Ok, it is time to stop this poe.trade silliness.

"

Maswasnos wrote:

It's definitely time for a real trading interface. Poe.trade was great when the game was just getting started, but at this point we need a real solution.

I'm really tired of PM-ing people for items only to find that they're:
A)offline
B)AFK or DND
C)not selling the item anymore (it sold or whatever)
D)just going to ignore me (they're busy doing something else usually)

Why can't I just click "buy" and have the item in my stash?

Also, the fact that you can't trade while you're in the labyrinth (without ending your run) is pretty stupid.

a) the only way this happens is if they use acquisition
b) can be fixed by having an actual api that pulls the in game information as far as palyer status, add another option to report to the api, where its online, then have one where afk is an option or have afk report offline too.

\dnd should list you offline on poe.trade
c) they either lie or its an API issue
d) /whois and figure out, sometimes its market manipulation, just move on to next item

"

1. Oh noes chinese botters will buy out things and resell them instantly! (That only happened in D3 because there was a uniform currency, PoE has no such problem)


2. Butz people will then get to endgame faster! (If PoE has true build diversity this isn't a problem, people will just reroll another character to farm with, look at D2; it had no endgame forever and was still highly successful for this very reason)


3. But tradingz is a pvp skill! (Right, because being an asshole that scams people essentially in an unregulated environment should be the type of behavior that is reinforced by the game developers. This would be fine if GGG allowed the community to enforce blacklist rules of their own, however GGG has shown to help scammers unban themselves from blacklists by getting name changes).

1) yeah chaos totally isn't a standard currency

2) 3rd party doesn't matter, its what you do with it, if GGG can do more by implementing the existing system into their website, sure, but porting a website interface inside the game is relatively pointless and we don't need a click to buy system. You can get all the items you need without it and it puts stress on players to be involved in the selling process, which IS IMPORTANT. Making that big sell and getting the currency is very nice, even making multiple smaller sells is nice, collecting money via a method that just involves "listing" an item is not enjoyable. Part of finding the loot is selling the loot, a click to buy system removes the burden of the player to actually sell.

3) People joke about player interaction, I've had many times when I find or see something that i would not have otherwise saw. Like a 4 beserker class party, where I popped some fireworks in celebration of a relatively underplayed class. I've seen other mtx's that i dont have that I might need to get. I've see interesting builds or unique item art that got my attention, but hey lets dismiss this factor because you don't enjoy it.

In what world would GGG ever remove (or reduce) player interaction given the fact that the whole idea around a free to play online ARPG game that sells MTXs means players want to have other players see there shit.

"

I back you up 100% i am so tired of poe.trade and GGG in general... GGG spend so much crap atm on stuff that is not needed instead of making that freaking trade interface or whatever they can make to make trade fast and easy.

This is what it boils down too, even people that don't want click to buy get frustrated with stuff like the not actually online thing, afk ect. Those are things that can be improved upon from an API level, but frustration has lead to just replace the system, despite it being a solid foundation to build upon instead.

I don't fully agree with any of the major reasons given in the OP, although I have mixed feelings on all of them.

1. Market manipulation isn't a bad thing. Let me explain.

There's a farming vs trading balance. If trading is very easy and farming very difficult, trading is overemphasized. If trading is very difficult and farming is very easy, farming is overemphasized. I'm not done "everyone must be self-found" zealot or anything, I'm just saying if you give players two options, where A is OP as balls and B is underpowered, you're going to have a lot of people who love B surrendering a lot of time on A and hating it. Works both ways; people who love trading shouldn't be forced to farm.

So difficulty. Both trading and farming need difficulty levers. One is tedium: in trade, forcing buyers to research sellers to find one, making sellers need to be constantly online to attract sellers, what the fuck is this Trade Chat shit, etc. For the most part, that's bad. Another level us skill intensity: in trade, giving meaningful choice to players, with risks of failure and possibilities of success. Seeing through others' market manipulations, pricing items oneself instead of depending on online cheat sheets, and making market manipulations which are difficult to see through are all skill-based and, with the proper tools, needn't be tedious.

So if farming is to have difficulty, then trading is to have difficulty; if trading is to have difficulty, it should be skill-based; if trading is skill-based, then new, unskilled players are likely to be completely fleeced. Well, it depends - with high-supply items market forces are overwhelmingly in their favor when buying - and should be, but aren't, when selling very high-end items - but for mid-tier stuff, yeah, they're gonna get owned.

And that's fine. New players get owned by PvE content regularly. It's part of learning. It's that, or difficulty through tedium, or imbalance.

Still, I wonder if "farming is difficult" is a GGG priority anymore. If not hardcore game, no need for hardcore trade. I'd be hesitant to make an irreversible plunge, though, in hopes the difficulty can return and the "clearspeed meta" gets tempered a bit.

