My problem is solely with the relist fee, and it’s opaqueness and unpredictability.
Want to take money out of the market? Great! Just raise all the related taxes and fees. Those I can calculate and plan for. I have zero problem with something like that.
But a huge relist fee for updating my order makes it nearly impossible to figure out whether a given order will turn out to be profitable, because I can’t predict how often I’ll need to update it in order to sell through.
Sure, it will encourage people to find strategies that don’t require as much updating. But given how the market works – where only one buy/sell order at a time gets all the business – that will only go so far.
I think you’ll see more of the mitigating adaptations – more, smaller orders that are more likely to sell out before they need updating.
Which is fine, but a major hassle. And I don’t understand the point, when it would be much more straightforward to simply raise fees/taxes. If the problem is botting, just raise the wait time between order updates. That directly attacks the bots’ main advantage, without unduly affecting humans.
Bots will always have an advantage. But only being able to update once every 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour, levels the playing field a LOT without overly intrusive interventions like captchas or unpredictable mechanics like a steep relist fee.
And the market may not come to you. In the middle of a supply surge your buy order will be buried very quickly with all the sellers coming in and putting it on the market on your sell order using your calculation and getting the profits at just below your nice calculation.
…and then people will complain that they can’t update their orders often enough when online. Plus bots still can run 24/7…
Relist fees directly effect bots as it plays on their strength of endlessly relisting. Captchas (good ones) are great at catching most bots as they are hard to program against…especially random ones.
I mean, if all you want is a delay then why not say you can only update your order once per day. Problem solved. But of course, that’s not what you want…
Bots will always be able to run 24/7. So that’s not a real argument.
Have you read this thread? The problem is that many ACTUAL HUMANS relist frequently, too. So this change causes a lot of collateral damage.
I’m a UX designer. Captchas suck. They are literally the most-hated interface element among users. Especially if you plan to force me to captcha more than once a session.
Read my posts in this thread. I’ve said three things:
I agree we need to increase ISK faucets and also cut back on mineral production. I’m not on here whining that it’s my bull getting gored.
If CCP simply raised market-related taxes and fees to remove more ISK from the game, I’d be okay with that.
If CCP wants to combat botting, then raising the wait time between order updates would be an effective way to go – directly attacking the bots’ main advantage while minimizing the inconvenience for humans. Once a day goes to far, IMO. But I’d be fine with raising the wait time to 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or even an hour.
My issue with the relist fee is its opacity and unpredictability, not “it’s going to cost me more.”
So then if you propose to limit both human and bot relists with a delay, you are actually not doing anything as “bots will always be able to run 24/7”…penalizing both the same with a delay doesn’t do anything.
Shrug. So? Bots can change hundreds of times a day for a single item…it’s exponentially more than the human player that does it for an hour or two a day.
It can be any challenge-response mechanism…it’s not complicated…
Yes, this would limit bots to a maximum of 24 updates per day and to use your phrase, the collateral damage would be that people would also be limited…
Also, you are missing the fact that if my bot listing widgets is limited to 24 transactions a day, then I just run 4 bots and have them synced…Human limited, bots unaffected…
Hit them with ISK penalties, not time penalties as bots don’t care about time…we do.
Also, unpredictability is a good thing…that’s what makes games interesting.
I went at it assuming sales came in at 5 minute ticks for obvious reasons. Obviously this isn’t the case, but to do anything else we have to actually use integration (even then not really, wince orders don’t actually come in at an actual steady rate) which even now I’m too lazy to do. It’s good enough for the approximations that I was giving.
Again, no I wasn’t. I was assuming you were lucky enough to update before someone sold to whoever undercut you at rate Z which forced you to update/place your new order.
Regardless, it’s enough to make my point that as long as you can update the order before someone who undercuts you gets a sale, you will get that sale. Of course you wont always get it, but that wasn’t the point being shown. The point was that by creating subsets of X as close to the rate of Y you will minimize the number of times you have to update your order, thereby minimizing the taxes paid. Also that by using smaller volumes you are paying less over the entire amount you are selling. To say anything else is to not even understand the simplified example I provided.
No ■■■■? It doesn’t change the fact that by creating smaller orders, even if it’s 2Y or 1.5Y as long as it’s Y<X you will very likely save money in the long run in most all markets.
