Dear GGG (re re re re re requesting automated online only trade)

So there's a guy who got scammed recently. Let's analyze how we got to this situation.

1. limited stacks
- limited stacks comes from how GGG originally created the game as f2p but wanted to monetize by selling stash tabs. before currency tab was introduced even buying the regular stash tabs would eventually fill up.
- there was also LESS variety of items so GGG had to find artificial ways to fill players inventory. making currency stack in limited quantities achieved just that.

2. No automated trade
- GGG's stance on trade is they want to encourage players to engage with the game more than relying on trade. thus they intentionally made it difficult to trade.
- POE 5 years ago was a very different environment. i would even argue back then you could - with difficulty, clear most of the game with 100-200k dps. what an average player with a janky ass build can do was still a huge number of things by themselves. thus it made sense to make trading difficult. "Ugh, the sellers not responding/ the items already sold/ someone offered a higher price" leads to fuckit i ll just farm it myself. it made sense and was plausible for the average player to farm most of what they wanted themselves.
- Making trade difficult also helped prevent botters from profiting too much.
- Prevent market manipulation or at least slow it down.

Now lets see the downsides of these 2 issues

1. limited stacks.
- for starters you get into situations that force players to initiate trade multiple times. the more trades required, the higher the chance for someone to get scammed.
- its easier to scam people who dont pay attention if a stack or two are not full stacks
- it makes players (like my lazy ass self) have problems adding up stacks to see if they have enough.

2. No automated trade.
- players are inconvenienced. if they are engaged in long form content such as lab/sanctum, they are forced to complete it first. it could add additional stress as they know someones waiting on them. players sometimes opt to ignore trade because theyre busy.
- some sellers are simply never online or AFKing
- scams can happen more easily and honest mistakes can happen too
- price manipulation can happen anyway where people list items at a stupid low price, tricking other players into listing the items at similarly low prices
- item sniping happens anyway, item listed at low price? ALERT! and sniped
ime for ONE. not both. trade is now ESSENTIAL to the common player.
- botting happens anyway AND players LOVE BOTS now. bots actually sell currency that they need. better than the 10-30 players listed at top that all dont reply for one reason or another.
- as a seller you will get bombarded with whispers for items that already have been sold
- players can actually delist an item and relist it at whim. its not exactly market manipulation but it causes the buyer to waste time. personally i found an item listed that was a good deal. i traded a lot of my currency and at times AT LOSS in order to get enough divines. when i finally got enough. PM the dude. after a short while. he doesnt respond. after a LONG while. i give up and try searching trade again. OH THERE IT IS, the items there again by the exact same dude but listed higher. it is within his right to do so but damn did he waste my time and resources. do i blame him? tbh i want to blame him but one should always identify to the root cause. it's actually GGG. GGG allowed this to happen by having their trade system behave the way it currently does.
- a lot of salt from automated online trade not being a thing.

Other points of argument.


- GGG also has a "making a game to be played forever" philosophy, one way of achieving that is by making drops scarce. the less resource you have, the longer/harder it takes to reach where you want to be. in line with this forever philosophy, a lot of this rested on STANDARD being the primary league.
STD has always been the primary league back during the beginning of POE's lifetime. Temp leagues were introduced to allow GGG a way to test new mechanics to introduce to standard. Everything GGG did was a step to improve standard. standard is where people hoard and "play forever".

this changed as GGG had to come up with new ways to entice the "forever STD" gang to actually play temp leagues. i myself am one of such persons. i do not want to relevel a new character. i do not want to farm my gear again. i do not want to link/color my sockets all over again. leagues were made to have interesting rewards and could be very lucrative. they even introduced mtx rewards. eventually many players end up play temp leagues. in fact i would say the majority of players now focus on temp leagues and are at the point of deleting their characters/gear at the end of the league.

why am i bringing this up? for starters, the scarcity of drops. its common to get currency that you dont need and lack the currency that you do need. hence the need for trade.

then we have the amount of "rebuilding" you need to do. as mentioned, POE 5 years ago is kind of a different beast altogether. there was less to do. now, theres honestly so damn much to do that for a normie, its simply not reasonable to assume you'll be doing all the content. want a specific AUL? get busy delving. but what if you need a shaper/elder unique? have fun farming fragments. but what about making your gear 28% quality? what about transfigured gems? what about double corrupts? what about jewelry quality? what about annointing? do you need cluster jewels? do you want awakened jewels?

theres so many things that are available now that a casual player cannot reasonably farm alone. this is in contrast to GGG's original intent of encouraging players to play the game and get what they need instead of trading. it could have made sense 5 years ago but not now.

also, to nail that point down, GGG themselves have introduced HIGHLY RANDOM drops which kinda forces trade. watcher's eye was the beginning. now we have that which was taken jewel. they could be "useless" to you but could be highly valued by other players. similarly GGG released VALDO's which they literally told players to trade them if they were too worried about not being able to run them.

that said, POE in its current state should NULLIFIES GGG's trade manifesto. if not nullify then at the very least GGG should take a good hard look at it and reanalyze it. imho its outdated and should just be removed.

also i bring up standard because standard no longer is the primary focus of GGG. since the focus is on improving temp leagues, facilitating easy trade will DRASTICALLY IMPROVE new players experience.

