Why does GGG hate auction houses?

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

poe.trade is optional. Of course, people wanting to do well will use it.

But the moment you make an auction house or marketplace standard, it is *expected* that people use it. That's when the devs can balance the game around that assumption, which leaves people wanting to play the game as it originally was meant to be played up shit creek.

So it's not that GGG hate the Auction House. They are just very aware of the consequences of implementing one.

I only replied because I really hope your name is inspired by Demigod. Because I loved Demigod.

I totally disagree with this the only thing an AH would affect is access it would not generate more items than are already there.The drop rates at the moment seem massively low because the vast majority of the items are in peoples stashes never to see the light of day, how is that how the game was meant to be played if it is then there would be no trade function at all (id be in favour of that TBH).

Its all or nothing either everyone has reasonable access to trading or they remove it.What we have now is toxic and holding the game back.If GGG cant or wont do it themselves then let a third party have access to the servers so they can.

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RegulusX wrote:

If a game has to rely on third party tools to simulate an auction house, then you know it's in bad shape.

I'd consider tons of other criteria before that one to judge if a game is in a bad shape or not. And it isn't even one of these criteria.

Something else to consider, did any of you AH advocates actually think about that playing and finding items and gradually improving is what the game is about? What do you gain by buying the best obtainable items for you? Where is the sense of achievement that you defeated the endboss with crap gear? Where is the exitement of finding or crafting a good weapon? Where is the happiness of finally getting your first 6-link after lots of work (or sheer luck?)

All this goes away once you can easily log into AH and just buy what you need.

I know what I'm talking about. I played D3 with auction house and without. I know exactly when my fun doubled: when they removed the AH.

Hold on a moment and think about whether the game will be still fun once you have purchased godlike gear and facerolling content - this is the moment when cries for content and out of boredom start to arise - from clueless players who want it on a platter, got it and are now bored.

There is a reason the devs want a timesink and want trading to be an effort.

I can debate about making the trading process some more coomfortable, like setting up items for sale in the stash and getting an advertisement sign with your items on it so a buyer can take a look - something like that.

But certainly not an AH comparable to D3. The trading and ultimately the game will become meaningless and the devs know it.

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Nascha wrote:

Something else to consider, did any of you AH advocates actually think about that playing and finding items and gradually improving is what the game is about? What do you gain by buying the best obtainable items for you? Where is the sense of achievement that you defeated the endboss with crap gear? Where is the exitement of finding or crafting a good weapon? Where is the happiness of finally getting your first 6-link after lots of work (or sheer luck?)

All this goes away once you can easily log into AH and just buy what you need.

No one would force you to use the AH. Not everyone wants the same experience as you do.

I'm sure people already said as much, but because an AH has a negative influence on the game... The instant I heard about the AH in Diablo 3 I knew it was going to be a disaster. And it was. Because if you increase the ease of trade, lots of people that never would have been doing it before, now start doing so. It effectively increases the pool and accessibility of items drastically compared to when there is no AH. So to keep items maintaining rarity, they had to make drop rates utterly abysmal. Which made playing the game feel terrible, as you could play hours and hours and hours and never find a single thing that got you even remotely excited.

This is one of those things where inconvenience is healthy for the game. With no auction house you have two choices. 1) Just play the darn game and try and find one yourself. 2) Go through the footwork and headache of tracking one down and trading. Either way, that effort is relatively large. And that effort gives the items added value. And it makes playing the darn game still feel like an attractive option. Which is ALWAYS what you want. When you make one of the two options infinitely easier and more convenient, you are shooting your game in the foot via path of least resistance. I have two choices. Play the darn game and try to find one myself. Or take 60 seconds looking at an AH screen. Yay. Way to completely devalue the experience of playing the game.

I know most who want an AH will never see the reasoning in this though. It's not a clear cut and easy to see matter, and in some ways it feels very backwards. But I am entirely certain that if an AH came to PoE it would hurt it, not help it. I don't want an arpg that is an auction house simulator. I want one where I go monster smashing for loot.

TLDR: inconvenience creates scarcity so that GGG doesn't have to. If they had to, the game would be far less fun to play because it would be so ridiculously hard to ever find something exciting outside of an auction house screen.

