GGG's argument about AH/state of trade that is grinding my gears - 2018 edition

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Perq wrote:

But it isn't 100 minutes. People who want to get everything from trade already do that. You can sit all day complaining about these people, or that they are taking the easy way (not like you, the true player, btw ssf, tips fedora, PT died for this and so on), but this still remains a fact.

And of course it isn't binary - at this time we're at the point in which casual players simply don't want/know how take part in trade, so they don't. And because of that they lose out, which creates the disparity.

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Perq wrote:

You can claim all day that if you make the trade less-annoying, it will be worse for the game, but the fact of the matter is that inconvenient trade CAUSES the disparity and not the way around. At least this makes more sense compared to what GGG is proposing.

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Sickness wrote:

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torturo wrote:

What and why actually happened was pointed out many pages ago, if you wish you can find it out by yourself.
Or search on the internet for the many related topics.

It's just tiresome to explain something over and over and over and over.

So Blizzard lied? Why did they do that ? Why did they remove the AH in the first place if it was so great?
Nah, you are not making any sense.

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The first thing you have to understand is why open trading didn't work and still wouldn't work in Diablo III. And that reason is because 99% of a player's progress and power comes from the clothes their hero wears.

This single reason makes trading super OP because it allows people to trade instantly for the best gear in the game without having to put hardly anytime in the game at all.

All you have to do is level to 70 and you can slap on anything you want. Pretty pathetic requirements to be honest.

So this made trading a huge problem because it short-circuited the "grind" or "reason for playing the game" and left players with nothing to do afterwards.

So.... Blizzard had 2 choices that they could use to fix this issue.

One was smart and the other was lazy. Guess which one they picked?

Smart Fix
Blizzard COULD have changed the game so that gear wasn't so important. They could have put more power back onto the character with a skill system that allows players to level up certain skills. Or anything along those lines.

This would have offset the over-importance of gear and would have given players something else to do besides sit on the AH and flip items to make money to buy gear to give them more power. It would have let people play in different styles and commit to those gameplay styles because they would have the ability to level up the skills they want to use.

People wouldn't have been so reliant on gear to succeed and wouldn't have had to worry about developer nerfs every 3 months because in a system like that it is much easier to balance skills rather than trying to balance hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of randomized gear.

Lazy Fix
The Lazy Fix was to just leave the game as it was and remove trading all together. To compensate they just ramped up the drop rates times a BAZILLION and basically left the game exactly the way it already was.

Blizzard obviously went with the lazy fix and the funny thing is that after they removed trading it finally made people realize how shallow this game is and how little there is to do with hardly any incentive to do it. Literally, the only good thing that came from removing trade was the fact that people and developers couldn't use that as a scapegoat any longer and had to actually look at the game itself.

Thanks to this lazy, streamlined approach Diablo III has de-evolved into an Action Adventure game with minimal options and almost no choices because all your decisions have been pre-determined by the developers and whatever sets they choose to release.

There is no offset to the over-importance of gear and there never will be. There are no meaningful quests in the game and there never will be. Everyone is exactly the same and always will be.

It's an MMORPG except you are limited to 4 people and there is no raiding. You just race against timers in GRifts and try to play as efficiently as possible at all times because the only boss you are ever fighting against is the RNG boss.

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Sickness wrote:

"The disparity". What disparity exactly?
You are looking at different problems and calling them idiots because they don't agree that your problem is bigger than your problem.

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robmafia wrote:

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Perq wrote:

And of course it isn't binary - at this time we're at the point in which casual players simply don't want/know how take part in trade, so they don't. And because of that they lose out, which creates the disparity.
You can claim all day that if you make the trade less-annoying, it will be worse for the game, but the fact of the matter is that inconvenient trade CAUSES the disparity and not the way around. At least this makes more sense compared to what GGG is proposing.

lolz @ the thought that easier trade (AH or otherwise) would somehow magically make the casuals poeconomics-savvy... and blaming the state of trade for the disparity of knowledge.

more casuals trading = more fodder for flippers.

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Perq wrote:

Here, took me 5 seconds to google. Bro Taiga at D3 forums explained it pretty well, I think:

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Perq wrote:

The point is - PoE is VERY far from the shallowness that D3 has. Many people have proven time and time again that you can do end-game content with shitty gear (or even SSF btw one). Once again - people who gain the biggest benefits will do that anyways, and people who really NEED those benefits (casuals) are denied it with the level of annoying bollocks that you have to do in order to trade. And lets be honest here - new players that aren't that good with the game will not be able to success, even if they get great gear from AH. Because PoE is far more than trade and gear.

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Perq wrote:

The disparity that GGG uses as an argument? You know, the very topic I'm trying to discuss here? :P
And it isn't really my problem. This mainly hits new players - I can manage to get around current systems - they not so much.

