Bartering Tab Idea (Auction House Alternative)

Disclaimer.. I like trade how it is generally except for the dark parts of the games economy.. rmt, botters, price fixers and others.

Bartering Tab:
the bartering tab would be similar to the Expedition NPC shops, You can list an item buyout price as what you'll take without any haggling and a min/max allowable so if a player visits your shop they will see the maximum price and be allowed to haggle if they try to haggle too low your bartering tab will nope them off to the next person but if its not too low then they will get the item.. This could be setup so they cant just yeet the lowest price straight up and there is a slight variance to it just like the expedition npc.

People would flock to a system that would sell their items for them and it would reduce a lot of the annoying spamming people literally 50+ times even in some cases 100+ to get some of the most trivial items(ESPECIALLY TRIVIAL ITEMS) and unless you're overpricing stuff which makes people flock to the cheaper offers you stand a chance at losing some money and gaining some money depending on how the dice roll.

Players hoping to fix the markets will find it more difficult with bartering tabs automatically completing sales giving a(one would hope)more consistent and true price for a lot of items instead of people just trying to selfishly manipulate everything for themselves where a lot of us are just trying to get by and have fun playing this awesome game.

Inventory Space
A bartering tab would have no more than a players maximum inventory or less because it would support currency stacking(cant have these making default tabs worthless now)

Sales/Notifications
These tabs would notify the player(configurable on/off) when an item has sold and for how much depositing it into any tab with the currency tag if applicable otherwise it would store the currency internally and require the player to manage it.. The tab would allow currency stacking as not to overflow on sales of large amounts of lower currency especially which would normally be larger than ones inventory in some extreme cases.

Trade Website Compatibility
The items sold in bartering tabs would be listed just the same on the trade websites as all other items except would feature an indicator showing that it is in a bartering tab and doesn't require the seller to be present as well as a filter to only show these listings.

Auction Mode
Plenty of people like to auction off items collecting offers to see who will pay the most.. If those types of sales could be handled in the bartering tab then you can allow people to bid against eachother in an automated bidding system while you are off mapping.. The players placing bids would have to have the currency they are bidding with in a currency enabled tab.

Some kind of tax would not be unreasonable however placing a bid would "reserve" currency and make that amount unavailable to you until you either cancel the bid or someone else wins the bid so its already putting you at a disadvantage im not entirely sure a tax is necessary but if the system can be spammed either a cooldown on bids or a tax would be the direction to go.

Online Support Versus Offline Support:
Online support is what you'd get by default by purchasing the tab and if you're online your items would sell if someone decides to buy them regardless of the league you're in..

And Offline support would mean that your items could sell while you are logged out of the game doing whatever it is that we all do when not playing POE.. This feature should require a fee per x amount of days giving people with less time a fighting chance in the marketplace.

or allow the tab to sell both on/offline out of the box? i like the idea of GGG making plenty of money to continue the development of the game so i prefer the subscription model for offline support even though i would rarely personally(as someone with low income) jump on that train.

Yes please Something like this would be extremely useful

That's nice and all, but similar things were suggested multiple times in the past, and Teh Holy Vision™ is quite conservative regarding un-crippling that intentionally crippled trade poe has.

"

dW2005 wrote:

That's nice and all, but similar things were suggested multiple times in the past, and Teh Holy Vision™ is quite conservative regarding un-crippling that intentionally crippled trade poe has.

As far as I'm aware the focus from Chris was on creating a market where people would barter/haggle and while as a Standard player for many years i was able to enjoy this atmosphere and during my first leagues this was still mostly the case but not everyone was willing to haggle.

Time went on year after year the market and how people interact with it until bots became commonplace in trade to the point some people have been praising them as a positive rather than the actual severe negative they are.

I've never really been too worried about having an Auction House in the way most people want it but as all these elements slowly poisoning the game i love, RMT activities which sadly will never go away, botters who make a lot of currency while their real character is off farming(there are even auto-buy bots that buy equipment!)how can i compete with that?

Its a bit of a bummer interacting with trade these days outside of the already mentioned stuff as a seller who always reply's to their trades when possible i often receive trade requests which i immediately accept only to find out they had already pmed 30 other people and are already trading someone else.

In order to even complete the trade we have to risk dying if in content to reply unless using third party tools which are so commonplace now.. We also have to sacrifice a portal in our map on top of that which far too often results in that trade going to someone else anyway and you're down a portal for nothing.

