A plea for official bots
" Ah, good point. They should have competing bots then, with a prize for the one who got richest each week (or rather the employee who ran it). That would ensure the market develops naturally, like now, because functionally, there is no big difference between a hard-core trade flipper and a bot then. May your maps be bountiful, exile
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" ...wtf is happening on this forum? hahahahaha [Removed by Support]
"Your forum signature was removed as it was considered to be inappropriate and a breach of our Code of Conduct." ...it was quotes. from the forum. lolz! | |
" Sorry OP, but I don't see your point. Either you want a) strictly fixed currency exchange rates or b) a volatile market (as it is now). Your whole suggestion only makes sense if you're for a). NPC vendors could do the job probably better than trade bots because a bot can only serve one customer at a time, a NPC vendor thousands. I lack the knowledge to judge your argument about the technical benefits of bot vs. NPC vendor price adjustments, but I can't imagine it was worth the effort to keep 50 or whatever number of bots running over updating NPCs. Sounds like much, much more work for the devs to me. I also can't follow some other of your arguments - if the trade bot is active 24/7, what's the gameplay difference to a currency auction house? You won't lose a portal because you decide when you contact the trade bot (between maps of course). Competition between GGG trading bots means they must have different exchange rates making the whole concept pointless. Assigning employees to competitively tweak their own trade bots would be extremely expensive and unproductive for GGG. If you want fixed exchange rates, you really could introduce a gold currency. Since you could consistently express the value of one type of orb in terms of another type, you could also express the value and crafting costs in gold currency. Just call the alt shard "1 Gold", the alch shard "5 Gold" and so on. Since the chaos orb is around 10 Alt or 2 Alchs, you could call it 200 Gold and the exalted orb (around 110 C) would be 22.000 Gold. Of course the total convertability between orbs and gold would also work the other way round at crafting: The job done by one alt would cost you 20 Gold, rerolling a rare item would be 200 Gold and so on. Since you could statically convert all orbs they would be simply the same thing as gold, just with a different label - just like you have small coins and banknotes in real life, you had alch, C and Ex in POE. Replacing orbs with Gold currency in a scenario of fixed exchange rates had zero downsides, but several advantages. Gold currency allows for very fine precision pricing, while orbs force you to either make big price jumps (like from 4 to 5 Ex) or lose time negotiating ratios (like an item offered for 4,2 Ex - "what's your ratio, how many C?"). Also SSF would profit from a gold currency system because it would introduce convertability between orb types that are nowadays only convertable between players but not towards NPC vendors, like converting Chromatics and Fusings. I usually find much more chrom than I need, but urgently need fus for 6-linking as early as possible in a league. Huge amounts of Chromatics only are intersting for off-coloring in late league, but at that point you wouldn't need any fus any more as soon as you have your 6-link. Having Gold instead of chrom and fus would make things easier for SSF. Keeping the clumsy orb system only makes sense if you want to keep volatile exchange rates and thus also want to allow flippers and bots to make profits from ratio differences. The main reason for inflation is that the obviously intended currency sink, crafting, sucks so massively that only the famous 0,001% of the playerbase seem to even touch it. The rest saves up to buy or mirror stuff. Fix crafting and you'll fix the inflation. Enjoy the damned labyrinth? Go play Tomb Raider...
