A new trading sytem (forum integration) = bad after all?

Man... after being so vocally supportive of a new trading system for so long...
I'm beginning to think the opposite.
Would a new trading system really make PoE a better game?
Would it perhaps even make this game worse?
Some points to consider:

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(1) I see people on here (and reddit) always complaining about "Path of Trade", and how traders/flippers ruin the economy for everyone else.

Well, if GGG were to implement a new trading system (as Chris has mentioned), the general accepted idea/feature would be to allow online players to trade with offline players (forum integration). This means that players would be able to trade with each other 24/7, whether they are logged into the client or not. This sounds absolutely amazing on the surface, until you realize flipping and "playing the market" would become even more rampant than it is now. Like, ten-fold rampant. Dedicated flippers would be able to uninstall their client, sit at a cafe somewhere, browse poe.trade on their phones, and play stock-market simulator. PoE would become a flipper's wet dream.

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(2) Now I don't know about you guys, but I sell the bulk of my items because I'm online, and my competition is not. I price my items about average (which means there are items priced a bit lower than me), but I am able to sell my items just fine, even in a market as saturated with items as Standard. Buyers would rather buy from people who are online, than some guy who only bothers to log in once per week. This makes sense because it rewards players who actually log in to play the game. If I happen to quit PoE for awhile, I fully expect to take an in-game loss. And if I got back into PoE, I expect to have an [economical] benefit of doing so. In all other games, when you stop playing, you stop progressing in the game.

With the way GGG designed PoE, I think everyone can agree the economy plays a huge role. With forum-trading integration, the line starts to blur between game and forums. If you allow players to affect the in-game economy when they're not even logged in, now you are not only pitting online players against online players... you are pitting online players against online AND offline players. Prices of items will be undercut, only the lowest will sell, and for you hardcore Dom farmers, the Shavs that took you 1000 hours to find wouldn't even be worth anything by the time you found one.

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(3) Lastly, we've had the same "trading system" for nearly 3 years, and PoE is still chugging along just fine. An indexer like poe.trade has helped tons, and I think that's just about as efficient as the market needs to be. It's not automated. People still need to message each other to trade, and people need to be logged in for trades to happen. If PoE has survived this long without a proper auction house (or something of that sort), do we really need one now?

We don't need an auction house.
Just a possibility to trade via forum without logging into the game.

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SidleJinks wrote:

We don't need an auction house.
Just a possibility to trade via forum without logging into the game.

Wow, it's almost like...


































You didn't read my post.

I play the market, I'm down with this idea

The only thing we really need is an ingame index and the ability to set prices for items we want to sell ingame aswell. It's silly that we have to use 3rd party programs when they're doing exactly this, and everyone's using them anyway.

It's a silly and boring inconvenience that you have to tab out, copy character name, check if the item is available, copy the item name, double check the prices, check your own prices when selling... all that stuff. Everything else i really don't mind.

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GooberM wrote:

I play the market, I'm down with this idea

I think you're underestimating how many other players "play the market" just like you do.

You're not just competing with people who are online anymore. You are competing with everyone who is offline too. Instead of pricing your Lightning Coil at the current market price of 20c, you would have to price it at 1c because 50 other guys (who are usually offline) priced theirs at 2c, and they're available to trade 24/7 (via the forums).

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rrtson wrote:

Wow, it's almost like...


































You didn't read my post.

Your post is your opinion. My post is mine opinion.

Proper trading system might also be trough the game client. But in this case it should have full poe.xyz functionality and also the possibility of buying an item from an offline player.

This way or that way, convenient trading system is needed as this game pretends to be MMOG.

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rrtson wrote:

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GooberM wrote:

I play the market, I'm down with this idea

I think you're underestimating how many other players "play the market" just like you do.

You're not just competing with people who are online anymore. You are competing with everyone who is offline too. Instead of pricing your Lightning Coil at the current market price of 20c, you would have to price it at 1c because some other guy (who is usually offline) priced his at 2c.

Yeah, I'll buy a shit ton of them at 1c and re-up them at 2-3c and leave them there until the 1c ones are gone. Also, I doubt this is going to change the value of the high-end items, which are the real money makers.

The problem I've ran into in my trades is that id say 70% of the people I trade with don't know about Poe.trade. To my benfit sometimes and to my loss, ingame integration at the caliber GGG wants, is a strive for all gaming companies or should be.
Now your right in points 1 and 2, IMO there will always be flippers, scammers, and bots. The "try not to think about it" mentality does go along way but does have its breaking point. Personally I have high hopes for the cross forum and ingame trading offline.
Point 3, Inovation should never be scoffed at, this company has alot of sense, IMO, if there system turns out to be a hazard on the economy i'm sure the plug will be pulled ASAP.

Any change ( usually suggested ) would lead to automatic trading with bots that would destroy PoE economy.

Current trading system is fine, that's why GGG doesnt plan to update it anymore.