I noticed some fishy local market ads on benten-f so I wanted to know what was going on. I placed my own identical looking buy ads, and someone took the bait.
A player accepted one of my ads, and he contacted me demanding the contract be undone/corrected in some way.
Question arises, is what I did against the community guidelines? Is this the risk you have to accept when using the LM? Was this scenario anticipated in the design of the local market? Does the UI need to be improved to make things extra clear?
I’ve seen the LM orders myself, as I buy sometimes from Benten f. The original buy orders are okay as long as two separate players are involved (e.g. no multi-accounting).
@jkomut Your action is totally legit as well. The local markets are unregulated, so if you feel like buying @ 1 CIS then you can setup an order, no problem. It is the responsibility of the other party to check the whole ad before accepting it, in this case this includes to check who the creator of the ad is.
So from my point of view there is no need to change anything. Let me know if you think otherwise.
It’s responsibility of the one accepting the contract to check all details, so it’s a mistake on their side to not check everything necessary and to accept the contract.
That being said, I’d like to clarify the situation since I am one of the parties involved:
I have arranged transportation of H from XK-745F to Katoa in exchange for payment. For this we setup two corresponding contracts on each LM to simulate transportation contracts since they are not yet implemented.
The reason for the mistake might have been that this process of setting up contracts became routine - in addition to that noone else was using the LM.
The reason that I once posted BUY contracts on a H gas giant was that I made a mistake myself and forgot to set the type of contract to SELL.
After the mistake we reached out to @jkomut to resolve this dispute diplomatically.
A possible improvement to the UI could be to state the creator next to the ad on the local market and highlight them. Although, right now the creator of the ad is already displayed before the ad can be accepted.
Re-evaluation of the UI from an usability perspective could reduce the amount of mistakes made, although, afterall I’d say this is rather an edge case where players work with the same type of contracts repeatedly and stop paying that much attention.
Implementation of transportation type ads might help (and would make my life so much easier, haha).
About attacks on an LM:
As far as I have observed there exist two types of reputation systems that help mitigate attacks over a LM.
The one reputation system is implemented in-game and provides a ranking for a player. Depending on the type of attack, it can reduce the attacker’s reputation, i.e. they just don’t provide their part of the contract.
The other reputation system seems to be with the community as players who are observed to not fulfill their part of a contract are often called out in the Discord or in-game chat. Respectively such an attack can reduce the attacker’s reputation “inofficially”.
Although it is hard to judge how effective these reputation systems are.
In this case it would actually backfire since if the victim of the attack does not comply with an unreasonable contract they would get a hit on their ingame reputation.
I wasn’t aware on how the conversation between you played out and I am sorry about this as I do not approve of toxic behavior. I just stepped in afterwards.
