General Discussion - Trading System? - Forum

" Shagsbeard wrote: They "deliberately ignore" this because the solutions make the problem worse. Easy trade would ruin the game. No trade would ruin the game. Hence, they compromise on "difficult trade". Read the damn manifesto. This! Does someone actually think GGG is unable to code/implement an automated system? Do you guys think they don't know how? Of course they know. Of course they can. The only reason why they haven't, is that they haven't found the right solution. The solution that would make the GAME better. The solution that doesn't make TRADE better on behalf of making the GAME worse. They can't win this. In their vision, there has to be certain "limitations" when it comes to trade. Why? To preserve the in-game progression and don't make the game all about trade. So if they were to make an automated system, you can bet your wife on the fact that it would have direct limitations - and the community would raise havoc. Now, we have an indirect limitation. Just play the game. And trade when you really have to. Have fun. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.	Posted by Phrazz#3529 on Feb 9, 2019, 11:52:22 AM Quote this Post
" Shagsbeard wrote: They "deliberately ignore" this because the solutions make the problem worse. Easy trade would ruin the game. No trade would ruin the game. Hence, they compromise on "difficult trade". Read the damn manifesto. Please stop talking about "easy trade" as the reason for not making any changes. The "DAMN manifesto" as you call it states: " Chris wrote: Spoiler Items Matter. Trade is Important. When we started developing Path of Exile in 2006, we identified several key design pillars. These are fundamental philosophies chosen to guide our design decisions throughout development. One of these was that "items matter". Items are a player's reward for playing Path of Exile. They're the primary way of measuring progress in a league. A person with vastly more in-game wealth has often played longer than someone with a higher level character. They also matter because if a player had better items, then they'd be able to build more powerful characters, play harder content, and be viewed as richer and more successful within the game. The acquisition of items is why people play Action RPGs. Chances are, if you're reading this, you understand why it's important that items matter because your Path of Exile items mean a lot to you as well. For items to matter, it's important that they can be traded to other players. It's important that you could give the item to the other player, if they were able to convince you into it. For this reason, almost nothing in Path of Exile is bound to your account. Even in Solo Self-Found mode, which doesn't allow trading, items can be moved at will into the regular trading leagues so that you can benefit from their value if desired. The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile - if you're lucky, you can find amazing stuff that you can trade for all the items needed to create an entire new character build. Consequences of Easy Trade So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile's formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not. While easy trade sounds great on paper, there are some important considerations! Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items. People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level! Easy trade means reducing drop rates Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can't be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can't use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in. Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower. The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier. Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players. Trade in Path of Exile From the start, we knew that Path of Exile needed the ability to trade items and that we had to be careful not to make it too easy. We had seen what happened in other Action RPGs when characters could be upgraded trivially. We added trade chat and a secure player-to-player trade screen so that people could negotiate transactions and complete them without counterparty risk. With insufficient foresight into how it'd eventually affect trade, we also added the ability to link items on the official forums. Linking items is a way of showing other players that you actually own an item, because the system automatically checks that you still have the item in that form and marks it as verified. This system was intended so that players could show off their awesome finds to other players, in a similar way to the in-game item linking system. Because items matter so much in Path of Exile, it was important that we provided many ways to prove ownership of items. We even intended to allow people to Tweet their items from within the game, though never got around to implementing this feature. Before long, people used item linking to set up shops within the trade forums. This was expected, because the goal of item linking was to prove ownership of items (so that people could know that you still have the item before they make you an offer). These shops became complicated and people made tools that let users manage their shops and post to them efficiently. So far, so good. Then came the forum-scraping bots. Smart community members worked out that they could automatically crawl the forum and insert all of the items into a database, creating an instantly- and accurately-searchable index of all items for trade in Path of Exile. There was nothing we could do about this, because it's almost impossible to stop people gathering information from a public website. A trade ecosystem evolved where players would search for items on trade websites to quickly find what they need, but would have to manually contact the user in-game to perform the trade. While this was a lot quicker than before, we grew to accept it but were worried about one aspect in particular: To create trade forum threads easily, users would download third-party programs and enter their account details (or at least web session IDs). While these