Wow This level of price fixing is ingenious

I am only beginning to understand how the scam works and how even poe.ninja websites get manipulated.


The price fixing scam

1. Manipulate poe.trade by listing multiples of item at lower price either with 1 item b/o or with fake accounts listing the price for cheap

2. Limit the number of fake price accounts so that it gets ignored from corner cases in aggregate / averages / stat websites like poe.ninja

3. have item for ridiculously high prices with a vast number of fake accounts so that the average price keeps going up.


with this you have manipulated the items average price , you have set up the window to grab the card at lowest price from whoever looks at the first page of poe.trade


Fking brilliant , This is but one of the ways where you create artificial demand.

I would love to hear what other ingenious ways people price fix , or have come across.

Another thing I noticed is that some of fake accounts with at step 3 are re listing those items at insanely high prices. I would assume this is to make a "fake sold" price appear to be true or something like that. Some of those high prices are pretty obvious they havent been sold for weeks/days.

fast moving / in demand items always get sold in a day or two.

It's not a scam, it's just people's clever use/abuse of a very stupid trading system.

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Pewzor wrote:

It's not a scam, it's just people's clever use/abuse of a very stupid trading system.

that's why i ignoring first 10-15 offers on poe and list item somewhere in the middle.

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Pewzor wrote:

It's not a scam, it's just people's clever use/abuse of a very stupid trading system.

you know , I used to think that i wanted AH but i can only imagine how things will go to shit with automated programs making instantaneous snipes. The rate at which the price is manipulated will be waay to dramatic .

the second you put an item for a wrong price its gone before you even realize what happened. At least now you can get suspicious enough to look if you have 4-5 instantaneous whispers for an item the instant its put up , assuming you are suspicious of instant whispers and dont think its dumb luck that your item is getting sold fast.

I mean its frightening how soon every thing can be manipulated at instantaneous level to make huge profits for gold sellers. I know it is currently being manipulated too but at least there is some illusion of sanity at times.

Whether you define it as scam, abuse or whatever, it is driving the market into an interesting position especially and hopefully as PoE stops experiencing huge mood swings.

We have way fewer drastic changes than we did closer to the betas/ less collective small changes that amounted to huge swings in essence, or at least what it feels like to me playing fairly casually since OB. I am hoping in the long term, patch notes get more consolidated each major patch as the only things they should be pumping out are the patch notes relating to new mechanics and less and less bug fixes and balance changes overall.

And with that I would also hope we can see market swings being less drastic so it doesn't get hit by big balance changes like VP change and what not. That combined with these "market incidents" make me inclined to hope that whatever is traded for frequently under any category will slowly have a real market price. Pretend like a year from now, Belly of the Beast for example having a solid steady price that even a more casual player who hides from trade a lot would know the price tag they are looking at if they want to buy one, or even if it drops for them the moment they see the specific rolls. Similarly, rare mods more well known what is consistently valuable in what combinations at what prices on what bases so there are fewer "I know these mods look good, don't know what its worth, let me plug the mods in to poe.trade and then fumble around with specifics so I know what its worth in comparison" from that same category of 'light traders.' Either end of these "market incidents" that people are using to their advantage would hopefully lose a lot of their advantages and flat out be seen by many as the extreme low balling or high ball selling that they are because even casual players would be able to point out the typical price of an item without research or the trade macro help. Then the only market swings we'd really see are from start of league and league aging/new items for the league where the prices are allowed and expected to be volatile for a time.

I personally never got to play D2 or anything, slow ass country internet as a child made handhelds and consoles much more appealing. But that is the impression I get when others talk about D2's economy and such when the internet was more immature and we didn't have half a dozen websites and tools for a game like this. Because it feels like that is how Runescape's economy evolved over time that I actually did play. You had manipulators and scammers and still do in some forms, but there was a general price or range of prices you learned that were consistently stable for long periods of time and didn't have to actually look it up. These things hopefully will become just general knowledge to even those with the minimum of playtimes.

Nothing really ingenious about this, and it has been done looong before PoE was even a concept. The fact that you don't have to sell for the price you set makes PoE market a joke compared to well thought out trading systems.

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you know , I used to think that i wanted AH but i can only imagine how things will go to shit with automated programs making instantaneous snipes.

GGG would be far more able to prevent real-time mass scanning of a ton of items and automated mass purchuses if it had to be done through a AH they managed rather then web scripts. And if things were posted on buyouts that auto sold in game, they could'nt flood the market with items at prices they have no intention to actually sell at. No, GGG keeping the trading system sh***y intentionally is massively enabling for the price fixers and market manipulators.

The manipulators win, the vast majority of the player bases loses, and GGG could'nt care less - it's one of the things that really makes me question my commitment to this game and the company.

Yes AH or not market manipulation will stay so it will be exactly the same as what we have right now just in different form. Whereas now there's fake lowball-no-sell, it will be slightly higher than norm and buyout all undercuts and corner the market.

However the differences are, currently fake lowballer carries zero risk, whereas market cornerers can run into demand issue and end up with bunch of unsold goods now worth less than what he paid for.

Also everyone would get instant trading.

Logically AH is far superior no matter how you spin it for the majority, but I also understand "pro" PoE players wants to manipulate market at 100% 0 risk AH poses a great threat to that kind of zero risk playstyle.

It seems some people wants to use "but D2 didnt have AH" as the ultimate excuse while GGG gets to use the same excuse to save some dev resources creating a superior trading system.

Trading limits/offer limits based on lvl of character in the league will solve most of problems.