Are new players happy with market availability?

tl;dr - the market is not necessarily providing needed low-end items to those who need it, nor a good trading experience for new players. If a better way to achieve this can't be generated by better-automated trading, then please, theorycraft a way to achieve it.. (guilds? ilvl 40 and lower unique lotto run by tarkleigh?)

I'd like to expand on a point I made which will be lost among the sea of (rightly) positive feedback to the developer Q&A, focusing on the response 'we have nothing to say about trade at this time'.

I'd like to talk about low-end availability particularly, notwithstanding concerns I have with mid-high end item availability showing evidence of poor distribution driven by disinterest in gambling (please don't call exalt/eternalling 'crafting', crafting is making an object out of another object, not rolling dice and hoping for a Ferrari to magically appear rather than a dining setting).

In a normal market, the supply of goods should enable prices to be set relative to demand. I.e. while you may well have enough money to be buying Maseratis all day, if you're a sugar tooth someone can still expect to sell you a small candy for 50 cents, and if you happen to want to slum it you can still easily obtain a BMW M4 too, at a price far less than your Maserati. Demand at one end of the market doesn't stifle demand or supply elsewhere.

PoE, being trading-based, should aim to follow that market approach, allowing competition to drive prices.

That doesn't seem to be the case at the low end. It is egregiously difficult for most new players to get a basic set of uniques and low-mid level upgrades for weapons and armour. There is a massive amount of such items around, but they're vendored in large numbers because the trading system defeats availability. If it can't be wielded/worn at lvl 28 and is GG (and therefore $$) and/or can't be sold above a certain breakpoint (being, why would I stop a map if I only get an alt for it), it's more efficient to just grab the alt shards and move on. Yes, in theory you could eventually make 200 exalts off transmute sales, but realistically there's a lack of incentive to sell at those prices, which is stifling availability to new players. The players we want to keep around because they help fund GGG.

On the one hand, more items are leaving the market, reducing inflationary effects. But on the other, there seem to be too few items traded at very low levels (alteration orb or less). The trading system is too inefficient to allow new players to get useful items. Even Guilds, which commonly give away crappy uniques to people levelling up, often have stifling 'request by snail mail or post on my private forum' type systems which require excessive time and effort because, well, ninjas.

How can we fix this? Failing any trading improvements, do GGG need to invest a lot more time into Guilds and partying at lower levels as ways to incentivise movement of levelling uniques and rares? Can automation of trades be put in place for anything under a certain cost? Other than altruistic giveaways, which by definition are rare and can't be relied upon, how can we get more people having fun in their first hours of the game? Is it better to just be 'hardcoah' and make people suck it all the hell up?

+1

There have been a lot of posts on making trade easier recently, but I like this thread because it's starting a discussion on actual market/economic issues in the game. Trade is certainly a part of this - it's so much easier to vend things than sell every rare that could potentially be useful to someone for a chaos or two - and currently many mid-tier sets of mods are simply unavailable for low level characters (I'm sure this impacts PvP especially). But additionally, I've noticed than many high-end mod sets aren't available either, even with all the exalted in the world.

I'd love to upgrade some of the equipment on my level 94 ranger, for instance. Some upgrades exist but are 100s of ex at this point; in other areas I'm suck with what I have because there is NOTHING for sale (boots/gloves anyone?).

My point being that the ultimate goal of any economy is to provide more goods to more people at more affordable prices. Right now there are simply not enough goods available and there are massive price differentials between tiers of equipment (also, oddly, while many uniques are extremely cheap because of their availability, rares with similar stats are very expensive. Gang's Momentum, for example) I'm not sure exactly what the cause of these issues are nor can I prescribe a solution, but I hope GGG has an economist as an adviser for their team. Seriously.

Frankly, I believe it is a matter of quantitative easing.

I touch upon it indirectly here.

What I see functionally is that currency orbs are extremely illiquid as a result of their scarcity. It is a learned behaviour of the player base to hoard currency orbs till end game, which means the orbs are not actually being used to trade lower value items during the early/mid game, nor are they being used as utility orbs to actually craft/roll incremental upgrades as a player progresses.

What this means is that the market is stagnant due to no movement of wealth. Wealth isn't moving because the orbs placed in the game to be used as a trade currency have become associated with arbitrarily high value due to scarcity. Gear is currently priced according to orb scarcity and not a reflection of actual crafting/rolling costs, which would actually represent a more balanced valuation (i.e. production/manufacturing cost versus luxury goods items that have artificially constrained supply, creating exclusivity and wealth imbalance). Currency orbs, instead of a trade commodity with utility value have actually become precious stones to lord over.

