Why are you, as a player, against an auction house similar to D3's?

Auction house is that way ---------------------------------------------------------------> D3

Call it what you will there needs to be a more effective method of putting buyers in touch with sellers. A forum and chat channel is not an effective way when thre are hundreds of thousands of players trying to conduct millions of transactions.

If it makes you feel better call it a 'public stash tab'.

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BlowFish wrote:

Buying and selling stuff can be an exercise in wasted time and frustration. There are hundreds of thousands of players trading millions of items. A chat channel and forum section for trading is not an effective way to put one in touch with the other. It's no wonder there are ludicrous prices going down people are offering big bucks to get items without the pain of spending hours of wasted time locating them so they can actually play.

I have spent hours on the forum locating an item (load web page which is slow because of all the images mouse over one by one etc.) only to be gazumped in the time it takes to meet with the guy online. Grrrr.

This happens to everyone but at the same time one dude did get that item that you failed at getting. That's just how the world is we don't all get what we want all the time but when we do it's awesome. Just roll with it man trust me you do not want an ah. For what it's worth there is an ongoing issue with D3 ah where items get sniped from right under your nose by farmers so ya you can always get beat out by another.

No auction house but a Message board without prices and maybe an offline message system you can leave for the seller.

That would be good and since no prices are shown you still have manual trading

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BlowFish wrote:

hundreds of thousands of players trying to conduct millions of transactions.

I don't think we are looking at the same trade chat at all lol.

Let me tell you why. In D3 EVERY SINGLE piece of gear I have on every single character came from AH. In PoE EVERY SINGLE piece of gear on every single one of my characters I either found or crafted myself. AH idea sounded nice on paper before D3 launched. And then d3 launched and I hated AH. It's too convenient, too easy and discourages playing and looking for items and instead encourages playing AH because it becomes the easiest way to get good gear.

I'd have no issue with a limited AH but I don't use the trade channel so that is probably just me. I find trading via trade channel so annoying I'd rather just play the game as a single player game most of the time. I wouldn't want an AH like D3 had though. Something where you can put up like 1 item or where the items could only be sold one time so there were no resales or something would work.

GGG has 19 people in the company(or so I've read many times). An auction house would be a significant engineering and design effort that would take away from critical game feature development. On top of that, its a very unpopular idea in this community. It just isn't smart for GGG to implement such a feature.

Everyone else has already said why an AH is bad, however, I wouldn't be against a trading post that acted like the newspaper classifieds. Being able to list your item with a desired price and wait for people to contact you wouldn't eat as much time and it wouldn't destroy the bartering aspect. The only worry I'd have at that point is it might still make the game more about trading than looting and it still isn't worth the engineering and design effort at this time.

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Yogabba wrote:

It will kill the community that has been created by having to actually trade with people using words. Sometimes you get ripped off and sometimes you do the ripping off. It's fantastic.

Also the way the economy is set up without using gold or one standard currency an ah makes no sense at all.

The first real point against (amongst the logical fallacies, hyperbole and rhetoric). Even though you have offered a reason I personally don't accept it. When I buy or sell something be it real or digital I am not interested in having a relationship with the counterparty. Not providing tools to facilitate trade does not build community. In any case even if you accept the 'community' argument there is still no excuse not to provide better tools for buyers and sellers to 'meet'.

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however, I wouldn't be against a trading post that acted like the newspaper classifieds. Being able to list your item with a desired price and wait for people to contact you wouldn't eat as much time and it wouldn't destroy the bartering aspect.

This. That is all that I want. +1