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Okay CCP, scam me more. . .NOT!
oscarian
Member Posts: 116
I cannot believe that this game, a highly enjoyable FFA (free for all) sandbox, has /legitimised/ scamming as a part of their game mechanics.
I was stung by a "margin trading scam". Okay, sure enough, the apple may have been too big to bite from. The trade in question involved a player who had (X) amount of product for sale, under multiple sale orders, and yet also had a purchase sale order for (Y) amount of the same product.
I had originally thought that either the player with the buy order had inserted one too many zeros, or in fact had a niche market (such as refining the product for minerals) and could afford the price offered in their buy order.
It took an explenation from a CCP GM before I realised I had been scammed. Okay, fair enough, I didn't realise the game mechanics worked this way, and was willing to accept the loss, even though I had spent real world money on my attempt to fulfil the buy order.
What happens is, if the player in question has a buy order on the market, set up with the margin trading skill, and they subsequently do not have enough Isk to fulfil the order, the order then disappears, since they cannot cover the cost.
Come day two, today. I noticed another "margin trading scam" in the market, and had decided I would nullify the order, obviously set up by the same player, since I already had enough of the said product to fulfil their order. *BAM*. . .when the order failed, I was charge 23m Isk for the suddenly redundent buy order, since the game mechanics are set so that the purchaser in question now has a "buy" order of their own, set up at the same cost as the previous player's buy order.
Erm. Okay, so, scam me not, CCP. I have cancelled my subscriptions, and won't be back. I was fine with being scammed due to "n00bishness", but I am not prepared to be scammed directly by the gaming company I AM PAYING to play their game.
So. That's it. For all the month or years of potential income CCP may have earned from my legitimate subscription, you have forfeited every cent due to your "amoral" approach and your "that's how the game works" mentality.
/Englebert
aka /Oscarian
Comments
That one of the reasons I no longer play EvE its TOO WILD or was to FFA
I figured that I would ask questions, watch and learn, but no matter how good you are your going to fall for some sort of scam. To much activity to a point that taking risks gets way to stressful for me.
I constantly see smaller fleets get elimitated, everyone is paranoid of spies, hard to get in a good corp without it going down the tubes in some kind of way, or not doing anything at all and just sitting around. To difficult to get any reliable information about what is going on around you at any time.
EvE is made for a certain kind of player, and its not me.
you'll have to explain this a bit. how did you set up "buy order" by selling stuff?
what probably happened is that you set up sell order and got charged sales tax.
to be honest, your problem is "too much too fast". if you started small and built up according to your ability, you would learn by losing much less, and then you wouldn't lose big time once you earn more. you simply took risk, overextended and lost. happens every day.
I agree with you, these days Eve is exactly like the way you described it. The reason for that is not the margin trading skill, that skill is part of the game for a long time now, the problem are the players.
I have seen the Eve community change from a friendly, helpful and loyal one to the scaming, insulting and paranoid one we have now.
Eve as a game might not be dead or in trouble, but Eve as a nice place to be in and enjoy your freetime is no longer there.
MMORPG Forums: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
Eve is still Eve.
Maybe you changed ? i meet lots of nice people ^^
Altough i am in CFC and know there are much scams going around.
Margin trading is ingame for quite awhile now, you should never ever trust stuff in Eve.
This is what makes the game special, and if its to good to be true...well then it mostly is
The only sad thing about Eve is that its a one of a kind
Wish there were more mmo like this.
Firstly someone said, had you not tried to run before you could walk you would of realised long before you took a real hit (for that im sorry, losing r/l cash)
But the end result is its your greed that forced this upon you, the 23mill isk loss will be due the excess items being listed for sale, so its actually just normal sales tax
EvE is famous within the MMO community as a hive of vile and theft but in fact the eve community has only a VERY small percentage of players who wont help others, I myself have given away many thousands of ££s of in game items to newer players or friends, but , (and this is a big one) if your a stranger and your dumb enough to give me 10bill and not 1bill then so be it.
