Rens T2 market - Could sellers use a little common sense?

Marketplace Market Discussions
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Here’s what’s recently been happening in Rens with T2 mods sellers:

  1. Certain item’s lowest Sell price is 1,000,000.
  2. Somebody lowers his Sell price to 999,999.99. (Usual Jita .01 isk lower thing).
  3. Next guy lowers his price to 989,999.99. 100,000 less. Why? Doesn’t he realize that most people buying T2 mods don’t know or care if the price is now 100,000 isk cheaper? They want the thing, and if they can afford it, they just buy it.
  4. Some other guy consistently does this thing: Lowers his price to 989,999.00. OK, .99 isk, no big deal. But still, the same logic-- what are you getting out of driving Sell prices down, considering that most players just buy at whatever the lowest price happens to be.
  5. Other guy lowers his price to 979,999.00. Again driving the Sell price down by 100k.

Can anyone think of a logical reason someone would not want to follow the Jita .01 isk-lower model? Said another way, any good reason someone would want to lower the price in 100k isk increments for everyone (himself included)? Some sophisticated scheme to profit by depress that specific local market? Or just basic dumbarsedness?

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I’ve done this numerous times against you .01 iskers. If someone is that hard pressed to undercut me all day/ everyday I’ll make them cry about it. if I’m not going to sell anything what do I care if the price is driven down and if I do get my stock sold fantastic. I don’t care about getting max possible. I just want to get a return that I can flip over and over.

I used to get emails from people who told me I was totally stupid and dumb and awful and didn’t know anything. Those messages always made my day. It’s been a while since I had one like that so I was fearing that people no longer cared. It’s nice to know that they still do

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Some people are just silly. That’s life.

But there are various reasons why people might choose the pricing strategies you describe.

The guy who always does even-ISK amounts? Saves himself some effort in both math and typing, and in the context of a 1,000,000 price tag, dropping 1.00 isn’t a significant decrease.

The guy who drops 100,000 ISK? He could be trying to make a statement that he just wants to sell his item and be gone – he’s not hanging around for the long term.

Then there are the game players. The ones who think that an ‘8’ looks a lot like a ‘9’, so the next person who tries to beat their price will type in 999.999.98 instead of 989,999.98, and NOT beat their price.

That one I don’t get. Because usually at best it buys you another 5 minutes. It has never seemed worth the mental effort to me.

The other people I don’t understand are the ones who come along on an item where the top buy order is 20,000 ISK, and where the trading competition isn’t particularly fierce. And drops a 10,000-unit buy order at 100,000 ISK. That just seems like an unforced error to me. Trying to scare people out of the market for that item? Okay. I hope it was worth the millions in ISK it’s going to cost you.

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They do that because its a good way to combat bots.

Instead of having to compete with a bot who keeps automatically updating his sell order, its easier to reduce it by a larger amount in order to determine what the limit of the bot program is at.

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Honestly, I do 10000.01 isk drop in hopes that whoever tries to make their order lower than mines doesn’t notice and has to wait 5 mins to update again. It annoys people, and if you keep it up people might just stop competing.

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Hello and welcome to Rens Market

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Yes … it’s too easy to undercut. Either automatically or otherwise just without thought.

I want my prices to be competitive (ie priced to sell). Somebody has to think about pricing if they want to undercut me (pretty much what Alexi Stokov said). This is PvP. Don’t let the lack of guns / ships fool you.

In terms of Rens specifically, T2 prices are often stoopid. Using the .01 model also assumes the previous seller had set a competitive price before you. Which is also stoopid. A simple look at eve marketdata before setting your own price will often tell you otherwise.

I’ve done this. And at Rens funnily enough. Reason was because even at +100k my buy price was still below what I could make that T2 mod for. At the higher price I actually got people to sell me stock that I could then flip for less than the competition / at a higher margin than I could achieve with low industrial skills.

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I’ve done this. And at Rens funnily enough. Reason was because even at +100k my buy price was still below what I could make that T2 mod for. At the higher price I actually got people to sell me stock that I could then flip for less than the competition / at a higher margin than I could achieve with low industrial skills.

I figured it was something along the lines of that: “I can make money at this price, and most people can’t.” Makes some sense at secondary hubs. But I see it at Jita, where odds are the competition is just as skilled-up as you. Time and again I see someone do this, then three people beat that price, and everybody gets to enjoy 3% margins for awhile.

