People complaining about trade have no clue how good they have it.

I don't know how many of you played diablo 2, but I'm what you could call a 'veteran' I suppose even though I started playing diablo 2 near the tail end of the game's life cycle i.e. 1.10 after runewords like enimga were introduced.

There was no website like poe.trade where you could type the name of an item, mods, or anything of that nature to trade other players. Do you know how we used to trade?

There was a public game list which was called something like 'USA Trade 1' in which up to 7 people could join the game, and when you joined, you had to have all items you wanted to trade in your inventory and open a trade request with another player 1 on 1.

When they accept, you literally click on each item in your inventory and move it into the trade window. If they thought anything was good or something they wanted you'd get an interaction like this:

Buyer: WUW (What u want) for that item?

Seller: WUG (What you give)?

And then the seller would start dropping his garbage into the window, or give a price in runes and negotiation would occur.

This was a long, tedious and extremely inefficient process, but I still loved it because it was fun to try to barter/find good deals.

After your 1 on 1 w/ one player, you'd go to the next guy and start all over again. After this, you'd leave the game and join 'USA Trade 2' and start all over trying to trade-up on items and hopefully have more than you went in with when the day started.

The first time I started playing POE, I was blown away by poe.trade, and I still think it's a great system. I never played D3, but I heard about it and I think the entire idea of an auction house is cancer.

There is a reason D3 killed their own auction house. There is a reason D3 sucks fucking donkey balls and nobody plays it. It's because it's not FUN. POE trading can be frustrating at times, price fixing is dumb, and noobs cry tears of sadness, but it's all part of the game, it's a learning process.

I am fine with trading the way it is. There should never be an auction house, ever. Why would you copy an idea from a terrible game that failed? It makes no sense IMO. I personally would just like to see 2 things implemented on POE trade

1. The ability to create a login/block list to avoid seeing players who you know are fixing prices from ever showing up again on your search

2. The ability to see when was the last time a seller logged in when you do offline search (So when you're trying to price check items, you know if the last time a player was on was 3 months ago, it's probably not an accurate benchmark to use).

Anyway, that's my rant, and I hope that brings some perspective to how the whole complaints about the trade structure are a little overblown IMO.

Played strictly Single Player in D2... but we had our own way of trading. We'd send ATMA files by email after posting trade threads on the SPF/trading forums.

Only did it a few times, and later regretted it.

No fuck that trading is fucking garbage.

Cy@

I also played games, where you had to afk in a town witha stall and wait for people to click on it and buy something, similarly you had to browse others stalls to buy stuff, now that I think of it, it wasn't only just 1 game, but that is not the norm anymore.

All I need is an automated thing for maps/currency/divcards.

So I don't have to spend more time buying maps, than running them and the people who want to buy valuable divcards at 1/(stackamount) of it's value could stop bothering me with their blatantly obvious scam attemps.

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ironstove wrote:

I don't know how many of you played diablo 2, but I'm what you could call a 'veteran' I suppose even though I started playing diablo 2 near the tail end of the game's life cycle i.e. 1.10 after runewords like enimga were introduced.

I started playing it long before then, but I was definitely still playing it at that time, too. Fun times.

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ironstove wrote:

There was no website like poe.trade where you could type the name of an item, mods, or anything of that nature to trade other players. Do you know how we used to trade?

I know how I used to trade and I always avoided those games. I would look for or create a straightforward one like "Um 4 IK armor" or "Tal ammy 4 ist" and the whole process took less then 10 seconds to buy, and usually less than 1 minute to sell if it was primetime and your prices were right.



I liked the way it was organized playing on Bnet. The "join game" button was less than an inch from the "create" button so I developed the habit of hitting it and scanning the games before making a private one. It was convenient.

Sure there would be 4 or 5 "baal run" games... 2 or 3 "rush" games, and an occasional "help me in act 4" game, but the vast majority of them were trade related. As far as efficiency goes, I'd say it was roughly 1 million times better than the uncontrollably fast trade chat window in POE. Just a list of 25 random games being refreshed every, what, 15 seconds?

Oddly enough random results being given in the trade systems on Xbox seem to only be getting negative feedback. I wonder how it is going in the Chinese version. I guess after using google for a little while no one is willing to use a physical encyclopedia anymore. Let alone one without an index. Imagine that.

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ironstove wrote:

The first time I started playing POE, I was blown away by poe.trade...

You completely lost me here. That website is not in POE nor controlled by GGG developers as far as I know. (I do not know who they guy actually is... so I cannot back that claim up with any hard facts)

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ironstove wrote:

There is a reason D3 killed their own auction house. There is a reason D3 sucks fucking donkey balls and nobody plays it.

I thought those were separate reasons.

