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Saturday 13 June 2015

This just breaks my heart - a Plex blunder

Every time i see someone miss-sell a Plex it just breaks my heart.

In the image below it appears someone has sold at least one Plex at 910 ISK when i very much suspect they meant to sell at 910,000,000 ISK.  A classic miss-posting that can occur in Eve.

The current view is that the sandbox nature of Eve Online means that players must live with those mistakes - CCP are not here to protect players from themselves.



In the above case, this could be a Plex trader - in which case that is less of an issue.  They can take such losses and likely make such a mistake every so often.

It could though be someone who has spent $15 to buy a Plex and miss-sold it on the market - that would be a bigger problem.  i would hope they get their due ISK if they put in a ticket to CCP.

However, it does point to the flaw in the current market system.  On today's exchanges - Sell orders that are priced below posted below Buy orders are settled at the price of those Buy orders.

So, in the above example, the Sell order would have sold at something like 868,000,000 ISK even if it was posted at a mere 910 ISK.

I am no coder - but i wonder how much additional time and resource this would require?

8 comments:

  1. It takes :
    * 1 hour to discuss the problem
    * 1 hour to find the problem
    * 5 minutes to do the fix
    * 1 hour to test the problem
    * 1 hour to manage the process

    1/2 a day for the fix.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was always amazed at this myself. If the highest buy order for an item is 100 isk and I put up my sell order for 10 isk for mistake, why should the buyer spend less than they offered for it? It doesn't work in the reverse. Let's say I'm buying an item and I need 100 of them. The top 10 lowest sell orders only add up to say 30 of what I want, but order number 11 from lowest to highest price has 200 units available. Now maybe the difference in isk between the lowest order and # 11 is 1,000 isk or so. If I only want to make one purchase and go right to order #11 and try to buy from that one order, what happens is that ALL the first 10 sell orders get filled at the price I offered for order 11 so they get the windfall, even though they had listed at a lower price. So the first 10 orders get sold at my price for 30 units and only 70 units get purchased from sell order 11 at the price I offered. I "waste" the difference between the lower sell prices and the price of order 11 on the previous 10 orders. If I want to maximize my savings, I have to place 11 orders to get all my goods. Why do the sellers get the higher price and not just what they offered their goods at?

    ReplyDelete
  3. You're optimistic, managing is 1 week the first time, and it only gets worse.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Happens quite frequently. In a (perhaps surprising) number of cases, the person who made the mistake will be reimbursed by the person who bought the underpriced item.

    This is just a game, after all, so taking advantage of another player's unfortunate mistake, particularly due to bad game design issues, isn't something to be proud of doing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yep - if i prosper from someones blunder and they ask if they can reverse the trade, i always have given back 90% of the ISK to the player.

      Delete
  5. Actually there already is a system in place to prevent this. If you list a sell order or try to buy something that's x% out of the average range (And I'm not sure about the percentage) the game will warn you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Problem is that warning isn't very reliable. Half the time it comes up when it shouldn't and doesn't come up when it should.

      Delete
  6. All the code is already there. It already finds the highest priced buy order and sells to that order. The only thing they'd have to change is a tiny bit of logic so it uses the buy order price instead of the typo price.

    Now it's something like this

    if(enteredprice < buyorderprice)
    price = enteredprice;

    when it should be

    if(enteredprice < buyorderprice)
    price = buyprice;

    ReplyDelete