Why is there no auction house in POE?

Die-hards will complain, with no evidence, that easier trade leads to all kinds of things.

People quitting, mass hysteria, cats and dogs living together! In a word, chaos!

In reality, some people might use trade more and complete the league earlier.

Some people would use trade the same.

Some people would use trade more and play more characters, more hours a day, because you remove a frustration and annoyance tax on a key game mechanic for the majority of players.



Players dont know, Chris doesnt know, GGG doesnt know. Tencent made them provide a trade option for the asian markets, so maybe Tencent knows.


Anyway, the argument that it would do X or Y is silly. It is unprovable.

What is provable is that keeping a bad game mechanic around (by anyones measure, including GGG and Chris) because you fear what fixing it would do is a very lazy game development strategy.

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Chris Willson like scarcity and want scarcity. Game economy rely on scarcity by design. I assume it is what is beneficial to POE owners rather than to the players. Less grinding mean less game time, less money spent.

The huge power imbalance and disparity is inherent. It is what is incentivize and permissible so POE loot can be valuable.

Beneficial to GGG and valuable and precious items owners. More harmful and detrimental to other players as far as I can see. Scarcity or power disparity problems can't be solved with "Auction House". It just make those problems more apparent or "Visible".

As I termed it as "Don't fix it, it ain't broken! It is designed that way.

Thanks God you are Chris Willson in diguise or at least his representative with letter of attorney.

Let me enlighten you. Chris Willson will never tell you what he really thinks.

Moreover, already in 16th century someone F. Bacon realised about idols of the mind.

Human thinks about one thing, tells himself another, tells other people third thing.

We can end this with it is Chris Willson game bla bla bla. But if you end up using his words as a sensible argument, then it is not an option.

We should really think if they reflect objective reality.

Easy trade means reducing drop rates

So what?

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.

So what?

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great

S-o w-h-a-t? (are you kind of Che Guevara or Mao for caring)

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation

SO WHAT?

Less grinding mean less game time, less money spent.

Ok. I understand why in 200_ in first WoW you have to buy mount only on 40 lvl if you grind gold. Cause suscription. More time you run from location to location = more suscription money.

But game time = money spend in PoE, really? Can you elaborate your findings plz.

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Jgizle wrote:

Lets be real here. You are assuming faster item acquisition = player quits. That is an idiotic assumption, and there is no data to back it up.
This is not my assumption but GGG's logic. They have statistical data proving their own words.

High items avialability -> faster progression -> worse league retention rates -> financial losses. Always keep in mind it is F2P game. They don't charge us every season for 20-30$.

Im gonna have to call BS here...
Harvest is the strongest counter-example: The mechanic was a borderline item editor, the league had intense deflation reflecting it with stuff like triple t1/2 affixes that often sells for a bunch of exalts being traded for chaos(because really, making a triple t1-resist ring with t1 life with original harvestcraft was almost laughably easy). Yet, it was one of the leagues with stronger retention rate, sentinel is another example of a league that enabled easy progression having strong retention

Basically, retention is not correlated to pogression in the way you think: Overly slow progression shooes players away because it makes the game feel like pointless time-wasting. Fast progression on the other hand is often countered by starting another character, single-characters die-hards often forget most people cant stomach playing a single character for even a whole month, and completing more than 3 in a 4-month spam is not common, even with a mechanic like vannila harvest

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Jgizle wrote:

Each time players get easy access to something - it will get nerfed. Do you remember what happened whith Omniscience and Ashes drop rate? Same story. Astragali and Mageblood gambling, Metamorph drop (frags were abused), complete rework of Harvest, etc, etc, etc.

Onmi and ashes were abominations that broke the amulet economy on their original forms. Ashes in particular was an extremely good dirty cheap item that could fit on virtually any build. The price of 50c made it basically unbeatable from a cost/effectiveness perspective
Astra gamble was never nerfed. Geting a mageblood from it is as borderline inpossible as when mageblood first came, the difference is that today, the list of worthwile uniqs is much more restricted. Some time ago, more modest finds like arakaali were jackpots, today even farrul and aegis aurora are kinda "meh", so ofc uniq-hunting mechanics suffer
And the rework of harvest was inevitable: even the most casual player will be able to tell that deterministic exalts and annul mechanics on tier 1 seeds that grew in just 5 maps was way too much

Basically, none of the mentioned stuff was related at all by abusers. It was GGG dropping the ball quite hard or mechanics turned obsolete. Sirus drops are hot and supper common, they didnt broke the game, so they are unnerfed

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Jgizle wrote:

Just look, how HC SSF builds differ from SC trade league. It is very good example how the trade affects on item progression. I don't understand why we need even easier trade with such powerful (I'd say - overpowered) builds. Just why? To experience another iteration of drop rate nerfs?