tools and their authors never took advantage of this in an illegal way, it was a potentially dangerous situation for our users and we really needed an official solution. We made it so that Premium Stash Tabs can expose their contents to trade sites on a public API. So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade. This remaining frustration is the only thing standing in the way of trades being basically instant. While we understand that this sounds like a positive thing, we are very concerned regarding what will happen if that does eventuate. We have to prioritise the long-term health of Path of Exile. The Trade Market The version of Path of Exile published by Tencent in Mainland China uses the "Trade Market" rather than a system of exposing items via public stash tabs and forum posts for searching on web pages. This system is also in use on the Xbox One version of Path of Exile - as you can imagine, web page searches and textual trade conversations aren't well suited to the controller input of a console. On the trade market, we're experimenting with the opposite end of the trade spectrum, where it's very easy to complete trades but more difficult to find the exact item you're looking for. You can search broadly by a specific item class or type, but have to look through a lot of search results to find the one you want to make an offer on. This system intentionally makes the search process harder and the trade process easier, for quite a different trade experience. We're not planning to bring it to the international PC version of Path of Exile. Ok, so this is GGG's reason for leaving trade chat as it is and not improving it. There are many flaws here: 1. "Easy" or "Hard" to trade. Why must it be one extreme or the other? Why is there no middle ground for trading? 2. Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation. GGG is already is using Cloud Flare for captcha account logins already so using it for trade function to stop automated bot trading (I saw how that wrecked D3 AH) is a no brainer. 3. Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items. If players can trade easier than "hard" to trade then we're not upgrading our items as often. That statement just isn't logical. As we play a build we continually improve our gear as we reach higher levels and can then use the higher level better gear. If trading is easier it means we get to use better gear more often as the whole process of finding and buying better gear takes less time. Therefore we're likely to want to improve our items more often, not less. 4. Easy trade means reducing drop rates. How so? Right now PoE already has way too much trash loot drops so reducing the garbage drops (white trash) is a good thing. If GGG thinks that they have to reduce the times we get a quality item drop if trading were easier because we would find more items to trade for and wouldn't care what drops as much then that is A) Pushing us into doing more trading and is exactly what what GGG would like us to do more often (makes PoE even more trade-centric). B) Places a magnifying lens on the whole fact that right now 99.999% of drops are garbage. It also magnifies the GGG flawed thinking that in the endgame item scaling has to stop in the ilevel lower 80s (with rare exceptions). On an 85+ level exile the drops are all way below the level for it to be a better item than we're already using and thus we just ignore most of the drops save a few to vendor or store for the Chaos/Regal recipe. So unless GGG wants to remove the endgame ilevel cap and allow item scaling to keep pace with the exile level (which I don't see ever happening) then we're forever stuck between a rock and a hard place (not finding better gear drops and not able to trade easier for better gear as the "hard" (awkward) to use Trade Chat makes us not want to use it (WTBs go unanswered way too much). 5. Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great. Again how so? Right now the disparity in trading is mostly due to playing time limitations. The 10% or so of players that are wealthy each expansion league are those who have the time to devote to playing more and accrue more wealth. Ok, so that is all logical (if I play more I get more wealth, duh). But easier trading would allow more casual players to engage in trading and thus raise their wealth too (assuming they look up the current worth of an item and don't get scammed). And if there's a way for more casuals to sell items outside of having to be in-game, oh I don't know, say via a smart phone selling trade app, then a majority of casuals can actually engage in selling and sell un-needed items and thus raise their wealth each expansion which is exactly what should be happening now and isn't because it's too cumbersome and time consuming and can only be done while logged into the game which is what most casuals don't have which is the time resources to devote to being in-game as much as current trade chat requires. Thus easier trading provides the time limited players a greater opportunity to be a seller (with the out of game smart phone sell app) and thus gain more wealth to be able to gear a build better (and reduce the player disparity) to then take on the higher difficulty content. So what's bad with that reasoning? TLDR: In all my arguments (if you read and didn't just skip) it should be noted that GGG uses the word easy. I used the word easier which goes to my #1 item. Why is there no middle position to code a trade function between the difficult to use current system (hard) and an auction house (easy)? With the GGG manifesto they keep pointing out why an "easy" trade system is bad to justify their own position (trade chat works {barely for all but the no-lifers for selling} and thus we don't need to do anything more). But in the current system there is only one way to being a successful trader. Play PoE as close to 24/7 as possible to get the WTB whispers. Being a casual and having a sell tab or 2 just doesn't work as we're not on-line often enough to get the WTB whispers and thus miss the opportunity to sell and this just snowballs the frustration of a buyer because the seller isn't