Wraeclast is not Las Vegas! Stop the fucking RNG lottery! |
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" No, I certainly favour b. My suggestion with the trade bots does suffer from this, as Fruz already pointed out. My initial thought was: Bots have currency ratios determined by statistics such as POENinja, which is what human traders use as well. The human currency flippers do already set a kind of exchange rate, though it changes according to time of league. The bots would just contribute to establishing fixed rates quicker. I'm not sure if this would be a good or a bad thing. For casuals like me who just want to up-cycle unwanted low currency for higher orbs, it would probably be welcomed at first. It might turn sour if people then start thinking about every orb in terms of "this is just 1/25 of a choas, oh hey, look, here 1/2 choas dropped!". But isn't that already the case? If you look at poe.trade you see the first 10 offers are really close to each other. Which is obvious, as the average player has the same need for each orb type, which varies with league duration as his or her gear develops. Would bots really change anything regarding this? Dunno. Interesting discussion to be had here. Would also be easy for GGG to test by running bots and letting them dynamically set their process according to global sales statistics. As to inflation: Bots (like human flippers) make a slight profit on each transaction. But in contrast to human flippers, this profit is effectively taken out of the game because bots wouldn't craft and wouldn't use their amassed currency to buy items and could even destroy currency they gained. So they could definitely help keep it in check. May your maps be bountiful, exile
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" Ah okay, this sheds a whole new light on your argument. I thought Fruz had misunderstood / argued against you because you wrote before: " This seemed to me as if you were for a) and I had no problem with that since I see also the pros of it as pointed out. Still I doubt the practical advantage of bots compared to NPC vendors and yes, people already do think of everything just as a fraction of C / Ex now. And of course you're also right, any form of bot/vendor market intervention helps fighting inflation. But to me the main problem stays crafting. The fact we got crafting material as currency demonstrates that crafting was the intended currency sink when POE was originally designed. It is also obvious that currency consumtion via crafting is way underused. In my whole 2 1/2 years of POE I think I used one single chaos orb for classical crafting, iirc because it was a challenge once. And GGG could adress this main source of inflation by improving crafting, instead of pumping out new and new alternatives like Essence or Resonator crafting that make classical currency orb crafting even more worthless but are not good enough to replace it as a currency system. Your idea with an algorithm to copy market mechanisms for bots behaving realistically in a player environment is very interesting but I fear it could open gates wide for abuse. Price fixing could reach new extremes. First the scammers spam the market with fake ratios, the bots learn from them, then the scammers change their prices and have a huge advantage before the bots react. Like: WTS 1 C for 1 alch (price fixing, not really selling) -> Bot learns and actually sells at that rate -> scammer buys tons of c for 1 alch each -> scammer goes back to usual rate (finding no buyers at first) -> Bot learns and accepts usual rate -> scammer sells his c with huge profit. Because all bots are official they represent just one trading party and must behave the same way, so who gets to manipulate their behaviour manipulates huge parts of the market. If the bots don't set up their own ratios but try to learn, it will be the ultimative goal for scammers to "teach" the bots whatever behaviour the scammers want. Enjoy the damned labyrinth? Go play Tomb Raider...
Wraeclast is not Las Vegas! Stop the fucking RNG lottery! |
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" I fully agree, it seems a huge pity that only very rich people craft with the higher currencies. " Yes, that is a danger GGG would have to mind. But I guess if the bots don't get fixed ratios set by hand, GGG will have to think of ways to prevent this. Off the top of my head I immediately see several quick ideas to make manipulation harder, but that is a topic for GGG to consider. I'm sure they have capable people who could solve it. May your maps be bountiful, exile
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TL;DR: The trade system has issues and there are good ways to improve it. This isn't one of them.
Spoiler
There are various issues with this, and the only thing that this would actually fix is not getting a reply when trying to trade.
NPC trading is strictly better than trading bots. Why bother with bots and the usual trade interaction, if you're not interacting with anyone? NPC trading specifies either the bottom or top efficiency of a trade. In most cases, it is the bottom one, where exchanges below that ratio may be listed but will never be used. If it's the top, it leads to currency flipping of buying currency A, turning it into currency B and selling that for a higher price. It's relevant to mention, that the buyers of currency B have the same opportunity of instead buying currency A more cheaply and transforming it themselves, but they do not extend the effort. This effort is the source of the additional profit over exchanging a single currency in both directions. I know flippers aren't popular, but they provide faster exchanges in turn for a slight loss of profit. You could always price the exalt and wait for an offer rather than selling it to someone in order to get the 100c you want for an item, but someone else might buy it before you then. This is a win-win situation that is the basis for a free market. Bots would not improve this. They would still either offer bottom ratios barely affecting the market or be a target for flippers. Unofficial bots would lose profit, but not be unable to earn anything unless official bots or currency NPCs become a de facto gold standard. If there is any difference in exchange rates involved between buying and selling, people and bots will use it to make profit. Trading maps with bots at competitive prices devalues farming strategies. Why bother setting up your atlas to drop only the map you want to farm, when you can just bulk exchange all your map drops for a new set of 20-50 maps with profit? Flipping other items is not covered by your suggestion, so I don't see why flipping currency would make the current situation worse. Faster trade for any aspect leads to reaching greater wealth in a shorter amount of time. The more tradable drops already make up the majority of the profit of farming. Unique drops and good rares are worth at most 20-30% of the income, compared to maps, crafting items and currency, and divination cards. Bots earning currency and competing with each other will actually encourage more people to flip, even if the bots' wealth is purged. The best prices will be dominated by flippers and unofficial bots. I think that using bots to combat inflation is too artificial, and I appreciate the way currency values are influenced by farming situations and competing mechanics. It makes them feel more like real objects rather than just numbers of different denominations. Lastly, compared to the effort that goes into making bots, the improvements don't seem anywhere near being worth it. Many problems take a long time to fix in PoE, and they probably wouldn't be able to keep up even with twice the manpower. In all of this fighting fire with fire seems terribly inefficient. I feel like I originally wanted to say more and lost my rhetoric train of thought a couple of times (I should take notes before writing long replies, I guess), but overall I don't think it's a good idea. |
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Who cares about ppl, who are to lazy to actually play this game...
