Thoughts on trading's place in ARPGs

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morbo wrote:

With trade-centric game design, I mean stuff like:

* insane Zana mod prices (non-traders cant afford them)
* huge rng variance in map drops (dry streak will rekt your pool -> have to buy maps)
* chisels not sustaining themselves through drops (ofc when you dont have maps, you dont need chis :P)
* vaal orb shortage (I use them almost exclusively on maps, they are way too rare)

These things are designed only to artificially 'promote' trading. GGG improved many things (masters, gems available at vendors, div.cards...), but still some BS remains.

You can easily play self-found up to mid-high maps (if your build works only with rares). But if you want to continue playing at this point, you need much more orbs than you will find / create through recipes.

Your list is 100% high mapping sustain issues. So basically by "trade-centric game design" what you really mean is "the inability for self-found to sustain the highest map tiers."

And what are the results of this inability of self-found to sustain high maps?

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morbo wrote:

Since 2.0 and all the nerfs to map drops, you need to pump some serious orbs into 76/77+ maps. Chis, chaos spam (not because of difficulty, but because you need 5+ affixes), vaal, sac. frag... then Zana mods at 80+. This is not doable as non-trader and is basically the only reason I do have a small shop in temp leaguse - to cover gameplay expenses in mid-high endgame.

In summary, because the most difficult, furthest-from-the-beginning content of the entire game is designed a certain way, the most established players feel compelled to trade gear they find to players at lower points of progression, helping them gear up and thus catch up, because they will have currency sustainment issues and thus map tier sustainment issues otherwise.

You call this BS. I call it everything going according to plan. You broke out of your little bubble and actually helped some less-geared players progress. That's something which trading needs in order to function as a catch-up mechanic, because without established players willing to trade gear away to get orbs, there can't be late-bloomer players able to trade orbs away to get gear. And by your own admission, this huge push to stop self-founding and start your own shop thread is precisely where it's supposed to be: not late Merciless, not low or mid maps, but precisely at the end of the endgame.

I mean, I was hoping things might be this good, but thanks for lending your experienced perspective to convince me that the economic incentive system is in a really good spot right now.

Now, with that said, hopefully you understand why GGG should never, ever let you have enough chisels without trading for them.

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Ceri wrote:

The few times I do engage in trading is when I get tired of a gearing problem I have, typically while leveling, and decide to cheat, err, trade for an upgrade. When that happens, I want the item NOW. Not hours later, or next weekend, or something like that. If that was reality, I might as well skip the trade and just grind for a couple more days and my problem might go away by itself. So, in practice, a solution like this would pretty much kill all trading pre-endgame. Not a good idea, I think.

If by "now" you mean "before any more hours of playtime are logged," then I might be somewhat inclined to agree with you. But I really don't see why players couldn't or wouldn't make a series of listings or bids immediately before they end a play session, then go about their daily routine for 20 hours or so, then log back in and organize their spoils. I mean, of course online-to-online trading would be vastly preferred while you anticipating being online, it's when you are offline that asynchronous trading really works for you.

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Ceri wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

<snip> both bidders and sellers should be able to retract their bids/items voluntarily at any time.

No. NO!

The amount of griefing and market manipulation this would create, oh dear. No! There must be checks and balances in place, like if an item is listed on a market place, it is still available for sale. If you place a bid on an item, that bid must be binding. I would prefer a system where the actual item and any currency bids are directly withdrawn upon listing the auction and bidding on it, put into some limbo database while the "auction" is progressing. If not you'd end up with tons of people putting fake bids on everything, just to see them withdraw later on or just ignore the sellers if they win. Or just sellers putting up fake listings with bogus prices to manipulate the market values (like they already are doing with poe.trade).

It would be a complete disaster, trust me.

First off let me clear up what I hope is a miscommunication. I was imagining my system as this:
1. Seller lists item, can type any nonsense (with good or bad intent) in a description box; this description box is not sortable by in-game search engine but could be parsed by third-party sites
2. Bidder bids, trading is confirmed/greenlit from bidder's perspective (but can be unconfirmed at will)
3. Seller can confirm to complete the transaction, with exchange of items occurring immediately; reject the bid; or ignore the bid (perhaps waiting for more bids to come in)

Under that system, I don't see how bidders could really grief anyone. If you have a listing up and a bid pops up, just hit that confirm button and the trade is done. I imagine someone could pull the bid mere seconds before you hit the button, but that would be rare and backfire on them often enough to discourage such a practice. If it was really a big deal, I imagine a simple anti-spam of "you cannot retract a bid you've made until 10 seconds have passed" would be more than sufficient.

