Having now experienced Last Epoch's trade system, I think PoE does it right, actually.

If real life is so much fun, why are you playing a video game?

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

how many real people have you met in skyrim?

yes, its a single player game without trading, thats why i havent met a single person in skyrim. ive had a 6 year relationship irl with a woman i was engaged to who i met in path of exile in a guild i was in because i met my old guild leader through offering to buy a caster sceptre from him in ambush league.

Oh, my bad, I misread. I thought you were making a positive point about the many communities that have spawned around Skyrim and the huge number of conversations it has driven over time. It seems that you were actually saying the opposite, that single-player activities don't engender social interaction? Huh.

I mean I think you'd be wrong, but okay. People come together over all sorts of things that are "single player". A very large chunk of a lot of people's interests are things done "single-player". People will sit at home and read a book and then go and talk to others about it. Ever met a a birdwatcher? They'll talk your ear off.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

how did you make those friends?

I met literally none of them by trying to buy or sell things to them, would probably be my number one point there.

I'm not arguing that you can't or shouldn't make friends through trade. I'm arguing that positioning trade as a requirement for community is...a very narrow view of community and seems to expose that people aren't actually that interested in socialising.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

its by some kind of logistical thing in your life that forces you into contact with them like work or education and then you become friends.

What I'm trying to highlight is that no, you aren't forced into human interaction, you choose it if you value it. Nobody forces you to play POE, nobody forces you to trade, and perhaps most importantly here, nobody forces you to have a chat to someone while you trade. You choose to do that. You go out of your way to. You take that step. I'm highlighting and celebrating the agency people have. You weren't actually forced by the universe to socialise with people, you exercised your social skills and chose to do so.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

playing poe is not inherently a shared experience.

Of course it is. Both in the broader sense that thousands of other human beings are also doing it each day, and in the more immediate sense that you can't turn off other people in your towns.

It just isn't necessarily a social experience. But if you're interested in socialising, you can make it one. And the same goes for GGG and the design of their game.

From what I know trading for gear was never a problem in POE . The problem was always about currency / mapping materials / crafting materials eg essences that people even opted to pay extra to buy in bulk out of TFT (never used TFT and never will but used wealthyexile and seems quite nice to get rid of a lot of stuff at once without having to be a part of a shady discord server - P.S. personal opinion).

Keeping the current format of trade for items feels way nicer to buy and sell items as some of you mentioned already it provides a sense of satisfaction when selling / buying a GG item and also quite a nice interaction point between players compared to the consumables side of trade where it's just horrible at this point. I can't even say how many times I got stuck trying to buy like perfect fossils for example (over 20) and spent over 1 hour to get a response and going 1 by 1 almost (ended up saving money because I hit 30% with less then 20 but that does not void the point).

Updating the consumable trade (just the bulk selling part of the trade site) to instant buyout would actually provide a lot of players the satisfaction of selling in bulk with ease and for real now who wouldn't be happy to sell an essence tab worth over 20 divines in an instant and see the currency just stacking up in your stash . That would just be amazing. Also with the change to scarabs everybody will have easy access to mapping materials (god bless they removed sextants - worst part of POE end game - BIG WIN here).

EDIT : Also another + would be less time trading more time playing and this will benefit all players even groups / solo players / beginners (no one likes to trade 2 hours to craft for 30 minutes let's be real now)

"

GusTheCrocodile wrote:

...

gus i love you darling but your inability to grasp the essential point being made coupled with your ability to latch onto the most irrelevant minor details and use of words and then extrapolate them to a completely irrelevant conversation is quite remarkable.

Nice try GGG. Still want an action house.

Never. No matter how bad trade is in other games, POE's trade system is the worst. Not only do you have to directly interact with all manner of "special" individuals, you also have to disrupt your gameplay to make the trades; you'd think people can wait for a bit.....oh how wrong you are.

So yeah, I'll take anything over this atrocity.

"

lupasvasile wrote:

Never. No matter how bad trade is in other games, POE's trade system is the worst. Not only do you have to directly interact with all manner of "special" individuals, you also have to disrupt your gameplay to make the trades; you'd think people can wait for a bit.....oh how wrong you are.

So yeah, I'll take anything over this atrocity.

AH in LE is so bad you spend more time looking for item than you spend in PoE messaging 50 people that dont respond.

