It's 2023 and We Still Need to Spam Trade Chat?

While overall PoE is a great game, there are some serious issues with PoE that still remain, like the absolute horrible lack of balance between skills and rewards from content.

But honestly the thing that prevents me from loving the game or playing it more is the absolutely awful trade experience.

Spamming trades at people and having to deal with separating out currencies and waiting for people to trade is just clunky and horrible. Nobody enjoys the current trade system.

I hope PoE2 doesn't keep this awful system. It's already 2023 and we have AI that can write us entire essays. We have quantum computers in the world that can abuse the fundamental characteristics of physics to solve problems. But here we are having to manually set up each individual transaction like cavemen trading sticks and stones in a digitally based game.

Unbelievable stupid design decision and it showcases a complete lack of care about player's game experience.

+1

I used to play a game where I could put items for sale go offline and next time I logged in I'd have made a lot of money i don't see why poe couldn't have something like that even if only it would be for items that can stack

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lagwin1980 wrote:

[Removed by Support]

Is it that difficult to understand what is not fun about having to spam users for trades who 80%+ of the time are doing something that makes it inconvenient to complete the trade and ignore the request, to then waste time finding the item for the party selling, separating out currency for the party buying, just to enter a laggy server half way across the world just to complete a single transaction?

There are so many items and consumables in the game that it's the trade system itself that is the limiting and annoying factor to enabling fun content. If you can't understand why that's a problem in a game, I don't know how to help you.

As mentioned, having a system to put items up for sale and come back to them being sold would be infinitely more convenient and satisfying without wasting player's time.

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yeknoms wrote:

As mentioned, having a system to put items up for sale and come back to them being sold would be infinitely more convenient and satisfying without wasting player's time.

But as discussed in the trade manifesto, trade must waste players' time. Why? Because trade lets you bypass natural item progression, and is generally a horrible progression system at the same time. However, GGG decided a long time ago that trade is absolutely central and essential to their game, with the effect that item progression is horrible, and drops must suck for everyone (even for those not engaging in trade, i.e. SSF). One could kind of solve the issue with having a proper crafting system, which only generates items that are useful for the player, and not a lot of other useful-but-not-for-me-so-I-trade-it stuff, but GGG decided against that, too (Harvest was removed).

Long story short, trade deters from actually playing the game and makes the game experience worse for the majority of players, but GGG decided that it must be central, and because of it allowing you to bypass item progression, it must be clunky, waste your time and be a generally horrible experience. It is by design, it will not change.

GGG is right about trade. The friction makes trading a game of its own. If you removed it, effects like “bulk costs more” would go away and it would be harder to find unexploited market niches. It also reduces the empowering effect of trades and allows them to be more generous with drop rates despite trade still existing. The downside is players whinge about how hard trading is but it’s not so hard that it’s going to stop anyone who actually enjoys the game from playing - you’ve already jumped much higher hurdles creating a character that can acquire the resources worth trading in the first place.

It’s also not even that hard. Why would you spam trade chat when you can just use a premium tab to list items for sale on the trade site?

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DichotomousThree wrote:

GGG is right about trade. The friction makes trading a game of its own. If you removed it, effects like “bulk costs more” would go away and it would be harder to find unexploited market niches. It also reduces the empowering effect of trades and allows them to be more generous with drop rates despite trade still existing. The downside is players whinge about how hard trading is but it’s not so hard that it’s going to stop anyone who actually enjoys the game from playing - you’ve already jumped much higher hurdles creating a character that can acquire the resources worth trading in the first place.

It’s also not even that hard. Why would you spam trade chat when you can just use a premium tab to list items for sale on the trade site?

You really need to go play some true MMO's with different trading systems to realize that the excuses given by GGG are bull feces.

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DichotomousThree wrote:

GGG is right about trade. The friction makes trading a game of its own.

I don't mind them introducing mini games into the game, but in this specific case they balance the entire main game around the mini game making it worse both for those who don't want to play the mini game AND those who want to play it.

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DichotomousThree wrote:

GGG is right about trade. The friction makes trading a game of its own. If you removed it, effects like “bulk costs more” would go away and it would be harder to find unexploited market niches. It also reduces the empowering effect of trades and allows them to be more generous with drop rates despite trade still existing. The downside is players whinge about how hard trading is but it’s not so hard that it’s going to stop anyone who actually enjoys the game from playing - you’ve already jumped much higher hurdles creating a character that can acquire the resources worth trading in the first place.

It’s also not even that hard. Why would you spam trade chat when you can just use a premium tab to list items for sale on the trade site?

I dunno. Runescape has had the Grand Exchange for a decade and a half, and it hasn't collapsed the economy due to removal of friction. I just think GGG looks at the concept of an auction house and immediately gets Vietnam-like flashbacks of the time ActiBlizz had one for D3 which crashed and burned, completely ignoring the reason for it was because of RMAH. Either that or Chris's Diablo 2 nostalgia glasses were welded to his face and can't imagine an ARPG evolving with modern mechanics. I mean, consider how long it took them to modernize the minimap and loot allocation system. GGG giving us a loot filter, especially one so indepth and complex that I've never seen any other game do, is a miracle in and of itself.

Also, why would the OP want to become the thing they hate by putting the items they want to sell on a premium tab, go back to doing whatever, then get bogged down with trade requests they literally can't answer due to being preoccupied? The solution to the problem isn't to contribute to the problem.

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DichotomousThree wrote:

GGG is right about trade. The friction makes trading a game of its own. If you removed it, effects like “bulk costs more” would go away and it would be harder to find unexploited market niches. It also reduces the empowering effect of trades and allows them to be more generous with drop rates despite trade still existing. The downside is players whinge about how hard trading is but it’s not so hard that it’s going to stop anyone who actually enjoys the game from playing - you’ve already jumped much higher hurdles creating a character that can acquire the resources worth trading in the first place.

It’s also not even that hard. Why would you spam trade chat when you can just use a premium tab to list items for sale on the trade site?

I played Atlantica Online, old, turn-based MMO - really good stuff.. while it lasted. Back there we had both market and auction house AND p2p trade AND web trades AND market channel. Player progression was still limited by item costs, so players had to farm by themselves. But smarter folks managed to live off market-playing just fine.


You know what you didn't have? BS NOT playing waiting for replies from sellers. We didn't have (that many) scammers and obvious price-fixers. Whatever you placed in market had a fee, so there was currency drain on it.

You simply haven't experienced a good/player-friendly trading system. It's kind of a "frog in the well" case