Trade in PoE is not good and takes away from immersion

They needed a better trade system 10 years ago at this point. The whole experience takes so much away from the game. You're sitting there for 3-4 hours buying things you need for running your maps and then in the middle of running your maps, you have to leave your map just to make a trade.

People don't respond to trades, price fixers, massive market manipulation. People are not going to leave their map for you to sell something they have listed at a low price so it's a coin toss whether someone will even respond to you. You're sitting there messaging 10-20 people, sometimes more, for a single item, and it's not even gear, it's either a scarab, a map or some other currency. Make currency trading easier at least. SOMETHING.

On top of this, you have to have your game in windowed mode and have half of your screen with the trade window and the other half with the game. People actually asked Jonathan during podcasts, can we have the trade in the game please? And their solution is telling people to get a second monitor, yet 32:9 is removed from the game, so you have even less room to fit your game while having to fit a second monitor on your desk as a solution to having to use the trade that we are stuck with on this game. Even worse, the people who play full-screen just alt-tab. Imagine, every 20-30 minutes of playing a game, you have to press alt-tab to either sell or buy something to continue playing the actual game. This isn't playing the game anymore, it's just searching trade queries at that point and it completely ruins the immersion.

Also, you have content sometimes that you CAN'T leave. Imagine you're doing the final waves of a Simulacrum or the final waves of an uber lab and someone messages you for their item. Sure, you can tell the buyer "in lab, in simulacrum." But do you think they will wait for you? Of course not, they will buy from someone else.

Then there's the aspect of having to go into someone's hideout to trade when they are in a completely different server than yours, causing massive ping spikes and sometimes crashes and dc's. You play in Washington D.C. and join someone from Singapore for a trade, it's likely you will dc or one of you will crash to desktop.

Anything at this point would be better than what is in the game currently. Even cross-instance trading would help.

You could even do a system where you can trade a person without having to go into their hideout as long as they are online, one less step than what you have to do now.

I think the main reason they don't want to do anything auction house related is because their network, coding & database is archaic so they would have to basically re-do their entire infrastructure for it to work even though it is singlehandedly the most important & biggest issue there is in the game currently.

An auction house, for at least currency only, is an obvious solution but they conditioned their playerbase into thinking this would be bad for the game, when in reality, you can make the drop chance of most things lower, which would counteract having an auction house or even having a gold fee like they mentioned with instant buyout trading, which will still not be a full solution but it's better than nothing I guess. Then again you will have to wait another 3-4 years before it comes to PoE 2 and then eventually to PoE 1 so enjoy the current trading experience I guess.

It's called "friction". Introduced on purpose. Read the manifesto, because it's another one duplicate thread.

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cursorTarget wrote:

It's called "friction". Introduced on purpose. Read the manifesto, because it's another one duplicate thread.

Right, purposefully make a forced part of the game that you have to interact with as unbearable as possible and then call it "friction" to not have to work on making it actually decent and also not bothering coming up with any type of compromise.

If people keep making the same type of "duplicate" threads with the same complaints about a part of the game, does that sound like a consumer/player issue or a developer issue to you? The majority of people playing this game just tell you to deal with it and that's how you get to where you are today. A game with an overflow of items that clearly needs a better way of being able to trade but you instead get excuses like SSF or "friction" not allowing them to make any improvements to the system.

That manifesto you mentioned I already read when it first came out because I've played since 2013. None of the reasoning given is justifiable in this day and age of gaming. It's a manifesto from 2014. It's 2024. That's 10 years of changes. Their competition like Last Epoch implemented a decent trading system but they can't apparently. By the time they even realize they need a better trading system, there will be so much item clutter, it will be even worse as time goes on and it's already awful.

