When are we getting better trading tools?

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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.

I just can't get this "AH bad because other games AH bad" comparison...
Am I like Hitler just because I eat, sleep and have two hands and legs?
That makes me literally just like him, because.... riiiight?

Look at wow for example, Poe doesn't have gold, our currency items can directly used to flip a coin and multiply or reduce its value. Same with items, in wow everything is a clone, in Poe you have different tiers of value added to the items: high links, high rolls, and even corrupting gems over the limit or adding rare implicit special mods to items.
Then we got hardcore death which removes all the currency investments carried by said character from the league. You got nothing like that in wow. You just can't jump to final conclusions about a Poe AH by looking at other games AH. We need to test it first.

So what assumptions can we make?
"Once everyone starts selling stuff, the price of it drops to next to nothing."

At first, probably. Look at some SC/HC prices:
SC 1-2c, HC 2-4c = Wanderlust
SC 1-3c, HC 12-20c = Goldrim
SC 1-3c, HC 4-8c = Lochtonial

The restarting mechanics in HC make sure there's always good demand for any bracket of bis items.
SC however is our problem league, it would surely turn into a dumpster since there is no proper way to salvage item, so you either vendor stuff or put it on sale if you can be bothered with it.
Since the AH would make it very practical to list more items with less effort,
prices would first drop to a bare minimum, which is defined by the vendor value, a mix of shards.

Next, players would have to evaluate items they find, if it's worth the trouble of picking them up and trying to sell them. Experienced players have a sense of the market and a memorised inventory for unique items, even rare item mods, being able to price items with a low error margin.
Even if you lack those skills, you can tab out and price check items.
I think there's even a addon for it.

If the worst case scenario would be a saturation of the market, it should fix itself;
The devs just have to change the vendor value of items to fit the real market demand trend,
which they surely have plenty meta data of. For example a flat 1 chaos orb for unique items would keep them above a 1c minimum, since otherwise people would just vendor them directly to a npc instead of putting them up on the AH.

Monopolies... Can't really prevent them from happening, with or without a AH.
Already seen it in HC harb, at some point 5L chest items went up from 1-3c to 10-20c for a while, because a monopoly guild bought them all. That's what you get for having a free market /clap.


So, we got:
A) consumable currency
B) consumable items (crafting, recipes)
C) demand due to death
D) demand due to corruption (vaal orbs)
E) literally a trillion other things which I can't think of right now 'cos I've quit coffee


I'm sure a AH would work, and only reshape the game a bit.
You could always adjust things, change some rules, modify item vendor values, limit the trade frequency/quantity, and do a ton of other things to balance the market and keep the game within your ideals, keeping it from falling apart.

But at the very least GGG should have to start a seperate league to test a AH asap,
so we could start improving trade and stop this god damn never ending speculation.

i still remember when i had to go to the forums shops and look for the item i wanted, then i ahd to message the guy and had him in the frieds list so i could check when he was online and try to make the trade.

now i just go to PoEtrade and 10sec later i have what i want. i have no idea why u ppl complain.

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laurensk wrote:

Assume (ex absurdo) that this conclusion is correct, and that prices of gear go down when an AH is introduced due to these reasons.

If the value of gear goes down, then so does the EXPECTED value of gear that has not yet been identified. Hence, this increases, relatively, the opportunity cost of picking up and identifying gear (time that could also be spend on killing monsters for possible direct currency drops, for example).

We're already at the point where identifying gear is not really worth it, and you're better of killing more mobs for a chance to drop currency or divination cards. In the above scenario, the expected net benefit of picking up and identifying items is decreased even further, into what might very well become (if it isn't already) a negative value; i.e., players incur a net loss if they follow this strategy.

Assuming rationality of players, this causes them to actually pick up and identify LESS items, causing LESS items to hit the market, and due to decreased supply, prices will increase. This contradicts the initial assumption, which must therefore be wrong.

What is the flaw in the above line of reasoning?

