I saw there have been some chances to enhance market stability in EVE, preventing 0.01 isking (which was a terrible thing). I think a few new features are needed to increase market stability and make prices highly dependent on the actual moving volume and product demand, and much less so on player “Quick Sell”, price dumping, rapid price slides. All negative factors with respect to EVE industry, loss of profit and giving one player control of the market basically, irrelevant of moving volume and actual demand for the product. Having been an EVE industrialist for quite some time, I noticed there are several major market problems that lead to price manipulation, market abuse and control by a single player, without any underlying mechanics to prevent it.
Before the conservatives jump on this, keep in mind that before the 0.01 ISKing rules, all the hub traders opposed that rule, their justification being “We make money but babysitting orders and 0.01 ISKing everyone”. It got changed because it was messed up.
The EVE open market should be a highly regulated environment with rules in place to prevent unjustified price volatility. By “justified” I mean price volatility driven by demand not by one guy.
Contracts should be reserved for quick selling items, discounted bundles of the same or different item bundles.
PRICE INCREASES should be driven by item demand. What I mean by demand is high purchase volume depleting inventory and causing a shortage. This is currently working fine.
PRICE DECREASES - SHOULD be governed by high supply (across the market), low demand, driven by a lot of players selling the same items and orders changing rapidly, with a A LOT of live orders and not enough buyers. Currently this is broken. Price decreases are not driven by demand or supply and can be abused by one single player crashing prices intentionally or not, independent of demand or market wide supply. This should not be allowed for game balance purposes. See below what the two major problems with how the market governs (or does not) price decreases.
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PROBLEM 1: QUICK SELL ATTEMPTS MARKET CRASHES - One single player can trigger crash market prices for any given item at any time - If an item market price is 50 million, one player decides to put his two items on the market for 45 million instead hoping for a quick sell. Then another guy puts in a new order for 44.9, the next one 44.8. Thus, one guy created a 10% market price drop with a single order, creating a “sell panic”.
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PROBLEM 2: BAIT SELL ORDERS - you will often see bait sell orders for some items, which are nearly the same price as the BUY price for current orders. This is an artificial, abusive way of using game mechanics to cause would-be sellers to inadvertently “Sell” their stuff to the highest buy order, which is the same guy who placed SELL order. For example: Item market price is 100 isk. Buy price is 80 ISK. The buy price guy will place a sell order for some of this stuff for 80.10 isk. This will result in the system automatically selling
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS TO MARKET CHANGE RULES
PREVENTING MASSIVE “PANIC” PRICE DROPS BY SINGLE PLAYER ORDERS - REGIONAL
Let me first say that I have no objection to price drops, even massive ones so long as they are driven by market forces, supply and demand, not by one or two people trying to quick sell item X. Often people who want to unload assets and don’t care about build costs, attempt to quick sell items via the market and cause market crashes.
- New sales order min price no lower than 0.5% of the current market LOWEST price within 5 jumps of the station where the order is placed. This would accomplish two things. First – prevents price dumping orders in a market hub and prevents steep price declines not driven by demand but by “Quick Sell” attempts. Secondly – dramatically increases price stability, decreases volatility, and takes away market control from one player.
- If you are more than 5 jumps away from a market hub you can set your sales price up to 10% lower than the smallest HUB price if you don’t want to haul your stuff to Hub. Hub sellers would not be able to compete against you as their price drops have to stick within 1%. This would allow for three things: First – Allow traders to buy your stuff and haul to the hub for a profit. Second – Prevent Hub orders from being lower than yours at least for a long time. Three – Allows for QUICK SELL option to people looking for a bargain, without severely compromising the trade hub prices and causing a price crash. So, if you want to quick sell your item or try to, haul it to 6 jumps away and set the order there without being undercut by market hubs, without them buying your stuff and then having to haul it to make that spread profit. This rule would also prevent discount price stacking. If you want to do that, CONTRACT IT.
- Change orders regardless of location, subject to current rules of 0.01 Isking + fees.
- CONTRACTS should be reserved for selling items at a discount, just like in real life, subject to the contracting party rules / bundles / location conditions. If you want to sell an Ikitursa or 10 of them at 650 million while the market price is 750 million, contract it.
- LIMIT SAME ITEM SELL ORDERS PER PLAYER TO 3. Do not allow more than 2 orders of the same item per player. This prevents players form setting up 10 orders for 10 of the same ship, each 0.05% lower than the previous one or at the same price, allowing them do price changes on orders immediately, effectively eliminating the price change timer and flooding the market without risk. This way, if you have to sell 60 of the same ship, you either keep some in your hangar and sell them in batches or create 2 batches of 30 each or whatever. You should NOT be able to create 20 orders of 3 ships each. This should eliminate partial market control of one player. As putting all 60 ships on one order, would risk having to eat significant change fees.
All these rules are designed to facilitate good market order, stability and most of all, market prices to be driven by market wide supply and demand, not by individual players’. Price drops would inevitably be driven by the number of suppliers and not by the number of items available to a single supplier (without significant risk). These rules would also eliminate bait sell orders as mentioned above.
The basics of it are that the OPEN MARKET should be tightly correlated to supply and demand, and tightly regulated to prevent abuse, volatility (without underlying causes), facilitate income stability and be a reliable way for serious industrialists, traders, and manufacturers to sell their product. The CONTRACT market should be for everything else, like discount / bulk selling, quick selling, getting rid of unwanted assets (without selling to buy orders).
Below is an example of what I’m talking about but there are hundreds. Price tank triggered by a few players looking for quick sell and snowballed by those normal order changes.