Getting more specific with my calculations does not change that fact, it just wastes all our time. It doesn’t change that smaller volumes is still the best strategy to use now or after the change takes place. That this added punitive tax will hurt everyone, but most of all, the smaller traders and industrialists trying to get into the market and don’t know how the game is meant to be played and will try to list everything at once rather than breaking their stock up. Also that this game is played much better at scale by bots, than individual players across multiple markets.
There is a huge difference between them entering the market now vs after the change. I would never call such an arbitrary punitive tax a good thing under any circumstance, especially not under the fake guise of combating market bots. I’m actually angered by people be it RL or in game that support punitive taxes in the name of coaxing certain behavior out of people.
And again, this does nothing to combat bots. It just forces a change in the algorithm. You fight bots by going after bots, not changing core game play.
EDIT- fixed the quote blocks. I have no idea what went wrong since a simple copy paste fixed it…
You’ve addressed the issues that I’d been seeing and that others had been talking about. That relist fee is huge. Running the math on it really is discouraging.
CCP’s top deciders must all be ‘yes-men’ for this to have gone through. Either that or so massively disconnected that it’s probably amazing that they didn’t randomly come up with some other ‘great idea’ such as putting in a 1% chance of randomly blowing up any ship that engages in PVP in order to ‘add risk’ to combat. Yeah, I’m salty about the relist cost and CCP’s silence on it.
As for the forum trolls… there have always been cretins that would see a person about to jump from a building or bridge and would shout at them to hurry up. I scroll past those names now and just ignore the static they bring.
I agree that it’s a problem. I just don’t think CCP is unaware of this, and would probably respond that it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s just (IMO) a terrible feature. It’s one of the bad features of the 0.01 ISK undercutting wars that larger tick sizes is (in real-world markets) trying to solve: the disadvantage suffered by those posting orders first.
Relist fees directly effect bots as it plays on their strength of endlessly relisting. Captchas (good ones) are great at catching most bots as they are hard to program against…especially random ones.
It changes the “bot” or micromanagement strategy from frequent updates into creating small volume orders and immediately replacing them as they are completed. Something that a bot can still do 24/7, but leaves a human trader that has more going on in their life than staring at their orders all day at a disadvantage.
Under this new scheme creating large volume orders is incredibly risky. It forces sane traders into adapting a less optimal, but more micromanaging, strategy where you are also forced into creating smaller orders to minimize reslisting fees.
Bots don’t care about that because they work tirelessly 24/7. Humans doing the same work would go mental after a short while. Hence: Bots do not care. Worse, you can program bots to not relist immediately with every undercutting. Bots win again over humans.
Sure. Hard to program against. And worse still: Humans would be bothered by this as well. Sounds amazing.
Yes, meaningful unpredictability. But the proposed changes or other suggestions revolving around the market are not meaningful. They are meant to create frustration and irritation. That is not what makes the game more interesting.
Commodity markets are cyclical - use the price history tab to study the cycle and position your product a little above the midpoint. It will sell though it may not sell quickly!
I’m a manufacturer not a trader, so I’m working from build cost not buy order pricing and I usually have a lot more margin to play with than a trader would.
On my side , I trade quite huge volum but in small time period .
To split my ordinary SO into multiple small volum SO is out of the question.
The situation will be : you have a time windows of 1-2 weeks to get rid of your item,
there would be no more time to execute all the SO .
I know I won’t care of the relist fee, that would just east 10-20% of the forecast margin ( usually between 40-50% )
Consequence : I 'll avoid any trade under 30% margin
At the end I will end up with half of the sell goes to CCP and half in my pocket,
which is quite surprising ( looks like confiscatory system )
If predictability is a problem anywhere in this game its in PvE combat both in null anoms and high sec missions. Look at blazers. Look at how easy it was to bot or AFK with VNIs until they were nerfed. Lets maybe add some unpredictability and smarter AI to spawns there so that running PvE stops being boring as hell and repetitive and is no longer a bot heaven, and once players solve the PvE meta, why not adapt it and expand instead of just nerfing ships that might be fun in PvP just because they were to strong in PvE.