I have 2 rules in EvE
1 Dont trust anyone at face value then once you know them then its down to your own judgement. (hell i dont even trust my alts im that paranoid)
2 Its just a game, i will on occasion take 1/2 days away from eve if i get screwed over either by theft / killed but in the end what is it ive lost just pixels (now of course your greed meant that you used real life money and that can't be nice, but thats your greed and nothing to do with the devs)
Very very few scams work, whilst jita local is full of crap, very few even work, we only ever hear about the ones that do.
This post is all my opinion, but I welcome debate on anything i have put, however, personal slander / name calling belongs in game
where of course you're welcome to call me names im often found lounging about in EvE online.
Use this code for 21days trial in eve online https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=d385aff2-794a-44a4-96f1-3967ccf6d720&action=buddy
It's how the game works. If the original "buy" order (in this case, set up by the scammer) fails, and you are using "advanced" mode, the game will set up a sale order for the goods you tried to sell to the (scammer's) buy order at the same price as what the scammer was using (in this case, 400,000 isk for ~5k items). Since you are setting up a buy order you are charged tax, etc, for the order.
I'd really like to know how the "marginal trading" skill can be used in any way other than for scamming other players.
/Oscarian
Almost right
If you overload the buy order the rest of the items are listed for sale and you then create a sell order not buy
but the mechanics are the same and you are charged a pre-sales tax
But, in answer to your question
Margin trading is the most important skill (that is not invovled in reduction of costs) a trader can have, if your buying and selling lets say 10 items, you want to be able to spend more than you might have so reduction in the original outlay is highly important im going to use a 1 order example below
Your wallet is 100mill
you want to buy 10 items that cost 20mill each
without margin trading it would be 200mill + about 2mill in costs to set up buy order.
however with margin trading your original outlay would be about 40mill + 2mill costs (based on 20% cost to set up original order) the cost per unit to set up order is about 4mill so the other 16mill comes out of your wallet .
Then as you buy items you can then resell them, thus covering the rest of the cost from your wallet. If your wallet has insufficient funds then buy order gets cancelled
Basically it works the same in basic share dealing you can buy shares than your worth based on fact that you sell them for a profit to cover the cost, obivously should you not sell them then you crash and burn (see barings / jp morgan banks for examples of this)
This post is all my opinion, but I welcome debate on anything i have put, however, personal slander / name calling belongs in game
where of course you're welcome to call me names im often found lounging about in EvE online.
Use this code for 21days trial in eve online https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=d385aff2-794a-44a4-96f1-3967ccf6d720&action=buddy
If so, I'm not seeing this as a scam, people get burned in margin trading all the time in the real world, heck I knew a guy who at first made over 250k doing it but when the bottom dropped out lost everything he owned.
I don't really see a scam, more like the typical risk associated with trading of this sort.
But hey, we all get scammed sometime, heck, I was tired one night and bought a Badger 2 for 750M ISK....sucks but was my fault for falling for it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I think the only issue is people not understanding the mechanics and they see it as CCP has endorsed scamming by leaving this skill in game
But like you put above, very very few people have never scammed, I myself while playing a little drunk fell for the "take my 100mill for 1 trit scam " from the early days of this scam.
So thankfully it wasn't much isk, but still sucks to be scammed lol
I also got ganked by a Goon about 6years ago for 1bill isk in my badger, and only 48hours before i had made my first billion isk (back when it was still a very very good amount of isk to have lol)
So yep with eve the old adage shit happens is still true to this day
This post is all my opinion, but I welcome debate on anything i have put, however, personal slander / name calling belongs in game
where of course you're welcome to call me names im often found lounging about in EvE online.
Use this code for 21days trial in eve online https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=d385aff2-794a-44a4-96f1-3967ccf6d720&action=buddy
You weren't scammed by CCP- You were scammed by a legitimate gameplay mechanic, which is fully acceptable in this game. If you read a little about trading before you would have very easily avoided something as painfully obvious as this.