Well, I for one disagree heavily that some rare items isn't worth picking up and identifying. And if you have this attitude, OF COURSE you would want an AH, because you're buying EVERYTHING - and play the game with the intention of buying EVERYTHING from the get-go, not giving two fudges about item drops AT ALL, except Divination Cards and currency. My biggest concern about an AH goes towards the players NOT playing like this, that actually LIKE the in-game progression, items and gear acquirement through playing the game and not the market, while using trade as a supplement and not everything. Will this part of the game stay the same - with the same balance - if an AH comes along? I think not. Some disagree. Some don't give a fudge, because they never pick up shit to begin with, and don't seem to have enough empathy to care about other parts of the game.

But then again, I see your point. But don't you think the convenience of an AH, letting you "trade" while mapping, sleeping, working and eating will make people identifying more rares, even if the expected value is lower? Because they won't have to invite players to party, have them over to their H/O and trade, while not having to leave the map/lab/instance they're in? I do, but again, that is just speculations. When said rare items are listed, they don't have to think about them at all, and there's no more time investment needed - as it is now.

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thevdende wrote:

Lot of people seem to think automated trading will crash the market. News flash this already happened when ggg implemented premium tabs and an API. Before that I could actually make legit currency running my forum thread shop. People will become rich off flipping currency with or without the AH some people enjoy that some don't. Some want a combination of both, in no way will the AH change the values of items, everyone who wants to list something already can, the only thing that will change is wasted time alt tabbing/messaging/afk/dnd people.

I agree that premium tabs already downed the market pretty hard. As so it's a foresight what would happen if you implement an even more convenient system. Sure you all will be happy for a moment because no more AFK or offline people. But that will quickly be forgotten and then the focus will come onto the part where you aren't generating any currency unless you sit infront of the AH (Like pretty much any other game that has an AH)

The thing I genuinely don't understand is if you are already whining about flipping now and how people profit of the current system how the hell do you think it will be when every little bit of effort is removed? The only way then will be to sit infront of an AH trading all day. Trying to snatch up good deals. You really wanna play poe like that?

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Phrazz wrote:

Well, I for one disagree heavily that some rare items isn't worth picking up and identifying. And if you have this attitude, OF COURSE you would want an AH, because you're buying EVERYTHING - and play the game with the intention of buying EVERYTHING from the get-go, not giving two fudges about item drops AT ALL, except Divination Cards and currency. My biggest concern about an AH goes towards the players NOT playing like this, that actually LIKE the in-game progression, items and gear acquirement through playing the game and not the market, while using trade as a supplement and not everything. Will this part of the game stay the same - with the same balance - if an AH comes along? I think not. Some disagree. Some don't give a fudge, because they never pick up shit to begin with, and don't seem to have enough empathy to care about other parts of the game.

This is a fair point. What you're saying is people derive inherent utility ("fun") from identifying items and the thrill of the hunt for better gear. This is true, of course, but it also seems to be correlated to percieved economic value of those items. The fun-factor of finding good gear is in part derived from creating economic worth out of thin air. Hence, the higher the economic worth of the item, the greater the joy in finding it.

This implies that as the average item value goes down, so does the utility (even on this scale) of identifying rares. This again disincentivises identifying and selling rares, causing prices to go up due to scarcity. Again, this contradicts the premise.

However, this is a personal point. You could also argue that the fun-factor is inherent and not tied to economic value. This implies that the utility isn't affected by lowered prices induced by an AH.

"

But then again, I see your point. But don't you think the convenience of an AH, letting you "trade" while mapping, sleeping, working and eating will make people identifying more rares, even if the expected value is lower? Because they won't have to invite players to party, have them over to their H/O and trade, while not having to leave the map/lab/instance they're in? I do, but again, that is just speculations. When said rare items are listed, they don't have to think about them at all, and there's no more time investment needed - as it is now.

I really don't know. What you appear to need for your premise is a measure of utility that is inversely proportional to economic value. I can't currently concieve of one, but that's not saying it's not there.

