A middle ground solution for trading (aka "put your money where your mouth is")

What you describe is simply incorrect...two companies? What are you talking about?

We aren't talking two random players trading things to each other at whatever value they want, we are talking massive manipulation on the scale of 10+% of the entire economy. That ABSOLUTELY has an effect on the "real economy" as you describe it. You keep throwing around all these terms and things that have no actual connection to the market within PoE. Anti-trust? Anti-monopoly? These are MEANINGLESS because bots are faceless, "average" players. There isn't some main central company that you can say to GGG: Please ban JP Morgan for price fixing.

"There are no RELEVANT transactions". EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION is relevant. And bots can do thousands of these/ 10s of thousands of these in the same amount of time a human might do 10. Every transaction is relevant because it is within the same bubble that is the league economy.

Allowing bots more freedom gives them MORE leverage over "relevant" transactions, because the vast majority of transactions would be done by bots, and not by players. To say this wouldn't effect the league economy as a whole is wrong, plain and simple.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

What you describe is simply incorrect...two companies? What are you talking about?

We aren't talking two random players trading things to each other at whatever value they want, we are talking massive manipulation on the scale of 10+% of the entire economy. That ABSOLUTELY has an effect on the "real economy" as you describe it. You keep throwing around all these terms and things that have no actual connection to the market within PoE. Anti-trust? Anti-monopoly? These are MEANINGLESS because bots are faceless, "average" players. There isn't some main central company that you can say to GGG: Please ban JP Morgan for price fixing.

"There are no RELEVANT transactions". EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION is relevant. And bots can do thousands of these/ 10s of thousands of these in the same amount of time a human might do 10. Every transaction is relevant because it is within the same bubble that is the league economy.

Allowing bots more freedom gives them MORE leverage over "relevant" transactions, because the vast majority of transactions would be done by bots, and not by players. To say this wouldn't effect the league economy as a whole is wrong, plain and simple.

Would you sell a Mageblood for 10c to me just because some bot network sells 500 of those per minute to practically itself?

I bet not. You are reasonable enough to understand that it is worth (actual worth, incrementing price, reasonable value for currency) hundreds of divine orbs.

And banning would be easy. Simple heuristics on trading data (not even AI needed) can find patterns. Whole IP blocks can be blocked (countries with affinity to RMT), etc...

Anti-trust in action. Instead of wholesale player annoyance.

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navigator4223 wrote:

If two companies decide in the real world that they simply send the same articles back and forth between each other, for an arbitrarily low (deflation) or high (inflation) price, still no deflation or inflation would happen in the real economy.

You are making the error of assuming a game economy is equivalent to a real-world economy. It is not...

In the real world, there are costs (not necessarily money, but also time, effort and so on) involved in transactions. There are also costs involved in creating items, physical or virtual. Those costs are significant and put a damper on reselling for profit.

There are no such costs in PoE! Items you create (find) are completely free, and so are money. You are not paying anything for them. The time you spend is time spent on entertainment, not production.
Without the current barriers on trading, there would be nothing blocking the way for market manipulations on a massive scale.

That is why PoE has the current trade restrictions. To act as the 'cost' in real-world trading.

GGG understands 'trading' a lot better than most players...

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Cyzax wrote:

"

navigator4223 wrote:

If two companies decide in the real world that they simply send the same articles back and forth between each other, for an arbitrarily low (deflation) or high (inflation) price, still no deflation or inflation would happen in the real economy.

You are making the error of assuming a game economy is equivalent to a real-world economy. It is not...

In the real world, there are costs (not necessarily money, but also time, effort and so on) involved in transactions. There are also costs involved in creating items, physical or virtual. Those costs are significant and put a damper on reselling for profit.

There are no such costs in PoE! Items you create (find) are completely free, and so are money. You are not paying anything for them. The time you spend is time spent on entertainment, not production.
Without the current barriers on trading, there would be nothing blocking the way for market manipulations on a massive scale.

That is why PoE has the current trade restrictions. To act as the 'cost' in real-world trading.

GGG understands 'trading' a lot better than most players...

Which market manipulation?

Btw, levelling beyond 95 doesn't actually feel like "entertainment"... just sayin'. Not because of the dying, I can already avoid that, but because it requires a mindnumbing grind.

Again:

It doesn't matter what the bots do anymore as soon as the market is fully free and open. Realistic pricing (300 divines for a Mageblood, 220c for 1d, etc...) will always be realistic pricing. If the bots do some idiot stuff, let them, it doesn't matter to the real economy. All we need is a community tool "trade filter" that excludes well known bots, with user contribution to who and what is a bot.

I even have two examples of games with fully free markets: WoW and EVE Online. Both have thrieving economies, although (admittedly) WoW suffers from insane inflation time and time again, because there are too few currency sinks.

So what that teaches me:

PoE should have a fully free economy, too - but with a currency sink. Placing something on the market should involve a fee of something like 10% of sold items for a bulk trade proposal and 1c for an item trade.

Community-wise the ninja-website is also quite helpful and could probably be extended to exclude fake bot transactions.

Seriously, I don't see the problem. There is no problem at all.

And regarding realistic pricing:

That would even be much easier to achieve, because supply would not be limited by the willingness of prospective sellers to put up with the metagame BS (endless whispers, having to be online just to trade, etc...) anymore but items would be priced based on actual game effort vs. game reward.