I believe one solution, albeit a very dramatic and drastic one would be to vastly increase orb supply (i.e. bump up drop rates substantially). The item market is mature enough to absorb this inflation because there are already BiS items available ('Mirrored gear'). Power creep will be negligible due to how broken the skill gem system has become (AoE one skill crit spam). Solo players will rejoice. Traders will have a field day with arbitrage. Newer players will not feel the hard gear checks anymore (they will become mere speedbumps). High fives all around!

Except the game doesn't need to be easier or more accessible.

I don't feel like this is an issue early in the league because everyone's struggling to get half decent stuff and even super common uniques like crest of perandus go for several chaos in the first few days. If your drops are useful, they'll definitely be worth selling.

Later in the league, there are still enough people selling the common and optimal low tier items to keep them sufficiently available. If you can't find anyone selling a goldrim on poe.trade, you're doing something wrong. If you're looking for a low tier helm that is not a goldrim, you're also doing something wrong.

Also, if things are really coming down to an alt or two, vendoring a crappy rare/unique often gets you nearly half of that already. Even with some sort of automated trading system for low value currency, these items would probably not be worth the set up time.

It wouldn't help anyone to add automated trading of low tier items and it would go against the philosophy of the game. It's a total waste of time.

The only thing that they should add to the trading system at this time is a way to perform trades asynchronously on the forums, but I suspect that's been bogged down by implementation and design difficulties because they've been talking about doing something like that for years.

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goetzjam wrote:

Except the game doesn't need to be easier or more accessible.

Heh. But that boat left the harbour a long time ago.

May as well provide suggestions/ideas in line with the direction the existing ship is going than pretend that we have the ability to head back to the harbour and plot a new course...

I'm so new I didn't even know what a Goldrim is, but even I could tell that it would be a waste to use my precious orbs this early in the game. And I've found no need to trade for better items, since the game is easy enough as it is. Though I suppose it would be nice to have some gear with both increased rarity and resistances. But hey, I'm not in a hardcore league, so I can afford to die every now and then. So Gold Rings and Amulet it is.

EDIT: Found my Goldrim in a lockbox on the third floor of the Ancient Pyramid. How nice of the game to so cater to my needs. Well, some of my needs. I went there without knowing that there would be no waypoint, and that I would have to return later. The price of freedom is to sometimes go to the wrong place at the wrong time.

I suspect the answer is 'yep, seems fine, but then we know no better' (certainly would have been for me when I started). So, eh - whatever. I still think the market for trading low-end weapons and items is very sluggish, but if no one knows what to even look for, it's probably not a huge issue. Though if Goetz says it's not, perhaps it is.

As an aside, starting a character today I remembered another thing that made PoE feel really slow when I started - single-clicking thousands of NPCs because I don't have a spare cleave gem and melee splash is level 19! Hate that non-AoE stuff! (hi Charan)

Most of a new player's needs can be met via vendor recipes--a system much easier to develop an understanding of, than appraising affix values on the open market.

Just my two cents ^-^

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Garr0t wrote:

Frankly, I believe it is a matter of quantitative easing.

the term QE doesn't really fit in here because in the real world the amount of whealth in the private sector (people, banks, firms) doesn't change when the government decides to buy off government bonds from banks, it just alters the type of whealth in the private sector.

ggg increasing the orb drop rate could be compared with direct government spending, like every government which runs it's own currency system and has control over it's central bank, ggg has the power to spend unlimited amounts of currency.

but in opposition to a government, ggg hasn't got the means to get back their money from the private sector (player base) by adjusting taxes to control inflation.

that's probably why they are very careful about increasing the rate of spending. if players decide to hoard their currency it will dramatically drive up prices for high end items, increase the price for low end items a bit but the top end of players will have to buy additional stash tabs for the exalts/eternals which are rolling in because the whealth they already have gives them control over market prices of high end items and so the means to manipulate the market.

without any currency tax (for example as a mandatory "orb fee" to be able to play for a certain time, or in the form of a maintenance fee for your items), i'm afraid they will not increase the drop rate.

personally, (i already got called "stalin") i would introduce new random events: "revolution-pvp". the top 3 of the richest players in orbs have to play against each other, the 2 losers would lose half their whealth to ggg. wouldn't hurt 99,99% of the player base a bit but like in the real world, people who don't know the difference between a million and several billion in whealth would think they're affected and be against it.