First Wave of Trade Improvements

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cipher_nemo wrote:

Exactly. Those complaining about this or labeling it as P2W want to make some sort of distinction that this is new functionality only for paying customers.

It really is, though.

I've used Acquisition and Procurement myself. They're nice programs, but they're not part of the game. That's why people have been asking for improvements to trading. The state of trading in PoE up to this point wasn't Acquisition, it was trade chat. It's great that the community developed its own workarounds, but that happened because trading was lacking in the first place. I really don't understand why we're now implying everything was completely fine and this is just another option instead of a long due overhaul to the system all of these people had been asking for.

And that's not even considering the change in the landscape of 3rd party tools. One party (exiletools, I believe) already announced they most likely won't support crawling the forums anymore. If you allow me to indulge in speculation for a moment, these changes address selling items, surely there's going to be something for buying in the future, right? Do you think the interface for that will include shop threads? I mean, considering that their own system for listing sales doesn't touch the forums, at all?

I'm sure GGG will come up with a good system in the end. But the suggestion that trading with 3rd party software as we know it will remain unchanged seems very optimistic to me.

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Any hypothetically, if we got a "Super Premium" tab that had twice the space and included auto sorting features, would we see the same P2W complaints again?

I don't know. It's possible, I suppose.
However, while we are talking hypothetically, if you had to buy Zana's map device each league and non-paying players had to use the Eternal Laboratory or party up with paying ones, would we see the same "you could still run maps, it's just a QoL improvement" argument?
P2W is a horrible term imo and a bit misleading. There are quite a few features in the game you really don't need to "win" by any definition of the word. If you had to pay for all of them, though, I don't think anyone would deny that to be a vast shift from the current business model.

I mean, it's as you said: it comes down to the definition of ethical. Surely, though, it's a step away from the situation we're enjoying right now, independent of whether the change is indeed P2W or not. It's debatable whether that's good or bad.

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Wazz72 wrote:

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Gemini666 wrote:

where is now the "GGG" politics which only cosmetic items is vending as microtransactions and game content is not sold?
smells like everything changes. and sounds dishonorable do this.

Exactly! This is the issue I - among others - have with this feature: not the money, but the principle.
And to the others posters who pointed out that extra stash tabs where already p2w, that was debatable, given the possibilities of muling and alt accounts- my personal view of the mattare is that they are borderline p2w... With this feature only given to Premium Tabs, there's no debate imho.

If you complain about this new feature because it saves the player time and effort, then stash tabs have to have been p2w in your book as well, because they also saved the player time. There is nothing debatable here at all, either it is p2w because it saves time, or it is not.

And just to get this out the way: There is no game content being sold. No maps, no items, no characters, no passive nodes, no exp boosts, nothing... As such the p2w point of view is invalid.

Free to play means that the entire game is available to play without a dime spent, it also means that a freeloader has to be able to experience the game at hand without spending a single dollar. This is still the case, no point in arguing any further. There are many games out there that are gating content and power behind paywalls, POE is not doing so, at all. One may argue that they gate the added utility behind premium tabs, but as long as GG does not take anything away as a result, there is nothing worth complaining about, at all.

F2P confirmed, period.

For reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play

I don't mind it working only on Premium Tabs, but since they become mandatory, maybe grant every player one premium tab, instead of a normal one?

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Sure_K4y wrote:

Free to play means that the entire game is available to play without a dime spent, it also means that a freeloader has to be able to experience the game at hand without spending a single dollar. This is still the case, no point in arguing any further. There are many games out there that are gating content and power behind paywalls, POE is not doing so, at all. One may argue that they gate the added utility behind premium tabs, but as long as GG does not take anything away as a result, there is nothing worth complaining about, at all.

What if the 3rd-party programs authors stopped developing/updating them? Relying on 3rd-party programs to fix the game for you is kind of silly. They have finally developed a way to remove the need of such programs and put it behind a pay wall... Guess the next changes will be after Ascendancy, don't think they will improve trading mid league, so we will have to see what they will bring next, hope it will be there for everyone to use...

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MaliceSong wrote:

I really don't understand why we're now implying everything was completely fine and this is just another option instead of a long due overhaul to the system all of these people had been asking for.

Keep in mind this is labeled by GGG as the "first wave", so we'll have to see what happens from here. All of the complaints, regardless of whether they are logical & sincere or just downright ignorant (yours being of the former), will hopefully help swing GGG's feelers into the overall community reaction and where to take the next step. So far the community response has been a mixed reaction between elation and anger.

So as you said, we'll have to see where it goes from here.

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MaliceSong wrote:

I mean, it's as you said: it comes down to the definition of ethical. Surely, though, it's a step away from the situation we're enjoying right now, independent of whether the change is indeed P2W or not. It's debatable whether that's good or bad.

Yup. One thing is for certain, that we can both probably agree upon: it's a fine line on the ethics, so it's easy to argue both sides. What we both don't want to see is this becoming a slippery slope for the micro-transactions store, with more non-cosmetic features and functions.

One thing I'm worried about is with this new functionality, 3rd party actors are going to have less incentive for maintaining their apps and utilities that are being duplicated by these features in the first wave.

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cipher_nemo wrote:

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MaliceSong wrote:

I really don't understand why we're now implying everything was completely fine and this is just another option instead of a long due overhaul to the system all of these people had been asking for.