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Yeah, I get how that looks strange. For me, it would still be a win because it had forced the competition to up their buy prices and so cut their margins … more bloody mindedness than actual benefit to me, I grant you, but did I ever mention PvP?

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I will sometimes do this if I want to get something sold quickly or to test the competition. I know how low I can go and still make a profit. And moving product over faster is more important than trying to squeeze every last .01 isk out of things. So why ■■■■ around with it. If I drop the price and they don’t match, then I hold the lead for a while.

If they do match, well we would have pushed it down to there eventually, and I just saved myself a bunch of time and a bunch of brokers fees from modification.

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In jita, it’s more likely to be less about “i can still make isk at these prices instead of making the item” and more about “this is a cornered market, ■■■■ off.”

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Okay, but why would you want to corner a market at a price where you make hardly any money? That’s the part I don’t get. It’s all yours at 120,000. Never mind that the sell price is 125,000. After taxes and fees, you’re losing money on each sale.

Maybe the theory is that people will abandon the item and not come back, and then you can lower your price and make money without competition. I don’t think that generally works. I’ve seen it fail time and again, and once you lower your price, it won’t be long before other buyers dive in.

When I first started station trading, there was a guy who would do that: Goose the price of an item past profitability to drive me out. He also reported me as a bot because I was outcompeting him.

So I began messing with him. When he goosed the price, I’d place a 10-item order beating him. He’d then jump the price some more. It cost me almost nothing to step him up, while he had to have been paying broker fees through the nose to raise the price for his 2000-item orders.

Meanwhile, I had a station container named after him. In it I put all the modules I bought that I knew he was trading in. After making him pay tons in broker fees to raise the price above my profit point, I’d sell him all my accumulated modules at the inflated price. Half the time that was enough to buy out his order. So he was forced to buy hundreds of items at the inflated price, I made more money than I would have normally, and I was still the top buy order.

Sometimes I’d lay off for a while and wait for him to lower his price back to normal. Then I’d put the 10-item order back on top, forcing him to pay the broker fees all over again to jump the price back up.

Was it worth it to me economically? Well, I made money. But there were probably more profitable uses for my time.

Was it totally worth it in terms of making him regret his life choices? Yep.

I don’t run into him anymore. I think I’ve moved up the food chain enough, or our trading strategies have diverged enough, that we’re not competing anymore. I kind of miss him. :slight_smile:

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I don’t trade T2 in Rens, but I always do this, it is the only way I trade.

Reasons:
a) I don’t update very often
b) some of the competition will not follow me down.
c) item sells faster, or they go to the buy price.

Your poblem is as a 0.01 daytrader, you only know your own profitability. You care that the price remains stable, I don’t. When you sell at a loss, I might still sell with profit, because I bought the item 10 days ago or 1 month ago when it was exceptionally low.

The sell order that you see is only 10% of what I have to sell. It is just my reconnaissance troops. If the price goes to the buy price level, I will sell my bulk directly to today’s buy order, and you will have no idea, except you will see a sudden drop in the price of the item you just bought.

Another thing is, with your specific market of T2 in a specific station, there might be people selling at a loss on purpose. People do that because they want to free up money. I may do it in some cases withouth even knowing it. Google “opportunity cost” with respect to that.

Hope that helps.

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I just did this in Jita. Saw a good opportunity that required 9b in liquid ISK, had 7b, so sold a bunch of T2 blasters to buy orders at a small loss.

Better to get 2000m for 2200m of stock, and be able to action my larger plan, than to sit on that stock and eventually get 2500m for it, but miss out on the larger opportunity that needed to be actioned before I go to sleep, otherwise I will miss it.

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I do this quite often as I trade in low volumes.

If I see someone drop 10 T2 mods and I only have 1 up, it makes sense to undercut 100,000 for me. You’ll be losing out more.

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Your maths is wrong, they are 10,000isk drops

I understand your point though…

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there are many reasons for “10k-isking” versus 0.01. I personally never 0.01-isk because hitting “.” on my numpad introduces a vector for entry errors. It is better to lose 0.99 ISK of profit than to accidentally spend 100M on accidental extra broker fees.

