Auction.

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Chris wrote:

We still have some stuff to announce later on.

:D Now you make me think you've figured out something regarding auction house. I'm really curious.

NO it's a COOKIE and besides that I don't see how an auction would be "fair" if there wasn't a points based power rating scale for the equipment (I think my original values were... quite a bit low) I don't really want GGG to bend at all to the WoW crowd they are still playing it and paying for it so if they are going to spend most of their time on that I don't want to appease them and you did say that we need to think less like an mmo (about the cool downs) so I don't see how bending to the will of WoW will have any positive effects on PoE.

You probably got me wrong about the WoW crowd (I shouldn't have said that in the first place^^) - I meant the people who have WoW as the standard for anything rpg related. Like if theres not an AH in the game, the game is broken, because you see theres an AH in WoW.

As for the points system - I already gave an example where "similar" items value in player's eyes can be different 1000000000000 times...literally. Now given that there might be quite a lot of specific builds looking for specific combos of magic properties, theres many combinations which you cannot predict beforehand that would make items extremely valuable in player's eyes...or the opposite. Thats a really cool thing about randomly generated loot, I hope I explained myself well enough.

Anyway, Chris made us think they have some sort of a system planned for trading already...we can only wait and see (=

Trading but not an auction... I don't think I really want an auction... for me it might ruin finding new stuff because I could have gotten it earlier... at an auction, that form of gameplay is one of the things that makes D2 better than WoW, it destroyed finding new things in WoW... and Everquest II, and so many more MMOs

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Chris wrote:

We still have some stuff to announce later on.

I love seeing posts like this.

Dun dun dun...

Personally I've always felt that trade should be an active player action, not an automated system. However, this is probably more MMORPG than what I feel the PoE developers are aiming for. I suggest a marketplace where players can occupy a stall (either physically in digital space, or abstractly through a series of menus and windows), where they can handle transactions through an organized interface, or a private chat channel.

Personally, I dislike the idea that you can just drop off your loot at a market board and go run dungeons while you wait for it to sell. I value that there is a difference between the item finding phase and the item trading phase. And equally, the money earning phase and the money spending phase.

If there is a market or auction house, I hope items bought rather than found are tagged as such. Just like the item verification system, items which weren't found by the player holding them should be tagged. I agree that buying ruins the dynamic. 75% of the fun is finding good items in a random roll. If I just choose the items I want and automatically get them, why even play?

I'd only support an auction house if it allowed for modification of what was being traded on a case-by-case basis. For instance, I have a Whirling Axe of Doom and wish to trade it for something I need like an Impenetrable Hide, or even multiple somethings of lesser or equal value to make up the difference.

Just thinking out loud here:

There needs to a be a player driven economy with a focus on bartering item-for-item. I'm not even sure the developers want a monetized economy if that's what you're driving at with this AH system. They've already stated they're going to have something like 20 different items that are homogeneous, have a use other than currency, are rare, and they're a great bargaining chip because they've a universal value and are easy to carry.

Then again, I suppose they could always use these items as a currency within the AH as well. Some people don't always have the time to barter or look for that super rare item, should they really be punished for having real world obligations? I just hope the game will still encourage bartering whenever possible because that's always been a significant part of the meta game for me in this type of item-heavy game.

P.S. PsychoRomeo brings up an astute point. I much rather my trades be face-to-face. It usually works out better for the parties involved because they can normally reach an agreement that's better than the original offer. If one goes to the AH with some majorly rare item without any idea of its value, chances are they're just going to set it to a buyout that's insurmountably high, along with some arbitrary min/max bid that may be too low. Only to find later that they didn't get the best offer that they could have if they'd done more digging and had asked around.

You know, months ago I made the same topic about AH and my idea was if we could put items there and request others of the same level in return. Let's say, for example, you're a marauder and you have a cool staff for a witch, and you want to exchange it for an axe. You put the item in the AH and link the name of the item you wish to get. So, when someone wants to grab that staff, they need to put the axe first in order to retrieve it. So, if they have the item, they take take the staff and the axe is sent to the mailbox of the marauder (dunno if that's implemented yet).

Just a thought.