to the reader).
Of course there is a strong indicator they actually meant total price here as they state the initial charge to create an order is unchanged at Broker Rate times Price and from experience those who trade in wholesale might have noticed that the broker fee for 1B of trit is more than that for 1M of trit…
This leads to a more sane result for the Relisting Charge that an order of 1B total price incurs the same charge to relist regardless of the unit price. But if we assume that the term price is used consistently throughout the Dev Blog, we must assume that this was also meant for the minimum price increment leading to an inherent advantage for trade bots.
That being said, it reminds me a bit of hisec incursion changes from last summer which were intended to lower the ISK faucet of incursion bounties but in reality only lead to a lot of “normal” players giving up on incursions due to more traveling and spawns in hisec pockets while the 24/7 multibox fleets (nota bene, unlike trade bots I’ll assume the known large scale multiboxers have been thoroughly screened by CCP for any signs of TOS violating activity like input multiplication and are thus perfectly legal but of course a small minority of the player base) run as before and the change in incursion bounties has not really gone down.
TLDR: Hire an economist. If you can’t afford that, please at least buy a student of economy dinner and have him or her proofread your Dev Blog on economy changes.
Cheers,
Zoltan
