List your AH fears
" let me just take that pro-argument out of your list. i think it's the most negative side of an easy to use and automatic trading system as an auction house normally is: it means: - higher trade volume generally means lower item prices as more players try to underbid each other - players who stopped at certain ingame barriers get better items fast, so reach endgame faster and can quit earlier because they get bored faster - being able to trade more and even faster brings even more advantage to the guys having unlimited time in the beginning of new leagues - more trading volume brings an advantage to those who don't play the game but just flip items - more sales mean players purchase less stash tabs for trading imho trading in poe has just to serve one purpose, to let people exchange items with unique or rare features neccessary to finish a certain build. every other trade is bad for the game. age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill!
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"This is why the particular structure of an asynchronous and/or automated trade system is extremely important. Take, for example, the D3 gold AH. Now, I am thoroughly convinced it would have buckled under the weight of botting-induced hyperinflation anyway, but its design wasn't doing itself any favors, it had no added resistance. The buyout system punished sellers by putting all pricing pressure on them, none of the pricing pressure on buyers. The incremental automatic "bid-until-max" system similarly punished sellers whenever they didn't set a good reserve price. The 2-day auction punished sellers by preventing them from correcting errors and being forced to wait. And so on. D3 had an extremely buyer-favored, seller-on-a-tightrope market system. However, higher volume does not necessarily mean you're going to have an overwhelming amount of downward price pressure. You can keep pricing pressure on buyers using tricks such as silent auctions (bidders cannot see other bidders' bids) and/or flexible duration auctions (no specific end time, seller can retract item at any time, no sniping possible). Both of these emulate the non-automated interaction of "offer-counteroffer," in the form of an automated system. The silent auction thing is particularly important because it obscures the winning bid of previous auctions and thus makes reading the search results for market value a more difficult task. Perhaps more important here is the concept of tedium versus decisionmaking. Wanting to make trade easier by making it less tedious, less inconvenient, that's just a good thing, it's good game design to make your game convenient and accessible. However, wanting to reduce decisionmaking in trading is not good design at all. It's saying you want things so easy that success it automatic, rather than dependent upon good decisions on the part of the player. Really, the reason why tedium is bad is because it adds unnecessary wait time between decisions. I think trading should have difficult decisions, where players have to develop skills of item valuation and market analysis in order to be successful traders. What I do not think helps any is adding unnecessary delays which reduce a player's ability to be utilizing such trade skills as frequently as possible. "That's not how I see it. To me, the primary purpose of trading is a catch-up mechanic. For example, if you start a new league on the day it begins, there's not going to be much of an economy for you to get upgrades from, up until you take some kind of extended break and you're no longer one of the frontrunners of the race. On the other hand, if you start a full week after the league starts, you're going to have a decent economy of cheap upgrades to choose from which can accelerate your progress. As far as catch-up mechanics go, it's a very cleverly designed one, because people who show up late do get very significant speed boosts, but the competitive advantage at the end of the day is always to the players who have played the best and the most; the catch-up component never unfairly overtakes the frontrunners, it just brings those lagging behind closer. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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Auction House only has pro's. Notice that everyone uses xyz? It's and offline auction house because actually trying to sort through that crap spam in a trade channel is worthless. It's just the same people over and over hoping to find a new player that they can rip off with some junk item.
I've had numerous characters I loved playing but simply stopped dead in their tracks and got canned because I had to sit and wait far to long for the right item to come up for sale. With the right resists on it and the right amount of movement speed or rarity. There's few items posted because it's so little gain for the amount of time investment you have to put out. It's a waste of your life to sit and make a million posts or edits or updates or even to constantly use acquisition to do it for you. It should be painless since you cannot self find at all. The increased volume helps you find that super specific item your looking for faster since the RNG rolls are all over the place. Which gets you back to playing the game and less to playing the "trade" game of sit and refresh xyz every 10seconds for hours til something comes up. The ONLY people who want no auction house are scammers (that includes every single person who purposely wants to price things very high because they know some poor sob out there will buy it because he doesn't know any better), and people who don't even want to play the game. Just want and economy simulator or want to make this a real life job instead of just getting a normal job. |
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" That isn't a problem with better market efficiency, it is a problem with the discrepancy between good and bad items. Whether you have the inefficient market or not, you still have this problem. If you increase the functional value of low and mid tier items, their monetary value will go up. If you lower the functional value of high tier items, their monetary value would go down. |
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" I'm afraid the technology just isn't there yet... Recruiting for Archnemesis League/Siege of the Atlas!
