Thoughts on trading's place in ARPGs

You're very good at explaining ideas, Scrotie. Even though I have a slight issue with the way you presented part of your foundation, it doesn't make any difference to the conclusion, so thanks for sharing it. Defining all your adjective labels for trading made the thought process crystal clear.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Ashen_Shugar_IV wrote:

Holding bids in escrow would remove too much liquidity from the economy

I don't know what you meant to say, but considering I'm suggesting that bids be retractable at any time, liquidity is certainly not the right word.

I'm pretty sure liquidity is the word I wanted to use.
Lets say I've got 100ex and I'm looking for a 55ex item. There are 3 sellers and I bid 50ex at 2 of them. All are offline, but any could be willing to accept my bid. I now have 0 liquidity, and a bid unmade.
In this case my big bids are preventing me from bidding/purchasing any other items I might also want at the time.
It is entirely possible that a large portion of the liquid currency that exists within a given economy could be tied up inside of various bids, or hoarded harder for bids with a higher chance of success (my previous post).
Being able to retract a bid at any time does not help if I still don't have the item I wanted. All I've done is communicated to a seller that I am probably no longer interested. If I go around that and message them then the entire bidding/escrow system is redundant and tedious (and the Seller may yet insist on a bid anyway to help prove their time isn't being wasted).

Your posts are very well reasoned Scrotie which is why I clicked on this thread to begin with. What do you see as the merits to an escrow system?

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Ashen_Shugar_IV wrote:

What do you see as the merits to an escrow system?

Primarily, it allows the exchange of items to occur on the third step, when the seller confirms the trade. At least, that's how I imagined it. To be honest, I didn't really put a lot of critical thought into reviewing that decision.

Without an escrow system, at the very least it's a lot more complicated. Now that I really think about it, I guess you could set it up such that items are used towards two different bids, and if one of the two bids is accepted by a seller, the second bid is automatically retracted due to the bid no longer being available. I imagine this could be a preferable system, because although Ceri brought up some concerns regarding multibidding I feel these are mostly mitigated by the seller's power to finalize the trade, initiating item exchange.

Even now, though, I'm mostly musing; I'd have to think about that one longer, because it can be tricky to figure out where all the possible abuse cases lie.

Do you see it as a necessity based on technical limitation? If you can put a specific bid into escrow offline or from your mobile then you can already manage every step of the trade. If you had to be online to put a bid into escrow/initiate an offer that would be a problem in and of itself. Would you also have to be online to retract a bid? If not, what happens when your bid is returned to you?
** Remove-only stash tabs? **
Winning more than one bid is another legitimate obstacle, so you will always need both parties to finalise acceptance immediately prior to an exchange.

Obviously the interfacing is/could be rather complex but it doesn't need to be anything more than
> Offer
< Accept
> Accept
>< Exchange

Mimicking the existing process.



Edit:
I can see an escrow system being easily abused as storage if one were to make a mule account and send dummy offers into escrow indefinitely. Bonus points if returning/expired bids physically cannot fit into remaining stash or inventory space (forcing them into remove-only tabs?).

The purpose of escrow is to increase trust. Your AH is like an email account, and escrow is your spam filter.

I'm not sure how you envision the process working, but I assume it is something like this:
Seller Listing -> Buyer Offer -> Seller Accept -> Buyer Accept -> Exchange Made
With escrow the process is different:
Seller Listing -> Buyer Offer (with implicit accept) -> Seller Accept -> Exhange Made

The difference is this separate step of buyer acceptance.
If the buyer is allowed to make offers that they don't accept, what does that offer look like? Illegitimate offers make trading inefficient in a pointless fashion. An illegitimate offer from a buyer is a bid with no intention of fulfilling it. An illegitimate offer from a seller is listing your current gear with no intention of selling unless you can fish for a stratospheric bid. The AH can easily flood with bids and listings where people are holding out for one of their illegitimate offers to come thru before they settle on one of the legitimate offers (which may instead be a cleverly disguised illegitimate offer itself). The trades AH was supposed to help find get drowned out by the graft it created.

