Bring me 3x rat tails, we've all heard this MMO tale. EVE has these too of course, but EVE being EVE, it makes them obnoxious and rather punitive. Case in point: data centers.
NPCs have levels in EVE and the corresponding challenge and payoff of their quests roughly correspond to these levels. The only way to ascend up to higher levels of NPCs is to build standing with the faction an NPC belongs to. You can make standing grind slightly easier with some skills, but for the most part it's just a dull grind of insipid missions.
Enter data centers.
Data centers are zones that have NPCs that give you tedious collect quests. And when I say tedious I don't mean conceptually tedious, I mean that the items you need to collect don't drop with regularity. Why bother then you might be wondering? Because the NPCs at data centers give you huge bumps to standing if you complete their missions. Oh yeah, this also means that if you don't complete the quest after accepting it you also get a disproportionately large hit to faction standing too.
What's the natural consequence of this? People just buy the items in TEH MARKETZZZ for ludicrous markup. 420 xXnO sCoPeXx 360 mlg buy orders outchea, lich.
There are a couple of ways to look up items on the market, some are more stupid than others. My natural inclination is to type text into the search box. That's one of the most stupid ones, FYI.
When I didn't know anything about standing grind I accepted a data center quest. I put it off for awhile because the market surcharge was too rich for my blood, but eventually I found out how much risk I was putting my faction grind at by leaving this quest hanging and got a bunch of ISK so I just decided to buy my way out of trouble.
So I hop in my market browser and type in the most unique word in the name of the item I'm looking for and the market browser dumps out like 15 items instead of just 1 like I was hoping for. This was at night after my usual 12+ hour day of looking at financial data all day so I was lazy and bought what I thought I needed for what I thought was a good price.
I hadn't bought what I needed and it wasn't a good price.
Illustrative example: If I needed to buy 3x Mk Alpha Widgets which sell for a million ISK each due to mark up, I had bought 3x Mk Alpha-2 Widgets at 250,000 ISK each instead.
Did I log off in a fit of rage? Did I storm off to the official EVE Online forums and complain? Did I pour myself another glass of absinthe and contemplate how hard my personal mistakes are punished by the skeins of fate? No, no, possibly.
What I did do was go, "How can I turn this L into a Ł?"
After some consideration I hatched the following harebrained scheme: Operating on the assumption I can't be the only person who searches the market by text input, and I definitely can't be the only person who shops after a long day irl, and I absolutely can't be the only lazy MMO player, I decided to put these items on the market like they were the item everyone running this mission would be looking to buy quick. Sure I couldn't change the name, but I could put them on sale in the system with the data center and I could sell them at a price that was close to the price that the real McCoy was selling at (but 30% cheaper to look like I was a seller who couldn't / didn't want to wait for someone to buy my wares at the equilibrium price
).
This was 10-12 days ago. Every day I check my open sell orders hoping to see that some sorry sap has taken the bait and bought my electronic pyrite but no one ever fell for my deception.
Until tonight that is.
Yes friends, I sold absolutely nothing at 5x what I paid for it to someone looking for something by preying on the laziness of others and a ghastly user interface.
Welcome to New Eden.