responding to the WTB. This has got to change if GGG is to make PoE the best arpg of all-time and it needs to be done asap. So keep the overall mechanics of having to {Alt}Tab out to do an item search, then copy/paste the WTB in the trade chat window, but then let the seller get notified by an instant messenger app on smart phone so the seller can be AFK from PoE and still sell items. This will level out the disparity between the no-lifers that can respond to all WTBs and the casual and time limited players that miss most of the WTBs. This would also dramatically reduce the quantity of no responses to a WTB whisper. Thank you and have a good day GGG. "You've got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone..." Necessity may be the mother of invention, but poor QoP in PoE is the father of frustration. The perfect solution to fix Trade Chat: www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2247070 Last edited by Arrowneous#3097 on Feb 9, 2019, 7:02:01 PM	Posted by Arrowneous#3097 on Feb 9, 2019, 6:57:46 PM Quote this Post
It's perfectly ok to disagree with them. But they're making the calls, and they've made one of the most successful games in the history of computer gaming. I'd listen to them.	Posted by Shagsbeard#3964 on Feb 9, 2019, 9:44:43 PM Quote this Post
Well, okay, I don't know about trade chat, so I'm not going to attempt to speak to that. Could trade chat be improved? Sure, but I think that's tangential to the main point. The main point is sourcing. This is a loot-hunt game. That's the core game play: Kill stuff, get loot. The loot makes you stronger, so you can kill stronger stuff and get better loot. It's meant to be a standing wave of "challenge" (I'm not saying it's successful, I'm saying that's the design goal of (all, or most) ARPGs. Players are meant to experience (more or less) consistent levels of challenging game-play across the envelope of developed content. Each encounter is supposed to be a certain level of difficulty (it's not completely consistent, some are supposed to be harder, some easier). Each encounter is supposed to offer incremental rewards. These rewards are intended to give you just enough increased strength, that you can tackle the next challenge in line. Etc, etc. " Arrowneous wrote: 1. "Easy" or "Hard" to trade. Why must it be one extreme or the other? Why is there no middle ground for trading? There is a middle ground. What we have now is that middle ground. As I said, it's the lesser of two evils. Trade exists, it's functional, it can be used to gather additional wealth (although see my comment about zero sum below), it can be used to acquire key pieces of gear, which you may personally have not seen drop, but which you consider critical to your character's progression. But the game remains a loot-hunt. The trade function should never become the primary source of gearing. (Which is exactly what happened in D3). I will say that (I think) pushing map progression onto the trading system is probably a poor choice on GGG's part. Personally, I'd make Orbs of the Horizon a bit more common instead. " Arrowneous wrote: 3. Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items. If players can trade easier than "hard" to trade then we're not upgrading our items as often. That statement just isn't logical. As we play a build we continually improve our gear as we reach higher levels and can then use the higher level better gear. If trading is easier it means we get to use better gear more often as the whole process of finding and buying better gear takes less time. Therefore we're likely to want to improve our items more often, not less. I disagree, based on my experience with D3 (back when it had a game-gold AH). I think Chris Wilson's assessment of how trade would impact upgrade frequency is spot on. The point is, that when you are killing stuff, you get (making up some numbers here...) 100 chest drops. Of those 100 drops, let's say 5 of them are at least slightly better than whatever you happen to be wearing at the moment. That's 5 times you have a chance to "upgrade". Maybe you choose to take those options, maybe you decide that rebalancing your stats isn't worth it. But regardless, the game has offered you multiple decisions in a given span of play. If on the other hand you offer easy trade, then the player doesn't look at choices 1 through 4. The player uses the search function and finds choice 5 (the "best" one), and buys it. He doesn't spend the time to kill all those enemies that dropped the 100 chest pieces, he doesn't ID them, he doesn't look at them or consider them. He's already wearing a better piece. He knows he's already wearing a better piece. So, those 100 chest piece drops, they're no longer potential upgrades. They're just a chore, a grind he has to do to be able to afford the next upgrade he's going to buy from the market. " Arrowneous wrote: 4. Easy trade means reducing drop rates. How so? Right now PoE already has way too much trash loot drops so reducing the garbage drops (white trash) is a good thing. If GGG thinks that they have to reduce the times we get a quality item drop if trading were easier because we would find more items to trade for and wouldn't care what drops as much then that is A) Pushing us into doing more trading and is exactly what what GGG would like us to do more often (makes PoE even more trade-centric). We're not talking about reducing white drops. We're talking about reducing the things people actually want. Why? Because that's exactly what they had to do in D3. " Bashiok wrote: If we say "a player should have X power in Y amount of time through drops" and completely ignore that the time factor can be reduced by simply having access to more drops through trading and the auction house, players would be gearing up far quicker than we've determined they should. It has nothing to do with the auction house per se, but the general ease at which players have access to more items than they would without it and us needing to keep that in mind while balancing drops. It would be rather poorly thought out if we balanced drops completely ignoring all of the ways players can gear up, and trading