Trading is terribad

Yes, I read the manifesto regarding "why no easy trading" with the bottom line "making trading painful is our design philosophy", which, as a person with a background in both software engineering as well as psychology, is somewhere between "ridiculous" and "outright offensive" to me.

Look, people like me habe a day time job and real life things going on as well.

Tried to buy, with no success, 4 items for my build via trade (items were abundant) because I was ignored or, in two cases, people kicked me out because I was not clicking fast enough.

Wasted 2 hours of time I could have actually played the game instead.

Seriously, this is not how things should work.

Auction house is really important.

And no, I am NOT looking for obscure items. I'm looking for 4 items for which there are TONS on the market.

Make trading viable PLEASE.

(And stop using inconvenience as a game mechanic in general.)

> Make trade as annoying as possible
> balance drops around trade so you have to trade anyway
classic GGG

yeah yeah self found yada yada

Absolutely agree! This idea that game balance can be achieved by making the game deliberately bad and un-fun in all areas where things are overpowered without having to address the actual power balance of the thing in question is idiotic. You don't make a game good by making arbitrary parts of it bad on purpose. I know I cant be the only one who sees that GGG is gaslighting their players with their waterfall of nonsense that can easily be disproven by looking at every other MMO that exists. None of them face problems from trading being "too easy" so why would PoE? They need to stop lieing to our faces about why they keep this garbage system the way it is and just admit they're too lazy to put forth the effort. They have monsterously expensive microtransactions (such as a battle pass that costs 3x what every other games battle pass costs) and on my last check 1.5million players worldwide (half the size of the global audience of god damned Fortnite) and yet somehow they cant figure out something as simple as, "good thing make game better, bad thing make game worse"? I dont buy it. They want to milk PoE for as much profit as they can while putting as little back into it as possible. They rarely even ever develop new assets and instead choose to just reskin or recolor old ones and apart from a few new lines of (usually poorly) voice acted dialoge each league I havent heard a new sound since they got rid of the 4 acts 3 difficulties model in favor of the current 10 act story.

There is no excuse for this and no amount of suck ups defending their broken logic will make this make sense.

I was gaming already back in the 80s and I remember how many games utilized this strategy back then, like "sports games" with an arbitrarily unprecise control or similar things. Or artificial long latency times (even some back then "high profile" games did it) to compensate for the game not being hard enough without annoying the player.

Of course, and I'm well aware of that, an auction house would lead to inflation of prices, because the market price of items is no longer co-determined by "how much nonsense are people are willing to accept just to exchange 30c against a Void Battery", but eventually this would rebalance everything around "time * drop chance vs. currency", instead of putting a premium on actually NOT playing the game and instead whispering people by clicking on a website, only to be stressed SHOULD that be fruitful.

Item exchange should be seen as a productive, community building thing instead by GGG, it should be embraced in the form of even "gathering items has two great purposes: outfitting your characters AND getting other people going via our in game auction house".

Interestingly I had a discussion with a friend of mine during lunch break who has a PhD in economy and he agreed with my assumptions - especially the fact that there are multiple functional currencies makes this an interesting playground.

However, in the current state its mostly about "who can endure more nonsense, clicking and being ignored", which is like what we often got in the 80s, but on an MMO-level now.

If you ask me: setting up an auction house in game should be highest priority.

It is not going to happen... The game structure simply doesn't support it.

The two major issues are:

1. There is WAY too much loot dropped for it to work. If easy trade was put in, every bot would start identifying all rares, and they'd be on the AH. As a result we'd have the same situation as in D3 before they canned their AH, that nobody would ever find anything 'good' and they could buy much better stuff cheaply on the AH. This is a deadly sin in a loot-based MMO, as Blizzard realised.

2. There are trading and non-trading players in the game playing in the same game balance. Difficult trading makes that just about possible without too hard balance problems. Implement easy trading, and GGG would have to raise game difficulty (as everyone could buy super items for nothing), which in return would make it impossible for non-trading players to play. Non-trading players are the majority!

Yes... Other games have implemented easy trading. That means exactly nothing. The point is that PoE loot-wise is more similar to D3 before their (easy) AH was nixed than any other game, and face exactly the same problems.
The possible options are either a difficult trading system, or no trading system. An easy trading system will not work.

Diablo failed because they didn't restrict it. Simply limit the number of allowed trades per day and/or add a fee in in-game currency to list an item. These are problems with easy answers. Meanwhile we have price fixers who exploit the nature of the current system so plunge the price of items, mostly currency, down to the bottom of the ocean so they can then buy up all of their chosen currency at the price they plunged it to to be sold back at full price later. This is done simply by listing an item at an abysmally low price and ignoring offers for that item until actual players start listing at that price too. If trades were automated this practice would vanish instantly because them listing that item for super low prices would result in that item selling at that price with no chance for easy market manipulation.

