About "we don't want trading too easy" in the last PODCAST

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solates wrote:

My suggestion about an AH with limited uses per day would work.

They would probably bankroll what they make in a whole year in a month with that in place.

Because humans are generically greedy.

Honestly i would just slog through the game as self found. AH limit trades per day + paying for extra trades sounds like a mobile phone game akin to Candy Crush where you are limited in turns per day unless you buy more turns.

If trading in this game turned into what you are saying, then I would only play self-found. I guess that's not a bad thing, but the inherent greed of a few is still dependent on the "pleb market" that moves high-value goods at a cheap price due to inexperience.

Your trade mechanism sounds good theoretically but would fail in the grand scheme of things. People are already complaining about "Premium stash = P2W"...imagine what would happen if you had to pay for extra trade "slots" or market listings...this place would be a ghost town fast.

The problem with all of this shit IS trading. I don't mind trading...I actually like trading...but having trading in a game shortens the gear hunt. I can grind out easily 100+ chaos a day just doing unid recipe in dried lakes. I'm not hunting loot...i'm hunting recipies. THis gives me 100% direct access to OP gear immediately.

Trading = direct access to the exact piece of gear you need to make an OP build work.

Regardless if trading is "easier" or harder, the universal truth is that trading for an item ends the "hunt" for that item. Which also shortens the gear hunt for your completed build by that much more. Unless you are intentionally targeting a weak fun build (i.e. scold's/whirling blades/CWDT), this game WILL be instantly easier for you.

With Ascendency, that journey is even shorter because B rated gear is still plenty good to smash the content in the game once fully ascended. I was doing T14 maps with nasty rolls with my ED/Contagion Scion in all mediocre rares with 5K total life + a decent CWDT setup.

The reason people are bored quicker this league has to do with the power Ascendancy brought and the failure of GGG to balance the mobs for the power creep.

Why do I need perfect stats on gear to one-shot mobs when I can get "average" gear for cheap and one-shot mobs?

Once the game difficulty is adjusted, gear will matter again...until then traders will be bored and self-founders will rejoice (with or without Cadiro).

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solates wrote:

So easier trade makes an easier game because it removes the farm the X level area for X hours in the 1 in 1,000,000 chance the exact item you need for your build drops?

No.

Even if TRADE was easier you still have to have the CURRENCY to trade.

The only thing an easier trade system would enable is make the game player friendly.

Still have to farm and farm and farm and farm for currency if nothing else.

Now.

There is something to be said for an easier trading system = MORE trading being done.

And more trading being done means more players getting help from other players meaning easier game.

I mean, in some fantasy world were trade was easier but players didn't trade more, okay, maybe game wouldn't be easier. But that's a fantasy, because easier trade means players trade more.

Unless you add arbitrary limits to such trading, but that can be unhealthy in its own right.

I understand what your saying.

But no it would work fine.

1. people have 2 items they can put up for sale easy through AH.

A. A ton of items simply get stashed or vendor'd instead of dealing with selling anything in this game.
B. It gives you an immediate way to determine about how much something is worth.
C. Currency would flow around more instead of being concentrated only at the top.

Only issue that I could see is that the items are indeed permanent.

But ultimately an easy trading option would let the currency flow around.

That is a good thing.

And you have the option of personally not using the AH, just like everyone has the option now to use poe.trade or trading channel or not. I find poe.trade cumbersome and trade channel is just spam.

And someone buying some daily buys/sales is nothing compared to someone facerolling all content with their 30 EX worth of gear that they got because they endured the trading process instead of actually playing the game.

Maybe that is why I am so vehemently for an AH. I can see the game is wonderfully complex, with innovation and a strong fundamental design.

But to find something I need for a build...I do not have the time for self found...and its a repetitive aggravating process of alt-tabbing to poe.trade to write down the often just horrible logins to attempt to get the item.

Now can you not-sure.

You can get to around 80 with 0 issues through slowly slogging through low level maps and dried lake. Those last 20 levels though require capped resists, good dps, and a fundamentally GOOD build, usually built around specific uniques that make it viable.

As far as pay to win?

WTF cares.

This is a GAME company that cost money to operate and they NEED revenue too keep it operating.

I can slowly sell my 10 tabs of 5alt-10c uniques over a period of 2-3 weeks at 2 sales a day OR I can spend a few dollars to throw it all up at once.