is certainly one of them. Source: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/d3/topic/5150764997?page=3#49 The point is, that if we consider a popular item, say ... the Impulsa chest, for every copy that ends up being traded, there are at least 9 more that are collecting dust in someone's stash. If you make trading easier, then some/all of those other 9 chest pieces come onto the market. Because if trading becomes easier, supply (which is normally "lost" due to the intentional inefficiency of the trading system) grows. Chris Wilson has the figures on trade, he's indicated that most players do not trade. At all. " Arrowneous wrote: But easier trading would allow more casual players to engage in trading and thus raise their wealth too No, it does not. Trading is a zero sum game. If you trade, and you make 10 chaos in trade, then someone else has 10 less chaos. Zero currency enters the economy via trading. All currency enters the economy as a direct result of playing the game, killing enemies, clearing content. Some people do get rich via trading, but they do it at the expense of those who buy and become poorer as a result. Now, I'm not saying that there couldn't or shouldn't be quality of life changes, but (in my opinion) making trading easier (in general) would have exactly the impact that Chris Wilson thinks it would. 'A Balrog,' muttered Gandalf. 'Now I understand.' He faltered and leaned heavily on his staff. 'What an evil fortune! And I am already weary.'	Posted by Unquietheart#1016 on Feb 9, 2019, 11:07:25 PM Quote this Post
Im so god damn shocked that we get "trade is bad" threads every week and I still see lietrally WALL OF TEXTS in every of them. Do you guys dont have anything better to do? Trade is bad and will be, can we stop? Last edited by Aynix#7757 on Feb 10, 2019, 5:57:53 AM	Posted by Aynix#7757 on Feb 10, 2019, 5:57:35 AM On Probation Quote this Post
" Aynix wrote: Im so god damn shocked that we get "trade is bad" threads every week and I still see lietrally WALL OF TEXTS in every of them. Do you guys dont have anything better to do? Trade is bad and will be, can we stop? Yes these threads pop up all the time. But just saying "trade is bad" doesn't do any good if you are not willing to explain or take a stand on the subject. Having a rational debate on this (or any topic) is what people do all the time. Just adding a troll response is bad. Hmm... with that comment then EVERYONE should stop playing all game now and forever because doing so is certainly not productive unless you get paid from being a streamer. We should also quit watching tv or doing anything that is obviously a waste of time. It's early Sunday morning right now and I'll be going to my church soon to sing in our choir. It costs me money and time to drive there and spend the whole morning interacting with other religiously like minded individuals. But I guess I should quit because it's another waste of time. Your life must be extremely boring. Sad. "You've got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone..." Necessity may be the mother of invention, but poor QoP in PoE is the father of frustration. The perfect solution to fix Trade Chat: www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2247070	Posted by Arrowneous#3097 on Feb 10, 2019, 6:44:54 AM Quote this Post
they made clear that for trading we either get comfortable item exchange or item search. i i were to choose i don't want them to close down poe.trade, abandon their own trade search and implement the xbox ingame trading system for the world realm. age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill!	Posted by vio#1992 on Feb 10, 2019, 6:57:44 AM Alpha Member Quote this Post
" Unquietheart wrote: Because the existing system is considered the lesser of two evils. Not "lesser" - "lazier". " Unquietheart wrote: Conceptually, you're not supposed to be trading constantly. You're supposed to trade for a handful of key items that will make or break your chosen build. Then why current trade system DOES allow to trade constantly? Why dont implement a system, that actually doesnt allow trading 24/7? An AH with limited number of sells, searches, etc per day, for example? " Unquietheart wrote: It's all explained in considerable detail in the Trade Manifesto. Which is what Shagsbeard linked (above). That manifesto is worth less than paper it's written on. It's full of nonsense and isnt linked to reality in any way. The only logic explaination for current trading system to exist - GGG is too lazy to make it right way. IGN: MortalKombat Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power	Posted by MortalKombat3#6961 on Feb 10, 2019, 7:14:28 AM Quote this Post
If you reject the offer to explain why something is true, you will never understand it. The reason they can't go to "easy trade" is that people will stop having to save items. It will become easier just to amass currency and trade for the items you wish to use. No storage necessary... and storage is their cash cow.	Posted by Shagsbeard#3964 on Feb 10, 2019, 7:18:26 AM Quote this Post
" MortalKombat3 wrote: Then why current trade system DOES allow to trade constantly? Why dont implement a system, that actually doesnt allow trading 24/7? An AH with limited number of sells, searches, etc per day, for example? If you can't see that this would be even more unpopular than the current system, you haven't been paying attention. Personally, I wouldn't mind - I trade very little. But as an emphatic person I would recommend against it. " MortalKombat3 wrote: That manifesto is worth less than paper it's written on. It's full of nonsense and isnt linked to reality in any way. The only logic explaination for current trading system to exist - GGG is too lazy to make it right way. If you seriously think the reason why they haven't implemented an automated system is "laziness", I feel very sorry for you. And just because you can't understand their reasons in the manifesto, doesn't make it bullshit. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile. Last edited by Phrazz#3529 on Feb 10, 2019, 7:36:36 AM	Posted by Phrazz#3529 on Feb 10, 2019, 7:35:50 AM Quote this Post