Broker Relations D-Day

Today the March update was released, with the new Broker Relations changes dropping. The full patch notes can be found here:

https://www.eveonline.com/article/q6z2qy/patch-notes-for-march-2020-release

I've also been working from home today, and managed to use the time I would normally be commuting to finally get a little bit of EVE in. I decided priority number one was to update my sell orders before the patch dropped, allowing me to do this for 100ISK rather than 1-2%. I managed to get 2.5 characters out of 4 done this way, as well as both my station traders. Not too bad. Having the rest to do allowed me to see the new mechanics in action, and make my first mistake very early in the new patch. 

The mistake I made is related to the 4 significant digits rule. I had a sell order for (I think) 149,999,999.98 ISK. There was an order below me on 149,999,999.97 ISK. I did my usual right click -> modify -> use the scroll wheel to bring the cents down, and hit enter. I expected this to put me at 149,900,000 ISK. Instead, it rounded up to 150,000,000 ISK, and charged me about 8 million for to the privilege. Whoops. Although I think that the final window should tell you what it's going to round your order to, rather than doing it afterwards. Bad UI design CCP.

I finally remembered to log in and set "Advanced Broker Relations" to 5 on as many traders as possible as well. I already had it to 5 on a couple of characters, 4 on a couple more, and 0 on everyone else. Could have been more prepared there. 

The formula for working out the relist charge is as follows:

• BR is the character's effective Broker Fee rate at the station/structure (factoring in skills/standing/settings as appropriate)
• RD is the character's Relist Discount rate (factoring in Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Fee to create a new order at price P (this is unchanged):
• Fee = BR * price
• Fee to modify an existing order, changing price from P1 to P2:
• Fee = max(0, BR (P2 - P1)) + (1 - RD) BR * P2

CCP have given the following examples:

Example #1:

• Character has Broker Rate of 3% (from skills/standings) and has a Relist Discount of 60% (from Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Character creates a sell order for 2,000,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 60,000 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR * 2,000,000 = 60,000
• Character then drops the price to 1,950,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 23,400 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • 0 + (1-RD) BR 1,950,000 = 23,400
    • (In this case, the delta is negative, so the first part of the fee is 0)
• Character then drops the price again to 1,900,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 22,800 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • 0 + (1-RD) BR 1,900,000 = 22,800
• These two modifications cost them a total of 46,200 ISK

Example #2:

• Character has Broker Fee of 3% (from skills/standings) and has a Relist Discount of 60% (from Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Character creates a buy order for 2,000,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 60,000 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR * 2,000,000 = 60,000
• Character then raises the price to 2,050,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 26,100 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR (2,050,000 - 2,000,000) + (1-RD) BR * 2,050,000 = 1,500 + 24,600 = 26,100
• Character then raises the price again to 2,100,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 26,700 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR (2,100,000 - 2,050,000) + (1-RD) BR * 2,100,000 = 1,500 + 25,200 = 26,700
• These two modifications cost them a total of 52,800 ISK

I tried to input my own values for a change, but couldn't come up with the same fee CCP is charging. I think it stems from not knowing my "BR", but when I change an order from 58,700,000 to 58,900,000 I get charged 895,500 ISK for the pleasure. That works out at just over 1.5% by the way. When I can work through an example clearly I will on here. 

What I can say from all this is that I don't think station trading is dead. Moving stuff from hub A to B and selling is definitely not dead, I just have to be careful about order updating. I may up my acceptable margins to accommodate a few price adjustments. What I may do is change the plan for my character I was meant to be grinding standings for. The plan was to trade high volume, low margin items like skill injectors within and across hubs. This looks like it'll be even more challenging with these changes, so I may get him into blockade runners and use him to region trade in Lonetrek in a similar way to how I'm doing in Tash-Murkon. We shall see.

Interesting times to be sure, really not sure how this will shake out.