Umbra Exiles: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3244875 The Official Path of Exile Guild Directory: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1192567 |
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" I feel like I am responding to people who have never even cracked open Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but still think they have an even basic grasp of economics. Trade is the transfer of goods and / or services in exchange for some type of compensation. It doesn't matter if it is trade in PoE, trade in the real world, or trade between hyper intelligent transdimensional space mice. That is what trade is. Increased volume of trade equates to competition, lower prices, and more options. All of these are positive. Items being cheaper to purchase is a positive, not a negative. For instance, a few patches ago a friendly fellow decided to b/o every single alpha's howl in the hopes they would become legacy. When they didn't he decided not to waste the opportunity and put them all on poe.trade at 10 ex a pop. It then took weeks for the supply of new alpha's howls to drive down the price to a fair level. If there was a higher volume of trade there could be too many alpha's howls for this person to corner the market as he did! One of the most famous quotes probably never said was by Henry Ford..."You can have a model T in whatever color you want, as long as it is black." He had cornered the market and could thus fix the price and limit consumer choices. Competition is what allows customers to have choice. For your other points in no particular order: Increased volume of trade means more stash tabs not less. I trade a lot. I don't flip, but I do opperate a shop. I have 48 stash tabs. I have never ever played a temp league and I am not a pack rat. These are 48 stash tabs of valuable items (meaning worth at least a few chaos per item). Increased volume of trade means more traders buying and selling more things, means more stash tabs needed. You claim more trades allows a select few to control everything. As my examples above show, this is also the opposite of the truth. It will be harder for the Axns and Ventors of PoE to own everything, as they do now. Increased trade volume makes it harder for the rich to corner a market and increased choice makes it harder for a flipper to charge insane premiums for his services. More choices will result in better prices. No more fucking 16 chroms per chaos when 600 chroms equals 1 ex and 60 chaos equals 1 ex (do the math on that shit!) The argument about burn out is just false. People burn out when they burn out. Lvl 100 is a distant dream for most people, especially in a temp league. It will continue to be a distant dream for players even after they are not too poor to afford gear that isn't trash. A final note that wasn't mentioned by you. Yes increased volume of trade will mean that trash is no longer traded. Isn't that a novel idea? Temp league players will no longer be selling each other trash gear and instead will be trading decent items. No more temp leaguers smearing themselves in garbage rares, oh no the horror! Keep PoE2 Difficult.
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Items being cheaper isn't strictly better when they are everyone's source of income. We don't have an enormous array of industries to profit from in a game like you do in a real-life economy. Comparing the two as though they're parallel is incredibly naive.
IGN: Smegmazoid
Long live the new Flesh |
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I feel like I am responding to person was learning about economics but never saw AH in real lif... Game.
" trading volume in RuneScape is enormous. Flippers are doing fine. Flipping item on market is best way to make money and the more money you got the more money you can make. " AH will not fix that there are prices that you dont like. If you dont undersand that different goods have different value for different people you failed your economic education at supply/demand lesson. We had to list our AH fears in this therad so this is my fear: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/diablo%C2%AE-iii-auction-house-update-9-17-2013 "Is there such a thing as an absolute, timeless enemy? There is no such thing, and never has been. And the reason is that our enemies are human beings like us. They can only be our enemies in relative terms." Last edited by kamil1210#5432 on Dec 6, 2015, 3:14:33 PM
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" You failed to even understand my post and so your limited response was both shallow and irrelevant...congrats! It has nothing to do with what I want. You were just unable to understand the simple point I was making. So I'll try to make it easier on you. 600 chroms can currently buy an ex if a person is willing to wait in trade chat / noticeboard long enough. The same is true for 60 chaos per ex. Yet at the same time currency flippers are currently using a ~16:1 chrom to chaos ratio. That is a 60% premium they are charging players for the convenience of converting up currency instantly. These flippers will then spend the needed time in trade chat to turn those chroms into ex and make that 60% as profit. This can only take place because we do not have a place to set up buy and sell orders. Having an AH would eliminate this form of flipping by removing the massive wait time needed to complete such a trade. With an AH or some sort of item exchange anyone could place an order and then go back to playing the game. Prices will shift as they always do, but with an AH there wouldn't be any discrepancies in currency values that can only be explained by players taking advantage of the currently inefficient market. Seeing how you couldn't understand this point previously I am guessing you are the one who has failed a class or two, hopefully you at least understood the math? :) EDIT: It is funny you mention runescape, seeing how much of a hell it was to try to trade in Falador or Varrock pre GE. Ffs things were so fucked up there were runners who would buy a material directly from producers and then bring it back to the player made market places to sell for more. That is the basis of regional trade in the real world. It is also great thing in a game like EVE, Archeage, or Albion because that sort of activity is built into the game. In Runescape it wasn't. Trading was so awful in runescape that people were willing to sell off whatever they were producing to mindless runners who spent their time going back and forth with no threat, challenge, or deviation in their path between runs all to avoid having to take part in the player made market. Keep PoE2 Difficult. Last edited by Fluffy_Puppies#3904 on Dec 6, 2015, 4:17:41 PM
