EVE Search - Make market speculation more fair

Teckos Pech wrote:

Donnachadh wrote:

Frostys Virpio wrote:

Unless you change how downtime happen, then no. Unless you want to suggest CCP have their staff responsible for downtime procedures to have work shift spanning any part of the day across the years to be able to even out the downtime across all time zone...

That is only one possible method that CCP could and should investigate as a possible solution and there is no technical reason why it cannot be done that way. Several of the online games I play routinely change the timing of major release as a way of balancing things across the time zones and see no reason why CCP cannot or should not do the same thing.

Perhaps there is no practical way to change this and those in the EU time zones will have an unfair advantage forever.

I guess my real point is that because of the time zone they choose to live in or were born into gives one certain advantages or disadvantages and denying that serves no purpose other than to lie to yourself about it.

The TZ effect is not related to downtime. It is related to when this information goes public. So long as we randomize the announcements, or even make them rotate (e.g. the next one is say Eastern USTZ, then the one after that is Central TZ, then Mountain TZ, the Pacific TZ, etc. this way everyone gets a shot at taking advantage of changes to the game that affect the markets) then downtime becomes largely irrelevant. Market participants take in information as soon as possible and act on it. Either they cancel buy orders, put up new ones, or even go and buy up existing sell orders. This affects the price which in turn tells other market participants information like go mine more, mine less, put up a POS to compress ore, and that last one will send signals to people who do PI do start making more POS fuel block inputs if enough POS go up to drive up the price of fuel blocks. Prices contain information, information from these announcements and what is going on in game. As new information becomes available, speculators will incorporate that information into their behavior and thus the new resulting prices will contain the new information as well.