If someone’s price is, say, 12,999,999 ISK, I will usually go 12,888,888 ISK, because repeating digits are harder to fudge. This is my go-to undercutting approach when there are 1, maybe 2 competitors, and they are not frequently 0.01-isking me back (say every 7+ days).

Now, there is little I hate more than unprofitable items. They take-up valuable market order slots, and if they aren’t making me ISK, I want them gone. If I have had an item listed for months with very few sales and there are now 5-6 competitors who viciously 0.01-ISK within 1-2 days of me modifying my order, I will start viciously slashing prices in-retaliation. Oftentimes if I slash harshly enough, the 0.01-ISKing will stop, my inventory will sell-out, and I can move-onto the next item.

If you 0.01-ISK me within a manner of hours, or minutes of me making an order change, I will make it a clear point to eliminate your profit margin. This is market PVP.

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I trade Rens, Dodix, Hek. I do as you say. My market orders rarely 0.01 isk instead they will 1 isk either in the 10k or 100k.

I do this for a few reasons,

10k isking is a good way to beat market bots, they normally have a threshold in the 10k region as standard they won’t bot down or up from 10k without changing of parameters or manual intervention from user.

Also my out of game (bot) spreadsheet pulls and updates in the 10k and I just blindly copy/paste it in no matter what.

I’ll often change a 0 or, 9 to and vice versa because its a ball ache for some traders who are not using a bot or spreadsheet.

Sometimes I will just hammer down a market because it is a market I don’t give 2 shits about or it is a market I have failed to make ISK in at all, If I am not making ISK neither should you.

I am pretty douche like when it comes to markets. Sometimes I just experiment and shake things up, I’ll pull market prices way up outside Jita and watch industry dudes & freight boi’s flood the market then I’ll crash it by dumping my stock to Jita sell price just to see what happens. Some people will follow down like lemmons and others will just leave massive amounts of stock in the hopes it will sell, (it won’t).

Market PVP is pretty complicated, niche and it is one area of high sec PVP where CCP has not nerfed into the grave. The tears and losses in market PVP can be brutal. I’ve seen chars that are only months old lose billions and then message me begging for isk back. My biggest ganks in this game have been market pvp, I have solo ganked 5bn ISK ships in high sec but on the market that is small pickings.

I’ve witnessed people lose 500bn + to market mistakes, I have never received 500bn ISK but I did take a tiny share of a 500bn ISK mistake many moons ago. Dude bought 1000’s of missiles and accidentally entered his buy amount in the price again. Bought out the whole rens market of missiles for like 100k a pop, I had several hundred million come my way and I had a tiny amount of missiles for sale. If you know where to look these massive losses are visible in price history going back a year. You should never have more than 50bn in a single
active wallet anyway, I hear CCP will reimburse you for horrific market losses if they think it was not deliberate.

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Speaking as a programmer, I think this is probably nonsense. The main point of a bot is to keep beating the price – as long as the price is profitable to you. So if I were programming a bot, I would not necessarily give it a price-jump limit – as long as the new price is within the max/min price limit I have set, I would want the bot to beat it.

I could see adding some sort of price-jump limit to prevent other players from manipulating your bot. But even in that scenario, a 10,000 ISK limit doesn’t make much sense, when so many modules cost millions or billions of ISK. It would make more sense to set it as a percentage of the max price, meaning the limit could range from a few hundred ISK to millions.

The more I play the market in EVE, the more I think market bots are mostly an urban legend.

Shrug. I don’t use either, but I can 10-key. Matching a random price increase isn’t a problem, and I doubt it’s a problem for most traders.

You almost certainly lose money doing this. Not sure why you think this is winning, unless the amount of money is minor to you compared to the tears you cause. I mean, I understand being a dick to someone who is causing you heartache. But I don’t see the point of shooting myself in the foot in the process.

This I totally understand. I’m willing to lose money in order to learn a market mechanism.

And those people deserve everything they get.

I love it when people do that. They mean to post a sell order but accidentally post it as a buy order, or transpose some digits, or add an extra 0 to the end of their buy price. I have made a lot of money from time to time on such mistakes.

As you say, in Market PvP you can lose billions with the click of a mouse. My advice to anyone playing the market: take time to double-check your order before clicking “OK”. There’s just no good reason to be in a massive hurry with billions on the line.

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