The arguement against auto trading is what, exactly?...

This is a game which has it's reward system based on finding items. Easy and fast trade would make finding items less rewarding.

I bet there are as many people that would find "easy and fast trading" just as rewarding as those that would not.

except we already have fast trading, it just isn't as easy as it could be. its easy enough (when the moons align and someone responds on the first whisper)

i think the way they did jewels this league is in order to bring back what they want to be forum trading. make the jewels have so many "seeds" that you literally have to make a scion, take a picture of all the nodes it changes and what it does and make a forum selling post for that jewel. dead serious. Chris said in the baeclast this is what they wanted trade to be.

the problem was, trading was done via forums etc, but then someone got smart and made a trade website that just searched the forums itself or w/e so you could easily get a listing of items you wanted instead of spending hours on a forum trying to find an item.
eventually this pressured GGG to do something, since it got so popular. so they ended up making premium stash tabs, which they state they regret making. boom

as it is, the end game crafting is the best option to get rares, not trading. trading makes this easier to do though, since you can trade for fusings and what have you. its also much cheaper to craft yourself than to buy the gg rares that are already crafted.

in my opinion and experience trading is mostly used to get materials you cannot sustain on. fusings, vaal orbs, chisels, maps, alterations, fossils etc. those are used for crafting. this is most of the trading, and not buying items.

any item worth buying is either so cheap and plentiful that its easy enough to get anyway, because there are thousands of listings and its a maximum of 1 chaos. you'll get the item eventually, making the process less frustrating will only improve that experience.
and for the big trades, you're looking at a few exalts worth, to which you'll take the time required in order to make that trade because its a big trade worth your time. so again making that experience less infuriating will only improve the experience.

trading is already easy enough. its just an unnecessary annoyance to deal with AFKers, flippers, etc. making trade more auto will not change anything about people obtaining items, it will only make people happier about not getting constantly pissed off from the process of getting those items.

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xMustard wrote:

except we already have fast trading

This isn't really an argument though, as trading already is far more accessible than GGG ever intended. They have, repeatedly - in so many words, confirmed that.

Interpreting Chris' statement over the years, it seems that (in his eyes) trading plays an important role, as it gives drops value. The simple fact that you can trade an item, gives it so much more value than SSF games ever will. Chris has, again - repeatedly said so.

As I've understood it, the release of the API back in the days came because of a tremendously high amount of pings towards the old forum trading - from poe.trade and the likes. They caved, they released the API - poe.trade became the center of everything. A couple of years past, and GGG finally released their own trading site. Now they find themselves in this... Twilight Zone. Trade is far easier than they ever intended, yet people want even more.

But as we've seen from GGG and Blizzard statements, trade and balance goes hand in hand. The easier trade get, the more they have to adjust in-game balance. If they made trade automated/easier, it's pretty naive to think that the game will "remain the same". Maybe we won't see changes right away. But when every piece of new content is being implemented with "instant/automated/easier" trade in mind, we WILL get changes.

Some are OK with that. Some are not. That's why this debate keeps reoccurring time after time.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

This is a game which has it's reward system based on finding items. Easy and fast trade would make finding items less rewarding.

SO i dont know about you guys, but lets say you want a Kaoms Heart.

Finding a Kaoms Heart directly or finding something else of equal value, is just one and the same for me. I couldnt care less if i find the items i want myself or if i buy them.

A few additional counter arguments against auto-trading.

* Currently trading requires both parties to be online and in the same zone to successfully do a trade. If there would be auto-trading, the entire point of buying mtx becomes redundant. You are basically playing a singleplayer game at this point. Why would I even purchase new mtx if no one is going to see them anyway? There will be players asking refunds for this. GGG will have to come up with a new way to finance their game.

* If there is auto-trading, why buy so many stashtabs? Let others buy the stash tabs and if you really need something, you just click through the database and instabuy it from another player. There is no incentive anymore to buy as many stashtabs as you can. The instant buyout database serves as a community stash now.

* If there is auto-trading, all premmy tabs become redundant. Refunds will be demanded.

* If there is auto-trading, most items will lose a lot of value. Exalt items become chaos items, chaos items become alt items. Now one can say that this is a positive but keep in mind that you will not be able to finance big ticket items anymore due to lack of income. Also currency rates will skyrocket. Because big players will be able to buy scraps from multiple players at the fraction of a second, you will see exalt ratios going through the roof.

* Large scale manipulation of the market.

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Phrazz wrote:

This isn't really an argument though, as trading already is far more accessible than GGG ever intended. They have, repeatedly - in so many words, confirmed that.

Interpreting Chris' statement over the years, it seems that (in his eyes) trading plays an important role, as it gives drops value. The simple fact that you can trade an item, gives it so much more value than SSF games ever will. Chris has, again - repeatedly said so.