I don't like to spam trades to buy a 1c uniq for 1h no reply
I don't like to chase divines on live search, hit whisper and no reply
I don't like to have to check the price of my items constantly
I don't like to be ignored if it takes more than 4 seconds to load the seller hideout
I don't like to spend 80% of my short free time per day on 10 different trade tabs instead of playing

I feel part of the community, of the community that doesn't like the current poe's trade, The trade of a video game doesn't have to be "fun", it doesn't matter if it feels like a "single-player game" I'm not interested, I just want the item, it's a trade not a blind date

I don't know how much you've gotten to play, but you can take that "You're messaging real people" thing with a grain of salt, and even if it's the case while on HC or SC, does it even matter? I just want my item, I don't care if I get it by a person or a bot.

"seeing their hideouts, some of their accomplishments (level, class, totem of achievements etc) and I often have little chats with them about their builds etc" I only want my item, I didn't come to make friends or talk abour seller's build, I came for an item, at most I'll thank you and I'll leave, my thanks reply is "※\(^o^)/※ Thank you xoxo ( ˘ ³˘)❤" very cute, yeah, that's it. And the most likely thing is that if you keep talking to me, I will hit the ignore, since I have other things to do and I don't want to have you behind me asking me about my build, how I am doing or how my game is, I don't have time for you, I'm not interested in you. If I want to socialize, I already have a boyfriend, several discord servers, and real friends that we go out from time to time.

And so I came to rest, not to stress over an obsolete trading system. So obsolete that in Jonnathan he said that the industry is evolving to AH, in poe 2 there will be, and depending on how it goes they will do something in poe 1 related to this. It's okay to like obsolete and cumbersome systems, but the vast majority don't, we hate it, we want improvements, which cannot be in current trade systems because the system itself.

"

CanelayAzucar wrote:

I don't like to spam trades to buy a 1c uniq for 1h no reply
I don't like to chase divines on live search, hit whisper and no reply
I don't like to have to check the price of my items constantly
I don't like to be ignored if it takes more than 4 seconds to load the seller hideout
I don't like to spend 80% of my short free time per day on 10 different trade tabs instead of playing

Then play SSF. Because no matteer how much they will change trade, it still will have most of those problems. With AH or not.

Mate, I was playing Circle of Fortune with lenses to narrow down the item pool, and I was having infinitely more fun finding good stuff for myself to use, instead of relying on trade so much.

In PoE, items are so fucking rare on their own, I actually have to rely on trade. I have over 10k hours in PoE and never seen a natural HH or Mageblood, let alone Mirror drop. I don't want to feel forced into 6-man party play with giga juiced MF where you don't even have time to pick up anything under a Div. And those people still rely on massive scale trade flipping and guild stash.

Nothing is "fun" about PoE's system where you message person after person to then receive no response. Stupid price fixing and flipping, how I hate it. And nothing is fun about grinding specific content for 100+ hours to get a chance at something you might want.

PoE's terrible core design regarding item pools and drop restrictions is the sole reason why I'm not playing SSF, never have and likely never will.

I don't like Heist. In fact, I despise it, yet I'd need to grind that for dozens of hours to get an item I need for a specific build, i.e. Replica uniques.

Same goes for Betrayal and the stupid unveil mechanic grind we have to do every league.

I don't like to grind Delve for dozens of hours to maybe get gloves I could then fracture so that I could craft them properly.

PoE's mod pool is such utter shit that I'm scared, or rather greatly discouraged, to further craft on any good item I find until I have a large sum of capital in the form of currency as a backup. Mistakes/RNG in this game are so punishing it could set you back like 50-100 hours of playtime, if not more. Feels really great to get single digit Life Regen on a lvl 100 item.

The item pool is so dilluted now that there needs to be a massive overhaul. There is so much trash dropping in every area that I never get to see unless I press ALT. In Blighted Maps this can get so ridiculous that pressing ALT can crash people's computers.

So on and so forth. And don't you dare bring up Standard, which is the usual rebuttal, because no one is playing it when a new league starts, the economy is fucked 10 times over, and drops are exactly the same.

So, yes, I'd welcome some kind of market NPC or similar, so that I wouldn't have to further my frustration when dealing with a-holes who will re-list an item for 10x the amount because they didn't like your 70% offer. Or the ones who insist on an unreasonable amount of currency for an item that is literally PERFECT for your build, only for you to then watch it rot in their stash for the next 2 weeks. I had this happen way too many times.

---

Oh, and since you brought Last Epoch into the mix:

I found it a nice breath of fresh air when I was farming Temporal Sanctum to craft Legendaries. No abysmal drop rates, still RNG to it, but I can narrow everything down with the lenses from CoF. All I needed was a bunch of bases to start from, and even though I didn't get any 4 LPs yet, I was happy crafting on useful uniques with 1 or 2 LP. I didn't feel cheated out of my time.