[suggestion] buyer oriented trading system (bots)

ggg doesn't want player to be able to specify buyout prices as they establish a common price for items on the market which can be manipulated by dedicated and skilled players.

there are several ways of achieving that: for one, the seller and buyers could meet in a market system completely anonymous but this would have the usual drawbacks of a seller oriented approach as:

• players finding a way to specify buyout prices elsewhere on the internet
• inflation/deflation
• flipping of items
• skilled players dominating market prices

a more revolutionary approach would be a buyer oriented trading system (bots)

general:

• players offer item requests rather than items
• ggg has to remove the ability of posting items on trading forum sections
• remove poe.trade (make it non-practicable in it's current form)
• trading partners in bots would be completely anonymous

item buyers:

• can specify items or item properties they look for in single "item requests" in bots
• placing a request into bots costs them currency (from 2 alterations to several chaos)
• they have to put the currency or items they are willing to spend alongside their request into bots
• they see all item offers for their request

item sellers:

• cannot place items for sale directly anymore
• cannot search all item requests, they can only access a subset of item requests
• they can link a item of theirs to a request which results in the item getting locked
• they can only link an item to one item request
• when offering the item, the seller has to state if he agrees with the offered price
• if he agrees with the price the item is offered unlocked, otherwise it's offered locked

trade negotiation:

• the buyer sees all item on offer (also offline) and can decide which item he wants
• the buyer can instantly buy any item which is unlocked
• the buyer can increase his currency (item) offer and sellers get informed about the change
• sellers can unlock their items at every time if they agree to the offered currency

still not sure about the disadvantages, maybe you can help.

advantages

• it can co-exist beside a external seller oriented solution if item exchange outside bots is made unreliable
• it solves the current problem of the seller oriented poe.trade (and probably ggg) not tolerating any "want to buy" based database system because that would enable automatized item flipping
• it prevents the need for item hoarding because it clearly shows the demand for certain item types and affixes in the player base

edited changes:

..

You can't remove poe.trade (it's not owned by GGG) and if you remove item posting on the forum I'm sure it'll be about 17 seconds before someone puts together a forum which can take item data from your account and add pictures and be indexable. Maybe longer, but you get the point.

To be honest, the idea seems fairly horrible. A tax would make more sense than making people pay just to look for items, not that either seem needed.

Perhaps at one point GGG wanted no one to have any idea about what anything is worth, and perhaps they still do, but whether tools are provided in-game or not, people will always find a way to make trade more sane through information sharing; of course, if it's impossible to know whether a shavs is worth 1 chaos or 500 exalts, some people will instead stop bothering to trade (no one likes feeling screwed over).

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davidnn5 wrote:

You can't remove poe.trade

no they can't. and they can't prevent players from putting their sales there.

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davidnn5 wrote:

if you remove item posting on the forum I'm sure it'll be about 17 seconds before someone puts together a forum which can take item data from your account and add pictures and be indexable.

doubt that as this requires ones login info.
if i think about it it will be just enough to close the trading sections in the forum.

trading over poe.trade will be impractible:
- it will be more difficult posting items as players have to manually select every affix and property of every single item.
- and ingame item exchange will be risky because the new trading mechanism would replace the trading window. players would have to revert back to the method of throwing items and currency on the ground in levels.

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davidnn5 wrote:

A tax would make more sense than making people pay just to look for items

you don't pay a tax to look for items, you pay a price for putting a item request into the trade system.
for sellers, looking for potential buyers of their items is free of charge.

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davidnn5 wrote:

Perhaps at one point GGG wanted no one to have any idea about what anything is worth, and perhaps they still do, but whether tools are provided in-game or not, people will always find a way to make trade more sane through information sharing

that's always true. but as the trading system is completely anonymous there is no way to tell the partner any buyout/sellout price.[/quote]

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davidnn5 wrote:

of course, if it's impossible to know whether a shavs is worth 1 chaos or 500 exalts

the advantage of buyer oriented trading: the potential buyer can increase it's offer until someone is willing to sell for that price.

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davidnn5 wrote:

some people will instead stop bothering to trade (no one likes feeling screwed over).

players will always find a way to trade because there is a demand for it.
and every item has a different value to their respective owner, which rectifies a different price.

copied the post from the other discussion here.

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davidnn5 wrote:

All you have to do is ask in game - "should I buy this alpha's howl for 20 ex??"...

this is always difficult if you don't have the currency at hand. with bots you can put up your search request for alphas howl and slowly increase your offer until you find someone willing to sell.

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davidnn5 wrote:

it's basically impossible to take away all information-sharing capabilities, and if you do, you end up with... a mess a bit like what's going on in beta right now. Most people seem to intensely dislike the lack of poe.trade functionality there.

and i think bots can exist beside a external seller oriented system.

This system has several disadvantages for casual players:

1. Only players with high online volumes will be able to sell their stuff and to respond to requests in time.

2. Casual players wont ever be able to indicate a fair price or fair value of their item that they are going to sell without spending endless amounts of time about investigating prices. Looking at other players offers helps them alot. In general prices would be more random overall.

On the other hand:

3. Dedicated players will have their buy requests open for the items they wanna stock up at any time. This would again work as an indicator of fair prices of items and in the end be very similar to the system we have now (at least for popular items or item investments).




I like the approach of the idea still. But not as a replacement for current trading but an alternative.

Advantages:
GGG and players got enough time to sort out this style of trading and adapt to it. If it is successful long-term, then a replacement comes in question.


Greetings

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LSN wrote:

Only players with high online volumes will be able to sell their stuff and to respond to requests in time.

i don't think so.

currently it's even worse as all the work of indexing their items and getting them displayed properly in poe.trade is done by the seller alone. with bots seller and buyer participating more equally.

regarding "in time": with bots, before making a decision, the buyer will always wait if someone maybe posts a item with better stats for his offer.

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LSN wrote:

Casual players wont ever be able to indicate a fair price or fair value of their item

"fair prices" are an illusion.

because, for example, players who desperately want to make a mjolner build will value this weapon much higher (and pay more) than someone who gets eye bleed from the notorious skills attached.

in difference to bots, the current system doesn't represent this difference in value.
by introducing (ever changing and manipulatable) "standard prices" it's rather the main source of dissapointment for many players according to my experience.

and it's unlikely that current trades all go for the common price (aka "fair"), most sellers are interested in fast deals for less than the usual currency. please consider that trades aren't all about endgame uniques and gear.

with bots, a buyer can slowly increase it's bid until he finds a seller. i think it's at least as fair as the current solution.

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LSN wrote:

3. Dedicated players will have their buy requests open for the items they wanna stock up at any time.

the best feature of bots is that it prevents this and clearly shows the real demand of certain items in the game. which is probably much less than everybody thinks it is.

a buyer has to put the currency he wants to spend for the deal into the trading system, there are only a few players who have the currency available for several endgame item bids at the same time.

thx for discussing

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LSN wrote:

I like the approach of the idea still. But not as a replacement for current trading but an alternative.

no it can't. current buyer requests will be indexed in no time in external databases, allowing for tools to automatically match offers and requests. a item flippers dream would come true.

selling items securely in the current way would have to go.