I personally stopped playing D3 after they announced they were killing the AH (mostly unrelated: I don't like the idea of never-ending "paragon" levels or stats). But slightly related in that it was one of the main redeeming factors for me when comparing D3 to D2. I personally enjoyed the AH until they introduced the Real Money version of it (also possibly unrelated... inflation just reached stupid points by then thanks to... bots? Maybe? Drop rates?)

I agree there is a reason D3 sucks... but it has nothing to do with the AH and a lot to do with the itemization (and how it is oddly more similar to POE than to the original D2). And the travesty of a skill system inappropriately called "runes." Mainly that. The synergies in D2 1.10 (or 1.09?) had more depth to it than those "runes."

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ironstove wrote:

I am fine with trading the way it is. There should never be an auction house, ever. Why would you copy an idea from a terrible game that failed?

Believe it or not the idea of an auction house used for moving items in an MMO is much much older than D3. And, if I am not mistaken, most have been successful.



D3 is just the first one I know of that had developer-sanctioned Real Money trading incorporated into it. I assume they decided it wasn't worth the hassle. Probably not really a "game design" decision to axe the whole thing so much as a fiscal one.

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ironstove wrote:

1. The ability to create a login/block list to avoid seeing players who you know are fixing prices from ever showing up again on your search

2. The ability to see when was the last time a seller logged in when you do offline search (So when you're trying to price check items, you know if the last time a player was on was 3 months ago, it's probably not an accurate benchmark to use).

Again... you are not actually talking about POE anymore but some website thing. You should make those requests to the guy who made or currently runs the website. Although maybe he could not do either of those without GGG changing something with the API stream? I don't know. I'm not a computer programmer.

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ironstove wrote:

Anyway, that's my rant, and I hope that brings some perspective to how the whole complaints about the trade structure are a little overblown IMO.

I believe the best complaints are those that are way overblown and unrealistically exaggerated. :D

Like this one:

Same works the opposite, people not complaining about trade have no clue how bad they have it. Both sides are correct, and it is up to devs now to shape it as they see it working for betterment of game.

But whatever, guess we have to have daily trading threads in here too.

Ah, the (good) old days of D2 trading... IIRC, people didn't even use the now common acronyms "WTB" and "WTS" back then. Instead, we used "N" (need) and "O" (offer). If you wanted, for instance, to sell your 12 perfect gems for 1 Pul rune, you would create a game named "O 12 Pg N Pul", and wait for someone to join :) And yes, the current trade system we have in PoE is miles better than that - but D3 auction house was still a superior solution. RMAH was cancer, true, but any real-money trading is cancer, it's not specific to the auction house system. And the regular AH was very convenient and efficient. Still can't quite get it why they axed it, and later went full SSF. I'd love to see an AH like that in PoE.

I don't know if anyone else has already said this, but OP, you are flat out wrong.

Yeah, there were in fact games where you could trade, but there was also dozens of trading channels, more or less titled the exact same thing(USA Trading Channel 1 through whatever). Far more then 7 people were in each channel, many times that. On top of that, there was also d2jsp where you could trade items on there, either straight up trades, or what was termed "jsp gold", and you could then trade that "gold" for other items.

Now, that may not sound like it wouldn't work(the d2jsp), but it really, really did. It was slow to build steam at first, but by the time 1.12 came out, it was the preferred form of trading for a lot of people, you could even flat out buy d2jsp gold and then just spend that gold on items.

I was a trader on d2 before you even were the proverbial baby in diapers, I played from the very start, back when Perfect SKulls were the "standard" of currency, and rare Lances were(could) be the best weapon a person could have, 6 P.Skulls for an SoJ, and let me tell ya, it was hard as hell trying to get 6 perfect skulls back then. I also remembered when I lost my first SoJ due to believing a guy could teach me how to dupe, and instead he popped my corpse and looted everything I had, including said SoJ. Total devastation ><.

I would literally spend hours and hours playing the market in the trading channels(before d2jsp) and would buy items that people didn't know were worth, and then sell them for a much increased profit to those who did know what it was worth.

Literally, only(and I hate to use this word) scrubs used actual games to trade. The only time I joined trading games, were to dump multiple character stashes of what I personally considered to be "junk" on the ground so those who could actually make use of it would have something to start off the game with.

TL;DR: If you used trading games, you were doing it wrong, very much so. Trading Channels, and d2jsp were the primary forms of trade for anyone who has a passing knowledge of the game.

Games have evolved a lot since the early 2000s and so has the player mentality.
People have a lot shorter attention span nowadays and want instant gratification more than ever before.

Comparing PoE nowadays to D2 from over 10 years ago needs more context. Simply claiming PoE players have it good ignores the context in which the games exist.

comparing trading between games which are 13 years apart nice one OP... like comparing graphics from a ps1 Metal Gear Solid to ps4 one