The margin trading game mechanic should be fixed. This particular scam in EvE makes no sense. This is not how a margin trade works.
A margin trade in real life is collateralized by broker/banker who punishes the margin trader if they cant pay for the full order.
CCP. An easy fix would be to garner income from the wallet of the player’s omega account. So when you margin trade you agree to ALL income of ALL of your account’s wallets may be garnered at HIGHER COST to cover the buy order.
IF the buy order is paid in full you dont incur the extra fee of garnering your wallet.
Say the contract is 10% @ 10% of value.
So if you buy 100million.
Then every time you add money to your wallet you pay 10% of what was added until you reach 110% of the buy cost or 110million.
This mechanical fix would still work with “margin trading”.
Now the margin trade skill lowers escrow, but also lowers the punitive fee (from 10% to 5%) and the skill lowers how much is garnished each wallet transaction.
This is an easy fix. And will eliminate virtually all Margin trade scams.
If CCP wanted to “fix” the margin trading scam they could, and would have done so at any time in the past. People have been moaning about it since pretty much the beginning of time.
Scams are part of playing Eve, always have been and hopefully always will be.
If it looks too good to be true, it is; even if it looks legit at first glance you’ve missed it, you check it at least 3 more times before even thinking about pulling the trigger.
In Eve you get to deal with people who wanted to RP as Ferengi but the Star Trek offerings sucked the big one; thus the Rules of Acquisition and caveat empor apply.
I’m all for a good scam. When the game mechanic makes sense…
This ONE game mechanic makes no sense…I hope you can understand the difference.
In the real world the margin trader is COMPELLED to buy at the established price. IF they cant pay then their margin holder can take corrective actions against them.
You dont get to just go out to an auction and run up the price then when sold get to tell the auctioneer you dont have the money.
No that’s a ■■■■■■■ waste of my time. It’s a game. I dont care that much.
I call my recent scam purchase my Painting. Cuz now I got a nice 2billion painting on the wall lol.
Entirely Worthless but yet worth so much in the asset list.
But doesnt mean CCP shouldnt FIX the issue.
Scams should be a fun abuse of good game mechanics.
There was a point ccp were seriously considering changing it. The argument for it was because the client was technically lying to the user.
In the end though i think the community got ccp to leave it at is. No money is ‘lost’ as such and the ‘victims’ of the scam are the greedy and imprudent. And that’s true! So it’s been allowed to continue.
Quality scams should be part of EVE, scams that depend on social engineering and being smarter than the other player. Scams that are based on exploiting nonsensical and counter-intuitive behavior from a mechanic even a lot of veteran players don’t fully understand should not be part of EVE, especially when the scam is so utterly lazy and mindless to execute. You shouldn’t be able to scam people by putting up a broken market order and passively waiting for someone to make a mistake.
Unlike the real world the market in Eve, including the various shenanigans that can befall the unwary, in Eve is unregulated; it’s a dystopian universe where corporate warfare and cutthroat business practices are literal.
There is no authority, in game or in lore, to regulate scams out of existence.
Read up on how it works, it’s actually quite interesting; I evemailed the guy who stung me for my first billion cussed him slightly and asked how it was done, he was more than happy to explain it.
Not falling for scams comes with experience, experience being the name that we give to the mistakes that we learn from. Learn from it and move on, google is definitely your friend if you wish to know more.
Correct, I have a hard time filling buys because everyone thinks I’m pulling a margin scam I had an order for 30 million units of an item, I think I got like 125,000 units, now I know price matters and I am ALWAYS the highest buyer and nearly always close to sellers price unless sellers are putting ridiculous prices.
That being said I see people sell a few items to “test” if it’s a scam and about half end up selling the other half are too jittery to try selling in bulk, it wastes time for me the buyer trying to fill my orders.
Exactly, that’s how the scam works; the guy who sold you whatever you bought and then got scammed when you tried to sell it is the same guy who set up the buy order that bounced. Rare items are almost always scams.
Eve isn’t a civilised society, it’s the middle ages, complete with the inquisition, constant conflict and very little law beyond optimal +2xfalloff , with nukes, in space.
Of course it’s a mistake. Nobody is going to fall for the scam if the market interface correctly displays the fact that a buy order will not be completed instead of having it display as legitimate and then fail because of a nonsensical and counter-intuitive mechanic that can not be detected until the order is attempted. This is 100% an interface issue, not a player greed or trust issue.
It’s just like how zero-talent scammers whined and cried when CCP changed the display to show text labels for million/billion/etc instead of just the raw numbers. There was nothing interesting involved in that scam, only setting up an obviously absurd market order and passively waiting for someone to click the wrong thing.
But this isn’t a case of law vs. civilization, it’s a case of bad interface design. The game won’t let you post a buy offer in any other context without the money to pay for it, so why is it possible in this one specific case to set up the exact right interactions to make an order fail to execute? I can’t put up a contract offering 100 billion ISK for something without putting 100 billion ISK into escrow and automatically transferring that money to anyone who accepts the contract and provides the item I’m asking for. I can’t arbitrarily put up a fake buy order on the market without rigging my wallet level to generate a failure condition. Etc. These are things that should be possible in a lawless world, but the only one that can happen is the one that depends on weird mechanics involving one specific skill.
I fell for the margin trading scam around a decade ago. Never happened again.
While I feel it’s the only scam currently accepted that should be an exploit, it’s also the only scam you’ll fall for only once before learning your lesson. And over the long term it’s a pretty cheap lesson.
The guy set up a buy order because he wanted to buy some items at a certain price. Maybe he had a rough patch and lost money, so the buy order fails. How is this a “scam”?
Sounds like someone just got too greedy and overvalued the worth of a particular item that they can’t sell anymore.
I beg to disagree, but hey we can both have an opinion about it.
I get that people feel that the mechanic is broken, but margin trade scammers aren’t the only people that use the margin trading skill in this way.
I have it trained all the way up, when I’m actively trading it’s rare that I can fulfil all of my obligations from my balance via buy orders if they were all filled in a short time.
The margin trading skill enables me to use cash flow from sell orders to cover my obligations; “fixing” affects myself, and others who also trade, more than it affects scammers.
Apart from the exploit bit I wholeheartedly concur. I have a Badger with some worthless shite in named “You’re a feckin idiot”.