Trade is in a sad State

I think improving trade has made this afk etc thing worse. Now so many people will list any ring they find etc but not care about being available. TBH though it's not like its hard to gear at the moment, so many good builds can buy equipment for 1-5c (each piece) and if you shop wisely you dont have to buy again. Sure a lot of ppl are afk but its an easy game at the moment and that includes gearing.

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goetzjam wrote:

Trading isn't cancer, its the same, but improved system that we have been using since that time. You know what has changed, players, droprates, ect, if anyone is really to blame its GGG to doing changes that cater to the "little guy", instead of sticking to the original hardcore ARPG, difficult and complex game. People are afk, that happens, an improvement can be made to the API to pull that information and report it so you could search by it on poe.trade, that is something that should can can happen.

Yup

People should start to realise that if they see an item listed on a third party website, that they should not immediately feel entitled to it. Wraeclast ain't a supermarket where you can just purchase stuff on the fly. In the end it is just a listed item from someone's stash with some coordinates of the potential seller. The real trading/haggling starts from there. If you are respectful towards your fellow players and invest some time, you can seal some good deals.

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Fhark wrote:

I think improving trade has made this afk etc thing worse. Now so many people will list any ring they find etc but not care about being available. TBH though it's not like its hard to gear at the moment, so many good builds can buy equipment for 1-5c (each piece) and if you shop wisely you dont have to buy again. Sure a lot of ppl are afk but its an easy game at the moment and that includes gearing.

True indeed mate, people dont care in general because the game isnt so enganging and unforgiving as it used to be. There lies though another problem, easy gearing is what also contributes to the game being easier and easier, and thats another part i would like to analyze a bit.

Auction houses (basically poe.trade for poe) have that effect on the game, they make gearing extremely easy for the average joe, as well as everyone else in most cases, which in turn though makes the game much less enganging and shallow or way to much trade-centric.

"And how is that a bad thing you asshat?" you might want to ask, simle: achieving much earlier your goals cause gearing and trading allows that, is some form of instant gratification that only causes you to lose interest earlier too.

And here lies the tricky part, trade in PoE is on a very thin line, you cant make it completely automated and integrated into the core game like an auction house cause everything then would turn into perandus league with 1c prices for mjolner and 1ex kaoms heart, which while allows every average joe to get one, those who find it lose not only in value but in fun and excitement too and thats bad for the game.

And thats why it is a very difficult decision for GGG to make. I for once wouldnt be bothered at all if poe.xyz had never existed if for example cross instance trading was implemented and you could see other's players shops threads inside the game. Like truly a free market, which would greatly reward those who spent time looking for prices, cause literally poe.xyz is an auction house without instant buyout option. That though would have a big impact on player retention, people like feeling powerful, trading for items lets them achieve that feeling even temporarily, while searching and interacting with others might not sound very enticing for them.

To be honest the state the current trade system is in, is caused by many things, one of them being that many people nowdays dont really care about trading, causing the rest that care and have fun with the player interaction and market manipulation to suffer more. Others may include the gratuitous powercreep and (clear) speed metas making people not only feel very powerful early on but also not care about the multiplayer aspect of the game (or care in the minimum) or the game itself. Trading, partying and pvping are the only character interactions ingame, with the first being like a huge factor for the games longevity.

I know this post comes out very weird, like "dafuq dude? do you want easier trading or not? you fucking got me very confused like seriously what drugs are you on?". The answer to that is not a simple one (not the drug related one), trading has room for improvement, it doesnt need to get "easier" as in instant buyouts, no player interaction, no alt-tabs, no stops, everything automated with auction houses, but rather keep the very important player interaction for a multiplayer game intact (or even enhance it) and make small but important changes like cross instance trading for starters.

[Removed by Support]

I have a critical question to ask that calls into question an assumption that people here take for granted:

Why is player interaction important for trading?

Honestly, I have never seen a good justification for this, so I want to know why this assumption exists. There's almost no interaction in general other than General Chat and forums. The game does a good job of making sure players see each other in an adversarial light, so why would we want to interact with those players?

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I too struggle with the question of how easier trade interacts with game difficulty, but I inevitably come back to the same conclusion: Difficulty is not really about trade; crafting has more say in both of those than they do with each other, and this is because crafting is in a terrible place. The sheer RNG involved in getting a decent roll makes trade the default option, and this is the real reason difficulty and trade are considered to be in tandem.

If you can see how that is true, then the consequences of easier trade are easier to deal with, because crafting is supposed to be a viable alternative (which it's not right now). When more currency is sunk into actually crafting gear, and that crafted gear can be competitive with some good finds, the over-inflation of raw currency diminishes greatly.

I don't see how else you can reconcile the issue if crafting continues to be ignored.

Plenty of explanations for why player interaction is important for trading, perhaps even right in front of your face.

As for crafting not being a viable alternative, I'm call bullshit on that largely because masters made that aspect much easier then it was before, but at the cost of using your currency that you could otherwise purchase something else with, which doesn't require you to grind up for a bit and that allows you to search for higher stats instead of settling for a lower self found alternative.

Of course there isn't a crafting substitute to unique items, pretty much just div cards to help there.

You know, Goetz, all the bullshit aside, you have to be blind to think masters alone makes crafting viable. They had that potential--maybe they still could--but they are not enough.

Also, you're free to provide some of those reasons. You could have already, and I'm not sure why you didn't take the opportunity to if they are so apparent.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

You know, Goetz, all the bullshit aside, you have to be blind to think masters alone makes crafting viable. They had that potential--maybe they still could--but they are not enough.

Also, you're free to provide some of those reasons. You could have already, and I'm not sure why you didn't take the opportunity to if they are so apparent.

The only time crafting is viable is when you're pushing ladder at the beginning or already at the top of the ladder and there's nothing better. That's about it.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

You know, Goetz, all the bullshit aside, you have to be blind to think masters alone makes crafting viable. They had that potential--maybe they still could--but they are not enough.

Also, you're free to provide some of those reasons. You could have already, and I'm not sure why you didn't take the opportunity to if they are so apparent.

Not sure if serious of legitimately doesnt know how to use masters to craft items...

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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Albinosaurus wrote:

You know, Goetz, all the bullshit aside, you have to be blind to think masters alone makes crafting viable. They had that potential--maybe they still could--but they are not enough.

Also, you're free to provide some of those reasons. You could have already, and I'm not sure why you didn't take the opportunity to if they are so apparent.

Not sure if serious of legitimately doesnt know how to use masters to craft items...

If you truly believe that, you're welcome to expound upon it. Otherwise, this kind of comment boils down to another baseless personal attack. Go ahead, try to explain how to get 6 good affixes on an item of your choice, reliably, that can be used for end-game content or high value trade. I'm all ears.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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Albinosaurus wrote:

You know, Goetz, all the bullshit aside, you have to be blind to think masters alone makes crafting viable. They had that potential--maybe they still could--but they are not enough.

Also, you're free to provide some of those reasons. You could have already, and I'm not sure why you didn't take the opportunity to if they are so apparent.

Not sure if serious of legitimately doesnt know how to use masters to craft items...

If you truly believe that, you're welcome to expound upon it. Otherwise, this kind of comment boils down to another baseless personal attack. Go ahead, try to explain how to get 6 good affixes on an item of your choice, reliably, that can be used for end-game content or high value trade. I'm all ears.

LOL

"I dont know how to master craft but im going to call Goetzjam out and say that hes full of shit"

Soo youre feinting ignorance and calling it a personal attack when someone says you dont know what youre talking about ?