Keep in mind this is labeled by GGG as the "first wave", so we'll have to see what happens from here. All of the complaints, regardless of whether they are logical & sincere or just downright ignorant (yours being of the former), will hopefully help swing GGG's feelers into the overall community reaction and where to take the next step. So far the community response has been a mixed reaction between elation and anger.

So as you said, we'll have to see where it goes from here.

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MaliceSong wrote:

I mean, it's as you said: it comes down to the definition of ethical. Surely, though, it's a step away from the situation we're enjoying right now, independent of whether the change is indeed P2W or not. It's debatable whether that's good or bad.

Yup. One thing is for certain, that we can both probably agree upon: it's a fine line on the ethics, so it's easy to argue both sides. What we both don't want to see is this becoming a slippery slope for the micro-transactions store, with more non-cosmetic features and functions.

One thing I'm worried about is with this new functionality, 3rd party actors are going to have less incentive for maintaining their apps and utilities that are being duplicated by these features in the first wave.

I believe everybody would be perfectly fine with it staying exclusive to premium tabs under one circumstance, and that circumstance would be to give players a way to earn at least one or two premium tabs as some sort of league challenge reward, for example. That way, bots are pretty much excluded, it would become widely available, as well as being a free feature.

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Sure_K4y wrote:

I believe everybody would be perfectly fine with it staying exclusive to premium tabs under one circumstance, and that circumstance would be to give players a way to earn at least one or two premium tabs as some sort of league challenge reward, for example. That way, bots are pretty much excluded, it would become widely available, as well as being a free feature.

That's a good idea. And it reminds me of LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online), which was at the time driven by Turbine before they were bought up. They took an MMORPG and went from subscription to F2P, however their micro-transaction store was not just cosmetic items, it also contained content. The content was behind a pay-gate. That sounds horrible, but the beauty of all of this was that you could earn its MT currency by playing the game and completing things. So you can play your way to more content and never have to spend a dime, even if it took you longer to get there.

So if GGG decided to hand out Premium Tabs or Premium Tab Upgrades as some sort of reward, I'd be all for that. Because I truly enjoyed Turbine's MT model with LOTRO, in which their other title DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) was already using.

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cipher_nemo wrote:

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Sure_K4y wrote:

I believe everybody would be perfectly fine with it staying exclusive to premium tabs under one circumstance, and that circumstance would be to give players a way to earn at least one or two premium tabs as some sort of league challenge reward, for example. That way, bots are pretty much excluded, it would become widely available, as well as being a free feature.

That's a good idea. And it reminds me of LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online), which was at the time driven by Turbine before they were bought up. They took an MMORPG and went from subscription to F2P, however their micro-transaction store was not just cosmetic items, it also contained content. The content was behind a pay-gate. That sounds horrible, but the beauty of all of this was that you could earn its MT currency by playing the game and completing things. So you can play your way to more content and never have to spend a dime, even if it took you longer to get there.

So if GGG decided to hand out Premium Tabs or Premium Tab Upgrades as some sort of reward, I'd be all for that. Because I truly enjoyed Turbine's MT model with LOTRO, in which their other title DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) was already using.

When I heard the trade improvements news and them being exclusive to Premium Stash tabs, that's what I thought. I hoped that the Perandus challenge league would award a premium stash tab, if that was the case I doubt anyone would complain.

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Sure_K4y wrote:

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Wazz72 wrote:

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Gemini666 wrote:

where is now the "GGG" politics which only cosmetic items is vending as microtransactions and game content is not sold?
smells like everything changes. and sounds dishonorable do this.

Exactly! This is the issue I - among others - have with this feature: not the money, but the principle.
And to the others posters who pointed out that extra stash tabs where already p2w, that was debatable, given the possibilities of muling and alt accounts- my personal view of the mattare is that they are borderline p2w... With this feature only given to Premium Tabs, there's no debate imho.

If you complain about this new feature because it saves the player time and effort, then stash tabs have to have been p2w in your book as well, because they also saved the player time. There is nothing debatable here at all, either it is p2w because it saves time, or it is not.

And just to get this out the way: There is no game content being sold. No maps, no items, no characters, no passive nodes, no exp boosts, nothing... As such the p2w point of view is invalid.

Free to play means that the entire game is available to play without a dime spent, it also means that a freeloader has to be able to experience the game at hand without spending a single dollar. This is still the case, no point in arguing any further. There are many games out there that are gating content and power behind paywalls, POE is not doing so, at all. One may argue that they gate the added utility behind premium tabs, but as long as GG does not take anything away as a result, there is nothing worth complaining about, at all.

F2P confirmed, period.

For reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play

First of all, I already stated that imho stash tabs are borderline p2w.Borderline 'cause there's mules and alt account options available to all.
Second, they are - atm... - gating the first step of their INGAME trade system behind a pay wall. So some game content, albeit optional but highly valued by GGG, is indeed behind a pay wall.
...Oh wait no, there's also trade chat \sarcasm

EDIT:And the thing that bugs me the most is that they're going against their principles and doesn't even seem to bother them a bit.

YES! I'm reading this post a little late, but man am I happy about this!!!!! :)

Good job on this one GGG!