Let me dispel some of your illusions about auction houses.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

That's addiction-creating design - players getting rewarded so much for doing what they despise, that they continue doing it anyway - and it's bad business.

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deathflower wrote:

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grepman wrote:

no auto-buyout of any sort whatsoever. rule of thumb is if its automated, its bad. automated auctions are not good either, because more time will be spent on them than the game as well.

Id welcome an in-game way of listing items instead of poe.trade but no real ability to buyout easily.

however, trading must occur in a way that is hard to automate and transactions are not homogeneous (ie, hard to predict/patternize). the instant you trivialize efficient trading is the instance there becomes little point to actually play the game.

Sure if you don't like the name we can call it asynchronous trading. If you don't like automation, we will require more button pushing to complete the deal. I hope this is to your liking.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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grepman wrote:

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kahzin wrote:

Uhm I'm pretty sure that both ZiggyD and Mors said that it wasn't the AH that destroyed the game but rather the concept of itemization (i.e. needing the gear from the end of the act to beat the act).

I couldve sworn they discussed why auto buyouts are bad, but if not - I stand corrected.

Mors is the one who talked about itemization - and hes right. meaning, itemization prevented non- AH people from venturing into later acts on inferno pre-nerf.

but that isnt really all theres to it. itemization was one of the things that sucked in d3. AH was bigger. AH was always a better, easier, faster, painless way of getting gear than actually playing the game. It was always better than grinding the game, and so much better you could argue that it wasnt any point in playing the game if your goal was to get best gear.

and since d3 was all about gear anyway (toons identical and no variation without gear), you getting GG gear meant you beat the game (which was obvious once they nerfed inferno damage of mobs and fixed the itemization)

again, auto-buyouts are evil in any game. you go from making trade an important part of the game, to the only part of the game that matters while progressing. all under your fingertips in-game and tailor-made for automating/abusing and flipping while being ultra-efficient.

While I don't completely disagree with this, I feel you're painting a picture which is a little too black-and-white.

I like to use the word balance when I'm talking about players weighing two different options in their mind, trying to figure out which is better, and I like to use the word tuning when I'm talking about stuff players face in the game, beyond their control, which determines how difficult the game is. In that sense, there is concept of balance between trading and farming. Players are going to evaluate whether they'd progress faster trading or progress faster farming, and then mostly choose based off that evaluation.

Unfortunately, this isn't always in sync with what the player enjoys doing. I have absolutely zero problem with a player who loves trading choosing to trade hard, and eventually becoming quite good at trading, and then making unimaginably large stacks of loot trading. That's all good, because it's fun-creating design - players getting rewarded for doing what they enjoy. However, I have a problem with a player who despises trading choosing to trade hard, and without much effort in developing skill immediately making large stacks of loot trading, and feeling compelled to continue because the progression is so much faster. That's addiction-creating design - players getting rewarded so much for doing what they despise, that they continue doing it anyway - and it's bad business.

Skill is really key here. If trading is designed such that the traders with developed skill are the ones who are rewarded, and the ones without developed skill are rewarded much less or even lose value, then it's less likely that someone who doesn't like trading will be heavily rewarded for it, because their initial ventures into trading will be a mostly-losing learning experience. These learning experiences are mostly wasted on those who find little enjoyment in trading, as they quit and go back to doing something else.

What doesn't work here is tedium. If the key to being a successful trader is something easy but boring like staying logged in more than anyone else, or routinely going to trade chat and spamming Ctrl+V to repeat your sales pitch, then that doesn't reward the most skilled players, it rewards players for raw time commitment, regardless of skill.

I feel the main problem with a buyout system isn't that it's inherently "evil" or anything, but that it affects trade vs farm balance in a way which doesn't encourage cultivated trading skill. It doesn't just make trading fast, it also makes it very easy. We don't really want fast and easy; we want fast and difficult.

But just to be clear, we want slow and easy least of all.

I feel it's very important for the trade system to make the buyer as responsible for pricing as possible. Pricing an item is the key demonstration of trading skill, and in buyout systems this responsibility is placed entirely upon the seller's shoulders. It's a little distressing that systems like poe.trade have taken so much of the evaluation responsibility off of buyers already, encouraging an increasingly passive acceptance of seller prices. While it's okay for a seller to set prices and indicate that they are not willing to budge on what they want to sell, it should still be up to the buyer to decide whether or not he wants to try to budge the prices anyway. Against offline sellers in particular, buyout systems make the cost of haggling too high for sellers to seriously consider it as an option.

That's why it's bad. Not because "D3 did it" or any kind of superstitious mumbo jumbo. But because a system which doesn't encourage skill in trading will, by its nature, lead to an imbalance between trading and farming which creates addictive behavior patterns in players who would rather be farming.

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Martozo wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

That's addiction-creating design - players getting rewarded so much for doing what they despise, that they continue doing it anyway - and it's bad business.

That's the problem of games these days... Instead of making a fun game, 95% of developers add addiction element - login at least once in x of days and get some stuff.
I'm active gamer for more than 25 years now, but there are less and less games I can play for more than few days...
Where is the fun element in games?

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junaum wrote:

What if:

1) When you put an item for sell at the AH, the item gets locked for 24-48h, being unable to have it´s price micro-managed in real time.

2) There is no Bidding, just "buy out" (so, no AH but a shop instead).

Being heavily based on trading, POE punishes it´s player base for not having a reasonably good trading interface. Having tools like poetrade and acquisition implemented would be just great.

Before we had the Hideouts, I've made a relatively simple thread to build what I thought it would be a decent player based vendoring system (altough now, I wouldn´t suggest implementing bidding system).

Spoiler

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/848024