Currency Trader NPC

I think it would be really handy if there was a trader NPC where you could go to see real time exchange ratios for currency items based on player trade meta data. The trader would allow you to exchange your currency items too but you'd get a worse deal than trading with other players.

For an example of this sort of system see the Guild Wars materials trader, except I think that one was based on player transactions with the NPC. Any thoughts or comments on the idea, please post them.

An interesting idea, but it would require some way retrieve data on what players are actually trading. The only way I see this working is if it was built into the (hopefully) upcoming forum to in-game trade system that is being discussed.

The way GW did it worked great.. but trying to track ratios based on player trades is a bad idea, and completely unnecessary. Currency vendors would naturally balance out to the market price on their own GW-style.

I don't think this is really necessary though. The forum-based trading should make it relatively easy to exchange currency items with other players.

My experience with trading has been frustrating because it necessitates spending too much time working out fair trade values for the currency items. Often I've had to make several trades with multiple players just to work my way to having the specific thing wanted by the player I'm trying to trade with. This sort of problem will be much worse in times of low player volume.

It might be easy enough for anyone spending lots of time in the game, but for someone without so much time to waste it's a real pain in the backside. I feel that relying on the forum to carry out trading is just as inconvenient. I agree that it could be problematic gathering meta data from player trades.

Perhaps a better system would be to attach a hidden value attribute to currency items. This would gradually increase over time but decrease as players sell that particular currency item to the NPC.

To trade with the NPC a player would pick what they want from the NPC and see the total value of those items. As they drop their own currency items into the trade window they would see the total value of their items. The player would have to keep adding currency items to their trade window until their total value exceeds that of the NPC's items by X% before they could accept the trade.

This kind of system should self balance, increase the liquidity of currency items, allow players with less time to participate fairly in trade and retain an incentive for players to trade with each other.

This seems like a plausible idea since you'll (hopefully) always get a worse deal with the NPC then players.

Also, it's possible since each orb is like it's own currency and converting one to the other is essentially the same as converting USD to Euros, hence there's an underlying, fluctuating currency exchange rate for any orb to any other orb.

The real problem I see with this is that you could readily convert low-end currency to high-end currency. The end result is that, with the tremendously increased liquidity, the low end currency would become severely undervalued (everyone would trade their alts/transmutes/armor scraps in for GCPs for ex.) and at the same would essentially clear the market of low end currency since they'd be converted to higher tier orbs.

So, the rarer currencies wouldn't be as rare.

Another issue would be market manipulation. Who's to say the metadata can be trusted?

On another note, but related, folks seem to bring up the "PoE needs an auction house" topic a lot in global. Then people say "Oh no! That can't be done! How will we ever barter via auction? It's impossible!".

Well, I have a semi-decent solution that actually is similar to yours. Of course, I don't know details of the trade system yet, but here goes...

Since orbs are currency and can be "converted" (see above), then why not allow a seller to post an item and just select what orbs they want and how many they'll take, i.e. "For sale! Please pay 2 GCP or 8 chaos, or 16 alch" then the buyer can choose his payment method in any combination of those orbs to satisfy the seller's conversion rates. So, a buyer may pay 1 GCP and 4 chaos for the said item.

There are some downsides to this system, namely that every item would need a base price in a single currency and there could be rounding errors on conversion (either buyer pays too much or too little, depending on the design).