2. Having third-party developers isn't bad, and many a first-party incompetence can be fixed by not relying on ANY particular entity to fix the issue.

However, one area where problems won't get fixed is when a problem is actually popular. For example, most poe.trade users want easy, predictable trades and are anti-manipulation. The management of poe.trade has banned players from the site for things like manipulation in the past (which leads to the creation of alt accounts to perform the same tasks). That's not healthy in my view of things. And it does show that third-parties gain power to change the games actual trade design, which could be taken in various ways.

I think third-party is overall an excellent fix for a small indie team, but perhaps less so for a fully polished product. Putting all trade design and development on GGG's shoulders is a big weight, but the ideal case is they do that AND don't fuck anything up.

3. If "player interaction" is a euphemism for haggling, a pressure to price items oneself, market manipulation, etc, then I'm for it, for reasons described above. If it's referring to people warmly greeting each other and appreciating the seller's hideout, then lol how naive.

---------------

In general, I'm for piloting skill in farming to create difficulty, for pricing skill in trading to create difficulty, and against automated buyouts. However, I mentioned the problem of high-end items and market pressure earlier, as well as the problem of tedium in constant seller online-ness.

Here's what I'd like to see for an in-game trade system:
1. Seller picks a single item to sell (or single stack of currency), chooses a currency type to receive, chooses a recommended price (which is not enforced in any way), and chooses a duration. The duration can be any length, even past league duration; listings move to parent league at league's end. The item on sale remains in the seller's stash/inventory but is "red out" and cannot be moved; mouse hover reminds player of duration remaining.
2. Buyers can bid on items, in terms of the currency seller chose; one or more currency stacks can be bid, but not a fraction of a stack. They can search by item mods and sort by end time or suggested price, but cannot view current bids (silent auction), not even winning bids of previous auctions. Bids are kept in bidder's stash/inventory but "red out" and cannot be moved until auction ends; mouse hover reminds player of duration remaining.
3. When auction ends, the highest bid (or the item, if no bids) is given to seller, highest bidder gets item, all other bids released. If there is a tie, the oldest bid wins. If the item gained uses more stash/inventory space than the item lost, it appears in a remove-only tab.

This system allows offline trading, puts pricing pressure on buyers, and (with sufficient duration) prevents me players from being ripped off too badly when selling high-end items.

These whinings about market manipulation always makes me laugh a lot. First because they do not respect a whole type of players, those who just love to play the economic game. You may not like it, but they do exist and they are not that rare. I have a friend who has been subbed to WoW during 5 years and never did anything else then playing the AH game. For some reasons, he found it very fun. Who am I to tell him he should be ashamed to manipulate the market ? Second, flippers are in fact good for an economy, they help to make the economy stable, they "correct" the market errors and provide references points for prices.

My only problem with trading right now is this : if GGG wants to follow the third party way, and there are a lot of good reasons to do so, then do it fully by providing state of the art APIs. It should not take a really long time to provide a full featured set of APIs, so that third party can fix and improve the tools they develop. Public stash tabs were a good move in that direction, a better online API (indicating AFKs people and such) would be a good next move and so on.

I don't want to ever see offline/async trading in PoE, it would be a disaster for the game and I'm pretty sure GGG knows that. Blizzard almost killed its game because of that (and because of other things too).

The complaint about market manipulation is specifically about people who list their items for a low price but refuse to sell them for that price. This is not a good thing. In most real-life economies, this is illegal. (Obviously it's not illegal in PoE, but it is shitty.)

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I think third-party is overall an excellent fix for a small indie team, but perhaps less so for a fully polished product. Putting all trade design and development on GGG's shoulders is a big weight, but the ideal case is they do that AND don't fuck anything up.

Well that's where the weight should be. A proper trade interface is not some ridiculous request in a game that is advertised with a very trade-centric playstyle.

Actually most players will think GGG is a bunch of dumbasses for having such a robust currency system that is backed by such a shitty trade system.

There is no way to cut this cheese softly. GGG needs to step their game up with this trade shit. A large percentage of players go to trade chat and can't make heads or tails of what the fuck is going on there.

If trade moguls continue to feed on new players in trade chat, this community will never grow. Players need to believe gear is accessible through either drops or trade. Drops are currently balanced around trade so they don't natively reward the "average" player (assuming normal RNG and not shavs-from-hillock RNG). As such, the player must be able to see and digest the awesome items out in trade land in a very easy way. The current method is not acceptable imo. The only reason it is successful is because of all of the current whales that keep dumping money on GGG.

That's fine if this is the biggest GGG wishes to become. If they want to be the ARPG monster they deserve to be, then they have to improve trade. It's really that simple.

you know. You all scream Auction house, but how do you know that won't be manipulated too?

