Trading, How can we fix it? - An Outline and Essay.

Without any real statistics at hand, this is what I've been noticing the last few leagues, and I've noticed the distaste and contempt for it has grown greatly. I have noted that many people across the spectrum of Path of Exile players have grown increasingly tired of this problem, and have likely started to stray away from the game for long periods of time, if not in perpetuity, because of this problem.

Trading.

It's clunky, slow, and often times time wasting. It feels as though we spend more time managing our trades than playing the game, between having to get a stash snapshot from a 3rd party website, to automatically register everything and then spit out a price tag that we can then screenshot and send to another third party Discord server, which then we get a ping on Discord (Or in game), then we have regular business trade from that point.

A potential solution has been raised a few times, but I don't know how in depth those other pitches have been, if they've been noticed at all, or if there's any new internal talk about the potential solution to this.

An Auction "House", A.K.A. An "Automatic" Trading system.

Now, those words may be scary and off putting right off the cuff, but hear me out.

A way for GGG to make real $$$ off of this, in addition for us players to save time, effort, and headaches with all of the third party websites. It would be a welcome addition for both new and veteran players, as it would assist in letting players actually trade without having to find out they need to use poe.ninja, poedb, poe stack, excilence, and discord in order to optimally trade.

I present, the Auctioneer Exile (Name WIP)

An NPC vendor, just like Lilly Roth, or the Expedition Masters, or Virac. Give one free to every player with two-factor authentication activated, that has a premium tab within it, placeable within a player's hideout. This solves two issues at once that GGG has often raised against the Auction system.

A. Automatic Offline Trading - This is solved because a player's hideout is only accessible while a player is online, so therefore their vendor is only available while the player is online.

B. Unlimited Offline Trading - This is solved due to the vendor having a set space in the inventory that limits how much trade is viable through that vendor at a time.

Now, kind exile, you may be looking at this and saying, "But what about Mageblood trades! Why should someone get 100 Divines without inviting someone to their hideout and actually phyiscally trading the item???"

Limit the total amount of currency able to be traded at a single time with the Vendor, so that a player can't list a Mageblood on the vendor. Or they're heavily incentivized not to, anyway. Limit the total amount of currency per trade to, for argument's sakes, 1 Divine per trade.

To add on to this, to discourage botters, you could add a "Trade Cap Increase" tied to Challenges, account age, or levels gained in the current league.

Well why a vendor NPC? Why not make it a part of the stash itself?

Because creativity. Let people have the option to place a vendor within their hideout, and decorate their hideout around that vendor, to indicate 'Hey! This is an Auction! You want to buy my goods? Khajiit has wares if you have coin!' - Wait, wrong meme.

With that, I believe I've solved a majority of GGG's own arguments against this, now to give them an incentive to actually go ahead and put forth the effort to do something like this, remember when I said the vendor has one premium tab for free for everyone?

Well, that's just one tab. Why not allow players to do any of the following options, that could be easily done through the MTX shop, so GGG can make a little scratch off of this too?

Option 1: Allow players to buy extra tabs for their vendor through the shop, they're super duper premium tabs, because they sell automatically! A regular premium tab is 40 points, or 4 USD. I would happily shell out 10$ per tab, heck, we already shell out 15$ for a premium quad tab.

Option 2: Add it as a reward on the premium track for Kirac's Vault Pass! This way it encourages people actually playing the game to spend the money on the pass even further than they're already incentivized with the admittedly awesome cosmetics, while even further decentivizing degenerate robot gameplay.

Option 3: Instead of tabs, do a whole extra vendor! Instead of placing one, you can place two! Maybe even do "Premium" auctioneer vendors that we can customize with some of our showcase items? cough Mageblood cough

I do understand the apprehension to a plan like this, but I sincerely hope that GGG take a look at this idea truthfully. I understand some of the problems they have foreseen with a system like this and once upon a time, I would have agreed. However, the system we have in place has created more harm than it has good. Having to whisper 50-100 people for a single trade of fusings, scammers, botters... All to avoid these things in the first place. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I hope that some of the recommended additions to the game that I've outlined above help GGG with an idea, even if they don't directly use this, I just hope it helps.

I love this game. I love the community. It's not trade that made me fall in love with this. It's everything else. It's the people I've met along the way, it's the game I've played for over a decade, and hope to play for another decade. I always sing the praises of this game and the company that runs it to all of my friends, even if they don't want to play it, but I understand why they don't want to. It's so complex, even at a base understanding, and then if I explained to them how to trade for the items they want?.... It would discourage them from even trying to play it in the first place...

Thank you for your time, exile, and good hunting. I hope you find plenty of juicy ones.
- Xavorin, The Noodle, The Breadman. (Also ZOOTS are some cool people.)

Read this. It explains why 'easy trading' is neither desirable, nor possible with the current state of the game.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Yes, it is still current.

So I have a few thoughts in regards to Chris's points in that post, regarding the ease of trade, and I'll outline them below.

