poe.xyz.is = The "auction house" that everyone thought we didn't need?

People often say one thing and then end up doing another. Having been here for quite some time, I've noticed that as PoE has evolved, so have the players' tastes, especially when it comes to trading. In open beta, I was one of the people who was sorely against having any type of auction house. No auction house was actually what drew me to Path of Exile. But over the course of a year, I am now one of the presumably thousands of players who use sites like poe.xyz.is / poemarkets to trade items on a daily basis.

Why has my view changed? Well, I'll start off by stating the obvious: People want to spend more time killing monsters, and less time trading. That's what this game was designed for wasn't it? But with the current trade system, that is exactly the opposite of what we're getting. Instead, people who aren't familiar with sites like poe.xyz.is are spending hours on end sitting in town, staring at a waterfall of text (trade chat), hoping to find something they can use, and/or flooding their own items on trade chat in a futile/cumbersome attempt to clean out their stash, so that they can go back to slaughtering monsters. I can say poe.xyz.is has saved me an eternity of headaches, and I'm sure for a lot of the people I trade with too. I now spend less time trading.

The first common issue people have with an auction house is that people don't want to play a "trade simulator", and how PoE is supposed to be a dungeon crawler, where you're supposed to find your own gear upgrades and forge your way through the foreboding world of Wraeclast. That's all well and good until you realize finding/crafting specific gear in PoE is borderline inefficient -- heck, nigh impossible with the current loot tables, and the randomness associated with the completely unpredictable "crafting" (i.e. no better than gambling at a roulette table). The good gear you find is often suited to another build entirely, and when you try to "craft" your own, you're very likely to go broke doing it. We've all seen thread after thread of people exhausting their entire bank trying to 6S/5L/6L/rarify something, or hitting a wall at Act 3 Cruel, because the rares they find haven't been able to serve as a single relevant gear upgrade since Normal difficulty. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But what do these people have left to do? The answer is to find someone else who already has the item they want.

It's the same reason why, in real life, we aren't all our own plumbers, electricians, chefs, accountants, doctors, firefighters, etc. We buy shoes from a certain company, and purchase computers from another company. People specialize in different things, and as a community we transact with each other so that everyone's expertise can be shared with others. Trade/commerce is simply an inevitable result of a developed/mature community. Everyone has something different to offer.

Even if GGG increased drop rates and introduced a more focused crafting system, we've still established that trading with others is very much a natural and essential progression. People will undoubtedly find/craft valuable gear that they have no intention of ever using, in which someone else would gladly take off their hands. Do we place them in a large crowd and tell them "good luck finding each other"? Or do we develop a system where both parties can transact in a hassle-free manner? I'm betting the latter. Now the question is, how do we reduce the amount of time spent trading, so that everyone can get back to doing what really matters?

The answer is simply an in-game marketplace where items can be placed in a searchable public domain, in which potential buyers are able to filter down to exactly the type of item they need, much like how we're able to filter results on Amazon.com for the specific type of book we want to purchase (by genre, by author, etc). Not only that; when we are ready to purchase, we know exactly who to buy from.

People may ask... "well wasn't it the AH that killed D3?" Not exactly. The idea of an auction house is sound. But the biggest issue about D3's auction house was its poor implementation. Namely, the instant buyouts. Blizzard allowed players to sell their items at all hours of the day, 7 days a week, even if the sellers weren't online to do so. Items were held in escrow until a buyer came around to snatch the item for whatever price it was listed at, whereby the buyer would immediately receive the item, and the seller would receive his/her funds. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what killed the auction house idea.

It was the fact that bots could be programmed to literally index all of the prices of a particular item, and through automation, proceed to buy out every single item which were listed below market price, then resell the items immediately for a higher price. They could do this multiple times a minute; faster than any human could. There are several solutions to this problem which would make an auction house viable in PoE:

(1) Only allow trades to occur when the seller is online to sell an item directly to the buyer (like what we have now, through a trade window). This way, it slows down the rate at which items can be "flipped" by dedicated traders, and the viability of bots are virtually eliminated altogether.

(2) Allow people to list their items, but with no buyout / current offer listed. This still allows buyers to find the exact items they're looking for, but encourages the buyer to contact the seller and have them work it out via good old fashion human negotiation. There will also be less of a "fixed price" mindset for any particular item, since prices are not listed.

One common misconception with an auction house / in-game indexer is that people assume the market will be overrun with low-tier items, and only the top-tier items will sell. This is simply untrue. The reason why lower-tier items do not sell as frequently on poe.xyz.is is because most of the users of that site have only discovered that site when they hit end-game, and thus are no longer in the character range to purchase low-level rares/uniques for their characters. With an in-game marketplace, newer users will be exposed to it much earlier on, and will be able to buy lower-tier rares/uniques from the more experienced players who find those items.

Even when it comes to low-rolled uniques, these items are far from completely worthless. For example, there is currently still an abundance of buyers for low-rolled uniques on poe.xyz.is. Some buyers simply want the unique item as build-enablers regardless of the low roll, and will likely reroll the item later with a Divine/Blessed, in hopes of getting higher-rolled stats.

The last point of concern is that GGG will nerf drop rates in order to offset the immediate availability of items in the auction house, thus making the auction house the only way to progress item-wise. This isn't a function of the AH itself. It's the function of incompetent developers (like those at Blizzard).

I will say, this is where GGG has to get past the mental block of an auction house somehow making this game too easy for people who use it. The drop rates should be tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House, as I'm sure there are those who would prefer to play self-found anyway. The people who do use the AH are, like I mentioned above, following an inevitable path to a more efficient way of bartering, which in no way affects those who choose to play self-found.

The progression towards a more mature game necessitates that there be a more mature trading system than simply bartering. The current in-game trading system is akin to throwing a bunch of people in a room and telling them to shout over each other, in hopes some of them will find others who will do business with them.

The popularity of poe.xyz.is is only a testament to how many users actually use the site to trade. In fact, I don't know any end-game mapper who doesn't use Poe.xyz.is. In my own experience, without buyers being able to come to me for items, I would have to spend a disproportionate amount of time in town staring at trade chat. If you imagine Path of Exile as a barebones ecosystem, then the "invention" of Poe.xyz.is and its subsequent popularity is proof that there is indeed a large demand for a categorized/searchable (indexed) database of available items with their associated sellers.

Of course, we can live perfectly happily with poe.xyz.is as a standalone third-party auction house, but I think the devs at GGG can maybe wake up to the possibility that perhaps their dogmatic notion of "NO AUCTION HOUSE" has outlived its efficacy. The Noticeboard can finally be used just for questing/mapping parties. Global chat can finally be free of price checks every other minute. In my opinion, implementing a similar system as poe.xyz.is into the game itself will improve Path of Exile in a massive, massive way.