A much better solution than what we have now.

Regarding metagame BS, here something I have experienced in the last couple of days:

Put a few Tabula Rasas on sale for 7c each. Did maps, did heists, people whispering me. Me, willing to sell, invite them to party to trade, then they refuse the invite.

Are you kidding me? Are you seriously insisting that this is an acceptable user / player experience?

How it should work:

1. I go to the auction house (terminal in my hideout or whatever)
2. I put Tabula Rasa there and say: "I want 7c for this"
3. I pay 1c of fee
4. Whoever picks it up gets it and the 7c are delivered to my "Currency" stash tab
5. Later, when I have earned 300 divines I go to the auction house terminal in my hideout, enter "Mageblood" in the search bar, add "4 flasks" as extra search term, find one and hit "plz gief!!1" button
6. We're done. No problems.

Same for bulk trades.

Thats the ideal model.

The current model actually encourages and helps bots because supply side is artificially limited by psychological factors (the metagaming BS I mentioned) so anything that hasn't a psychology (read: bot) has a very, very big advantage over the homo sapiens.

Sorry, but STOP, this misguided bullshit noting that offline/automatic/AH trade would some how fix your problems with trading are just that, misguided bullshit.

It dose not prevent you from getting scammed, it dose not get you the thing you click on it dose none of the things you think it would do and adds more ways to fuck the player over.

It dose not prevent scams = most "scams" are people to tired/dumb to properly check the item they are trading for before hitting accept, an auction house can rely on exactly the same player behaviour to scam people (literally WoW listing for copper start bids to 1000g buyout which is still catching people out)

Having trade for 250,000 players running through the one auction house (or whatever BS you want to call it) would mean that anything you click (especially bulk) at the lowest prices would already be gone, again WoW...you go to buy your raid flasks on raid day and click the lowest price and get an error because someone beat you to it, requiring you to refresh and try again at a higher price, this is on servers that only have at most 20,000 people on it

Now add bots into the mix, you have given them the tools to literally snipe all the most sought after things and control the market on maps, some of which will end up forcing people to feel the need to RMT...it feeds into the whole bot eco system

free markets don't work, and they don't exist irl.

governments always protect their local industries, prices are dictated by huge companies dominating the markets and even globalisation of production is rolled back nowadays.

throwing countries into a club using the same currency horribly failed with the european monetary union, it's almost the same as an ingame economy where the player producing the goods with the least effort wins the market and outcompetes it's "opponents".

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in games ... lets just say that the most whealthy players should have achieved that by being good in playing arpgs, not just the market.

removing market entry barriers don't enforce that principle and neither does adding a small fee for trades.

Then do it like EVE Online.

Buy orders and sell orders.

Player A: "hm, would like to buy 200 fusing orbs for 20c, lets see if somebody fulfills that" and enters it into the auction house.

Player B: "ah, I have 2000 fusing orbs, lets see if there are buyers on the AH... ah, yes, lets sell"

OR, other option:

Player A: "got my second Mageblood, lets issue a sell order for 295 divines"

Player B: "would like the Mageblood, lets see what is on sale"

Would solve the problem with sniping.

Additionally: add a limit to buy orders per minute per account. And monitor number of accounts per IP address.

Also add heuristics and ban all detected bots.

Come on, use your imagination, its all possible.

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navigator4223 wrote:

Make at least the stuff that is currently available in bulk trade automatically and, especially, offline tradeable. Like "ok, I offer my 5 divines for 219 chaos each" and who grabs it first gets it.

4. Automated, offline bulk trading would make the ghost of Milton Friedman very happy and maybe he drops a divine or three for us filthy exiles to pick up?

Hell no. Go back to school because there is work to do.

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navigator4223 wrote:

Then do it like EVE Online.

I played EVE Online for years... You're comparing apples and car engines, expecting the car engine to taste as good as an apple...

EVE was designed with economy at the centre. They had an economist employed for it (don't know if he is still there). There is a significant effort cost involved in gathering any kind of resources, and there is no 'auction house'... There are 1000's of separate auction houses, and you have to spend a lot of effort going between them. The resource sinks are designed to be able to absorb by and large all resources.

PoE gives resources for free, and in FAR bigger amounts that what is used in the game. There are not significant resource sinks for anything but a limited amount of currency.

Comparing the two is just mindnumbing...

My main character is about 4 weeks old and has gathered 7 or 8 divines so far.

About 99% of unique items that drop are not even worth the click on "invite to party" if I'm idling in my hideout if somebody would want to buy them (I don't put anything on sale anymore that is worth less than 10c because it's simply a PITA to deal with the whispers and especially the prospective buyers who ignore you if you invite them to trade).

We even have to employ loot filters to get rid of the masses of absolutely pointless loot.

But, of course, gathering resources in this game is easier than in EVE Online where you can farm for a fully equipped Megatron with T2 gear (my main in EVE Online was Gallente) from virtually 0 ISK in about, hm, 6 hours?

Been there, done that. You know, getting podkilled in the Siseide system.

And yes, the economist was certainly a great idea. EVE Online has very, very low inflation (in fact CCP had to artificially inflate the ISK a little bit a few years ago).