The AH dream is dead.

my biggest issue with an AH or even more convenient trading is flipping - my opinion is that items should become bound as soon as they change ownership.

I think a single experimental season (only seasonal) with some sort of an AH might be interesting. I do like David Brevik's idea of maybe making half the slots in game be soulbound by default. And maybe add to it with better enchanting or a single stat reroll on those.

In the end, trading is the heart of the game and all drops and rng affixes are based on that. Using poe.trade is clunky but far better than D2 trading ever was even with d2 jsp

Saying that there would be problems with an AH is a false dichotomy.

Yes, there would be. There's downsides to literally everything. But those problems come nowhere near the problems players currently face with the half-assed excuse for a system we have already.

The fact that an Auction House has downsides has no relevance. That's not a reason for why we can't have improvements, it's Chris/GGG sidestepping the issue because they haven't found a satisfactory solution yet and feel too ashamed to admit it.

Then we have the issue of fans bringing up D3 like that's a relevant comparison. It's not, mainly because the markets for both games are incredibly different. The AH was a means to an end in D3, whereas in PoE it is the end.

The AH was some of the issue, the other issue was that Blizzard's main demographic is far less hardcore than the people GGG have tried to market towards. D3 players did not want an AH, and Blizzard agreed they did not really want to design a game around it. By direct contrast GGG want you to trade, and have built their game around it, and so it makes sense to provide ample methods to do that.

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MrTastix wrote:

The AH was some of the issue, the other issue was that Blizzard's main demographic is far less hardcore than the people GGG have tried to market towards. D3 players did not want an AH, and Blizzard agreed they did not really want to design a game around it. By direct contrast GGG want you to trade, and have built their game around it, and so it makes sense to provide ample methods to do that.

Direct contrast? Blizzard also wanted you to trade. They built their game around the AH, so to speak. There are several reasons why that didn't work out very well, and the demographic is far from the main reason. The game was/became centered around the action house, because the contrast between drops and the action house was so huge, that there wasn't much point in hoping for a good drop.

The easier trading becomes, the bigger this contrast gets. The more accessible gear are via trade, the more "crap" everything that drops become. So you're left with one choice; buy everything. While some would argue we already reached that state via PoE Trade, there are several proofs of the opposite.

And again with this "hard core" label. There is not, and never will be anything "hard core" about farming currency to hit the market. It's easy, it's lazy - and will be even more so the easier it gets. "I want it NOW" is not "hard core". Never will be. Please don't use this misinterpreted label as an argument.

And while you say GGG has build their game around trade, I say yes, they may have. But they show a lot of signs that they do not want the accessibility too high, or the effort needed too low. And I'm hoping that's true - for the sake of this game.

This whole debate is scary as hell. Because I believe that the majority of players advocating FOR an AH, are players that doesn't care about trading being alfa omega. The one way. The only way. That IS not the case. That has never BEEN the case. And for Gods sake, GGG, don't let it be the case.

Trading should be a supplement to looting and crafting. Almost every patch and league have had elements improving those to elements. And I hope they improve them even further, to tone down trading. No, not removing.

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grepman wrote:

no, thats not basic building of ah, at all

what you've described is simply a search functionality for in-game items.

literally the biggest and most important thing in an auction house - buying the item and having an auction, has nothing to do with that functionality.

merely finding an item does not mean buying the item.

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Reinhart wrote:

Indeed. Poe Trade got nothing to do with auctioning. It just lists all the items that people stored in their premium tabs and scrapes items from the official forums. An item on that list, doesnt necessarily mean that it is actually for sale. A price listed, doesn't necessary mean that the seller will actually sell for that price. People are just deluding themselves.

The very reason why people state poe trade is almost an AH, is to "strengthen" their argument to implement a REAL online AH.

Wiki:

An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder.

Well i disagree with the premise of your own disagreements. I wasn't trying to claim poe.trade was a fully fledge AH simply that an element of one already exists in it. I've played WoW and used it's AH. The basic outlay of when searching for items is fundamentally the same thing, a list of items relating to that of which you've searched for.

In my opinion it is these search results that are a key part, note: not the only part, of an AH that makes an AH work in a game. All i was trying to say is that poe.trade does this part of an AH already.

If you were to implement an AH without the search function then it would be just as bad as the system we have now. The amount of time it would take for a player to browse through 1000's of pages of crap looking at all of their stats till they found something they were looking for would completely negate the advantage of instant buying power.

To put it into a real world situation: It would be like turning up at Christies on any given Monday in a random hope they were selling a pair of 1879 cufflinks owned by Marie Curie's husband.