Had some additional thoughts. Like … what about typos?
We all make them. Try to enter 100,000 and enter 1,000,000 instead. On a buy order it can be pretty bad – you accidentally buy up half the market, and then have to to wait five minutes to fix your mistake. But with the new relist fees, it will cost you an additional arm and a leg to reduce your price and fix the error.
Might make sense to NOT charge relist fees when reducing the price of a buy order?
Also, I suspect the changes will just encourage traders (and bots) to have multiple small orders for a given item to minimize their up-front fee risk for any given price update. So not much impact on botting or competition, just forcing people to manage three times as many orders as they did before – which bots can do better than humans.
And the point about not being able to easily calculate margin/risk/profit is a good one. Unless you somehow keep track of how many times a given order has been relisted (and there is nothing in the game UI that lets you do that), you have no idea how much a given order has cost you in broker fees. Meaning you have no solid idea if you’re making money or not, or what items are profitable to trade in.
More and more, the thing that seems really problematic is the new relisting fee. By recalculating the fee on the entire value of the updated order, the cumulative effect risks being both large and untrackable without a stupid amount of bookkeeping outside of the game.
I have no issue with CCP trying to make station-trading less profitable. Don’t necessarily like it, but I agree there is too much money in the game, and there need to be more ISK sinks and less mineral production.
But it should be done in a straightforward, understandable way that lets users calculate and understand their costs. The relist fee seems to make trading much more of a faith-based enterrpise.
My off-the-cuff ideas:
– Increase time between price changes to an hour. Directly degrades the main competitive advantage of bots, with relatively minor impact on humans.
– If you want to increase market-related ISK sinks, leave the basic mechanism the way it is now, but just raise broker fees, sales taxes, reprocessing fees, etc. Those can be calculated and taken into account far easier than the new relisting fee.
– If there must be a relisting fee, waive or greatly reduce it when a buy order is being reduced.
for every item on the market with new orders listed since you last blinked?