As I've understood it, the release of the API back in the days came because of a tremendously high amount of pings towards the old forum trading - from poe.trade and the likes. They caved, they released the API - poe.trade became the center of everything. A couple of years past, and GGG finally released their own trading site. Now they find themselves in this... Twilight Zone. Trade is far easier than they ever intended, yet people want even more.

But as we've seen from GGG and Blizzard statements, trade and balance goes hand in hand. The easier trade get, the more they have to adjust in-game balance. If they made trade automated/easier, it's pretty naive to think that the game will "remain the same". Maybe we won't see changes right away. But when every piece of new content is being implemented with "instant/automated/easier" trade in mind, we WILL get changes.

Some are OK with that. Some are not. That's why this debate keeps reoccurring time after time.

my point is trade has become much easier than GGG has ever wanted, so why not just clean it up and make it less infuriating?
making it instant doesn't really make it easier. unless you think something being frustrating, annoying, redundant and time wasting as "hard"

GGG should have stuck to their guns long ago and never released the api or a premium tab. now that they have they're too far gone. they need to modernize this aspect of trade that we already have.

and yes i don't think anything will change. or if it does, hardly at all. why? because as we both said trade already became way more available than GGG ever wanted.
trade is already completely filled with scammers, fixers, flippers and the like. making it more automated only makes it easier for people who are actually seeking to buy an item they want. and the only way it makes it easier is by saving them time.

saving somebody time is a MASSIVE positive. no, it doesn't mean you're just handing out the best tasting candy for free. what it means is people will spend less time sitting in their hideout spamming dozens of people looking for the one item they will always eventually get.
instead, they'll get the item quicker and then continue playing the game and playing the game way more without all the wasted time.

if GGG wants to limit people getting too powerful of items too quickly, they can certainly do that. but making the process of trading so unbearably annoying isn't the correct way to go about limiting item availability. mostly because it doesn't limit it, it just makes it infuriating, which sets a negative vibe against the whole fucking game.

Well this blew up more than I thought it would. I was only having a little vent.

By auto trading I wasn't suggesting a full auction house where everything was immediately available without effort. I was more referring to low value/high quantity items like the chromatics I was trying to purchase in the screenshot.

It's just irritating when all you want to do is craft some off-colour sockets but you have to spend 20 minutes copy/pasting whispers trying to get a response.

The irony is that after 20 minutes I eventually got a quick a simple trade that worked flawlessly; from a BOT.

The fact is that you can already vendor for low-level currency with NPCs, but only in a lower-to-higher direction. If I could have bought 120 from Lani using my Chaos I would have been just as happy.

So, basically, GGG have already put in the trading mechanic I needed in this particular case, they've just restricted it to one-direction value tiered trading.

Oh dear dear, what the fuck

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* Currently trading requires both parties to be online and in the same zone to successfully do a trade. If there would be auto-trading, the entire point of buying mtx becomes redundant. You are basically playing a singleplayer game at this point. Why would I even purchase new mtx if no one is going to see them anyway? There will be players asking refunds for this. GGG will have to come up with a new way to finance their game.

The game already drops you inside a town with plenty of MTX to go around. It already requires you to buy services for certain characters if you want challenges OR work with a guild, both of these expose your to MTX. Finally we have party play which, thanks to the way GGG structured this league, is way more profitable than solo play. The only MTX we will miss are hideout ones. You know, the cheapest ones.

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If there is auto-trading, why buy so many stashtabs? Let others buy the stash tabs and if you really need something, you just click through the database and instabuy it from another player. There is no incentive anymore to buy as many stashtabs as you can. The instant buyout database serves as a community stash now.

Even with this trash trading I already need only one stash tab. If I play a lot and find good items a lot I'll also sit around for hours per day to trade them so I never get overwhelmed.

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If there is auto-trading, all premmy tabs become redundant. Refunds will be demanded.

Not if auto trading is related to them and I don't see why it wouldn't be.

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If there is auto-trading, most items will lose a lot of value. Exalt items become chaos items, chaos items become alt items. Now one can say that this is a positive but keep in mind that you will not be able to finance big ticket items anymore due to lack of income. Also currency rates will skyrocket. Because big players will be able to buy scraps from multiple players at the fraction of a second, you will see exalt ratios going through the roof

Complete and utter garbage. They will become cheaper, a 30ex item however will not become a 30c item. I don't know where people get this idea from, finding perfect items will still be pretty damn hard, they'll still be worth a lot. There'll still be about 100 of them on the market, we wont suddenly start raining perfect rolls on super rares you doofus.

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Large scale manipulation of the market.

More than half the page of popular items/currency is already reserved for price fixing. Buying out every rare item and forcing prices is already being done. Exalts and chaos change their values on the whim of the richest. There wont be any damn difference.

Come back after you experience other MMO where bots are snipping off shits on auction house and make life insanely hard for average player.

Even if I want some sort of automation, I don't want that kind of automation floating in your / majority people's mind.