February 24—CCP released a devblog covering some major market changes coming on March 10. There are a lot of changes incoming, so head over and read the devblog here while this post gives you the highlights.
To give you the TL:DR before diving into details, here is the breakdown of what is going on:
- 0.01isking is going away, to be replaced by 4 significant-figuring (no catchy name for this yet)
- Introduction of a Relisting Fee
- Removal of Margin trading, meaning full escrow has to be fronted when placing orders
- 0% broker fee structures are going away, to be replaced by 1% fees (half of which goes to the owner, making structure minimum fee to the owner 0.5%)
No more 0.01ISK
Much bemoaned over the years, 0.01ing is no more. Instead orders will have to be entered, and updated, in increments of 4 significant figures.
Four significant what nows? Ok, so, what this means in practice is (to use a nice big round number):
Say I want to buy a nice shiny Providence, in the region of 1B ISK. At the moment, I can put in whatever value I like as the initial buy price, with decimal places. So, currently I can put in a price of 1,002,098,348.56. Under the new system it needs to be rounded to four significant figures. This means if I put in 1,000,000,010 it rounds it down to 1b. If I put in 1,000,900,100 it rounds it down to 1b. My options are, 1,000,000,000 or 1,001,000,000.
When I update this order, it updates in 1m increments as well.
What about smaller value items, say, PLEX. PLEX with a market price of say, 3,367,499.33 would be changed to 3,367,000 and would be able to be increased in 1k increments.
A 10k order would be increased in increments of 10. You get the idea.
Relisting Fee
If we stick with my shiny Providence order, I have set the price at 1b, and want to update it. Currently this will cost me 100 ISK usually to update. Under the incoming system, there is a whole new formula for updating:
Fee = max(0, BR (P2 – P1)) + (1 – RD) BR * P2
This is a whole lot of maths that I am not going to get into at this time of night, but, in my 1b Providence order, what it means is that to change it from 1b to 1,001,000,000 in Jita costs me around 8m ISK.
So a 1m increase in price cost me 8m ISK. (It cost me 2.6m ISK in a structure). A 70m price increase cost me 11m ISK, so it is better to do the big jumps in price to get more return for your increase.
There are full worked examples of this in the devblog.
About Margin Trading
The margin trading skill is going away. This is the skill that was allegedly only used for margin scams. It allowed you to only need to put 25% of the total amount of an order up front.
It is being replaced by Advanced Broker Relations skill, which reduces the cost of relisting by 50% at level 0 and 75% at level 5. This means that you should get your Margin Trading to V before the change, and also that you will now have to put up the entire amount of the buy order when placing an order.
Structure Broker Fees
Currently there is no SCC (Secure Commerce Commission) component in broker fees in a structure, meaning that 0% broker fee structures exist. The patch on March 10 will introduce a minimum 1% broker fee in structures. However, 50% of this 1% fee will go to the owner, and 50% to the SCC (aka an ISK Sink). This means in practical terms, structure owners can set a minimum fee of 0.5% by leaving the broker fee as the default.
The update fees for an order also go 50% to the structure owner and 50% to the SCC as of current testing on SiSi.
Whatever you think of these changes, they will have an impact on the market, especially on high volume items. The changes are on SiSi, so hop over and give them a try, and give feedback in the devblog thread.