All market's can be screwed with it doesn't matter if it's in the game or not, let the player's set their own price's everyone has an opinion on how things work in this game, you can't just sit there and say "oh! poe.trade is terrible because manipulate it! put in an auction house that way we can continue to let people manipulate prices!" then expect everything to be handy dandy

"

Prisus wrote:

Drops are currently balanced around trade so they don't natively reward the "average" player (assuming normal RNG and not shavs-from-hillock RNG). As such, the player must be able to see and digest the awesome items out in trade land in a very easy way. The current method is not acceptable imo.

1. This is semantics but I think it's important.

When I use the word "balance" I always mean adjusting player options against other player options. For example, melee vs ranged balance.

When I use the word "tuning," I always mean adjusting game elements which the player doesn't have control over. For example, drop rates.

Regardless of the terminology used, I feel it's a mistake to use the same terminology for both game design processes. They are very different processes with very different philosophical approaches. Tuning doesn't need to be balanced (monsters don't need even odds to win a fight). Etc.

So: droprates are tuned for trade.

2. Trade can be interpersonal or intrapersonal. If you're on your seventh Standard reroll, you probably have a good stock of leveling items and probably some endgame chase uniques in your stash, even if you've done zero interpersonal trade. The stash is a mechanism to trade items between characters on the same account.

So while it's accurate to say droprate is tuned for interpersonal trade, that doesn't mean the sole other tuning option is to tune for a single character. I personally believe droprates should be tuned for 5-10 full rerolls without interpersonal trade, meaning that instead of getting everything you need for one character leveling 1-100, you get everything you need for 5-10 characters leveling 5-10 characters 1-100. Those are two drastically different droprates.

The efficiency gain of additional characters sharing items has diminishing returns. An economy of 10000 characters is NOT twice as efficient as an economy of 5000. An economy of 10000 characters is NOT as a thousand times as efficient as an economy of 10 (containable in a single account).

So I am for low droprates overall. I don't know if I'd quite take things to the level GGG has; as I said earlier, I don't think droprates should be tuned around interpersonal trade. But tuning for a single character going through once is asinine.

3. The biggest problem with third-party solutions is affordance design. Third-party tools which are integral to gameplay shouldn't feel like a hidden feature. There are ways of doing this while still being third-party, but GGG really needs to make an actual damn button for trade indexers which directs players to a moderated list of public sites.

"

Perq wrote:

I was against the trading house (lets not use auction house term, cuz triggered), for the longest time. But time is up... :/

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/53dooa/psaanother_one_to_add_to_your_blacklist/

I was against it because there are some reasons which would potentially make it bad, but at this point cons of poe.trade trading are far worse than TH™ (Trading House™). Lets list some reasons:

1. Market manipulation.

Which is pure fuckery. I mean, sorry, but there is no other word to describe this. The worst about TH would be bots buying out things and then relisting them for more. While this is very bad for players who do not know prices, given you can actually look up prices, it wouldn't happen that often.
And because of how things look now, in most cases NEW PLAYERS ARE FUCKED OVER THE MOST. You don't know current meta? Didn't PM every single greedy-bastard listing their bait-prices? Well, too bad, you're gonna get shafted, while some neck-beard gets another free item.
This is absolutely beyond the point of being acceptable.

2. poe.trade is 3rd part.

Not only it looks amateur from development standpoint, but also gives GGG 0 control over what happens to the platform. The day poe.trade goes away, PoE is fucking dead (Well, SSF will remain, but that is not that big of a portion of players - nothing against them, tho, so don't get your jimmies rustled).
It is unprofessional to depends on 3rd part so much, while advertising your game as trade based. Nothing wrong in community doing some work with guides and builds, but basing whole aspect of your game, including game balance, on 3rd part is simply a bad move.
Also - while new players are being screwed over by market manipulation on poe.trade, those who don't even get to know that poe.trade exists are screwed over EVEN HARDER. There is absolutely no way to know that there is poe.trade action going on, unless someone tells you. This, again, looks amateur from GGG's standpoint.

3. Player interactions... haha!

We all know how much of a joke this is, so I won't even bother explaining this. What I will tell is that because of how much hassle you have to go through with trading, trading anything with low value (probably around 1alch-1c) is almost impossible. People will list those and never respond, or don't even list at all, because it is not worth the time to trade with such small values.
Because of that trading maps with mods that can be done by other build, but not yours, or trading maps to get your Atlas completed doesn't work.
Also, because higher tier maps are more expensive, you end up in a situation where buying low tier maps (again, new players) is almost impossible, while higher tier maps are available.

Discuss. I'm pretty tired with poe.trade. :(

If you don't like it , just don't use it .

Great post OP.
I agree with you on all points, I too am tired with the shenanigans of those individuals on poe.trade:((

Hope GGG takes the time to seriously improve trading in their game further.