Let's explore new playstyles - Play it your own way, not just like the others.
Quality management is one of the most underrated success factors in every business... | |
" Thanks for the detailed thoughts! I'm not sure I understood them all and some I disagree with. The easiest point first: " I think bots would be easy, as they already exist and you can bet your last shirt GGG experiments with them already so they know the enemy. The only effort going into them would thus be to set them up and running and adjust their prices occasionally. A new NPC, on the other hand needs to be programmed into the game itself. And its inventory management would be a lot of work, because it should not be able to generate currency: So if it sells an Ex for 100C, then it can only sell as many Exs as it has previously bought (and thus taken out of the economy), else it would generate them into the economy. And that would really mess with the prices! Not a trivial addition to the game. In general, I think you make the assumption that the bots I suggest act like NPCs in that they just exchange items at a fixed rate. This is not what I mean, as "my" bot could only trade away items it has previously acquired. And that means that prices are still free to develop. Example of trading maps: If everybody wants the same few shaped maps, these would be a lot more expensive and the bots would have relatively few of them and buy+sell them quite expensively. The unpopular maps would be a lot cheaper. Nobody can just exchange unpopular maps for popular ones in a fixed ratio. In general, the two constraints ...a: Bot may only sell what it bought in game ...b: Bot's prices change according to the market would ensure that these bots act very similarly to how flippers work these days. All current farming strategies would remain valid.
Spoiler
Reagrding b: If GGG has a history of what currency actually got traded at which rates, then cuts off the min and max tails of the prices involved (to prevent easy manipulations by players), they could automate prices for the bots to always reflect market prices. Dunno if they already gather such statistics or how hard it would be to do so.
" That is true. But trading is sooooooo much more profitable then slaying monsters that the bit of time gained by not waiting for the no-repliers does not seem decisive to me. Did I make sense there? Did I understand your assumptions correctly or did I completely miss your points? May your maps be bountiful, exile
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I think you understood most of the points I tried to make, but you're overestimating the cost of adding an NPC and underestimating the stock of a trade bot.
If a trade bot works well enough to be actually close to market prices while properly adjusting to the way its presence influences the market as well (which in itself I would consider an impressive tightrope to successfully walk programmatically), and trades enough to have a noticable impact that would make its addition worth the effort at all, the stock would be beyond what players could deplete. Because of its supposedly powerful adjustment AI, the increase in market price would even prevent a guild of rich players from buying out the bot. If I can reach five digits in lower currencies in a matter of hours, how much do you think will there be for a bot trading 24/7? And stock purges are too artificial to be an accepted currency sink. You waste a lot on rolling a good item? Understandable, may RNGzus be with you. You use chaos for map device mods? Only way farming t16 is worth it. You pay a fixed tax for a trade? Those are the rules. But you lose currency trading with a bot...for what reason again? And yes, I'm aware that the basis for individual trades will be quick profit in a win-win scheme, but the problem is that one winning side is missing, and suddenly it seems like the other side is losing when observed on a greater scale. And the other point; NPC complexity. Much simpler than it seems. One would assume that, on a basic level, NPCs with unified stock would have to work equivalently to guild banks. But this can easily be solved by limiting trade volume. Instancing the stock and removing offered items before displaying them ensures no duplicates. Buying in bulk can place transaction requests handled on FIFO basis. Completing the NPC trade can take a few seconds. Within a matter of days the stock should be large enough to never have any overlap. Setting the prices is much harder to solve. To sum up; I don't think bots have an advantage over NPCs in any aspect. I'm still against both forms. Trade should be left to people. It's the tools that are imperfect. |
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