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Zaludoz wrote:

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robmafia wrote:

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Perq wrote:

And of course it isn't binary - at this time we're at the point in which casual players simply don't want/know how take part in trade, so they don't. And because of that they lose out, which creates the disparity.
You can claim all day that if you make the trade less-annoying, it will be worse for the game, but the fact of the matter is that inconvenient trade CAUSES the disparity and not the way around. At least this makes more sense compared to what GGG is proposing.

lolz @ the thought that easier trade (AH or otherwise) would somehow magically make the casuals poeconomics-savvy... and blaming the state of trade for the disparity of knowledge.

more casuals trading = more fodder for flippers.

Depends on the tools provided.
In other online games where one can go kill stuff and find items and later list them for sale to other players for a price, there are generally tools to facilitate this in the game. One, is the "price history" feature. This lets people see a list of completed trades of that item. PoE's "Price History" would have to be fundamentally different from other listings, because most just use gold, and most items have fixed stats. (note these two facts make a PoE "auction house" or simply in-game browse-to-find-listed-items features far less impactful on the economy than other games with similar features)

In this case, the items listed would likely have to be based on the chosen item base the search is founded upon, or sum of affix values, and the pool of potential "history" cases would be more diverse, and would still require a player to build some knowledge of why different pieces went for the different prices in such a system. In such a system, I think Uniques would be the easiest to price, due to their mostly static values.

As to casuals becoming some sort of fodder for flippers: (first off, that's a very dim view of people who don't participate in this game's mockery of trade)

If a player lists an item for way less than they should based on a manipulated price history (a clan deciding to list a bunch of items for sale and sell back to other members), they'd say to themselves, self, that sold REALLY fast. Maybe I should raise my price next time... until they reach a point when it takes way too long to sell, and they say self, that took too long to sell, maybe you priced it too high, and they lower their price.

SOOOOO advanced. Can't expect players to get poeconomicly savvy with easy trade, now can we?

But right now, you don't just have non-traders who have NEVER used an Auction House before, we have (at least) one prolific trader in other games, who while in Path of Exile, simply refuses to take part in PoE's version of trade, using 3rd party websites and non-integrated trade features to do any trades. These sorts of people already know HOW to trade, but don't.

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I posted about this in their Trade Manifesto thread a long time back... I came to exactly the OPPOSITE conclusions on each and every point that they used to say "Easy Trade" was bad.

The only reasons I can see for them wanting "hard trade" is that they do not want every single player taking part in trade, one of the core pillars of PoE's game design. Thus, they cannot balance the game around trade, because only a few dedicated players (compared to the masses of players who simply don't bother with the mess we have here) are engaging in trade.

This essentially makes PoE a SSF experience, even for people playing in trade leagues, and we have players on two very different tiers of power. You can't balance around both, so you have people who trade and can steamroll content, claiming the game is too easy, while you have people who don't trade, and struggle to kill bosses in multi-minute battles claiming the bosses have to be toned down a notch. (dial this up to the max when you then compare a SSF melee player with a trading ranged or caster character and how do you balance this exactly? - and having a good build can be hamstrung by not having good gear - ssf I rarely find good Health on gear... so people saying you need absurdly high numbers of health to survive (over 4k health has been absurd to me, even going 200% life on tree, for instance - while I COULD in a trade league, just go buy gear with good health rolls on it, because apparently that stuff drops for the other 100,000 players, but not me.))

That's where your disparity comes from - and hard trade doesn't make this situation any better for the non-traders, it just leads to frustration.

GGG NEEDS to decide if they want the game balanced around trade or not, and then make trading either a core element of progression, or just a failsafe if your own drops don't give you what you need. Otherwise, the game will always be in an unbalanced state, and the disparity between traders and non-traders will be a huge gulf.

Putting an in-game interface for listing and searching for items for sale is an INTEGRAL part of a game with trade. Simple as that. (Whether there are buy-outs or not is not part of that point.)

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robmafia wrote:

you just proved my point.

now it's not just an AH, but an AH with "tools" including how much "gold" (lolz) something sells for.

*facepalm*

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robmafia wrote:

you should heed your own advice.

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Sickness wrote:

Just the fact that poe.trade becamse so popular completely destroys that argument. It was a more efficient way to trade and thus more people trades more.
[...]
And the more trading the less reliance on self-found/crafted gear, which to Blizzard was the point of the game in teh first place and the reason why they removed the AH.

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It is designed around a strong online item economy, deep character customisation (sic!), competitive PvP and ladder races.

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Sickness wrote:

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Perq wrote:

The point is - PoE is VERY far from the shallowness that D3 has. Many people have proven time and time again that you can do end-game content with shitty gear (or even SSF btw one). Once again - people who gain the biggest benefits will do that anyways, and people who really NEED those benefits (casuals) are denied it with the level of annoying bollocks that you have to do in order to trade. And lets be honest here - new players that aren't that good with the game will not be able to success, even if they get great gear from AH. Because PoE is far more than trade and gear.

Yeah that sound lovely but it doesn't change anything about what I have been talking about.

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Perq wrote:

Snip