Let me dispel some of your illusions about auction houses.

I should have phrased it better, "one click buying" is more accurate.

Ideally, you'd want players doing the maximum amount of pricing themselves, rather than "ditto pricing" items by using a search engine. There's a lot more skill in evaluating worth yourself than in copying answers. Unfortunately, there's not a lot which can be done to prevent copying. I think players who can't evaluate the worth of items on their own should be screwed over by players who can, but that is not the same thing as players who don't have access to the cheat sheet being screwed over by those who do.

So if there is some clever solution to make pricing cheat sheets go away, then I'm all for that... but that solution probably doesn't exist, and fighting against inevitability is pretty dumb. Until then, making cheat sheet access as equal as possible is the best option.

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ivkoto77777 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

The more effective 5 minutes spent trading is the larger the wealth gap between people who spend 5 minutes a day trading and people who spend 10 hours a day trading will get, essentially, which makes all sorts of existing problems far worse.

That doesn't work for Standard where things are already "far worse". You wouldn't see a difference over here, besides better trading experience (i.e. not having to communicate with douches with their "offer?" and other wonderful phrases like that) and cheaper items. Come to think of it... those 2 differences just might actually make the game batter?! How about that! D:

personally I dont agree, I think as far worse as it is in standard, it will get far worse than even that. Picture where standard will be in 3 years time under our current system, thats what 6 months from now will look like with an automated ah. 3 years ago in the first second of open beta you had exactly the same wealth as every other player in the entire game, now look where you are, were not moving in a direction thats benefiting you, speeding up that process will not help.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I should have phrased it better, "one click buying" is more accurate.

Ideally, you'd want players doing the maximum amount of pricing themselves, rather than "ditto pricing" items by using a search engine. There's a lot more skill in evaluating worth yourself than in copying answers. Unfortunately, there's not a lot which can be done to prevent copying. I think players who can't evaluate the worth of items on their own should be screwed over by players who can, but that is not the same thing as players who don't have access to the cheat sheet being screwed over by those who do.

So if there is some clever solution to make pricing cheat sheets go away, then I'm all for that... but that solution probably doesn't exist, and fighting against inevitability is pretty dumb. Until then, making cheat sheet access as equal as possible is the best option.

yep. Everything that currently exists should just be put in the game. The indexers, the shop makers, the whole thing. Its already there, youd have to have your head in the sand to not realize that any attempt to stop these things has already failed.

The difference is the 1 click thing, the difference between the functionality we have now with indexers/shop makers and what will be possible with instant buyout click the button and you have the item auction house is vast. I think resisting in game indexers etc at this point is fairly ridiculous, i think GGG know that, I hope they do. I imagine the reason we dont have one already is more down to time and money.

Thats really where the debate has to happen, with people arguing for and against instant buyout 1 click win. AH is too vague, you can call xyz an AH and argue for an AH being in game and ur essentially arguing against people who are defining an AH as the 1 click instant buyout thing which is entirely different to xyz. The debate is too muddy atm, I dont think people are clear on the exact positions being taken. I mean, is there anyone at this point who thinks its a bad idea to have an xyz style search of the trade forums in game? Serious question, indifference is indifference, is there anyone actually fully against the idea if we take for granted the implementation etc comes with no tradeoff costs for the sake of theory?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Again: the situation described in the OP is happening now, not some dire future. If you think this game doesn't have an auction house, that's only because you haven't used poe.trade and Acquisition/Procurement simultaneously.

If you do not like the effect of trading automation on in-game economies, that's fine and all, but you should realize the futility of your position. Trading automation isn't an option, it is an inevitability, for any game economy. GGG cannot design an economy where it doesn't exist (the closest they could get is no economy at all). Indexers, shop thread creators, SMS pushers are all current third-party tools, and there is nothing GGG could do to prevent it.

This has been true since Diablo 2 and the days of d2jsp, but it should be blatantly obvious by now.

If GGG took away the ability to link items on the forums, some guy out there would create a .jpg parser. Then that information would get funneled into indexers. People would just screenshot items instead.

About the only thing GGG has control over is whether one-click buying, a la D3 AH, is a thing or not. It shouldn't be. Everything else, it will happen, whether GGG wants it to or not, whether you want it to or not.

Not really. At current rate of progress, I would say we might have an in-game automated marketplace in approximately 10 years time...

