Eve devs are doing very good job with polishing this game but maybe there is time to redesign buying and selling on market.
It should be much easier to input buy or sell price so one don’t have to type it. For exaplme two options: list as cheapest sell order or list as highest buy order and input how much cheaper it should be. Like 0.01 isk.
Second thing is this 0.01 isk war. I would like to see it spiced up more and made more strategic.
Remove timer from orders for individual items and exchange it for global timer but smaller. Like 30seconds.
This will do following things:
reduce amount of data stored on server because you don’t need to remember hundreds of items for each player but only global player timer
reduce server read/write’s amount
make isk war more strategic because now you will update only prices that you really need to update.
end very annoying message that “sorry, you cannot change order yet, 1 second left” (or something like that) because you can’t see how much time for each item is left anyway. And you have to start whole procedure all over again.
My conclusion is that by making trading more user friendly will not necessary kill that activity but can make it better experience and still deliver some fun.
This could be actually more profitable to trade because prices would be modified less often and there would be bigger gap between buy and sell orders. That would encourage more people to trade. But It could be modified by a skill. Like default 5 minutes to change one order and 1 minute at level V.
You will be able to change less orders but on the other hand there will be less reasons to do so. Good change imo.
That would be nice to be able to see when you can update order and one global timer would be easier to make.
I would also add an option to be able to update orders with drag and drop. Then window with auto typed values would appear to accept new price.
This doesn’t work, because you need to set a starting price or the game won’t know at what price you want to begin with. You then want to have an end price at which you want to step out, or else the mechanic will drain you. As a result, when you have to give a start and an end price, will players automatically start fighting over these numbers instead of just an absolute price. It’s simply human nature to find a knob or a lever and move it in order to gain some form of advantage. It’s then best to keep it simple and not to try to fight human nature.
Also 0.01-ISK wars are perfectly fine. You’re not forced to change your prices by 0.01 ISK. In fact it’s rather time consuming and also has something of a gambling addiction. When you find yourself in a 0.01-ISK war then use larger steps and see who is willing to follow you. This works out all the time and to see who the winner is, even when one sometimes makes a loss - so will the competition - and you’re basically paying them to get lost. The question then only is if you are you willing to go down this road or if you prefer sitting in the trench that is the 0.01-ISK war?
Little historical fun fact: trench wars ended the moment planes started to dominate the war and bombed the trenches.
Also the idea with having just one timer won’t work. How do you expect a player with a hundred orders to change their prices? Maybe a player only wants to change all prices once per day. With a single timer and a 30s interval would you force the player to wait 3000s to change 100 orders.