I COULD do the same with poe.trade, and honestly most who use it now, probably use it still, but at least with those 2 items they can be sold whenever and I can just login and collect the currency and go run maps or grind for X item in my limited game time.

With that in mind-EVERYONE would have at least 2 items up for sale at all times simply because they don't have to go through the process to summon a minor demon to just sell an item in the game. And indeed quite a few people (notably currency sellers) would have several sell slots everyday because to do their business they need it. Also frees them up to actually play the game.

Like I said before POE absolutely has a gear cap, has a currency ceiling that is difficult to break through, and is not new player friendly in any way.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I don't want to have to play the players as if they were Act bosses. That isn't fun to me in the slightest; rather, it's a literal headache. I just want to play the game, and to be able to buy shit when I need it.

Why is it not a good design decision to make trading something you just *do*? Why is "skill" (which I put in quotes because I believe it is not skill at all, but rather wasting a LOT of time) of trading so important to the experience?

I covered that in the trade vs farm balance section, but to elaborate...

Because your claim to instant gratification trading should be no more valid than your claim to instant gratification farming.

Note that this sentence is NOT "your claim to instant gratification is invalid." I believe hyper easy trade fits well in a game with hyper easy farming (although it does become somewhat redundant there). I'm not trying to say everything should be this huge grind and/or challenge. I'm saying that unless you want trading to be (even more) ridiculously OP, and farming is already a huge grind and/or challenge, then some of that difficulty needs to be mirrored in trading as well.[/quote]

So prices would increase a certain amount. Yes, that makes sense, but as it is, we have to factor in time as thought it were an added expense already. If it takes four hours (which it sometimes DOES) to trade for an item, that's four hours we can't play (and therefore, farm).

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VideoGeemer wrote:

Not necessarily, because if people farm less, prices will all go up, meaning people will farm more.

You're assuming currency drops when you farm, but usable gear doesn't. This is a very poor assumption. All traded gear was at some point farmed and/or crafted with currency which was at some point farmed.

Well, crappy drops are vendored for currency, so they essentially are currency. Good items can, as you said, be crafted for currency.

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When there is zero farming, prices remain relatively static. I don't know how you could get more "farm less" than zero farming.

What I mean is that it would work the same way the Sun keeps its current size and temperature. If it heats up, it expands, which makes it cool down, which makes it shrink, which makes it heat up... So it always balances itself out.

If prices go up, people will have to farm more to pay for this.

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What is accurate to say is: because players have limited equipment slots, as they farm more, the pool of items which could be considered upgrades shrinks; therefore, as they farm less, the pool of items which could be considered upgrades shrinks less. However, unless gear is actually being sunk (by gear sinks) faster than it's being farmed, this pool will not broaden.

This doesn't change that people will always want items. Even with this current bass ackwards system, people still want to try to make it work. More sales could be made with a proper trade system ... and consider you're running around, and you find a great item, but you don't want it. As it is, you may or may not think it's even worth it to try to trade it. If you could just list it, and consider offers at your leisure instead of having to chat to everyone in the game, you're more likely to sell the item.

Yes, the economy would have to adjust. But the only reason it's the way it currently is, is because of the systems we've had in place, and we're simply used to it being this way. If it was any other way from the start, we'd never consider *not* having those options anymore.

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VideoGeemer wrote:

All it would do is make the actual trade something we can actually do with a few clicks, and then move on to actually playing the game. D3's RMAH system was very different, and I don't think the two can be so easily compared.

The key word there is "can." I'm not arguing whether players could or couldn't; I'm arguing whether players would or wouldn't. Powerful trade would encourage players to stay and continue trading instead of returning to "actually playing the game." (Trading doesn't count as playing the game apparently /sarcasm.) The experience is largely what a game "tells" you to do, not just what it forces you to do.

And for fucks sake, RMAH has zero to do with what I said. Zero.[/quote]

My apologies if I took your comment out of context.

As to what you say about people trading instead of playing the normal game (does "normal" work for you? Surely you see that trading is a sort of metagame, and the argument is whether this should even exist as such or not) ... well sure, if players CHOOSE to spend their time farming and trading, they still could. I'm not trying to suggest that this wouldn't still be a viable option, but what I am saying is that players would also have the option to just go buy an item and then go back to the game.

The real world has an economy, and the fact that people can go to a shop and buy something doesn't make suppliers suddenly stop wanting to produce items. The market balances.