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Nascha wrote:

Something else to consider, did any of you AH advocates actually think about that playing and finding items and gradually improving is what the game is about? What do you gain by buying the best obtainable items for you? Where is the sense of achievement that you defeated the endboss with crap gear? Where is the exitement of finding or crafting a good weapon? Where is the happiness of finally getting your first 6-link after lots of work (or sheer luck?)

All this goes away once you can easily log into AH and just buy what you need.

I know what I'm talking about. I played D3 with auction house and without. I know exactly when my fun doubled: when they removed the AH.

Hold on a moment and think about whether the game will be still fun once you have purchased godlike gear and facerolling content - this is the moment when cries for content and out of boredom start to arise - from clueless players who want it on a platter, got it and are now bored.

There is a reason the devs want a timesink and want trading to be an effort.

I can debate about making the trading process some more coomfortable, like setting up items for sale in the stash and getting an advertisement sign with your items on it so a buyer can take a look - something like that.

But certainly not an AH comparable to D3. The trading and ultimately the game will become meaningless and the devs know it.

No reason you can't twinked your low level characters right now. You can try wasting a few hundred fusings and get nothing. I don't know what you are talking about. I bought my 6 link...

They also improve the Loot drop in D3. That is what fix D3 not the removal of AH.

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Minara213 wrote:

inconvenience creates scarcity so that GGG doesn't have to. If they had to, the game would be far less fun to play because it would be so ridiculously hard to ever find something exciting outside of an auction house screen.

You are right about scarcity. However, I doubt the top tier items are gonna drop right into your lap, they are probably bought or crafted. Not like people aren't farming currency to buy what they want already on the market. Who are you kidding? If nothing decent drop through all your time and effort spend, you will only feel disappointment and frustration. Not everyone like this carrot on a stick policy.

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Col_Jessep wrote:

My two teammates convinced me to trade in in Talisman instead of going my old self-found route. I installed Acquisition, set it up in 5 minutes and already sold a couple of item I had no use for. All I do is literally drag the items in the properly marked stash tab (1c, 2c, custom price) and Acquisition scans them, posts them on poe.trade and makes sure I am displayed as online as long as I'm logged in.

We already have an auction house.
It's 3rd party but it basically does everything except the actual exchange of item/orbs for you. Get Acquisition, try it for yourself.

As far as I'm concerned nobody can claim an auction house would ruin PoE because it existed for some time now and the sky has not fallen.

Sorry for the advertisement but I just think everybody should know about it and use it. Also thank you XYZ, amazing work!

People know about acquisition. People use it. I use acquisition when I want to sell something (which isnt often, usually big ticket items). It is nothing like in-game automated AH, you still have to interact with people, whisper them, get in party with them, manually trade with them. The 'inconvenience' weeds out a lot of transactions.

@Nascha

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Something else to consider, did any of you AH advocates actually think about that playing and finding items and gradually improving is what the game is about? What do you gain by buying the best obtainable items for you? Where is the sense of achievement that you defeated the endboss with crap gear? Where is the exitement of finding or crafting a good weapon? Where is the happiness of finally getting your first 6-link after lots of work (or sheer luck?)

All this goes away once you can easily direct your browser to poe.trade and just buy what you need.

FTFY. Or, hell, why not say it all goes away as soon as you start trading at all?

Trading is, at its heart, about optionally replacing one type of gameplay - the usual farming experience - with another type of gameplay. This isn't an inherently bad, because of the optional part.

A lot of people who would enjoy farming more feel very put out because the trading route can be more profitable per unit time. This is especially true if trading is exceptionally easy. And there is some truth to that, because PoE should be a difficult game regardless of which route you're taking to overcome its challenges. But even ignoring this, just from a very basic game design perspective, optionally replacing gameplay with new gameplay means that you need to optionally replace challenges with new challenges. A minigame without challenges is bad design for the same reason a full game without challenges is bad design.