I don't know about a Diablo style auction house, But one like in Lord of the Rings would be a definite improvement on this game.

I'd also support increased drop rates of stuff like maps with the understanding that they would bind to account so that they are no longer treated as currency.

Two things I would like to see most. Ya, none of which will ever actually happen.

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Hackusations wrote:

I spent many years being an entrepreneur in WoW's AH. I was gold capped several times over, bought all the expensive doodads and mounts, sold/traded gold for time cards (RMT omg!), paid for PvE raid carries, etc... There was really nothing I couldn't acquire once I had near unlimited funds. Ironically, I was relatively amateurish compared to the true 1% of WoW gold making elite.

So how did I make all this gold on the AH? By killing content, farming for high demand/rare items, and crafting. JUST KIDDING!!! I sat in town camping the AH while running a horde(pun) of 3rd party programs, websites, and even phone notification apps.

And nobody sees anything wrong with that? Seriously what the hell is the point of the game if you're just playing auction house simulator. When did people stop playing games for fun/entertainment?

Hell, who the hell paid for WoW to go out of your way to not play the game, just sit in town trading pixels. Most cringe-worthy thing I've read all morning.

I prefer no trading over this degree of lifelessness. I'd prefer no trading over bots and people fucking the market over through manipulation; seriously, you don't need 1000 exalts, especially when people have been playing for years, the real way, and have found maybe 1 or 2. I'm sorry, I want to play a game, not look at a stupid 3rd party video game economy tracker or whatever it is. I still actually have a life. I'd rather find my own items.

First, the back story to why I picked up on all the AH stuff in the first place was because I was both bored and poor from just sitting in town waiting for Arena and BG queues. So playing the AH supplemented why I actually played WoW which was PvP.

Second, anyone good at playing the AH likely didn't have to actually pay for WoW when they could trade/sell an hour or two worth of profit for time cards. Now it is even sanctioned via WoW tokens.

Finally, if you are dismissing the enjoyment people get from entrepreneurship and trade then you simply don't understand that there are different types of gamers with a wide spectrum of preferences for what is fun.

For example, under the Bartle Test I would have heavy leanings towards the Killer classification.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test#Killers

I think Scrotie and snorkle make some pretty good points, though I am going to nitpick a bit. I think it's fair to say that what we have now is easily termed an auction house, if only an awkward one. It was mentioned that nobody seems to be championing an undoing of the current unofficial system, and that's probably only because it would take active effort to eradicate it. Make no mistake, however, it is possible. Assuming we keep an auction house, two other slider scales determine its impact on the game economy: ease of use and accessibility. These are the two real underlying issues, even in a system without an auction house. These are the two issues present in real-world markets that lead to market failure, government intervention, or the inability to create a market in the first place. Note that I'm not saying PoE's economy is actually analogous to real-world economy to any significant degree (it's not). But as a thought exercise, let's consider what a few different models would look like so that arguments can be drawn out about the value of certain kinds of trade systems.

#1 No Auction House. This includes undoing the current automated trade systems. How would this be done? In the physical world, time and space and opportunity costs etc can sometimes lead to scenarios where bartering or small individual exchanges are the only feasible options. To get to that point in the digital world, though, you're going to have to impose limitations. First step would be to nuke the trade forums. Or an idea I've floated for fun before was to remove the ability to trade with anyone who isn't a guildmate and put a time restriction on how long after leaving a guild before you can join a new one. This breaks up both the ease of use and accessibility of any automated system.

#2 High ease of use, low accessibility. This readily rewards those who know where to look, are well-connected, have the external software, etc. If I had to place the current system in a category, this is where I'd put it. Keep in mind, though, that these are slider scales, not absolute categories.

#3 Low ease of use, high accessibility. If the forums were an in-game feature, and the kinds of software that index them were blocked, this is what we'd have. It would be readily available for everyone, and easy to find as a game feature, but you'd have to go through all the effort of listing every item, a price, finding buyers, negotiating etc. I kinda suspect this is what GGG was looking for when they implemented the forums (of course, just my gut-shot opinion).

#4 High ease of use, high accessibility. Welcome to your one-click, in-game auction house. While I'm not a doomsayer here, I think the differences between real-world economy and PoE's artificial one make this option unpalatable for numerous reasons. What I dislike more than an AH, though, is how poorly people argue for or against one :)

If GGG took down the trade forums, the operation would move to the "poejsp" forums and poe.trade would parse screenshots on those forums instead of using GGG API.