Well, for the most part. Our real economy is a lot more complicated than PoE's, but I hope you get what I'm sating. I don't think easy trade would affect people's desire to farm.

See, as all the good gear gets bought up, someone will have to supply more! That means farming/crafting. From the other side, as all your currency gets used up, you'll need more...

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VideoGeemer wrote:

I don't want to be an online stock broker. I've haggled over a price for several hours once. I ended up wishing I never even attempted it, and did whatever, anything else instead. It's just not worth the hassle. People saying this somehow makes the game better confuses the crap out of me.

That's odd, I've haggled for about 15 minutes before and that felt like quite a long time to me. I don't think your experience was typical. I mean, if someone told me they spent hours trying to overcome Malachai and they wish they had that time back, I would probably just, you know, tell them to git gud.[/quote]

Maybe that was a very atypical experience. It only happened one time like that, but yeah, it wasn't awesome.

Also, I'd rather spend hours trying to fight a boss than trying to haggle for an item. ... And even woth erasy trade, there's no saying players COULDN'T haggle like this if they wanted to. We just wouldn't have to unless we had unusual circumstances and tracked down the seller and stuff. As it is, we have to track down the seller and just hope that they actually even want to sell the item.


-VG-

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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solates wrote:

So easier trade makes an easier game because it removes the farm the X level area for X hours in the 1 in 1,000,000 chance the exact item you need for your build drops?

No.

Even if TRADE was easier you still have to have the CURRENCY to trade.

The only thing an easier trade system would enable is make the game player friendly.

Still have to farm and farm and farm and farm for currency if nothing else.

Now.

There is something to be said for an easier trading system = MORE trading being done.

And more trading being done means more players getting help from other players meaning easier game.

I mean, in some fantasy world were trade was easier but players didn't trade more, okay, maybe game wouldn't be easier. But that's a fantasy, because easier trade means players trade more.

Unless you add arbitrary limits to such trading, but that can be unhealthy in its own right.

It might contribute somewhat to power creep, if that's what you're getting at, but the upper limit of power will still be the same as it is now. It might be a little easier to approach that limit, but the way to get that added power would be the same as it is now: Farm areas and level up. It would take a little less time is all, and if you're concerns proved true then maybe there would be a little needed difficulty balancing.

But I'll bet you we'd be happier with that than with almost dreading having to trade for something.


-VG-

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VideoGeemer wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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VideoGeemer wrote:

All it would do is make the actual trade something we can actually do with a few clicks, and then move on to actually playing the game. D3's RMAH system was very different, and I don't think the two can be so easily compared.

The key word there is "can." I'm not arguing whether players could or couldn't; I'm arguing whether players would or wouldn't. Powerful trade would encourage players to stay and continue trading instead of returning to "actually playing the game." (Trading doesn't count as playing the game apparently /sarcasm.) The experience is largely what a game "tells" you to do, not just what it forces you to do.

And for fucks sake, RMAH has zero to do with what I said. Zero.

My apologies if I took your comment out of context.

As to what you say about people trading instead of playing the normal game (does "normal" work for you? Surely you see that trading is a sort of metagame, and the argument is whether this should even exist as such or not) ... well sure, if players CHOOSE to spend their time farming and trading, they still could. I'm not trying to suggest that this wouldn't still be a viable option, but what I am saying is that players would also have the option to just go buy an item and then go back to the game.

The real world has an economy, and the fact that people can go to a shop and buy something doesn't make suppliers suddenly stop wanting to produce items.

No, this is exactly the effect of the real-world economy on real people. You might farm in PoE, but I very much doubt you farm in real life. The real world economy is all about minimizing DIY and encouraging niche specialization.

Just adding my 2 cents, Though it seems like I agree with most the posters here. been playing on and off since beta (my other account was a beta supporter), and this is the one league that I've consistently played the longest. And I personally attribute that to Caidro and his boxes, and the trading system as it is.

Caidro provides that little joy of "I wonder what he'll have this time" that is missing in 99% of the rest of the game. the boxes are little pieces of a regular attrition of currency. it makes me feel like I still have a chance of getting some of those interesting and nice items at a regular rate, instead of days of grinding with nothing, and then something drops, and it ends up being a lvl 10 unique.

this is also the first league that I've actually traded in. I've bought a few times before in the past, but this time I'm actually involved. IMO the system is right where it needs to be. I don't mind having to hop in the game and trade. Having trades occur outside of gameplay time would smooth things out a bit, and speed up the timeframe that we can make sales, but for me that would just be icing on an otherwise tasty cake.

