Trading is terribad

More importantly, back in 2013 the game was in a far simpler state and crafting essentially consisted of either chaos spam, or Alt/Regal/Exalt slam.

You could trade for moderate upgrades relatively easily as there were really only two currencies traded, and in most cases you were just looking for life and a couple of resistances.

For top end players, there was some very powerful gear, but nothing compared to today.

Now trading is its own stock market simulation and is far more complex that it needs to be. It has RNG layered on RNG with convolution on convolution all in an effort to distract that it's doing this for no real reason other than to delay the player, which if you have the means, doesn't work.

Honestly, if they were to simply move the trade site to an interface in game so you don't have to tab out of the game to access a feature of the game and use the system the console version already has that would be acceptable.

Personally I think they should also expand the system the console version has to include two types of listings: Buyout and Bid. That way we don't end up still having people price fixing and trolling by listing items for way cheap and declining all offers made. That and make Bid mode so that once you have Bids the only way you get to end early is if you accept whatever the current highest bid is and sell the item. Because if they let you cancel an auction with active bids and reject all current offers that would still leave the price fixing situation almost exactly the way it is where people will just cancel before the auction timer is done and relist to price fix. Even if not though, at the very least we would have a way to filter the price fixers out by looking for buyout only.

i love when players yell pricefixers the moment something gets more expensive.

Ye sure we are controlling and pricefixing goods that have hundreds of listings per day, we are organized poe mafia lol. Keep believing that.

a simple video on a farming strat or a good build can shoot up an item's price tenfold. this is a niche game and a video with 50,000 views changes a lot.

ive seen pricefixing only once in my life, with forbidden jewels i was trying to buy gathering winds. Had a green part, red part was 100 ex and i was a bit short. Farmed up, traded other currency, i had 130 ex next day - but now this fcking jewel is 1 mirror. Next listing 290 ex. Oh, you greedy corporate fuckers.

At least i sold my green part for 3 times the money i initally bought it for.

It's possible to pricefix extremely niche and or rare items that have a single-digit number of listings, including offline. If a particular Forbidden jewel has 3 listings and i have 500div laying around Id buy out those 3 and re-post them for 2x the price. That's how i made a crap ton of gold in WoW back in the day. Buy out rare mounts and pets, relist at a higher price. Played it for free thanks to tokens.

^sorry but this is incorrect. Because you have not seen it personally does not mean it doesn't happen regularly.

ALL currency items are pricefixed. Every single one of them. That price fixing can be done in a few hours and have a lasting impact. Those that know how to do it create bots to automatically set prices in such a way that they quickly fix the market. This has a cascading effect on the value of ALL items. It is incredibly ignorant to believe that pricing in this game operates under "free market" principles.

Any and every popular unique has gone through multiple rounds of price fixing in each league. The data is there in PoE Ninja, you can see for yourself. In a true, non-fixed economy, the graphs would look very similar across all popularly traded items. Yet they do not, because price-fixers get a hold and cause unnatural spikes or decreases.

You are absolutely right that videos, streamers, and builds have an effect on items. BUT they have that effect because of price fixers. It is incredibly rare that the supply is SO LOW that the increased demand from a video has such a drastic effect. More likely, and reasonably assumed: market players scan these sources and quickly buy up the supply in order to manufacture a supply scarcity and reap the benefits of the price spikes. Especially popular build videos: take a build-enabling unique that isn't particularly rare. A build video can cause the value of that item to go up 10-fold or sometimes even more. The supply can certainly keep up to make that price hike not necessary, but it is the fixers that feed into the popularity and inflate the pricing well beyond any natural state of supply/demand shift.

The price fixing happens on a grand scale in this game, and if you still believe it doesn't you have your head buried in the sand. It is basically the BEST money making strategy for the top tier guilds and players, and they are extremely experienced at it.

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Esubane wrote:

i love when players yell pricefixers the moment something gets more expensive.

Ye sure we are controlling and pricefixing goods that have hundreds of listings per day, we are organized poe mafia lol. Keep believing that.

a simple video on a farming strat or a good build can shoot up an item's price tenfold. this is a niche game and a video with 50,000 views changes a lot.

ive seen pricefixing only once in my life, with forbidden jewels i was trying to buy gathering winds. Had a green part, red part was 100 ex and i was a bit short. Farmed up, traded other currency, i had 130 ex next day - but now this fcking jewel is 1 mirror. Next listing 290 ex. Oh, you greedy corporate fuckers.

At least i sold my green part for 3 times the money i initally bought it for.

It's possible to pricefix extremely niche and or rare items that have a single-digit number of listings, including offline. If a particular Forbidden jewel has 3 listings and i have 500div laying around Id buy out those 3 and re-post them for 2x the price. That's how i made a crap ton of gold in WoW back in the day. Buy out rare mounts and pets, relist at a higher price. Played it for free thanks to tokens.

