Problem with Margin Trading scams is that it's at least half a UI issue. It's simply unbelievable to have a 50b order for widgets displaying with no money to cover it (after someone removes their own escrow). It's not immersive, the way the mechanic functions in the game is utterly counter-intuitive. If Eve is a story this is a piece of badly written narrative.

Compare with, say, the Jita contract scammers where anyone paying 900m for 2 plex without reading closely what the contract is really offering deserves to lose.

Also I'm not a big fan of mechanics that specifically advantage older players just for learning an idiosyncracy of the interface against clueless newbies. I'm fine with older players victimising newbies, I'd just prefer they didn't do it simply because the software is badly written.

Mars:

And yet, nobody is forcing you to buy that bait once you see it. There is no rule that says you must purchase that massively overpriced crap conspicuously sitting there on sell orders, and then attempt to sell it to that juicy buy order, which is for some reason set even higher, that just so happens to have a minimum unit limit on it.

This is a COMPLETELY psychological trick. The whole thing turns on placing the bait, expecting a random mark to respond to it psychologically (in this case via the rush of finding a "good deal that can make me a lot of money"), and then pulling the rug out from under them at the last minute. If people weren't overly greedy, and generally unaware of what products are really worth, then this simply would not happen.

By the way, I've never once used this "scam." I use Margin Trading every day (if you have it, you use it, that's how the skill works) for cash flow purposes. I trade at a region-wide level always pushing the maximum number of orders. The overall velocity of trade is slower than Jita, meaning that under normal conditions, my cash would stay out of commission a lot longer than I'd like it to.

It seems to me that you're bitter because it took you so long to find out what Margin Trading actually was. And the net result is that you hate the skill because of a usage that is, relative to all the other uses of it (again, this skill is always on once you train it, not something you CHOOSE to use in a given situation) fairly uncommon, albeit particularly annoying if you get duped, and very easy to place the blame on a skill rather than on your own psychological missteps.

I'm not here to downplay the reality that it would be quite obnoxious to lose money this way. All I'm saying is that it's basically impossible to fall for this if you do your market research. It's always been a core element of trading in EVE that if something looks off or suspicious, that's because it probably is. A red flag should go up in your mind. Tasty deals don't just sit around in the wild waiting to be jumped on like that.

Also, as I noted before, nobody in this game has the right for their sell-to-buy arbitrage to play out, even if there's no Margin Trading rug waiting to be pulled out from under them. An order could just as easily be filled mere seconds before you attempt to fill it, thereby leaving you with goods that you can no longer sell to it. Would that be a scam, too? Or would it just be the dumb luck of market trading? How can you really tell the difference?

Margin Tradings is fckd. I lost 4 billion to it last year

The only thing I really resent about your posting is calling people greedy for trying to make good trades. Is it greedy to expect a 6 month return on an investment of 2.5 billion ISK to be 1 billion ISK? That's more or less 170 million per month for the effort of managing your market orders and putting up the initial investment which takes you roughly 3 months to get back at minimum.

The thing about these MT scams is that the market history shows buying and selling of these products. Price History as you put it, and that price history supports the trade. They are also not all that profitable in most cases, with-as I said-months to recover the investment and roughly 10-30% profit expected in the end.

It's not as simple as just look and you will see it's fake. It may be as simple as knowing the value of every tradeable item in EVE though. Frankly, I still don't and it keeps changing every day.

Agree I'm not posting this because I want ISK, really I'm bad at managing it as you can tell by my post, this is a warning to others who continue with market trading. BUY orders can be ficticious so trade carefully.

It sucks that the game is designed in this way. It's true that EVE is a game where you can lose to a thief everything you've built up over years of gameplay in a single moment.

But just because it is that way, doesn't mean it should be that way.

No, as many would fill as possible and then the rest would fail and cancel. It is not possible to go negative with margin trading.

I basically agree with you, and yet I don't think that's the reason why this "scam" should be allowed to continue. The reason why it should be allowed to continue is because the game mechanic in question is fully usable for "legitimate" purposes, and really the scam itself has very little functionally to do with the Margin Trading mechanic. It's a totally psychological game, and one that could be played (albeit a bit more time-intensively) even without Margin Trading.

Just to give an example of something I'm glad was greatly diminished: Contract scamming. The reason why is because those were mostly scams perpetrated with the help of really poor graphical UI. There was no reason for the UI and graphical elements to be so horrible that they actually contributed to scamming. I'm sure a lot of old contract scammers moaned when the changes hit, but the net result was an actual benefit to players in the form of a more informative UI.

With Margin Trading, if we gimped the mechanic in order to satisfy these bitter scam victims, we'd be wrecking the game for a lot of legit players who use Margin Trading for non-scammy purposes. That's why Margin Trading should stay the way it is, not because we need to "preserve the scams" or whatever.

Which would be pointless as by then you'd already purchased the seriously overpriced stuff. All it would achieve is stating a reason why it failed rather than the generic "... failed to find a match" one.

Nope. No rules were broken. Think about it rationally for a moment and you'll realize that you were the victim of your own greed, and nothing else.

Well, how am I suppose to know then that the BUY order does not have enough funds to cover the trade?

What's the point of trading and market orders if the amount shown is not valid? How can I make a good decsion on a buy order when I have no way to tell that the item listed is not covered.

If somebody had just happened to fill that order legitimately mere seconds before you did, it would have been the same exact outcome for all you know. There is never any guarantee that a juicy buy order is still going to be there by the time you get around to filling it, whether the order is legit or set up to fail.

False, I was the victim of an unknown and undocumented game mechanic.

False.

where is it documented by CCP?

Please point me to the wiki page.

"BUY order is placed for 80,000 with a minimum of 20,000 units (also happens to be the total amount needed, )"


This is usually a good indicator...






I still haven't seen a good response to Mu-Shi Ai's comment yet. How do you know someone didn't fill the order before you?

I dont believe a 3yr old player would be dumb enough to pour every last bit of isk into a single market order and have nothing left to fall back on

Im calling a troll/ melodramatic rage post from someone who isnt in fact 'quiting eve'

If you arent trolling or embellishing your rage-quit, honestly youre a **** and probably wont be missed by anyone.

in the text of the skill you nitwit

RMT was also a problem and still is with eve online and I think margin trading is just as bad. Because it allows people with little experience and NO ISK to scam and steal from people who pay or put the time into playing the game,.

Because the station that placed the BUY order was empty when I docked. THey had to DELIVER the goods in order to collect the ISK placed on the market, since I had bought all of the items in system NO one could have beat me to the order.

PLUS, WHile I was docked the order was still up, meaning no one else could have filled it.

Nothing in the text warns about any possible scam genius or that orders will be cancelled.
It's very poorly explained and therefore not documented.

Logic try it.

at margin trading V you still put 23.73% of the isk required for the order's full value into escrow, thus the need for a minimum quantity > 23.73% of the order's value to prevent a savvy player from simply selling them 23% of the order.

next bad argument please?