So no to both 1 and 3. You can't realistically block either forums or indexers. (Blocking indexers while having trade forums in-game would be particularly insidious, because only players in the know would know where to post their items to have them indexed.)

You give up too easily, Scrotie. Nuking the forums was not presented as the quick way to make #1 happen, but it would be a step in that direction. Ultimately, I think forcing trade limitations through game systems is the way it would it would have to be done, but you can't just dismiss the model because people would try to work around it.

And yeah, #3 would be very hard to accomplish. You'll notice I didn't give a concrete example of how that might be implemented, and that's because I honestly don't know. Like you point out, people could make redundant forums and crawl them, etc. I do, however, suspect that this kind of model was what GGG envisioned with their forums and that its gotten away from them and now more closely resembles model #2.

The practicality of a model, though, is a secondary consideration. What makes an ideal trade system and what it would look like could be established purely on the merits of each theoretical model. Then taking reality considerations into play like practicality and profitability will inevitably constrain the ideal. I see a lot of posting on this topic that just says "no, they don't want it" or "it'll ruin everything because it can't be done" etc. and that doesn't help build the understanding necessary to make better decisions, build consensus, or (heaven help us) put the issue to rest.

 Wow, all this talk about AH. It should be plainly obvious that GGG and most of us don't want a auction house the likes of original D3 or what WOW has (never played it). So no one should ever ask for an AH or rant about how an AH would ruin PoE. It's never going to happen.

 What is needed is a way to buy an item without the physical need to engage the seller in Trade Chat. The current requirement that necessitates having the seller be on-line and directly interact with the buyer to make the sale is the whole reason Trade Chat has failed. With a whole world of PoE players it is highly likely that when I find an item I want to buy that the seller is no where to be found. Even if the seller is on-line playing PoE I still have to get the seller to stop and come into chat so that the trade can be executed.

The solution is some form of asynchronous trade where we each have our own personal trade stash in our hideout (a second stash exclusively used for selling and also to hold purchased items). With this we can post our wares (items for sale) and retrieve our items bought (in a remove only tab) and move them to our regular stash. If GGG codes it correctly then this would be the easy way to buy better gear:

1. I use a 3rd party trade site to find the item.
2. I click on a special link that takes my current build I'm playing and teleports it to
    the sellers hideout (of course I must be running PoE).
    Edit: Since I first need to go to my own stash to pull out the currency to make the
    buy it would be better to have a special symbol be added to my waypoint map that takes
    me to the sellers hideout. That way if I'm in a map/zone I won't be immediately taken out
    of it. I can waypoint back to my stash when I want, get the currency, go to the waypoint
    map, and then click the special link to go to the sellers hideout.
3. I open up the trade stash and can see all items that seller has for sale along with the
    prices. There will also be a button for each item so that I can private message the
    seller if I want to try and barter the price down. The seller's name will show at the
    top of the "For Sale" stash tabs and be green if on-line and red if off-line so I can
    immediately tell if the seller is available to trade chat with.
4. If I want to immediately buy I can press a "buy now" button for that item and the normal
    trade window will open up with that item in the top and I place my currency in the
    bottom and press the "ok" button to buy it (the ok button is grayed out until I have submitted
    the exact currency the seller wants for the item. Of course there is a cancel button to back out).
5. The item purchased goes into my own trade stash and I can use the waypoint to go to my
    own hideout, open my trade stash and find a new read only tab there with the item(s)
    I just bought. The seller will be notified upon next login (or be pm'ed immediately
    if on-line when a sale is made. The seller goes to his/her hideout, opens up the trade
    stash, and retrieves the currency from their remove only tab.
6. The sale is easy to do, is not a huge global AH, and is done in such a way to make it
    feel that Wraeclast is a dynamic environment full of exiles. A great bonus to this is
    that we get to visit other players hideouts often and can see if/how the place
    has been decorated (that alone should be a big incentive for buying hideout decor).

Note: The number of steps required to buy an item is long enough to not be a flipper economy wrecking AH. If some one could program a bot to automate this process then GGG would have to use some form of captcha to nullify trade botting.

End of discussion. Now we need to get GGG to code it. This should be a top priority.