Price Fixing is Cheating - How Might it be Fixed?
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Price fixing is cheating. Posting goods for sale at very low prices with no intention to sell - hoping to lure unsuspecting players to price their identical/similar items for prices comparable to your own - and then swooping in to buy these deeply discounted items is obviously cheating.
In the real world, such behavior is illegal - try these tactics in the real world, and you'll land in jail if caught. So, in the real world, price fixing is illegal, is punishable by law, and hence, there's a large incentive not to price fix. In POE - no punishment accrues. In fact, price fixing is rewarded. The only risk is that the price fixing account may be "ignored" if detected. Big deal - just open another account and continue on. =================== A POE Auction House fixes this problem - post items for sale and if anyone wants to buy, it's sold at the listed price. This eliminates price fixing per-se, but corning the market on an item and then bumping the price up really high is still possible - but market monopoly is easily policed. Yet, an Auction House is not without drawbacks - for-profit companies will exploit an AH by paying people to play POE, farm items, and then sell them, flooding the market with ostensibly hard-to-obtain items thus largely ruining the fun of finding such items. =================== So, here's a possible solution - once posted for sale, items are automatically traded, without seller's consent, for say 10 seconds. If you try to price fix - someone will buy your item within the 10 second period. Meanwhile, AH problems caused by paying players to farm for items is largely eliminated. 1) Items posted for sale are forced sales for only 10 seconds; 2) If you plan to pay a bunch of people to farm items and then sell them, you'll need to repost every 10 seconds to retain automatic sales - which means you'll need to hire a seller or program a bot to do this; 3) frequent reposting of the same item for sale will be extremely easy to detect - GGG can ban accounts trying to exploit the game by farming items. TL/DR It's possible to make price fixing unprofitable w/o introducing an AH or incurring high policing costs. GGG should implement an anti-price-fixing policy because failure to do so is already negatively impacting the majority of the player base. If POE is not as fun as it otherwise would have been, it might not be played. Last edited by hankinsohl on Jan 23, 2018, 5:57:04 AM Last bumped on Jan 27, 2018, 12:49:09 AM
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another "real world" argument. this is a game for chris' sake.
and it's not even true. shops advertise items on sale but only have a very reduced amount of them available if you get there. good luck sueing them. ---- where is the disadvantage in people or bots not being able to get the real price for items by just checking the lowest price on poe.trade? yep. there is none. ggg wants you to negotiate prices according to how badly you want the item in question. age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill! Last edited by vio on Jan 23, 2018, 6:10:04 AM
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I haven't laughed in awhile fucking ridiculous dude.
Dys an sohm
Rohs an kyn Sahl djahs afah Mah morn narr |
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" 100% honest advice - just stop playing PoE. 80% honest advice - yes, price fixing is disguisting andannoying, but for some wierd reasons, GGG continue to defend their flawed and frustrating AH, and dont want to add instant buyouts to it. I agree that instant buyouts is a neccessity for a game where "we want to trade". The only other option is SSF game design (like it is in Grim Dawn, for example). IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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I too would like to see "fake pricing" curtailed and offhand, I don't see a way for anyone other than GGG to get that done effectively. Much as I would appreciate a buyout option (I'm solely an Xbox player, but I am reasonably sure that the issue is generic to all platforms), as mentioned by a previous responder, GGG has shown little appetite to date in implementing one on any platform. But even if we must forgo any instant joy on the prospective buyers' part, there should be other ways to discourage fake pricing.
For example. A Buyout Option is part of a broader family of processes that involve the seller losing control of the transaction once a prospective buyer has meet the price for which the seller has agreed to sell the item (the explanation gets a little awkward because I probably should avoid the use of "buyout" - maybe the "shinning" price so that we don't get gonged). Here's how things could work (at least on the Xbox trade board). Seller marks the price on an item as the fixed selling price. A prospective buyer submits an offer exactly matching the ask for price. At this point, the seller cannot retract the offer. As soon as the seller goes online (instantly, if they are already online), the item gains an "Asterisk" on the trade listings alerting prospective buyers to what is going on. The seller can accept the first offer (or not if it goes against GGG's grand plan) If they do not accept the first offer within say 24 hours measured from the asterisk being applied, the item is removed by GGG from the trade system. All outstanding purchase offers are locked in at this point (yes your currency is tied up). After another 24 hours say, a random "winner" is selected from the locked in purchase offers. Winner gets the item, non-winners get their currency back, and the seller gets the purchase price. As much as I am naturally enamoured by my own suggestion, I don't expect the feeling is widely held - OP is probably just as loving of their suggestion. The point that I wish to make is not that things should be as I suggest, but that a pure buyout price is not the only way to get things done. Surely GGG can rein in fake pricing while immunizing their other trade interests. I now comment in Forums with my Xbox account:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/xbox/view-profile/walkjohn55 |
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It requires.. moderation.... GGG insider help.. etc, still wouldn't be done justly.
It can only be properly fixed with AH that commits to posted auctions. :))) I am the light of the morning and the shadow on the wall, I am nothing and I am all.
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Thanks to those posting thoughtful responses. Interesting feedback and perspective from other players is always welcome.
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AH would always fix it, my thoughts on how to prevent automated bots dominating the market is simply by limiting the amount of searchs/trades you can do per day. Having and ingame master that you level up and that increases that amount would help too. This way you prevent bots from spamming multiple searchs and doing too many trades. About 8 per day would be fine at master lvl 8 and resets per mission completed. A system that prevents your items from appearing in the market if you haven't completed any mission in the past 3-4 days wouldn't be bad either. Each listing has two week period where if it hasn't sold the sale gets removed from index and you have to reprice again to prevent item flood in the market. Limiting the amounts of listings you can have at once not bad either. The current system would still be funtional too for some specific items or if you put items for negotiable price.
However i'm quite sure this will not be implemented. Right now the best you can thing you can do is carefully pricing your items, make good use of ignore button in official trading website and don't allow your wealth to fall in the wrong hands. Simple as that. And of course, be patient, don't be too impulsive when trading. Work your way around lowballs and don't buy overpriced items. This on it's own should be in the game tutorial, however GGG is letting new players get abused by the people that know how to abuse them and make maximum profit. Just don't be that player and good to go. And if you meet someone that does that, ignore him. Bigger ignore list would help this too. "In this game you're just a cow being milked, not a human being entertained" - Kiss_Me_Quick Last edited by IIPheXII on Jan 24, 2018, 4:09:27 AM
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" 'Cheating' means doing something against the rules. While price fixing is annoying, there are no rules that states you have to sell item with listed price, so this is not cheating. Price fixing may create inconveniences for players for only one reason - these players are not really good to estimate real prices of items they are trying to sell and this is only their fault but not someone's else fault. Being better as a player and being able to recognise true value of items is part of gameplay imho. retired from forum because of censorship and discrimination Last edited by DivineChampion on Jan 24, 2018, 7:47:05 AM
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" Has worked before in Germany at least. Shops offering obviously way too little supply at a very discounted price have successfully been sued and gotten fined for that behavior. Remove Horticrafting station storage limit.
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