That said, there is definitely such a thing as a good challenge, ripe with meaningful choice for the player, and stupid challenge, devoid of choice and made dull by tedium. A minigame whose challenges are waiting and mindlessly repetitive behavior, instead of meaningful PvP-style interaction, is bad game design, for the same reason a full game whose challenges are waiting and mindlessly repetitive behavior (ex: Cookie Clicker) are bad games. The idea that trading "needs to be" a certain amount of tedious is a caustic attitude which encourages game developers to make less engaging trading systems. It needs to be a certain amount of challenging, but challenge and tedium are very different things.

This is how it should be:

Listing and finding items - Trade chat is almost entirely tedium of copypasta (selling) and futily scanning spam (buying). GGG should definitely replace this with a searchable index which allows you to search for items according to their stats.

Simultaneous login - Waiting for another player to come online is even further from actual skill than trade chat spam, and should be eliminated by implementing an asynchronous trade system which allows potential buyers to make offers/bids on items even when the seller is away, and sellers to accept bids while the bidder is away.

Bidding viewability - Bids should be kept invisible to competing bidders, because seeing other people's bids does nothing but remove skill-based challenge. Notably, this makes incremental bidding (ex: previous bid was 5, you set a bid max of 10, the system says your current bid is 6) impossible, since it reveals information about competing bidders' bids. Your bid should be what you're willing to give for the item.

Listing duration - The listings should have no specific end time, because sniping auctions with low bids is not skill-based as much as it is being there at the right place, at the right time; plus, GGG shouldn't set any official exchange rate between currencies, which is needed for an automated system to determine which bid is highest when multiple currencies are involved. Bids should be binding (the system holds them while the bid is active and returns when the bid is rejected), but bidders should be able to retract their bids at any time, if a seller is inactive. When a seller is online, they can accept a bid, reject bids (encouraging bidders to try again), retract the item (returning all bids), or leave bids alone; as I mentioned earlier, the bidder can retract at any time, so seller inactivity may result in bids disappearing.

Buyouts - Buyouts should remain officially unrecognized by GGG and left as an informal community standard. This encourages the maximum amount of bidder control over pricing, creating bid wars when sellers underprice (especially when the seller is offline) and lowball situations when sellers overprice. However, sellers should be able to fill in an "asking price" section on their listing so that sellers do not have to deal with the tedium of sorting through bids which are nowhere near seller expectations. Bidders, in turn, should be able to search by recommended price, to include ranking from highest price to lowest. A set of currency equivalency ratios should be possible, probably using an implementation similar to loot filters.

Interconnectivity - When you get a new bid, you should have an option of receiving an email notifying you. When you get a new PM on the forums, you should have an option of receiving an email notifying you, and also receive a notification in-game (unless you have /dnd on, in which case you are notified as soon as you turn it off).

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grant_m wrote:

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Minara213 wrote:

I'm sure people already said as much, but because an AH has a negative influence on the game... The instant I heard about the AH in Diablo 3 I knew it was going to be a disaster. And it was. Because if you increase the ease of trade, lots of people that never would have been doing it before, now start doing so. It effectively increases the pool and accessibility of items drastically compared to when there is no AH. So to keep items maintaining rarity, they had to make drop rates utterly abysmal. Which made playing the game feel terrible, as you could play hours and hours and hours and never find a single thing that got you even remotely excited.

This is one of those things where inconvenience is healthy for the game. With no auction house you have two choices. 1) Just play the darn game and try and find one yourself. 2) Go through the footwork and headache of tracking one down and trading. Either way, that effort is relatively large. And that effort gives the items added value. And it makes playing the darn game still feel like an attractive option. Which is ALWAYS what you want. When you make one of the two options infinitely easier and more convenient, you are shooting your game in the foot via path of least resistance. I have two choices. Play the darn game and try to find one myself. Or take 60 seconds looking at an AH screen. Yay. Way to completely devalue the experience of playing the game.

I know most who want an AH will never see the reasoning in this though. It's not a clear cut and easy to see matter, and in some ways it feels very backwards. But I am entirely certain that if an AH came to PoE it would hurt it, not help it. I don't want an arpg that is an auction house simulator. I want one where I go monster smashing for loot.

TLDR: inconvenience creates scarcity so that GGG doesn't have to. If they had to, the game would be far less fun to play because it would be so ridiculously hard to ever find something exciting outside of an auction house screen.

Perfectly stated. Top post in the thread! 11/10

I would rate it 100/10