Overall
For starters, I appreciate the link as it gives me some additional insight I hadn't had before, but I do disagree, and agree, with several of the points. The starting point I'd like to make is that the post was made in 2017. At that time, I would have agreed much more with Chris's ideas in regards to how trade works, and I largely would have (and did) accept these things as commonplace. However, the game has grown since then, and with the growth the game has seen, trade has become volatile, takes longer, and is much more difficult to interact with than it was then.

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.
I agree with part of this sentiment, that being that more loot from monsters incentivizes playing the game more, but something we've realized over time as players of this wonderful game is that crafting/trading is guaranteed a greater spike in power than a monster drop likely ever will be.

Since the time of the post, Bestiary, Delve, Harvest, and Ritual have been released. That post was made just before the Harbinger League launch, for perspective there have been 22 league launches, with each one iterating the game in a variety of ways, but one thing that hasn't changed, is trading. Mechanically speaking, anyway.

It has changed through the growth of the game, and the amount of botters, scammers, and price fixers that are present, to the degree that we have to whisper 50 people to trade a single item.

At the time, trading was already easy. I remember those days, I remember the old trade website, before the then experimental one that the post Cyzax linked was mentioning and that we have still to this day. Not only that, but since then, crafting items has become the way to get good items, far and beyond what monster drops we get now, outside of uniques, which we largely have to farm for with div cards, unless we trade for them.

Easy trade means reducing drop rates
A reduction in drop rates for which things would need to be implemented? A large amount of trading right now is for currency items and unique items. Rares that are mirrored are crafted through currency items farmed/traded for, and base items which are already traded with ease because bases are cheap. Why do I need to whisper 10-20 people for a Hunter's Exalt? Or 100 people for a pile of fusings? We've swung the pendulum too far in the other direction with the system in place, in my opinion.

Why do we need to create friction for players to enjoy the game, especially for newer players, as vets have largely just accepted the status quo when it comes to trade, or they've moved to SSF, where trade doesn't matter anyway.

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
This disparity has only grown with the current implementation of trade, because of the issue that those who never traded, or scarcely traded, are either on SSF, don't play, or still don't trade. While people who used to frequently trade, have taken those avenues now, as they've grown tired of the way trade is currently handled. I don't have statistics and insider knowledge of who does what with where, but I know what I see across discord, the forum, and the reddit, as well as youtube. A lot of people complain about trade as it stands because it has gotten worse. In 2017, it would have taken me 5 minutes to trade a full set of gear. In 2023, I oftentimes have to make concessions on items I want because the people won't answer, are price fixing, or otherwise. Which leads me to have to either trade more than I wanted to in the first place, or makes me take a worse item, which makes me, and others, feel bad.

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
One one hand, I largely agree with this statement, however, the state of trade as it is has already exacerbated the abuse of automation. Runescape had a major issue with this, and for some time entirely disabled peer to peer trading, and has slowly worked its way back from that time. Some of the things they implemented to fight against it were outlined in my original post, and some of the ways to combat this I also outlined in my original post. Tying unlocks to account age, the vault pass, etcetera, which would make automation significantly harder.

I agree with the stance that items matter, but our time matters too. In recent years, specifically since Ultimatum for my own memory and experience, I have spent more and more time each league trading, finding trades, and interacting with the trading system, than I have actually obtaining items to trade. What takes me an hour to farm in a set of maps, I often have to spend half an hour setting up a trade, another 5 minutes doing the trade, then I have another person wanting to trade while I'm trading, and by time it's said and done, I've wasted another half an hour just doing that. Or I have an item I want to craft, and I need currency to craft it, so I have to take the hour's worth of items, convert it down into currency of one type, then currency of another type to craft, then spend the time crafting, which takes more time than the maps themselves.

Last league alone, I spent more time crafting gear for a Wardlooper, trading for currencies, and sitting in my hideout, than I did farming the things to sell for the currency to craft that gear. It did not feel good to do that. The payoff at the end felt good, sure, but not in a "Yes, I've succeeded in my goal, and I am happy!" but more like "F**kin heck, that's finally over, I can actually play the game normally now. Woo." One is significantly more excited than the other.

"So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade."

At the time, I would have disagreed with this statement, it was quite easy to complete a trade then. I've outlined above how that was. I didn't experience the other parts of Chris's statements, as I joined the game during the unofficial trade site era, but at this time, the whole system was quite easy to deal with. The problem is that the frustration of completing a trade that he brings up, (inviting to a party, moving to a hideout, waiting for the player to find the item, open the trade window, both parties accepting the trade, and moving on), isn't the part I, and others, have a problem with fundamentally. It is the lack of responses from bots, scammers, price fixers, and afk people not registered as afk by the API. Or people who flat out ignore trade requests.

In fact, we have bots now that automate that whole frustrating part, and unfortunately are the easiest to trade with people on the site now! It's easier to trade with a bot than a real person because of the sheer fact that the whole "frustrating" part is automated, but it gets the trade done faster. Over the last few years, I've found myself being more okay with trading with the bot than finding a real person to trade with because my thought is "Well at least I didn't have to whisper 50 people at once for one trade."

