When are we getting better trading tools?

Never.

Given the choice, GGG would actually remove poetrade and make trading even harder than it is now.

Be grateful we're not posting shit on the forums anymore at least.

Like what?

Defining "better" is amazing difficult.

Better for who? (or whom... never did figure that one out).

Suggestions for trade improvements go back more than 5 years. Each of them had people on one side or the other. It's not clear what we even mean by "improvement".

Many think the game would be ruined by a marketplace. Many think the game is broken because it lacks one. No way to make it work for both parties.

PoE.trade gives them plausible deniability. They keep the "no marketplace" people playing at the same time the "needs a marketplace" people are satisfied that there's at least that.

What could be better than keeping everyone sort of happy? It's not making one group happier at the expense of the other.

One thing I think both sides would agree on is that we need a way to trade without inviting someone to join our instance.

Well, the problem, as I have observed so far, is inconvenient way of trading; people complain they don't want to waste time and leave a map for selling 1-2c items, and therefore don't even reply; sometimes we all have to go afk for different reasons; and price fixers is probably one of the most (if not the most) cancerous factors that makes trading (setting reasonable price) a joke.

Solution to that would be actually easy: an auction house. This has been proposed many times as far as I know. You'd simply need to put a price on an item (like it is atm in the case of premium tabs) and wait for someone buy it. However, there would need to be a sort of a deposit for the currency that you acquire after selling items, which you could take out of the deposit, but not insert anything there (so it wouldn't work as a free currency tab).

Another problem might occur when you simply want to put an item in auction house without setting its price in advance. In such situation you'll be needing to set a satisfactory minimum amount of a given currency, which you would sell an item for, within a time limit (a bidding auction).

Such a system has another significant advantage that could be implemented: trade between leagues. Because of the abovementioned deposit, you could exchange e.g. the currency you have in Standard league for an item from a temporary league, which you could pick up from the deposit afterwards.

This would also eliminate price fixing, as there would be no option to display an item for the sake of displaying it with a price (as it is now with poe.trade). + no more browsing through 50 people to buy a random thing you need asap, because everyone is either afk or cba to waste portal/leave lab/etc.


TLDR; I strongly believe we need an auction house with a deposit.

The best improvement: Eliminate Trade. Make drops worthwhile.

Nope. Simplification would ruin the game. You can't automate trading or everyone starts selling stuff. Once everyone starts selling stuff, the price of it drops to next to nothing. Once the price drops to next to nothing, the game becomes stale since anyone can afford what ever they might need. A game without needs is a short lived game.

You want automated trading... many do. But they don't see the second and third order effects that an auction house would introduce.

Eliminating trade would make one group happy at the expense of the other... not an option either.

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Nope. Simplification would ruin the game. You can't automate trading or everyone starts selling stuff. Once everyone starts selling stuff, the price of it drops to next to nothing. Once the price drops to next to nothing, the game becomes stale since anyone can afford what ever they might need. A game without needs is a short lived game.

Hmm, could you elaborate on this? I don't know whether I get your point, but do you really believe making a big deal of simple trading is actually healthy to the community? Price drop after a while is a natural phenomenon; people get more and more wealthy over time (check the patterns of currency exchange ratio at the beginning of a league and at the end of a league). A demand of more common uniques is also lower the farther from the start of a league.

What other effects that have a negative impact do you have in mind? I'm really interested about the "against approach" towards an auction house.