This is also the first league that I've gotten past tier 10 maps. with more then one cheesy FotM build. more builds are viable, and more builds are tried as a result. simple as that. There is still hard content to be had, and high tier maps are still the province of those playing/trading the most. The hardcore groups do not suffer with this current setup, they only prosper more. as do we casuals.

taking away perandus will take away allot of my motivation to continue playing (and buying stuff from their store) much faster. The longer I play, the more I trade (which means the more other players benefit from my playing), and the more money I spend in GGG's store (which means the more money they make). A very simply point IMO.

In my experience, both in PoE and other MMOs, an AH would resolve many more problems that the ones it would bring. In every game with an AH I have played, I would just go farm and have fun in the dungeons and at the end of the day I would unload any relevant thing I got into the AH, buying upgrades from time to time.

Yes, an AH would allow people to flip like crazy, but does it even matter? The flipping will be done on the expensive-hard to get items that an average player does not need to access all the content in the game, while weak-mid level gear would have such a high offer that it would be dirt cheap.

Considering how much this game talks about the build diversity and all that, being able to quickly gear and try new builds should be something to facilitate, not impede. And if some people want to play trade simulator, well good for them, I don't see why it should matter for the ones who only see trading as a quick way of getting to the fun part.

PoE also has the advantage to have a built in economy control. An item will never be more expensive that the currency it takes to make it, so even if the economy gets out of control it will have a ceiling it cannot pass (a high one, true, but that is more because of GGG decisions than anything else)

The main problem that D3 AH had was that the game was designed to force the use of the AH with horrible drop rates, and the offer obviously gravitated to the real cash one.

My few thoughts about AH.

We already have AH, just without in-game UI (user interface) and without trade automation.
Instead of full-blown AH with in-game UI, I'd like to see more trade improvements, to make it less hassle. I think that's ultimate goal of AH in the end, to make trade less time consuming.
Public stashes and their API was great quick-win move, my guildies who never traded before started to sell things just because it's easier now.

I'm developer my self, so i know how many man hours it would take, to implement in-game UI and own indexing database, which would not even get close to features of poe.trade's indexing and searching capabilities.
But there is sort of "easy" way to make trade less hassle for both sellers and buyers without need to invest lot of time, IMHO.

I didn't lookup at current API specs, so excuse me if some information is already being implemented in API data structures. Also, I'll use "{", "}" instead of square brackets used in-game as I couldn't figure out how to escape them on this forum.

Suggested changes:
1) Extend API to expose stash identifier and item coordinates within its stash for each exported item.

2) Change trade mechanism so trade can be initiated without need for characters to be in close vicinity and items can be transferred from seller's stash directly to buyer's inventory.

3) Implement support for {trade stash="id" x="x" y="y" /} tag/link into chat system, similar to current {link /} (or {item /} is it? Don't remember) for item links. Once sent to seller of an item from a buyer by @whisper, the recipient (seller) could click on link to initiate current in-game trade dialog with sender of link (buyer). The trade dialog would have item from given stash and given coords filled in as offer from seller. The trade would commence as it's currently implemented.

After these changes, poe.trade site would be able to generate whispers with {trade /} links for exact items.
The seller wouldn't have to form party with buyer (no Cadiro scams, map invasions, etc.).
The seller wouldn't have to leave whatever he is doing (find safe spot and click on link, no more "sry in lab atm").

Other implications from this suggested trade mechanism, I'll leave to a reader :) Like need to drop items on ground in map once inventory of seller is full and few stacks of currency should be received as payment. Unless, transfer of payment to seller's stash would be implemented as well...

I think, these changes could make trade even less time consuming for both sides, seller and buyer, and raise the number of trades completed as seller would not have to interrupt whatever he is doing with losses (map portals, lab progression, etc.).

Hmmm.

In that context why not have database editing do the trading?

Example- Unique 5=1203505

Buyer goes to poe.trade finds it, buys it, pathofexile receives a notification that player X needs to get 1203505 from player y and give player y 2 ex and player X needs 2ex removed from his stash and to create 1203505 in his stash.

Though arguably the items need to be in a specific spot to make this easier.

An automated script would do this just fine.

The unique secure key from poe.trade along with verification of player X currency and player y's item, which can be done already.

While I think us having to use a 3rd party site to just trade is total BS, why not use what already exists?