We are seeing first hand why GGG needs to step in..

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Emphasy wrote:

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It's a huge screw up by GGG that they allowed it to happen this way from the beginning.

I don't feel that way. It is actually smart ressource allocation. Because as long as 3rd party tools are working it means that they can allocate ressources to other things. This is essentially what Blizzard did with the WoW UI, instead of making it better themself they just let content creators on it with the side effect that players now have much more customizable UIs, because they can essentially pick what they want.

And after all they still have control over the API and another thing is if xyz missuses the abilities provided by those API other people might just make a competitive platform and in the end the users decide.

Blizzard's UI actually works though, and it functions perfectly fine. The 3rd party UIs are merely enhancement and are not integral or necessary to play the game.


Poe.trade/XYZ is literally essential to function in this game if you don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time on stupid shit.

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Emphasy wrote:

"

It's a huge screw up by GGG that they allowed it to happen this way from the beginning.

I don't feel that way. It is actually smart ressource allocation. Because as long as 3rd party tools are working it means that they can allocate ressources to other things. This is essentially what Blizzard did with the WoW UI, instead of making it better themself they just let content creators on it with the side effect that players now have much more customizable UIs, because they can essentially pick what they want.

And after all they still have control over the API and another thing is if xyz missuses the abilities provided by those API other people might just make a competitive platform and in the end the users decide.

Sorry, I don't agree with this.

A UI in an MMO, and being able to properly buy & sell items in an ARPG are two VERY different things.

A UI being the least important of the two.

Having a functional auction house in a game where killing & trading are literally the only things to do is not only almost mandatory, but it's such a simple system to add, it would take very minimal effort.

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True, OhhPaige.

However, it will NEVER happen. Because for GGG to go all in with something like that, it would mean an entire staff to take care of it for exactly ZERO extra profit.

It could potentially cause conflict of interest issues. Suddenly, the item nerfs and meta changes could be seen as favoring some economy players, while bankrupting others. Think of the issues that would arise if GGG was responsible for both sides? The nerds would lose their minds.

Forget EVER having any type of GGG automated trade service. It simply cannot happen. Not with the current game design and GGG's economy-sim first credo.

GGG has backed themselves into a corner.

In this case the profit would come indirectly by having a better game.

Just like releasing performance updates, or even adding content. In a game monetized like this, a happy player is going to spend money regardless. Adding new content doesn't have to be their #1 focus 24/7, although it should be a lot of the time.

I agree that its to late to change to a traditional auction house now, however ggg could implement for example trading that occured without both players being in the same location.
Despite what chris says about trading i cant see them designing poe 2 (if that ever happens) with the same cumbersome dated system as poe.

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Having a functional auction house in a game where killing & trading are literally the only things to do is not only almost mandatory, but it's such a simple system to add, it would take very minimal effort.

They don't want an auction house and D3 properly showed why it is a bad design. They could create their own tool to list items in game and essentially show of items, but right now I don't see a reason why they should do that, the additional value that is added is minimal.

And honestly I didn't even mind the actual old trading, which happened entirely ingame, because it meant effort and encouraged you to try to get things ingame. I don't feel that having players actually meet and do a deal is a bad thing.

And the amount of trading required in PoE isn't massiv. You can get a lot of things very easily and even crafting is a decent option. But considering how massively unique a lot of uniques are (compared to the Statsticks that D3 uses with usually only single unique mods and just regular stats) they are hardly interchangable. In D3 a lot of uniques can simply be switched for another or you can just switch your whole class. In PoE this doesn't work so unless you are able to find any single unique maybe until you hit lvl75 you cannot expect to play purely selffound unless you avoid any of those specific items even though some of them are not too powerful. However just buying items you need like an Eye of Chayula isn't in any way hindered by those tools.

And I also think that is what GGG have in mind with their trading. If they say that they balance their game about trading it is this kind of trading. Just filling holes in your build with some items. Chayula is not an expensive item, you can get it for 10 or less chaos, however you cannot expect to drop it. Other items are similar. Midnight Bargain costs 1c or less, but again if you need it for a build you cannot expect to drop it. Or even getting a bit of resists or items with missing stats is easily done by that.

And honestly I don't like that poe.trade even includes currency, this is not really useful for most players, because that was something the trade chat worked pretty well for and to be fair except for crafting you hardly need to exchange currency the best use of it is to sell all the jewelers, but you could also just use them. But a currency market essentially just encourages flipping and this wouldn't change with any official currency exchange unless they include an agency that regulates trade or include taxes.

PoE.trade is the perfect place to do these small trades to get those gloves with resists you need to be capped, to get your an Alphas Howl if you need it or Pledge of Hands, to get a tabula or a cheap clean 5l or 6l. And if you use it for that it is highly doubtable that whatever manipulation someone tries to pull off does even matter for you. While exalts prices are rather jumpy at times chaos are pretty solid, you have a very constant income of those and there is a high demand. And the higher demand and supply of an item is the more stable and the harder to manipulate it is. And most people will do transactions that only care about chaos, because they can't afford highly priced items that might be affected by a price change on exalts.

So yeah they could make improvements and they propably should make them, but it is hardly one of their priorities. The current system provides propably what they want from it and of course it fails in situations it should fail, because it was not meant to do that and I'm not sure if it should ever be able to.

^^ the problem for me with poe.trade is all the little trades for maps. I dont mind whispering to buy gear. But literally whispering 8-10 ppl to buy 1c items up to say 80x for atlas completion is a pain in the ass.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Ah, but then you're removing 50% of what you do in the game, Paige. From a player's perspective you're right: if killing+trading is literally all you do, you want a smooth, simple trading system so you can focus on killing. But from the perspective of a dev company that never quite found its footing regarding making "just killing things" fun and compelling, streamlining a shitty, clunky trading system that has kept people occupied for years might not be the best idea.

I agree with pretty much everything you said in that wall of text, but you put this part as if functional trade made all the trading fun (for some people it is fun) disappear and time spent on trading is reduced to something very close to 0. From other games I have played I can tell that functional auction house, cross instance and asynchronous (they call it that, I think?) trading does not do that. There are plenty people who would still log in to the game and trade all day, I have seen it in a MMORPG(s) I spent a decent part of my life in.

From my point of view, in a game with more effective trade the traders simply do more trading in the (same) time they invest in the game and killers can spend more time killing.

Sadly this does not matter as much as I would like it to, but you already explained the situation and it leaves me somewhat empty inside...