Looking at Blizzards failures and going, "lets never ever do anything close to that" is stupid. Instead they should look at their failures and go, "How can we solve the problems they created so we can succeed where they failed?"

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Blortad wrote:

Diablo failed because they didn't restrict it. Simply limit the number of allowed trades per day and/or add a fee in in-game currency to list an item. These are problems with easy answers. Meanwhile we have price fixers who exploit the nature of the current system so plunge the price of items, mostly currency, down to the bottom of the ocean so they can then buy up all of their chosen currency at the price they plunged it to to be sold back at full price later. This is done simply by listing an item at an abysmally low price and ignoring offers for that item until actual players start listing at that price too. If trades were automated this practice would vanish instantly because them listing that item for super low prices would result in that item selling at that price with no chance for easy market manipulation.

Looking at Blizzards failures and going, "lets never ever do anything close to that" is stupid. Instead they should look at their failures and go, "How can we solve the problems they created so we can succeed where they failed?"

Yep^ Needs a fee, this is the convenience cost and that fee should be non-refundable once the item is listed after a (confirmation click) to fully list it and consume the currency.

Make it high enough and people will not bother using an auto-trader system unless its actually a valuable item and possibly make the price fixers go broke in the process if they were to try and mess with the market.

This type of system can work in PoE, I think using blizzard after the activision acquisition as an example of why a system is bad is absolutely terrible, Blizzard is a company who has sold their product down the river so many times now that you can't compare them to GGG who actually made a deal to KEEP CONTROL over their game!

I'd say: restrict by item quality AND add a fee. The fee should be significant and only unique items and good currency should be tradeable via the auction house.

Regarding "so much loot in this game": yes, there is a lot of scrap metal thrown at us, but even though I use a good, tight filter from filterblade I still only pickup like 5% of stuff.

And, quite honestly, I'm at a point where I even roll my eyes when "another unique" drops because, except for 1 single item so far (this is my second character I play into endgame) on this character I never got something "unique" that I could actually use. The other two I wear are from my first character, which failed, because I didn't follow a build guide.

I tried, yes, to participate on the market - and gave up when I found out that I have to practically stop playing the game entirely if I want to sell stuff because you have to jump through x loops to trade, etc...

Sorry to all those I didn't respond to a few days ago when I tried selling... it was just that I was FLOODED with requests and all I wanted to do was to level my character up a bit more instead of hanging out in random hideouts for hours without end in my spare time.

Regarding D3:

Trading is not necessary in D3. The only tier of items that is actually a bit harder to come by there is the 0.25% drop rate primal ancient items - and there are strategies to force the one you want (gambling + cube, etc...). Also D3 has a system that is called "smart loot" where stuff useful for your class drops with (I THINK I have read that) 90% certainty.

In PoE I get items of unspeakable uselessness thrown at me, some of the items are actually meme worthy (like int gloves with + strength and a red socket and similar nonsense).

Also there is the "blue item issue" where the "cheaper" white items are actually FAR more interesting because you get much more alchemy orb material than regalia orbs.

All of that adds up to quite a "skewed" loot system that isn't compensated for by sheer amount of items.

This may explain ideas like R or SSF actually. It's just "saddling the horse from the wrong side" to literally translate a German proverb.

Exactly, there is also one key difference between the AH in D3 and what could be done with PoE. (and has been done for console players) Blizzard decided it would be a good idea to make MTX currency tradable, so nobody used gold to buy on the AH, they all used MTX currency and that allowed the whales to vomit their bank account into D3 to buy everything that is, thus allowing them to control the market.

There are also examples of loot driven MMOs that have an AH system successfully and do just fine as well as examples of games that let you trade MTX that do just fine, but no examples besides the miserable fail that was D3 where both existed in tandem without consequences. I went into detail in the other thread about this same issue if anyone is curious. Mabinogi and Warframe were my primary examples.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3389212

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Blortad wrote:

There are also examples of loot driven MMOs that have an AH system successfully and do just fine

Idk about loot driven but Final Fantasy 11 released in 2002 and still running to this day has an AH as well as exp loss on death and even de-leveling which would make so many poe players cry all the way home to mommy, It also features a number of interesting and unique systems not seen in many or any games to follow it which i wont get into here.

The devs should go for a stroll in that one while its still online.