Prevent daily calls for an AH: Make sensible suggestions

Edit in July: I'm gonna necro this thread, because I've seen may AH threads since and saw some interesting points+suggestions in them.
The last post from January is on pg 3.

Some points I've seen raised:
1. While the trade manifesto's logic may apply to items, it certainly does not apply to consumables like maps, essences or other crafting materials. So getting easier trade with those things might be fine even if easier trade for items could be bad.
2. Trading in leagues vs standard could also be separated, if the player bases are sufficiently different to want different solutions.
3. An item sink would benefit the economy even without any changes to trading. Synthesis league was mentioned, but many other ways come to mind. Selling great items to a vendor could net you progress on some kind of "vault-run" with random, but probably good rewards. Item durability should remain a no-go, in my opinion, for the same reason why std exists.
Vaal orbs and corruption chambers just aren't enough on their own for this purpose.

So, hope for some good discussions.


Edit in Jan: 2 pages of posts later, the consensus seems clear: People consider trade in PoE to be so bad that they'd like to see it removed completely. I disagree, but GGG should really take note and think about what they've done here!



Hi all!

I think many people are not happy with trade in its current state. This regularly causes some to call for an auction house in POE.
However, that is just not gonna happen, and there are some good reasons for that. While I believe many of the points in the infamous manifesto (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870) to be utter bull, I can understand that a full blown-auction house would require way too much rebalancing to be a good solution.

So why always think in black/white? Why can't we discuss smaller improvements to the current trade system? GGG has shown in the past that they listen if the suggestions are not against their core beliefs.


So, please make suggestions which fall somewhere in between "fully automated trade" and "no change". And please post productively, we have way too many flame wars over this topics in these forums. It would be nice if this thread could lead to productive discussions. Either improvements GGG can agree on or consensus reasons why certain improvements would be bad for the game.
Also, please be kind to what you consider dumb suggestions. Give counter arguments rather than deride the poster. Maybe they just didn't see the disadvantage or had a bad moment or maybe it was just worded badly. At any rate, we've all made suggestions in the past which were not fully thought out. This should not be discouraged too badly if we don't want to lose the occasional odd idea which may be better than it first looks or may at least trigger new directions of thought.


Have fun and good drops,
SB

I'll start with two of my own:

A. Allow cross instance trade
Publish, search and whisper remain unchanged, but the person who gets the whisper can open up the trade window from wherever the char is without going to the hide-out. This is just the usual trade window, with the referenced item already added. The players can still barter as now and at some stage the buyer puts the agreed price in the window and the trade is done, just like now. And yes, currency does go into the seller's inventory with all the usual limitations.


B. GGG should run some bots for maps/currency/crafting mats
These do nothing but trade, without generating any items or currency on their own. Example: A bot is designed to trade for maps. It will be given some starting currency by GGG so it can buy stock from players and then sell these maps to other players with a profit. As the bot can periodically destroy currency or maps, it can pay back its starting currency and even fight inflation.

(Edit: Moved some stuff to a second post to make the OP a bit more readable)

I'd like to add some arguments for and against easier trade, as they've been discussed hundreds of times and should not be ignored by people disagreeing with them.

Pros of easier trade
1. Less frustrating than sitting around spamming unresponsive people to get stuff. More time to slay monsters instead. Which does cause Con1, however, see below.
2. Fewer price fixers if done correctly.
3. It become easier to try out different builds if the necessary equipment is more available.
4. Gearing becomes relatively less important for progress in comparison to knowlegde/skill. If the new standard of gear is 90% of max instead of the current 60% (numbers pulled from my ass), a person with 99% gear is not at quite such an advantage over the average player. GGG could also balance the game a bit better then.
5. More currency means more crafting, which can be fun. But see Con5.


Cons of easier trade
1. Own drops no longer feel as good, because we can get better stuff for a few chaos. But that is already the case, many people don't ID all but the most special rares anymore.
2. Easier trade means more time to slay monsters and generate new currency/items. This will change the market. As both items and currency become more available, the direction of this change is probably complete speculation.
3. Trading should not be that much more powerful than slaying monsters. Though it already is, there is a price of time+frustration associated with it, which makes slaying monsters a little more enticing.
4. Bots would take over. I think this is nonsense. Bots thrive in environments which contain repetitive or generally frustrating tasks. Making trade less of a hassle would benefit people more than bots, so bots would become relatively less useful than now.
5. More crafting means more godly items, devaluing you finds.
6. Programming effort. Not a good argument, as anything a large chunk of people consider an improvement pays off, else the game would have stopped at closed beta.
7. Game is over when a char is fully geared. Trade makes this faster. This will be a good point for many people, but is not valid for all (my fav char in std is very well geared, but I still play it occasionally because it's fun).
8. D3 AH was a failure. Bad point, it sucked because of the RM aspect of it.
9. Specific to instant buyouts: Wrong pricing can lead to big losses. If I select "Alt" instead of "Ex" in the currency box for a price, I would be really annoyed by the loss. Currently, I'm just spammed into the ground for the next few minutes.