If you quit this game because of something petty like this I don't think you would last long in PVP, or anything else to be honest. So take it as a friendly advice for not wasting any more money into something you were bound to give up at some point.
Have fun in whatever game you're playing.
This.
Well said.
This is very accurate, and if Eve players want to stick heads in sand and pretend its not well go on you. I run a miner in eve I quit for a long time came back to find I was out of my old corp...and my old corp had disbanded, no big deal I like to solo mine and do small missions anyway...
But after awhile, and a large isk buffer, I thought it would be good to get back into fleet mining and start running with a corp again... but these corps are very insular these days, they want a full no time API, which I can kind of understand, they also just give off this feeling of paranoia that goes above what it use to be....hell I was bringing my own ship, my own gear and my own back up ships, I didn't really want any benefits from the corp other than the benefit of having a dedicated hauler/refiner/possible orca support during fleet ops (and of course low sec protection if it was a null sec corp)
...I went through about two corps...and I am talking exhaustive interviews "Why don't you want to solo anymore?" "why should we tell you where we are?", "Who is my main?" ect ect.....some of these questions were actually possibly damaging to me such as "Where do you normally mine?". What does if I say I am willing to move to the corp's high sec or null sec space in what system I am mining in...maybe I don't want you poaching my ore or blowing up my ship anymore than you want me spying on you.
it is possible having a created date from 2006 or 2007 worked against me but even after going through all this...I learned one of them wasn't even running fleet mining ops at the time just low sec solo stuff...what a waste of my time.
The looking for corp chat channel is useless unless I want to pop into a covert ops and join a rat corp, which I may do but it really isn't what I am looking for.
Contrast this with a couple of years ago (maybe 3) when I was in my last corp we ran into each other in low sec, I was able to join easy enough...I just dumped my ore into the corp and got paid for it..easy. During group ops we would get a percentage of the total haul (this was pre orca though), again easy...I don't need access to the main funds or the titan I just want to mine. In fact they set me up with my first mining barge at no cost simply so I could help out better, and in return we made lots of isk together.
edit: but yea back to the OP it sounds like you wanted to take advantage of someone else and got reamed for it, I wonder why you think that isn't justified?
You wanted to buy something for two dollars and turn around and sell it back to the same person for 3 dollars...don't be suprised when you are out two dollars + tax.
CCP do 'endorse' scamming. Scamming has been legitimate within EVE since the day it went live. I don't know why people assume that they should be invulnerable to loss in EVE of all games, but apparently the OP did.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
The margin trade scam works like this
(1) Identify an item that is not valuable and has very few sell orders. It needs to be something that few people are aware of.
(2) Buy all the items in the region
(3) Relist a number - say 5 or 10 - at a greatly inflated price
(4) Using a character with the margin trading skill post a buy order with a minimum quantity well above 1, that matches your sell order (this protects you from Joe Random happening to have one of these items and selling it to you.), and at a price that's even higher than the sell order you set up. The margin trading skill means that you don't put the full ISK amount of the buy order into escrow.
(5) Remove all the ISK from the wallet of the character that placed the buy order. This means that when the mark tries to sell you the items that he bought at a hugely inflated price from you, the buy order fails and is cancelled, and he's left with his collection of COSMOS Small energy transfers or whatever it was that he bought.
(6) The mark then tries to sell his items and finds out that no one wants them and that he bought them for 1000% more than they're worth.
(7) for extra points, set up another, this time legitimate, buy order for rather less than the going rate: with a bit of luck luck the mark will sell your scamming equipement back to you so you can repeat the process.