You have completely missed the mark here. That is NOT the kind of price fixing I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that all it takes to plunge a simple items price super low is for a handful of accounts, maintained by bots or otherwise, (enough to make up the 10 or so cheapest listings) to post an item for way LESS then what its actually worth and just ignore all offers for that item. This causes players who don't already know that items value to look it up in trade, go "huh, the first 10 say this price" and post their items at that super low price. At this point the price fixers can then buy up all the items that people post for the reduced price they made up.

In the trading manifesto, they make it very clear that only about 10% of players actually know what's what with trading, which means the remaining 90% of them will be tricked by this every time until someone is kind enough to fill them in on the scam and they either realize how stupid and highly exploitable the current system is and quit because of it (because they got ripped off for something valuable) or they start on the long and difficult process of learning how the games market works and what actual prices are and how to recognize the value slashing price fixers when they see them and join that top 10%.

This is not, nor has it ever been, about fixing prices on rare or niche items, its about the fact that every single common and heavily used item such as nearly every single currency is CONSTANTLY price fixed so these scammers can rip unsuspecting people who don't know any better off by doing things like having their 20 alt accounts each list 1 div at 100c, sit with a bot to keep AFK from triggering in their 20 hideouts while they ignore all incoming offers (literally as simple as moving the mouse in circles) until they can scoop up a bunch of half-price Divs from poor newbies just trying to figure out this absolutely dumb system we have.

All it takes to price fix and scam people in PoE because there is no interaction-free buyout system is to simply list a common item for less then its worth and reap the benefits. This is NOT a good system and it makes all the problems it claims to fix worse.

Edit: Comparing this games economic structure and the impact of trade on gameplay to WoW is not a valid comparison. Gear in WoW is untradable. You cant go buy the latest tier set on the AH in WoW, you have to run dungeons and raids to get it. We also don't need the same kind of AH system WoW has in PoE, it can be much more strictly limited such as only allowing each player to list a set number of items per day/hour or having a steep trade tax.

I have an entire page of valuable items I don't bother to even price because having to be GLUED to my PC in order to get things sold is ridiculous to me.

Do better.

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Noble_Seiken wrote:

I have an entire page of valuable items I don't bother to even price because having to be GLUED to my PC in order to get things sold is ridiculous to me.

Do better.

If the trade system was 'easy', you wouldn't HAVE any 'valuable items'.
Why? Because there are lots of items (like yours) that are never on the market.

PoE generates so much loot that if easy trading was made available, nothing would really be worth anything, apart from the very highest chase items.

That is why the trade system is as it is, and why it can't be changed. You're providing a good example for why the trade system as currently implemented, simply works!

There is a multitude of ways to make trading better and easier in the right places without flooding the market to no end. Like a limit to the number of items you can have on sale at any point in time. Plus, even without additional restrictions, not everything would be listed.
Most people don't bother listing 1 C stuff even now and even if they did it wouldn't really change the price because noone is going to list stuff for 1 wisdom scroll, no matter how easy the trade process gets. The effort of listing it would be too much already. Heck, even if we got a fully automated tradesystem the listings would still be limited because picking up everything is not worth the effort and it would naturally be limited by the number of premium tabs a person has.

That argument of yours convieniently forgets that 1) there is no truly frictionless and restrictionless trade and 2) that there is a limit to how low prices can go and we've more or less reached that limit already for 99% of the loot out there. Not having to be in your hideout for a trade (which is pretty much all people ask for) with everything else staying as it is would barely affect the market at all.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

There is a multitude of ways to make trading better and easier in the right places without flooding the market to no end. Like a limit to the number of items you can have on sale at any point in time.

Pointing out the obv here:
GGG offers the game "free to play" or "free to try" if u wanne call it that. Truth probably lies somewhere inbetween. Premium(trade) stash tabs are one of their main sources of income is my guess. So this particular suggestion would heavily collide with that.

Then they can just do what was suggested at the first page of this topic, put a fee in place. 1 Chaos/alch AH fee per listing. Would do the same thing. People won't be listing stuff for a chaos unless they are confident it's going to sell for at least that much, they will just lose money otherwise. Would also help greatly keeping inflation in check. As i said, there are plenty of ways to put restrictions on trade and give it friction without making it needlessly annoying and in the end extremely bot friendly. Because the only people benefitting from the current system are in fact the bot users as they already have the tradesystem we all want. One where you don't have to leave your map for every trade, where you don't even have to be at your PC to trade. They live the good life while the rest of us suffers.

Also, your argument is basically saying: "GGG can't improve the tradesystem because they rely on the income from bots buying stashtabs" because you can bet that a very large portion of GGGs income from premium tabs is from bot farms who have multiple accounts with large amounts of stash tabs. Meanwhile the average trade user has maybe one or two tabs to sell from.