NPC now has all gems, any other currency except chaos+ tier, so they should have all maps. Item trading is fine, but currency/map is abysmal. In the past max leveled Masters were selling uniques, so they should now. Since Zana sometimes have cards...

Maps should be unlocked when you complete whole tier, so now you can buy once or twice per day any map from that tier. It's fair and still don't let you easy farm of one type of map with the limit per day.

I would change Atlas mechanic in a way that you don't need a connection to drop a certain map for a higher tier, just go by tiers, so if you start from Atoll you can drop any other T2. Path in the Atlas should be only for +2 tier drops.

As for trading with other players - I would remove party and coming to HO, instead just trade option as you have whisper with rmb on someones nick. Even in Lab you have access to your chest, so it's not a huge problem. During rotas, there's always a gap between maps, so you don't have to leave the party anymore. If expecting that one peculiar item would be sold soon, you can always carry it in your inventory.

Maybe, a new league idea for alternative to item trading. Let's they Treasure Hunting. Something similar to Scarab with stat like: "Shavrone items are more likely to drop". Of course it's not limited to Wrappings, so I wouldn't call it OP, but it's still an option to more specific item find. We want it and now we have a means to get it.

Anyway, any mechanic that will make trading obsolete is welcome. Trading should be a last resort, not a necessary mean, especially in game which there's no mechanic to encourage it.

Having said that, current state of global 820 is garbage. Just service crap, boss killers, etc. Stop this. Once again - a new league idea for henches like in D2. I think that they're more people willing to "help" you than people who really need help. It's not a healthy environment. Especially that GGG does nothing to ban bots from globals, instead banning me for the le tucan (not on 820!), which is stupid and doesn't even make sense. People love him, praise him, so what's going on here? Why global 820 is full of sellers? Ban them all!

the AH whiners will still complain for an AH, regardless of what changes/etc, until there is an AH.

there is no compromise or whatever.

"

Gosen wrote:

...
Anyway, any mechanic that will make trading obsolete is welcome. Trading should be a last resort, not a necessary mean, especially in game which there's no mechanic to encourage it...

I think we can safely assume that GGG does want us to be trade with each other.

And I agree with them, it is an aspect of any dungeon crawler which makes the game more long-lived. Other games have shown that it need not be a pain, either.

So, does anyone else have suggestions for improvements?

"

I think we can safely assume that GGG does want us to be trade with each other.

And yet they do nothing to prove it... besides adding trade stash tabs behind paywall. Good job, considering it's the only thing they've ever done in 5 years regarding trade.

I don't like mechanics in game that let you earn currency without playing the actual game. As long you have some base currency you can just keep trading without playing a second... I've met a guy, who has a bad PC and can just basically trade, so he has like 21 exalts without even playing, while I put all my effort into gameplay and can't even drop a single one in 80 hours. It's not how it supposed to be working.

their own trade site wasn't made for competing with poe.trade
it's just that emmitt never cared for multi language support but ggg does.

cross instance trading would allow bots and malicious folks to easily exchange items. also legit people running several accounts would have it easier exchanging items to secondary accounts and not buy stash tabs.

have no suggestions for automated trading, having people manually do it slows it down already, i'm only missing some component that reduces the amount of trades one can do per hour without accounts having to be registered.

Wow, so far only hate for trade in general. One would think everybody plays SSF...

Does really no one have suggestions for small changes that seem realistic?

Poe trade is the single worst thing about his game.

People need to get over your d3 flashbacks, and gggs rmt paranoia and support a auction house to actually make trading work for anyone other than scammers.

I swear, I'm coming to think that old players are just so used to abusing price manipulation, scamming, and flipping to make their early bank, that they'd rather keep trade shit then lose that.

IMO, you will never see an AH in poe, because they don't want the headache.