All these same types of responses to these threads are reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome to me and I also like to equate it to Plato's Allegory. It's a story about these people who are chained in a cave and it's the only life they know. Then one of the people actually ends up leaving the cave and tells others, "Guys, there's a whole new life out here" but they don't care because the cave is all they know. Same with players only knowing a bad trading system. They don't know any better and they think this is the standard. A trading system made back in 2011-2013 being interacted with in 2024. It's not acceptable anymore and if more people spoke up about this instead of just putting up with it, maybe something would change. I'd rather speak on an issue than just ignore it when it's an obvious, major issue and affects most people playing.

doubt a auction house would do any better still be flooded with loot bots that still may or may not answer your trade still price fixer bots yanking up all low price items. and flippers trying to make a quick buck. so i mean yea you would have a trade in game but doubt it be what you wanted it to be.

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Savage_Tha_Clown wrote:

doubt a auction house would do any better still be flooded with loot bots that still may or may not answer your trade still price fixer bots yanking up all low price items. and flippers trying to make a quick buck. so i mean yea you would have a trade in game but doubt it be what you wanted it to be.

"loot bots that still may or may not answer your trade"

It doesn't sound like you understand what an auction house actually is if you think you would still have to rely on someone responding/answering. The process is automated. Meaning, the price is set on an item and it has a system that binds it to the person who makes the purchase first at the lowest price and so on. It's a complex system actually but you can check how it would work via Runescape Grand Exchange or any other game that has an auction house. There is no need to wait for someone to answer a trade because the auction-house/grand-exchange does it for you. This concept is so foreign to people who haven't played a game with an auction house that they can't even fathom it.

The set price of an item would adjust based on the market actually so price fixing would actually be less likely than how it is currently. I don't see how flipping items is a bad thing, that's a way to get an edge for people who are willing to actually put their time into something like this and it's not as profitable as you might think. You would have to do this with a ton of items to make massive profits and the price would eventually stabilize anyway.

I guarantee people would try it once and never want to go back to the old system. I remember they made trade affinities and they actually made it optional to stick with the old system they had before affinities, which is hilarious because no one is doing that. Who wants to manually put their items into their appropriate stash tabs without having it done automatically? No one. Everyone has affinities set instead. What makes you think trade being easier would be different? You think people will go "Nah, let me go back to the old way and message people for my items instead. I'm a masochist."

You can't even conceptualize it being easier/better because it's that foreign of a concept if you've only played this game that has awful trade and not played a single other game that has a good trading system.

I get the friction needed part, but if there is too much friction then people just RMT.

I mean.... if you think immersion is so important in ARPGs (other than perhaps in campaign) then you might want to look towards other genres like souls games or crpgs. I think trade discussions are valid to some extent but immersion?? cmon

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MLGonthorian wrote:

The set price of an item would adjust based on the market actually so price fixing would actually be less likely than how it is currently. I don't see how flipping items is a bad thing, that's a way to get an edge for people who are willing to actually put their time into something like this and it's not as profitable as you might think. You would have to do this with a ton of items to make massive profits and the price would eventually stabilize anyway.

Classic incorrect assessment of the "value" of an auction house. It would NOT make price fixing less likely, it would make it far easier and FASTER to achieve. Especially if there is a buy-out function.

And the idea that "set price would adjust based on the market" is incorrect as well. You will see far less "lowball prices", but because of that you will see a much faster inflation and price hike rate. It is still going to be the SAME people (or bots) pricing items, they just will need to set the floor higher but the ceiling will continue to rise.

Auction houses are double-edged swords: they make trade easier in each individual interaction, but they are historically proven grounds of TERRIBLE price fixing and price gouging practices, in games and in real life. Way way way worse than what we currently have.

The cost of your instant interactions and friction-reduced AH is going to be baseline higher prices, and higher volatility.

I see and understand their excuse as purposeful friction but its still not a good reason. Once you're in farm mode, a lot of time is spent just sending trades back and forth instead of playing the actual game.


I'd very much like if they did something to make buying maps, scarabs, fragments, and other stuff you consume to be easier and more streamlined.

I also don't buy the excuse that people would be botting it. They're already doing that. It is already happening. RMT still exists in this game. They just aren't able or willing to implement in a system to make trading better because GGG is wholly disinterested in providing a quality experience or adequately dealing with bots.

Man I get the frustration but like people been more and more anti-social and hate the immersion of trades. To each their own I guess.