Trading - Safety in more than 1 item for sale

EVE has a ton of weird mechanics. Any player knows that… Market is no exception.

Recently, while reading the official EVE forums I stumbled upon an explanation of a market mechanic I had no idea of, even though I trade for more than 4 years. I still need to test it but here goes. Try to see for yourself to in order to make sure I ain't saying something incorrect.

Whenever you try to buy an item overpriced relatively the regional average price, you get a warning something like: “Do you want to buy this crap way way over the regional price?” It’s kinda of a safety net EVE gives you. Unfortunatly we get so many of those annoying warnings, even with irrelevant items that cost as low as 100k isk (yes I don’t mind to buy that overpriced 100k item at 250k isk). Due to that “warning spam” specially in hubs outside Jita, we end up automatically pressing the “go ahead” button and not even noticing the proper price. Sometimes it goes terribly wrong and you buy an 100k item for 100mil. In this cenario there is nothing you can really do, other than paying attention.

When it comes to selling stuff and updating your market orders, there is a small tiny variation in this mechanic. If you update your market order, and try to sell an item a lot bellow the regional average you get the “Are you sure about selling this low?!” warning, but ONLY if your sell order was set up initially with MORE than 1 item!

Let’s go for some examples in order to explain better.

- I put up a Sell Order of 2 High-Grade Slave Deltas at 350mil.

- Next day I update market order, and put only 34,99mil by mistake.

- Because my Sell Order was set up with 2 implants, EVE shows me the “Are you sure about selling this low?!” warning

- Hopefully I pay attention and I choose “OOPS, no, don’t sell that” option.

- I proceed at changing the market order at it’s right price, 349mil, undercutting my competition.

Now, If I only had my market order set up initially with only 1 High-Grade Slave Delta, Eve would not have showed me the “Are you sure about selling this low?!” warning when I put it’s price at 35,99mil. EVE would simply have accepted my command and sold the implant way under it’s price. You’d see the wallet flash, the item disapear from your market orders and then be invaded by that “Oh crap!” feeling most traders know for sure.

This is why I pretty much buy, at least, 2 of each! It’s usually preferable, at least to me, to have a market order with some sort of safety warning, than nothing at all, even if I’m tying up more capital than I’d prefer in an extra item that could take long to sell, or have it’s profit margin reduced. This is because I’m usually really distracted and I mess up a lot.

Of course, all these “meta game market options” could be avoided if CCP just implemented a few certain rules:

 - Items automatically sell at the biggest “Buy Order” (you’d still have a loss, but tipically a minor one)

- Items are automatically bought at the value of the lowest “Sell Order”, so you would not pay 25 billion for a 2.5 bil implant. (Yes it seems something similar happened to a guy, acording to a redit post)

Maybe one day.