Now, in terms of "fake pricing" situations, I see what you're talking about and know the practice is current on poe.trade, but I really don't care. As far as I'm concerned asking prices are little more than starting points for a possible negotiation, and shouldn't be taken as solid by anyone unless they're trying really hard to be agreeable and get things done fast (which isn't a bad thing in isolation, it's just by no means something we'd want to force on everyone). There should be burden on the seller as well as the buyer to price the item themselves, and depend on their own knowledge and intuition, rather than mindlessly parrot the community consensus. For this reason, I don't feel any need to protect people from those who attempt to mislead others as to what the community consensus is; if they don't have the tradeskill to see through such ruses, I feel they get what they deserve.

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RogueMage wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Automated buyouts undermine a potential buyer's ability to have an impact upon sale price; they cannot feasibly suggest a lower price on items which a seller prices too high, or feasibly suggest a higher price on items which a seller prices too low, which can be effective when an overly low price attracts a lot of nearly simultaneous interest, creating bid wars. In essence, buyouts take the pricing skill out of buying almost completely. Buyouts should never be implemented; if this means that sites like poe.trade continue to exist even under a new trading system, then so be it.

I really like your in-depth analysis and justifications for an unsynchronized non-buyout trade system. However, I think it's easy to predict how this would play out with POE.trade continuing to do its match-making job in the background.

Competitive sellers would still list buyouts for each item, and eager buyers would still search for online sellers. Both would stand by in-game, the seller hoping to see a bid matching his posted b/o appear on one his items; the buyer hoping to find a seller ready to immediately confirm one of his multiple b/o bids. Once the deal was closed, the buyer would then retract all other bids he made on comparable items. Net result: each buyer makes and retracts multiple concurrent bids, while each seller watches for b/o's on multiple concurrent items. While it's always possible for buyer and seller to engage in some back-and-forth negotiation, in practice, it's always going to be more efficient for both to simply spam the market with multiple offers until someone takes the bait.

Where exceptions would arise would be for extremely rare or expensive items, special cases worth bargaining for. Everyting else would be treated as commodities, with prevailing b/o's searchable on POE.trade. In practice, we'd still have a largely buyout-driven trade system indexed by POE.trade, but with a bid, sell and transfer system automated by GGG. Not that that wouldn't be an improvement, but I think it would fall short of the non-buyout-driven model you have in mind. (However, it would require buyers to explictly retract no-longer-interested bids, instead of simply ignoring seller inquiries, as most do now.)

I feel it's important to hold bids in escrow (which means: if you bid 8 chaos, you do not have access to that 8 chaos until you retract your bid). This means bidders wouldn't be able to bid the same 8 chaos across multiple items. Also, if you go over my reply to Ceri, it would be possible for bidders to "accidentally" win more listings than they intend to. Still, I imagine someone with 24 chaos could make 3 bids simultaneously, and could retract very quickly if needed once they win a listing, so while I feel your concerns could be easily mitigated I must admit they wouldn't be completely eradicated.

Also, I don't have any particular hatred for poe.trade, and I'm pretty aware that vast quantities of players have absolutely no interest in thinking for themselves and prefer either mindless buyout-only behavior, or a mindless haggle-with-everyone behavior (and I guess it's good that the latter do not fare as well), rather than an informed choice between the two options. I think GGG should keep its API available to third-party sites to allow them to index listings, even if a new trade system is implemented; you never know what type of open-source conveniences third parties will conceive and implement, and I feel the community as a whole should be free to band together to try to "solve the economy" in this manner. What I do not think is that GGG should just hand this to players on a silver platter. (For a related example: I do not think GGG should just give away information on vendor recipes or other hidden info, but I have no problem whatsoever with the PoE wiki. Also, I have no problem with HearthArena but would be incensed if community card rankings popped up within the Hearthstone client itself.) In the same way, if players want to set up a website which parses b/o tags and then uses a currency conversion table to rank prices from least to most, I'm fine with that; but this isn't something which GGG should provide, because pricing is the main tradeskill and the research into the prices other players use (assuming it's not from fake listings) should be something GGG doesn't just hand to you.

Basically, there should be a description box where a seller can type anything (to include a suggested buyout), but it has zero engine support, to include bidders not being able to search by description. They can search by any item stat, seller account name, or the time the listing began (to include filtering out listings which are too old). All of that is fair game and tedium-reducing. But the game itself should not give skill bypasses.

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RogueMage wrote:

Here's a suggestion: allow automated buyouts, but only for commodities, i.e. for anything not priced in Exalts (or orbs of even higher rarity).

Why bother? It's already the "commodities" which are the most subject to community consensus in terms of their value, and thus the easiest to price properly. There's no need to make the easiest trades even easier.

I probably shouldn't say this because you've been very agreeable in this thread but I cannot help myself.