A note on the multi-bids, if there are so many comparable items that there are multiple equivalents you want to offer for, it is unlikely that serial negotiation will be much of a detriment in the first place. An example, let's say you're buying some exalts, then lots of sellers are offering it and there are several online sellers you can place a bid. If they don't accept you move on to the next. The loss of efficiency from doing the negotiation in parallel will not be large, it may still even be faster than other methods, which of course you can still use to trade in case it isn't.

As for storage, I assumed it would work like "Auction House Stash Tabs" I seem to recall Chris said they were working on trade tabs at one point, and that this is one implementation of that concept. Obviously this requires escrow. Without escrow the way storage would work... well I think you have identified yet another reason why escrow is a good idea.

edit: I had this statement in there and I accidentally deleted it, but escrow applies to both the seller and the buyer. Both parties give their item(s) to the AH while the exchange is negotiated. That's so both sides have the same incentive for honesty. Technically, the seller should also put down a deposit, but I don't see how that would work in POE.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Let's just get the TL;DR out of the way first.

• Trade should be asynchronous, instead of requiring both parties to the trade to be online simultaneously.
• Trade should be bidding based, not buyout based.

Asynch trading alone would be god sent and would make trading/flipping/manipulating super easy but then you add it should be bidding based. Sweet mother of RNG you don't even realize how that would fuck up every one. Apart from bidding on high value items who would waste time to but a bid on bloody few chaos items? Buyouts must stay and will stay in PoE.

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gathor wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Let's just get the TL;DR out of the way first.

• Trade should be asynchronous, instead of requiring both parties to the trade to be online simultaneously.
• Trade should be bidding based, not buyout based.

Asynch trading alone would be god sent and would make trading/flipping/manipulating super easy but then you add it should be bidding based. Sweet mother of RNG you don't even realize how that would fuck up every one. Apart from bidding on high value items who would waste time to but a bid on bloody few chaos items? Buyouts must stay and will stay in PoE.

The current system is bidding (or more properly, offer) based... are you confused?

I like post's like this.

But i am continuously wondering where is the line drawn of "intelligent trading". You seem to point towards this notion in your "op", where people familiar with the market etc can make well informed deals and be "intelligent traders" which yields them a profit.

However, if people are allowed to utilize bots and automated tools/programs to gather data on the market like they currently do, are they utilizing "game-skill" to gain that advantage?

Can it be called an "intelligent trade advantage" when they are utilizing tools against the ToS on the fringe line that is the PoE market.
Which for all intentions and purposes does not function "in the game" and as such is not regulated by it's rules.

We are not allowed to run bot programs simulating player actions, but when it comes to the market, there seems to be no offense taken to this notion and it appears to be an allowed practice.

As long as your proposed system still enables this behavior i am against it because it does not put player A vs player B based on "game attained intelligence", instead it allows players to utilize skill-sets entirely unrelated to the game to gain a direct in-game advantage.

Which constitutes P2W and should not be allowed.

Your proposed system is very prone to abuse, given how the current lack of a system is already being abused and butchered beyond the game-boundary's itself and unregulated by any form of ToS, it would only get worse.

Peace,

-Boem-

That doesn't entitle him to say I have 0 experience with mapping.


Being good at the game? What the fuck does this have to do with anything, we are discussing the merits of trading or more importantly what content is gated behind trade in this game. I simply asked a question of what he things is gated behind trading, then out of no where Anuhart responds with something that has nothing to do with the thread. How his post are allowed when they have nothing to do with the topic and go against the forum rules IDK.



But back on topic, I really don't understand how @ScrotieMcB you think your system could ever be introduced into poe now that the community has gotten used to getting items in a much easier fashion. If we are talking in theory of what poe could be with your system I guess its fine, as long as you realize it won't ever happen.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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gathor wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Let's just get the TL;DR out of the way first.

• Trade should be asynchronous, instead of requiring both parties to the trade to be online simultaneously.
• Trade should be bidding based, not buyout based.

Asynch trading alone would be god sent and would make trading/flipping/manipulating super easy but then you add it should be bidding based. Sweet mother of RNG you don't even realize how that would fuck up every one. Apart from bidding on high value items who would waste time to but a bid on bloody few chaos items? Buyouts must stay and will stay in PoE.

The current system is bidding (or more properly, offer) based... are you confused?

Bidding would require a third entity in the trade process which there isn't so it is accurate to describe a quick trade as a buyout, it's just not automated.