His points later in the post about SSF are valid, and understandable. However, as I've outlined in this follow-up, I believe, and many others believe, that trade has gotten harder over time, and it will continue down this trend if nothing changes. It's driving people away from the game entirely, because they want to trade, but they don't want to deal with the trade system. This friction that's been just widely accepted as good for the game's health, has made the game's health worse. I'm not fond of my favorite game losing HP. :c

"

Cyzax wrote:

Read this. It explains why 'easy trading' is neither desirable, nor possible with the current state of the game.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Yes, it is still current.

Yeah, and if i had the time to "outline" every time he contradicted himself or how bullshit that manifesto is, i'd be here all week discussing it.

"

Cyzax wrote:

Read this. It explains why 'easy trading' is neither desirable, nor possible with the current state of the game.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Yes, it is still current.

No it does not sufficiently explain that nor close the matter. Framing the conversation as though there are only 2 possible forms of trading systems (hard/easy) is a bullshit thoughtless cop out. The idea presented by op here is only one of probably hundreds of meaningfully distinct possible solutions that could address all the problems GGG rightly worries about for the future of the game while reducing the tedium and frustration experienced by actual players.

please dont throw links at people as though to shut them up. This conversation needs to happen even if its happened thousands of times before.

The desire for trade to be hard isnt the same as the reality that trade currently can be soul crushing. There can be a middle ground.

"

XavorinMoonshadow wrote:

"So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade."

This is the part that no longer holds true and therefor justifies a rethink of this system.

Completing a trade with a person (or bot) that is operating in good faith and wants to actually make that trade is incredibly fast; like can be 10 seconds or less.

It is actually sometimes insanely difficult now to search for items due to the sheer number of items posted by people who have no interest in actually responding to offers on that item. (I personally sent 100+ trade offers to try and buy fusing orbs yesterday before 1 person so much as replied)

So what we have in effect are 'fake' items posted where you'll never actually be able to engage with that player and these are indistinguishably mixed into the 'real' item postings so we have to spend our time wading through muck instead of killing monsters.

So yeah the premise for that policy has broken. Failing to update the policy will only grow more cancerous with time.

Thanks for fighting the fight.

"

BruteNewb wrote:

(I personally sent 100+ trade offers to try and buy fusing orbs yesterday before 1 person so much as replied)

This alone is reason enough for me to believe that the system needs to change. Doing some quick (albeit generous) maths; if you spent 3 seconds between each message to ensure that the message is received, and proper time has alloted for an invite, before moving on to the next message, then you have a situation where you specifically spent Three Hundred Seconds, for a pile of fusings. That's 5 minutes, which in modern Path of Exile is equivalent to having run a map, killing hundreds if not thousands of monsters, and actually engaging with the game.

"

BruteNewb wrote:

please dont throw links at people as though to shut them up. This conversation needs to happen even if its happened thousands of times before.

I appreciate the comments, even from people like this, because the link did offer me some perspectives, albeit outdated, that I hadn't had before, that I could work out my own responses to, perspectives from the leader of the team himself, no less.

Stay safe exile <3

An NPC trader works well. It's something I saw early as Ultima Online.

You load up the vendor with items, set a price and it'll even sell when you're offline. Some limitation should be placed these days like if you pull an item out of the vendor there's a time period before that item can be put back up. This reduces market spoofing a bit.

I'd say this system works better than the current one in every way.

Implement https://runescape.wiki/w/Grand_Exchange https://youtu.be/a72HTfoWPIc and then reduce drop chance of everything across the board. Oh look, problem solved.

Ironically it will probably take them 10-20 years before they realize this themselves. Or not and people will continue with the awful system there is currently. At least it's not Diablo where there is basically no trading at all so it could always be worse I guess.

Trade should never EVER be a p2w part of this game. Its already bad enough that players aren't given at least ONE premium (trade) tab. It is almost impossible to play the game without one, unless you are only ever going to be SSF.

Gating more and more of the basic game functions behind paywalls is not going to ever be the answer and is a total nonstarter.

As for an auction-house LIKE idea: I think the reason so many people are against even trying it is because it would fundamentally change how the "veterans" play the game. Gone are the dump tabs. Gone are every single league-start strategy. Gone is everything we have learned over the last 10 years. THIS causes more friction than actually even discussing the merits or pros/cons of the system itself. People do not like change.

That said, an auction house-like system might throw the game into upheaval...for a little while. But then afterward, as the dust settles, it might actually stabilize the game in a way we have never experienced. If items remain on the market for 24 hours...now we have a chaos ratio that is almost forced to remain stable for at least 24 hours. If you can set your own time limit on the Auction, then now you have players more wary and careful of what they actually put up at one time. It severely SEVERELY slows down the seller game, but possibly to the betterment of the OVERALL game.