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" I'm left wondering where you think orbs come from. Do you think trading spontaneously generates them? But as long as everyone is saying "I feel like I'm talking to people who don't know anything about economics," let's talk about economics... Beyond the nebulous concepts of supply and demand, much of what happens with prices in the real world orbits around demand for labor, which itself orbits around the private budget surplus (which is the sum of the public deficit and the trade surplus), the ability of people and companies to tolerate debt, the amount of debt consumers actually hold, labor productivity (i.e., technology), the skills required to do something, and so on forever. These are important because they end up informing aggregate demand for goods, i.e., total purchasing power of consumers that they'll apply to consumption. The thing about online games that makes real-world analogies useless is, online games have unlimited demand for labor at a fixed price. Or to put that in game terms, any player can, at any time and for any length of time, go out and do something that will net them money. While it's false and glib to say it in the real world, in an online game, time literally is money. Even more importantly, time spent "working for the game"---killing mobs, in our case---is how money is issued. If we were thinking of GGG as a government and players as citizens, then GGG is open to running a limitless public deficit, where the deficit is paid directly rather than indirectly through debt securities and a central bank. Then, conversely, using a chromatic orb to reroll some colors is a tax. Path of Exile is a bit different because the process that generates orbs also generates items. In terms of one's ability to pay for GGG services (e.g., changing item colors, changing item rarities, regenerating affixes), time is always money and there are various conversion rates depending on what you're doing with your time. Grinding mobs is, outside endgame, not a feasible way of getting the particular leveling unique you're after; you give the roulette wheel another spin with each mob, but that's a systematic rather than individual effect. It's still not a bad approximation to say that time is money even in PoE, so let's zero in on that statement. First, is it desirable for goods to take less time to acquire? While leveling, why not? In particular, while leveling and because orb drops are all over the place and because there's no good way to convert between orbs, it's generally not feasible to farm for them so upgrades are fewer and further between. So this gets back into that truly bizarre argument people make that market inefficiency is the best thing since having to slice your own bread, or that people being in worse gear because of said inefficiency is a noble game design choice. Second, this actually exposes what's going on, and it reminds us of something: if GGG wants to make an item more expensive, they can make it better, or they can reduce its drop rate. If they were so inclined, and willing to throw off the "D2 did it so that must be the correct way" blinders, they could increase item scarcity by having items bind on equip. Indeed, a lot of this talk about pricing dynamics is missing a fundamental aspect: there's a lot of ways to skin this cat, so why is making people frustrated the correct way? It's a bit like the parable of rested experience in WoW: They wanted to mitigate poopsock-leveling, so they implemented a system where, after you acquired a certain amount of experience in a day, your experience gains were halved. People really detested that system, and their solution was to double experience requirements across the board, replace the first block of experience per day with a 100% increased "rested" rate, and once that runs out you gained experience at the "normal" rate. Now let's talk about another way an online game is not like the real world. In life, I need around 2000 calories of food and around 7 pints of water per day, I need say three sets of climate-appropriate clothing, I need someplace for shelter and some fuel to heat it, and I want a variety of luxuries, and so forth. Some of these requirements are strict physical matters, and others are slowly-changing cultural norms, but much of this is physically invariant. It's not going to be the case that God will alter the thermodynamic properties of the universe tomorrow to dramatically alter my food or heating budget. But online games do have dictators who are capable of making such fundamental alterations. I think one of the big things that made D3 explode so spectacularly was the difficulty tuning of inferno. This made certain items actually inaccessible to most players, and it created a very hard demand floor for very good items. Best-in-slot wasn't just a luxury like embalmed sharks or shitty sports cars, it was a going-on-necessity to even complete the game. There is a feedback between the power of available gear and the power of mobs, which is enforced at the game design level. This has the effect of creating effectively-limitless demand for best-in-slot gear---and the price increases associated with that are not some counterfactual about auction houses, but they're the present reality. Prices for best-in-slot gear are already incredibly high, because there's limitless demand and such limited supply that you only have to cater to the ultra-wealthy. An auction house wouldn't change the practical effect of that, which is: the availability of best-in-slot gear is strictly a matter of your disposable wealth relative to other players, regardless of the form that wealth takes. If more money becomes available, prices will go up; if less money becomes available, it depends on how the money was drained. Anyway, the "actual problem" there isn't the price of expensive goods, but the fact that the possibility of someone equipping them influences the design of future encounters, so that there's evermore content that's simply not accessible to most people. And that has nothing to do with the people or the trading system, and everything to do with the drop rates of the gear required to run that content. In other words, this talk of auction houses is almost entirely a red herring, but we all suffer for it. Last edited by sphericalvoxel#0634 on Dec 6, 2015, 4:29:43 PM
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