Dear fellow capsuleers,
upon reading the new patch notes and reviewing them in-game I think there might have been an oversight on part of the development team responsible for “balancing” the market. All the changes make sence, but the added costs of updating an order, which came with the requirement of an order having only 4 distinct numbers that can be modified, cause the following problem as well as many others:
It costs a 400 000 isk to update an order of 20 mil isk total. There is no real sustainable way of profiting now with at least partial certainty. Once you buy something and plan to sell it, it requires several calculations to see if it is profitable AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. Price shifts caused by high isk update costs and update fees can cause a 500 000 isk difference between a sell and buy order to still be unprofitable. With these calculations in mind, only one possible outcome can be: Overuse of trading bots with neural networks that monitor the prices of items and number of sales per several days and create a complex algoryth that a human can not calculate and update in real time.
Lets present this with an example:
Original item buy price: 1 075 000 isk / unit
Original item sell price: 1 317 000 isk / unit
price of setting an order of buying 20 units: 937 000 isk
cost of updating an order of that size appx: 16 000 isk update cost
400 000 isk brokers fee
The prices of selling said items would be about the same, but both selling and buying does require about 3-5 updates to buy and sell. That would leave us with the formula of:
2 x 937 000 + 20 x (1 075 000) + (4 x 2) x (16 000 + 400 000) =>
buy price with both feex for simplicity = 26 702 000 isk
the outcome of selling the order is than simple =>
1 317 000 x 20 = 26 340 000
Before the update a sale like this would be highly profitable, but now it leaves us with a total loss of 362 000 isk note that I am aware of the added costs of 5% per sale and buy, but that only causes further isk loss for us, the players. Not every player will be calculating isk and both new and old players will go bankrupt without knowing what they did wrong.
We are at serious risk of ruining the ecoomy of EVE. Our options are to either revert the update or create a calculator program with these variables in mind.
Please reply with your comments on the matter or if you found a technical error in my calculation or my general statement.
I’m prepared to give it some time. Will it change buy/sell behaviour? Yes of course. Will it be a bad change? I don’t know.
Trading is only part of my playstyle so I’m not so bothered atm plus as far as I can see it won’t have an immediate effect on my trading strategy. It will over time though as other traders adjust.
So I’m set to wait and see before getting the torch and pitchfork out of the attic.
The only possible outcome is the evolution of neural network bots better than any human can be?
If these killer-AI robots are so good, why didn’t they take over before the change?
Forget it, discussing this hysteria isn’t worth the time. I’ll just point out the numbers and experience you are basing your fearmongering on are from the old paradigm. The new market will shift to a new equilibrium where there will almost certainly be profit for you. Yes, you may have to update prices less to extract maximum profit, but it’s not like trading or industry is going to somehow become impossible (or killed by super-AI robots), you are just going to have to adjust to the new normal.
By all means, work on some new tools or systems to deal with the new market conditions. This is a great opportunity such that those with a clever strategy can now beat those that just relied on the mindless strategy of frequent 0.01ISK adjustments thinking the whole time their bruteforce stratgy made them a “master” trader.
I wanst really trying to spread fear. Also the AI market takeover was more of a hypothesis. The bots themselves are really hard to code with the image recognition processing and thousands of item price fluctuations ter hour would require something like a centralised server network with solid power.
I think you’ll find the Eve economy comes through just fine. People will still buy stuff and others will continue to manufacture and sell stuff. Traders need to adapt to a new paradigm - they will no longer be able to micromanage their orders. The ones who figure this out will do OK but they’ll need to understand their market and the cycle for the product(s) they sell - robots can’t do that (yet).
Day 2, market still hasn’t collapsed. Could it be that prophet @John_Marcuss was wrong and doesn’t know anything? How is that possible? He used NUMBERS!!
How could he be wrong? How is it that the market hasn’t collapsed yet? I bet it’s the work of DEEP STATE.
@John_Marcuss was SO CONFIDENT, that he spammed MULTIPLE THREADS!!