Like all scams it relies on the mark thinking that he's the one taking advantage of a poor fool that didn't check the market properly. I'm not sure why we're supposed to feel sorry for people like that, especially when they think that the old adage "If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is" doesn't apply to them.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
The difference with the person you knew doing margin trading and EVE is that in the real world there is oversight of such trading, and appropriate laws to punish fraudulent activity. In EVE, there's nothing at all -- no guarantee, and in some cases the game seems specifically designed to encourage such scamming. I read, for instance, about the direct trading mechanism, which allows the other player to switch the item he's selling you at the last second before concluding the sale. Every MMO out there has a better trading mechanism, one that asks for confirmation before you do the trade. In EVE, you have contracts, I guess, but it just adds a step to the trade process.
And let's not forget that since the addition of PLEX, it's possible to be scammed out of real money. This is where I'm especially critical of CCP. Before PLEXes existed, it didn't really matter, because the money in the game was all self-contained and you only had to pay for a subscription. PLEX allowed the injection of real money into the game economy, and it can now be assumed that whatever is the current rate in ISK for a PLEX is worth at least $17.50 (on the cheapest plan). That a player cannot cash out of EVE is probably what shields CCP from criminal prosecution (not that I know Icelandic laws, but I'm guessing they do have something in place against online fraud), but even if the money injected cannot come out it does make scamming highly unethical once real money is involved.
How many times do people have to be told that CCP allowed Game Time Cards to be traded for ISK right from the start (and incidentally, they forbade GTC scamming too)? The "addition" of PLEX merely put in a way to do directly in game what was already a legit mechanic. They also mean that, once you've received your PLEX as an in-game item, then CCP has fulfilled their contract with the purchaser. What you do with your PLEX from that point on is your business, just as what you do with your T3 Cruiser or your pirate battleship is your business. Including losing it to another player. That's an accepted aspect that's intrinsic to the game, not "fraud" or "a scam" on CCP's part.
You might as well try and sue the owner of a saloon because you lost a hand of poker to another player who had a worse hand than you, but successfully bluffed you into folding, as blame CCP because you got scammed, tricked, ganked or otherwise outplayed in EVE.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Getting scammed out of a plex is not being scammed for real money, sorry to say that. The moment you buy a plex you are being charged $20 for 30 days game time item. Nothing else, what you do with it is your responsability and not theirs.
By that logic everytime you lose your entire paycheck in a casino you're going to say your boss scammed you.
And yet its the only mmo that has grown in a decade time.
Eve is the most hardcore game of all mmo's, many people are sick and tired of Tony the tiger and alice in wonderland mmo's that hold your and and guide you trough the game with your eyes closed.
If you are not paying attention in Eve you can lose everything, be it a ship or bad investment.
I played Hisec for 3 months and quited, returned and joined a null sec alliance and never looked back.
What a blast to blow people out of their homes and smacktalk about it.
What a pleasure to destroy your enemy's.
What a pleasure to make the most isk in the game by simple shoot a few rats and earn hundreds of millions of isk and buy a plex to play for free.
This game is made the the hardcore players and its a shame that we only have 1 or 2 of these mmo's.
Look at all the thempark and wannebe sandbox games going free to play in 3 months while Eve Online playerbase has grown in tenfold in the past decade
Its a shame all those developers try to copy each other with shit mmo's that dont even last 1 year before it dies.
CCP isnt perfect, but we love them for making 1 mmo that doesnt give a shit about carebears
Am I the only one who cringed at the thread title?
Edit: Also, I once bought a DC2 for 500 mil. It was not a rookie mistake, I just wasn't paying attention.
Someone got lucky that day. Wasn't me. I still play.
You're rage quitting over losing 23m ISK and making a forum post over it too?
You were not going to last long regardless of being scammed.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
is similar to this are the penny stocks, on stocks u dont trade anything that dont have a average ofr 500l shares per day and on eve you dont trade things that dont have a 2bn isk volume per day in the last 3 months
BestSigEver :P
So you wanted to take advantage on someone's 'fault', yet later realizing it was him outsmarting you?
Hilarious.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"