Also, note that there is still an opportunity cost to posting items for sale. Apart from time spend picking up and identifying, stash/AH space is still at a premium. You're going to run out very fast if you dump every rare that you find in there.

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laurensk wrote:

This is a fair point. What you're saying is people derive inherent utility ("fun") from identifying items and the thrill of the hunt for better gear. This is true, of course, but it also seems to be correlated to percieved economic value of those items. The fun-factor of finding good gear is in part derived from creating economic worth out of thin air. Hence, the higher the economic worth of the item, the greater the joy in finding it.

No matter how you turn it; except a certain Divination Card and a couple of unique items, the highest potential of a "one item, get rich" sale, comes from rares. No item in the game (leagues, that is) is worth more than a good rolled rare. Last league, I sold 3-4 (dropped) rares for more than 10 ex each. Not many uniques are worth this much. At least not un-"socketed". You can say I was lucky as a motherhumper, but the point remains; identifying rare items IS a very viable option to earn money in this game - if you know what rares to pick up, what tiers and so on.

This won't change with an AH. In contrast to "OK-ish" rares, VERY GOOD rolled rares will still be the most valuable items, no matter what. And if everyone speedruns through content, only picking up currency, these items will never hit the market - because the amount of "from base"-crafted items on the market is VERY low.

But I'm digressing.

Selling rares requires two things that most people lack... knowledge and attention.

Not sure if anyone posted about this, but a couple years back when COC builds where in poexyzused to have verify options and you could see if thw seller was online and/or still had the item in their possession. I don't know why now poe.trade shows people that are offline as online and showing people with items sold as having it still in their possession. If they went back to having these options to verify on the website instead of mass spamming the first 20 people in hopes one of those people aren't offline or already sold the item. Also maybe to implement something to where when a person turns afk their items in trade unpost from trade. since afk traders are one of the worste parts of the trade system.

Anyways that's my 2 cents sorry if the post is all jacked up I'm typing this from phone ;P

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Miská wrote:

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thevdende wrote:

Lot of people seem to think automated trading will crash the market. News flash this already happened when ggg implemented premium tabs and an API. Before that I could actually make legit currency running my forum thread shop. People will become rich off flipping currency with or without the AH some people enjoy that some don't. Some want a combination of both, in no way will the AH change the values of items, everyone who wants to list something already can, the only thing that will change is wasted time alt tabbing/messaging/afk/dnd people.

I agree that premium tabs already downed the market pretty hard. As so it's a foresight what would happen if you implement an even more convenient system. Sure you all will be happy for a moment because no more AFK or offline people. But that will quickly be forgotten and then the focus will come onto the part where you aren't generating any currency unless you sit infront of the AH (Like pretty much any other game that has an AH)

The thing I genuinely don't understand is if you are already whining about flipping now and how people profit of the current system how the hell do you think it will be when every little bit of effort is removed? The only way then will be to sit infront of an AH trading all day. Trying to snatch up good deals. You really wanna play poe like that?

Basically some people do want to play like that ~ and most people don't. I think most people don't actually enjoy trading for items, they mostly enjoy seeing valuable lewts and feeling epeen when you kill tough bosses. I think initially prices will be all over the place but they will settle down. The AH, I think, won't change people who enjoy trading: its qol for those who don't.

Edit: My main problem with the way things are now, is GGG is relying on a 3d party site which gives value to a product GGG sells; premium tabs. So, in the very least they could basically rip-off poe.trade exactly how it is, implement it in a noticeboard in town/hotkey and let you message people from there.

It doesn't matter what you call it. If you allow people to easily drop an item into your system and come back later to find that someone has left them something for it, you will flood the market with items that people currently don't want to bother with.

People don't seem to realize the scope of that.

You'll get a VAST increase in supply. You'll also decrease the demand for your items because your customers will have already bought items that they're happy with.

It shouldn't take a master's degree to figure out that your "market" will crash.