GGG may be worried about players manipulating markets but the reality is, it happens ANYWAY. might as well let it happen anyway. i would rather shake my fists at market manipulators hurling curse words at them for doing so but as it is, instead i find myself frustrated at GGG/POE and it's archaic trade system. the technology exists to fix it and make it easier but GGG isnt doing anything about it.

Dear GGG, what are you worried about? in temp leagues, the market is reset. everyone has to rebuild their wealth. economy is fresh. as for standard? did you even care for standard? why suddenly do you need to worry about standard?

why is it that after 10 years, after the game has changed so drastically, is GGG HAPPY to accept that trading is one of the worst experiences in the game?

GGG is HAPPY to allow people to get scammed.

why can i throw such an allegation?

if GGG does not want players to be scammed, they could have done soemthing about it.

but they chose not to.

i think this will be the last time i post about trade. as i have nothing left to say about it.

also with POE2, titan quest 2, GD expansion, TLI , LE announced/in existence, my passion towards POE has waned a huge deal.

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

And this kind of predatory trading - where experienced players lacking the skill to actually clear content try to make currency at the expense of newer players - would be made FAR worse with one click instant buyout trading. Imagine having your items sniped because you misclicked them into the wrong tab, or because you set the price to 5c when you meant 5d, etc.

Some people are always gonna make bad choices and lose their Monopoly money. Any changes you make to trade won't fix that because the solution is for people to just be smarter.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Careful. You are sounding like a scam apologist.

Also, that's not how scams work - which is why they are known as confidence tricks, social engineering etc. etc. All scams rely on the victim overlooking or trusting something they shouldn't have. That in no way diminishes the brutal dishonesty and scummy nature of the scammer.

The victim is never the one at fault. That's just something scammers say.

"

t0lkien wrote:

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Careful. You are sounding like a scam apologist.

Also, that's not how scams work - which is why they are known as confidence tricks, social engineering etc. etc. All scams rely on the victim overlooking or trusting something they shouldn't have. That in no way diminishes the brutal dishonesty and scummy nature of the scammer.

The victim is never the one at fault. That's just something scammers say.

That's an incredibly simplistic way of looking at the situation, but okay. If you think that someone saying that the people who prey on noobs only do so because they can't clear content is being an apologist, you aren't living in reality. I also argued against OPs grounds specifically on the basis of how it would enable these so called scammers far more than the current trade system.

I suggest you reread my post until you actually understand it.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Actually it didn't force you for most of the games history which created a culture for scammers.


those features you're talking about were added because of scamming.

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Actually it didn't force you for most of the games history which created a culture for scammers.


those features you're talking about were added because of scamming.

I honestly can't remember when the mouseover requirement was added, but I'd be hesitant to blame all of the parasitic trade behavior in modern PoE on something which was fixed years ago. Those people are always around, in every game I've ever played, so I wouldn't expect PoE (or PoE2 for that matter) to be any different.

Some people just suck. My ignore list literally fills up with them every league.

But my point is, the current trade system is extremely effective at combating their degenerate behavior, so it's weird to see a thread that wants to REMOVE this protection because a tiny number of players still manage to somehow get ripped off. If people could run a live search and INSTANTLY snipe underpriced items, the number of people getting preyed upon would skyrocket.

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Actually it didn't force you for most of the games history which created a culture for scammers.


those features you're talking about were added because of scamming.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Version_0.9.13f

As a sidenote: open beta launched 7 month later with patch 0.11.x. :)

Them receipts lmao.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

And this kind of predatory trading - where experienced players lacking the skill to actually clear content try to make currency at the expense of newer players - would be made FAR worse with one click instant buyout trading. Imagine having your items sniped because you misclicked them into the wrong tab, or because you set the price to 5c when you meant 5d, etc.

Some people are always gonna make bad choices and lose their Monopoly money. Any changes you make to trade won't fix that because the solution is for people to just be smarter.

But thats good actually. Forcing trades will make it feel better even if mistakes happen.

Servers are too unstable these days to require multiple load screens for trading.

Hell ggg could just make you double confirm the price and by your logic no one is scammed.

I see no downside.

"

Scarletsword wrote:

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The game forces you to look at items to trade them, so any predatory trading is not a scam, by definition.

Actually it didn't force you for most of the games history which created a culture for scammers.


those features you're talking about were added because of scamming.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Version_0.9.13f

As a sidenote: open beta launched 7 month later with patch 0.11.x. :)

Cool, Perhaps i misspoke on the "most of the games history" but it doesn't really change much, I've been here since 2013 and that system wasn't implemented when i joined, it was implemented later because of scamming as well as other enhancements to trade to curb this behavior.

I take issue with the approach where in this thread some are saying its the victims fault, those people are wrong.