Time is money and bots don't care about time.. They don't have jobs or have to sleep, eat or any of the stuff we humans have to do just to get through each day and at the end of the day most of the time what i want to do is sit back and play the games i like and have fun.. I personally have plenty of time to get most of what i want out of POE but try as i might i can not compete with the currency bots pull in so when i try to imagine being someone who can only play a couple hours a day at most because they work... that really is depressing to think about.

I wouldn't play POE probably if i had a full time job which in turn means i wouldn't be spending my $ on it.. This is probably true of a lot of people the harder it becomes to finish a character to completion multiple times a league... imagine not even having time to complete one character to endgame only because gear progression is too expensive and crafting luck just wasnt there for you.

Just want GGG to think about this because the Auction House requests aren't going away and this is one of the best compromises i could come up with that still holds some of the original theme of haggling.

I cant't say having a "human aspect", "interaction" etcetera in trading is bad, but honestly apart from Chris there's maybe a couple percent of the population who do care about it today (i counted myself among them btw, back when i played trade leagues); the rest is too concerned about bot-like effectiveness, egg-salts per hour and such. "tyglhf" or just trade and leave is how much interaction most people need/do, so a limited auction house wouldn't be bad imho, but knowing the tendency, it just won't happen.

I don't disagree that it likely won't happen but I'll guess it is slightly more likely to happen than changing the death penalty on death to some other alternate penalty. With the possibility of hell freezing over being there in same the ballpark somewhere.

so the bartering tab would exist alongside the premium tab?
my guess: if ggg repeats the disaster of the single tab and then releasing the quad tab with no upgrade action, there are alot of poeple out of here

and given there is a upgrade option or total conversion, the premium tab would be gone and i had 800+ auction tabs in standard and 200+ auction tabs in temp leagues.
means, i could totally profit from my real money investment into poe to make bank and wouldn't have to choose between playing the game and selling items anymore! ca..ca..ca..caching! i could basically sell every item i find, just put it in the auction tab and wait.

wait ... there are plenty of other supporters who would also cache in big and there currently no demand for average items 1 week into a league. who is gonna buy my stuff.

this game currently has a problem with demand, ggg's idea of items being worth something bases on the false hope that too few people bother selling them, a quick look at their trading database would show alot of items that don't sell for the advertised price already.

imho poe doesn't need to make selling stuff easier, it needs to make it more difficult. people should only list their item for sale if they think it will sell and the effort to sell it is worth it.

"

vio wrote:

so the bartering tab would exist alongside the premium tab?

Yes it would co-exist with the premium tabs but also function with other tabs(tags)for outputting currency.

"

vio wrote:

my guess: if ggg repeats the disaster of the single tab and then releasing the quad tab with no upgrade action, there are alot of poeple out of here

and given there is a upgrade option or total conversion, the premium tab would be gone and i had 800+ auction tabs in standard and 200+ auction tabs in temp leagues.
means, i could totally profit from my real money investment into poe to make bank and wouldn't have to choose between playing the game and selling items anymore! ca..ca..ca..caching! i could basically sell every item i find, just put it in the auction tab and wait.

wait ... there are plenty of other supporters who would also cache in big and there currently no demand for average items 1 week into a league. who is gonna buy my stuff.

this game currently has a problem with demand, ggg's idea of items being worth something bases on the false hope that too few people bother selling them, a quick look at their trading database would show alot of items that don't sell for the advertised price already.

imho poe doesn't need to make selling stuff easier, it needs to make it more difficult. people should only list their item for sale if they think it will sell and the effort to sell it is worth it.

are you suggesting an upgrade option from premium -> bartering tab? and if so how would that work with it having a smaller inventory space? would you be ok with that?

edit: updated op with online/offline support.

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

As far as I'm aware the focus from Chris was on creating a market where people would barter/haggle

That may have been the original thought, but today's trade limitations exist for only one purpose, and that is limiting trade (and for good reason too).

Just as an auction house, your suggestion would in practice undo that by removing the one-to-one interaction. Bots circumvent that some, but as most traders are not bots, trade remains overall cumbersome enough.

GGG has (correctly IMHO) made the evaluation that the PoE economy and gameplay can't handle unlimited trade, so it'll not happen.

when ggg are talking to themselves