My 2 cents on the Xbox Trade Issues

Due to the current state of trade on Xbox I thought I'd make this post to get some points across that I haven't seen many people mention in reference to the trade manifesto.In the trade development manifesto Chris says the following regarding the trade board;

"

On the trade market, we're experimenting with the opposite end of the trade spectrum, where it's very easy to complete trades but more difficult to find the exact item you're looking for.

With the current implementation we have it's far from easy to complete a trade most of the time. It's very easy to initiate a trade but you're then left to sit there staring at your TV until the trade is accepted. Hilariously enough the implementation that would actually be in line with the philosophy of making trades easy to complete would be the trade board having instant buyout but that's been talked to death already. They've made it clear it's not happening so I won't bother talking about it further. On PC the idea is that since you have poe.trade to easily find specific items the drawback is that you have to message the seller and meet up to complete the trade which slows down the process. On Xbox the need to wait for the trade to be accepted on the sellers side is functionally the exact same drawback as the need to meet up on PC which means that Xbox players have the same drawback as PC without the added benefits that poe.trade provides. In addition to this Xbox and PC both have roughly the same difficulty initiating trades, messaging someone vs sending an offer, but your currency is tied up on Xbox for each offer you've sent. So the current situation on PC is that searching takes a couple of minutes and completing the trade takes a couple of minutes for pretty much any item you can think of outside the ludicrously high end, but on Xbox the search can take anywhere from a few minutes to an ungodly amount of time, eg uniques vs specific jewels or rings, and completing the trade takes just as long as PC if not longer. So, what should be done? Outside of instant buyout I think the best thing would be to scrap the idea of slow inaccurate search with quick completion all together, open up the Xbox trade API to let us use poe.trade. Slow search with quick completion, (Xbox), would only be comparable with quick search and slow completion, (PC), game-play wise if the Xbox trade completions were actually quick, which GGG have said they won't do.

Similar to OP, I have tried to look at the Trade Manifesto as a logically flowing document but found it lacking in several respects. There is another way to "read" the Trade Manifesto.

First from the Xbox FAQ:

"Overall, we are happy with the fundamentals of how the trade market system on Xbox works."

Now, rendering down the Trade Manifesto:

There is a trade-off between drop rates and ease of trade.
blah blah blah
Trade on PC has become easier than we would have liked.
We intend to prevent that happening on Xbox.
blah blah blah.



Give GGG credit, it's all out there in plain sight.

They really need to just add a instant buy out. It's to easy to "fix" prices. When I want let's say buy fusing.... I'll put a bunch up that are really HEAVLY under cut. Ignore any of the offers I get. Then wait for others to under cut me. Buy them for dirt cheap. Then remove mine later so prices go back up.

Instant buy would remove this ability from the game. But until then a few people who understand this will get richer. And the rest will still be broke.