If you look at the market currently, you don’t see who is offering the buy / sell orders.
Since the game tells you after a transaction who you dealt with: it obviously retains this information.
It would be easy to have an offer (buy or sell) clickable so that you can see who originated the order.
The main problem with trying to see who is listing though is not getting their name, but the fact that players can have 3 alts per account. Unlimited accounts. Even if you can tell who listed an item, it might be their 30th alt listing it, and you have no idea that the alt is associated with the main account.
The far better solution is to check the accounts that are behaving in a “non-human” way.
Ban them for breaching the ToS if they do.
Raising taxes is never the solution.
Not even the government wins by raising taxes.
The behaviors they tax just get diminished or redirected to avoid the tax.
In this case:
The market is central to the Eve economy, and the changes just implemented will stifle trade.
The first problem with market change i see is usual for CCP halfarsed implementation. You can enter any price, but can’t see that real price will be (after “4 significant digits” rule applied). You better calculate it yourself before pressing ok
I still haven’t read anything that truly explains why this change to markets is required or how it benefits the community. Doesn’t this just dumb down another thing that didn’t need it?
I just notice this when I went to sell some items, So I can’t really pick the price I want. it picks it for you and it chose the ‘higher’ price, in this case, when I wanted the lower price to be at the top.
It doesn’t benefit anyone. Just adds more tedium and slows down the market. Probably CCP thinks they will sell more plex when everyone is tired of dealing with their BS changes to making ISK.
Funny this is the PVP quadrant and were getting market BS, mining changes, level 2 missions… roflmao…
I think you nailed the point of the change: to add an ISK sink in a few places.
This comes just days before the “Farm the Newbs” event starts on the 12th.
Soon you will see newb frigates exploding in space, and CCP will reward the attackers with skill points.
But don’t worry about the negative rep from attacking newbs: there is an ISK sink for the attackers to recover all negative rep.
Please remove the market rounding or at least give us enough significant figures to set small price increments, you are killing an important aspect of the game, I don’t want to have to be limited to changing prices in 100k isk increments
Please also give us an option to remove the ridiculous red dot
CCP indicated that there are a number of computer trading systems going on, doing “un human like trading” of 8+ updates to their trades.
This is represented as a fix, because the new ISK sink they introduced will make it unprofitable to keep relisting 8+ times.
The larger increments being the other component.
The problem is: Most newbs can’t update a trade anymore, unless they are willing to lose ISK.
This is because they lack the skills / resources to produce goods with a large profit margine.
Their initial price point was likely less than 10% profit, and might have been less than 1% profit.
Net effect is a significant “slowing” of the market.
It also make more sense now to go 1 significant digit below the next lowest sell order, because they can’t afford to relist down.
They had no way of knowing this. I updated trades frequently. Likely I updated many trades 8+ times if that’s what it took to get my orders filled in a timely manner. In addition I had a stop watch which I reset to know when the next time window to change orders was coming.
Although some might have thought I was a bot, it was merely that I wanted to put effort to get my trades done quickly and move on to the next thing not take weeks waiting for “maybe will my order fill sometime lalalalla”.
The market moves quick. If you buy materials now, then build something by the time it’s done the market could have shifted. Now it is even worse with the slower order fill time. Nevermind selling volume. Large orders are totaled completely.
AFK traders would cry, but the game should reward effort over AFK. Obviously CCP thinks that active traders should be punished and that waiting forever to do anything should be the norm.
4 significant digits means you’re increasing / decreasing the price by 0.01%
That should be small enough, but the auto-adjusting should be visible before accepting a price change.
This hidden price change, if you didn’t move enough, is akin to the 1.6M charged when you make a corporation. Nowhere are you told that you’ll be charged, you just notice it on your wallet transactions after the fact. First game I’ve ever played that does NOT tell you the cost before you can implement a corp.
As someone who has done a lot of programming, and taught computers:
I would argue that they would have ways of knowing the difference between your updates and an actual bot.
I think that your updating an order more than 8 times would likely put your account under closer scrutiny, but then a person looking at the data would have concluded human interaction.
I had added an example of how bots could be tested and confirmed, but removed it to avoid “tipping the hand” for those using bots. CCP probably already knows.
Perhaps, but you can also add mistakes and randomness to bots to make them more humanlike. You can have multiple bots log in from different IP addresses so that they are seen as “different people” to cover more time. You can even make different “mistake/randomness” algorithms for each bot to make them more unique.
Exactly, market trading and active market PVP is gone. We are left with the ideal of resourcing, building, researching, checking markets, and then maybe, just maybe managing to make a small percentage after 5-10 modifications. Can’t wait for the toll gates on stargates, parking wardens for tethering on NPC stations. I doubted the positivity of this prior to it coming into effect,. If this is eve forever, it’s only in the sense that they could feasibly stick market trading on mobile platforms now along with PI.
You’re arguments, while loosely valid, are operating at a very “low level” compared to the AI that is available today. The IP aspect though I see as irrelevant. If you’re logging in from multiple IP addresses, by any means, it would still be the same account you’re updating.
Alternatively, you could have multiple accounts “rotating” to see which will take the lowest / highest bid.
IP address would still be largely irrelevant, if not completely.
I did say multiple bots and IP. (the idea being that bots in the same location are more obvious - and that they would log in and out on their timezones like actual players) But in any case the point is that for any bot detection scheme there is, you can make a bot to defeat it. Eventually the scheme will either be too tedious for humans to deal with or actual humans will be caught by the detection scheme.
If you get caught (running an actual bot) then you may or may not know how you got caught.
To come up with a solution that defeats the defense: you first need to understand the defense.
This is why I have been vague, and not pointing out exactly how to defeat the bots.
This is what I meant by not tipping my hand.
To give you some inkling of what I’m talking about:
There was a game some years ago, also space based, but before the time of Eve.
There was a guy known simply as George.
In a time when multi accounts were regularly caught and banned: George managed to automate the game to the point of creating e-mail, signing up to play, and actually playing the game for weeks.
He could do that all without human intervention beyond creating the original macro and bot.
George managed to get over 300 accounts into the game, past the normal checks, and kept them running.
I wont tell you how he did it, but it gives you an idea of what can and can’t be done.
True, it is a tug of war both ways. Of course to make a bot one would need to understand the defenses against bots. Also in order to make defenses you would need to understand the ever increasing advancement of bots.
At the end of the day however, it is like any security. You can never have perfect security so you make something “secure enough” against the most likely threats and/or skill level of the people whom your stuff is worth their time. You can never have perfect bot detection but you can get most of them.
I would like to point out though: If you can automate the detection of 90% of the bots, you can make it easier to detect those that slip through the detection.
I will use the anti-virus as an example here:
You find out you’re infected, and you find out what the code looks like that infected you.
You then set about scanning all files for that code. You share that information with others in some way, and that particular virus gets widely defeated.
Another virus infects someone, and you get a copy of it to make a new “patch” against.
You distribute the new anti-virus program in a similar manner.
Eventually: you build up a “pattern” for detecting unknown viruses. So even as viruses become more plentiful, the defenses are stronger. Many viruses die without anyone knowing they tried to attack.
But some get through, and there is a new pattern that emerges, and then a new counter developed.
As you described it: “it is a tug of war”.
But far from being futile, the defense becomes better, and the number of breaches smaller, despite an increase of attempts. While the frequency of attacks moves from a cycle of days to seconds, the number of breaches is relatively small, and the “players” are narrowed down.