GDC Talk - "Cursed Problems in Game Design"

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trixxar wrote:

Which is why the many games with a functioning AH, including WoW which had 20 times the paying subscribers that GGG has free players, charged a percent of listing.

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Redthorne82 wrote:

In the spirit of "you can't make everyone happy, all the time", I'd just like to mention something.

I don't know how this seems to get lost on people...but there are MANY other ARPG options out there with varying degrees of difficulty, trading, online functions...

I just don't know why Path of Exile seems to infect people with faux-Stockholm Syndrome. People hate core aspects of the game, but keep playing because they "love the core game".

Maybe I've never spent as much time on other games' forums...but the obvious divide between players that like how POE works and those that don't is hilarious to me.

Is it psychological? Like putting money into a free game forces you to play it for at least "x" amount of time, even if you're miserable?

I know this is a bit of a side-step from the OP's purpose, but it still follows the fact that it's impossible to please both sides...but in this case, both sides will fight forever...knowing that they'll never both be happy.

Kinda sad, really.

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Deathfairy wrote:

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trixxar wrote:

Which is why the many games with a functioning AH, including WoW which had 20 times the paying subscribers that GGG has free players, charged a percent of listing.

Care to point these magical well functioning ah games please. Just to be clear wow is no where valid example because 99 perecent of gear people wear is bind on pick up. And the other 1 percent is bind on equip.

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trixxar wrote:

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Nidal wrote:

It is not that simple. wherever you put that middleground it will either be prohibitly expensive to put up cheap 1 chaos items or so cheap that its a drop in the ocean for the expensive one. the game cant tell your mace is 15 ex

Which is why the many games with a functioning AH, including WoW which had 20 times the paying subscribers that GGG has free players, charged a percent of listing cost.

Its an AH, whats the listing cost for the mace without a buyout? if you do put a buyout, how do you split an exalt? what rate is used? an artifically made one (messing with the economy) or the current one where players can list whatever rate they want at anytime? (abusable)

i do not consider WoWs AH a reasonable alternative, their solution is to make items BoE. they lose any kind of value as soon as they are equipped and are taken out of circulation. PoEs system lets you buy, use and trade it to someone else. id much rather have that over an AH
people can disagree, to some this is an acceptable tradeoff. but there is no easy trade AH without consequense

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Nidal wrote:

everything will lose value and droprates will have to be adjusted accordingly

So, if I have, say, 20ex to gear a character, and I spend 5ex on my endgame weapon and 1-2ex on minor slots, then I am going to spend that with or without an AH. Now, with increased supply, I am going to spend the same currency on (likely) better items with an AH than without. So there will be powercreep yes, but thats a different argument. Currency drop rates are (relatively) static, or at least unrelated to whether there is an AH. Total currency flowing into trade will be completely unchanged. Or explain why you think differently.

i got a couple of tabulas in my stash that i cant really be bothered to sell. im not alone with that. with easy access to the market, it all goes up. with so many people selling them, prices drop, they sell cheap (admit it, you see 30 people selling something at 35 chaos and you go 34) and then the market is saturated and they become worthless. nobody will make currency selling these pieces as they are now, hence youre stuck looking for things that do sell so you can buy what you want. but they only have value because of limited supply. now for the tabula to remain valuable. theyd have to drop alot less, for everbody. remember items dont disappear from circulation in PoE, unless bricked by corruptions or vendored.

we either end up with ALOT of items with no value, or low drop rates

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The powercreep from an AH would be a tiny fraction of the general game powercreep. Do you remember when you could buy stat stick offhands giving (in a SINGLE piece of gear) 120% of physical damage as extra elemental? And you think an AH boosting stats on your gear by 20 to 30% is going to break the game?

im not concerned about powercreep at all, thats just a matter of adjusting numbers for GGG. i just dont want PoE to lose the fantastic economy it has. everything has value, you run a few maps and you might not get your piece but you made a few alchemies, a few chaos, some chisels, maybe a lucky div card. step by step building you char. not buying your full map starter set for 3 chaos on AH in 2 min, and you dont actually want that either

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Nidal wrote:

If you do really want an AH, at least understand that youre arguing that for you the easy trading is worth these tradeoffs and understand why it isnt for the rest of us, alot of us like PoE because of the existing economy, everything have some value

I dont really get this one. If you dont like an AH, dont use it. Your argument is like saying you dont like minion builds so no one should play a summoner and they shouldnt exist in PoE.

Those examples are nothing alike. builds and choices are good. having an AH and not using it is like playing a game with self imposed limitations while still having reduced drop rates, BoE or BoP because of it

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You might be right if drop rates were changed, but see above.

theyd have to be changed, or BoE, BoP to maintain some kind of economy. its simple supply and demand.
so much stuff is kept off the market right now because we cant be bothered to sell it or we do not know how much something is worth so we "saving it" until we do :P

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Nidal wrote:

instead of trying to change a game fundamentally where alot of people like how it works, if you really hate the trading so much you should find a game that suits you instead of ruining the existing experience for others

You could make this false argument to say no one should ever complain about anything whatsoever. Also, we already have a terrible AH, some of us just want Chris' arbitrary "screw the playerbase and make the game annoying because I was scarred by D3" mentality removed.

what happened with D3 and their AH makes perfect sense. there is zero examples of a working AH without limitations and there is no reason to ignore an actual example of this having been tried. its not a bad example because it failed and you want an AH, its a good example of it not working. the manifesto makes alot of sense
its the people who wants an AH that need to explain how having so much more items on the market will not ruin the economy without having the game tell us what we can sell

Trade works fine as it is

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trixxar wrote:

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Deathfairy wrote:

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trixxar wrote:

Which is why the many games with a functioning AH, including WoW which had 20 times the paying subscribers that GGG has free players, charged a percent of listing.

Care to point these magical well functioning ah games please. Just to be clear wow is no where valid example because 99 perecent of gear people wear is bind on pick up. And the other 1 percent is bind on equip.

Already have Death, and didn't you claim to be a game designer so you should know anyway...

However, WOW, Rift, GW2, FF14, Lineage 2, Everquest, Everquest 2, and thats just off the top of my head.



Again, ignoring that for a moment, you could AH consumables only (maps, crafting, etc.)

As Nubatron eloquently put, thousands of ideas have been thrown up, thousands of objections. All have been and will be ignored.

When this game starts to tank (which could be 10 years from now, who knows) they will start considering player feedback. Not before, in my experience.

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Nidal wrote:

i got a couple of tabulas in my stash that i cant really be bothered to sell. im not alone with that. with easy access to the market, it all goes up. with so many people selling them, prices drop, they sell cheap (admit it, you see 30 people selling something at 35 chaos and you go 34) and then the market is saturated and they become worthless. nobody will make currency selling these pieces as they are now, hence youre stuck looking for things that do sell so you can buy what you want. but they only have value because of limited supply.

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Nidal wrote:

there is zero examples of a working AH without limitations and there is no reason to ignore an actual example of this having been tried. its not a bad example because it failed and you want an AH, its a good example of it not working. the manifesto makes alot of sense

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Nidal wrote:

Trade works fine as it is

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1453R wrote:

When your game is ABOUT loot the way path of Exile is ABOUT loot, auction-house and free item trade systems go against the core of your game.

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trixxar wrote:

There was a good open letter on trade on reddit recently - it was longish but the gist was that trade, by any metric, is a bad user experience in PoE. And that there are different solutions, many with their own flaws, but doing nothing over it is literally the worst solution.

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Again, many other games have solved this riddle with larger player bases than this one.