For one, to enable variety on the builds. Picking any skill or uniq on ninja will likely return whole pages full of people using the exact same setup. Yeah, there are many things that work, but the paths of what work are too rigid, you want to play one skill, more often than not, youll have to follow one of a very limited amount of setups(on HC SSF its crazy: selecting almost any skill on ninja will likely return at least 3 notables and masteries with around 75% pick rate)

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BambulaGTS wrote:

Thanks God you are Chris Willson in diguise or at least his representative with letter of attorney.

Let me enlighten you. Chris Willson will never tell you what he really thinks.

Oh no. You don't need to mindread Because Chris Wilson talk too much.

Like how he said "insane like I have to emphasize here We're probably ruining the game" after Harvest.

POE the hard game is ruined if it is too easy. It is unfair, but intentionally so.

Remember the Vision?

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feike wrote:

text here

You need to fix your quotes, you can't even do that correctly.

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Fapmobile wrote:

All you need to know is here:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Thank you very much, it was all i needed to know and tbh now i understand and agree at 100%.

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Jgizle wrote:

- The most popular leagues with the highest retention are the ones that offer reasonable drop rates. Overall most leagues have similar player retention rates. You know which leagues have the worst retention rates? The ones with the most trash garbage drop rates across the game. Less drops means less trade, more expensive items, harder earning of currency, slower progression, and quicker player drop off.

Yes, because the vast majority of players don't trade and bad drop rates are not good for this sort of players. But on the other hand you can't make the drop rates very high, "Tradies" will skyrocket even more, and even low-traders will leave the game after completeing all challanges. There must be some balance between acceptable drop rate and items availability on the market. GGG found it.

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Harvest was amazing, and some of the best items in the game could be made through harvest. But for 99% of the player base Harvest is the most boring mechanic in the game.

As Chris told, Harvest in its basic state had negative long-term consequences. The fact that you could abuse Harvest using 3rd party mechanics like TFT killed it. Not completely, it's still useful, but it is way less powerful than before. It was killed before new OP crafting methods ruined the game. If you tried to play SSF, Harvest wasn't OP as it was in trade leagues (SC or HC).

And I agreed that gameplay of Harvest was very close to Standard / Hardcore, it wasn't very fun for average PoE player.

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- Your example of the watchers eye nerf, is dependent on being able to sell stuff for currency, and be able to get enough to buy one, without farming a watcher's eye yourself. For one, getting the currency will be harder, because getting the items is harder, and getting currency is harder, and items are more expensive due to this drop in supply, but increase in demand. There is no situation in PoE where an item has high demand, high value, and high drop rates for basic currency than can be sold or traded up to obtain said item.

The problem with WE is that I cannot farm it by myself and get the neccessary mods in reasonable time. I am automatically forced to use trade and sell dropped WEs. I have to accumulate currency and then just buy the WE that I need for my build. It is way faster than farming Elder / UE like a madman, relying on CRT's RNG. This logic works for every single item in the game, for Wanderlust, for Mageblood, for Original Sin and for Tabula Rasa. Every mechanics with RNG involved is built and adjusted around having trade.

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SSF differs from Trade leagues because the game is not designed around SSF. It is designed around trade.

Exactly! And there is no special league with single-player rules or the rules for small group of the friends. SSF is just a tag, nothing more.

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Jgizle wrote:

The data shows the complete opposite of what you have said. If lower drops meant longer player retention, due to having to grind more to obtain the same amount of currency, to buy the items you want in a trade league environment, then the top 6 worst leagues of all time would have had the highest player retention to date. Simply not true. Player retention effects trade a ton.

Not exactly what I said. There is a window in which GGG can adjust the drop rates not having massive player drain and bad retention rate. On the other hand - high drop rate makes the progress faster and also has long-term problems like bloating build power. They are trying to find the balance. Sure, sometimes they don't succeed. But in general their "vision" (or paradygm) works well.

it baffles me why people keep referring to the trade manifesto as if it is some sort of panacea to all the issues of trading. The manifesto made four key points which in the years since it was published have become moot.

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.

Already happening, TFT allows people to buy entire builds in one go. Streamers publish builds and people either RMT or already have the currency to just buy every BiS item. No-one buys incrementally - they farm the hell out of red maps using a starter until they have the currency for their build.

Easy trade means reducing drop rates.

Already happened multiple times. Drop rates have been hit many times most notably 3.19

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great.

This is a joke - look at the top end on POE Ninja they are playing a different game to the average player. The disparity is already massive. The guy who runs TFT had something like 800 Hinekoras locks advertised. The disparity is already there.

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation.

Bots already dominate. Its also a shitty excuse to say we cannot police our own game so no AH.

Whatever your position on an AH the manifesto is hopelessly out of date.

Please, go on, don't mind me. *sipping coffee

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blindedbylight wrote:

"Already happening...

Yes, it IS already happening, because they have made trading a lot easier than they ever intended. But just because we have "60% bad", doesn't mean we should just embrace "100% bad".

All manifesto's that are several years old are outdated. But the ideas still remain. You can disagree with them, but it doesn't really take much empathy or insight to understand them.

Trading needs improvements, but they should NEVER make it automatic or enable offline trading.