can we talk about the trade manifesto ?

Hi guys, I'm taling about this post : https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Made by Chris and explaining why the trade on poe is what it is and why GGG won't do anything to change that.
I think GGG philosophy about trade is really outdate, encourage scammers and do nothing but hurting the vast majority of players.
I know Chris is in eternal love with diablo 2 and he's still stuck in the 2000th, but maybe it is time to change and do something ?

let's talk about it :

"

Items Matter. Trade is Important.

When we started developing Path of Exile in 2006, we identified several key design pillars. These are fundamental philosophies chosen to guide our design decisions throughout development. One of these was that "items matter". Items are a player's reward for playing Path of Exile. They're the primary way of measuring progress in a league. A person with vastly more in-game wealth has often played longer than someone with a higher level character. They also matter because if a player had better items, then they'd be able to build more powerful characters, play harder content, and be viewed as richer and more successful within the game. The acquisition of items is why people play Action RPGs. Chances are, if you're reading this, you understand why it's important that items matter because your Path of Exile items mean a lot to you as well.

For items to matter, it's important that they can be traded to other players. It's important that you could give the item to the other player, if they were able to convince you into it. For this reason, almost nothing in Path of Exile is bound to your account. Even in Solo Self-Found mode, which doesn't allow trading, items can be moved at will into the regular trading leagues so that you can benefit from their value if desired.

The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile - if you're lucky, you can find amazing stuff that you can trade for all the items needed to create an entire new character build.

So they basically say that itemsmatters and trading is important, cool, while I thing trading should not be that central in an ARPG (because trading matters in trading game, but who am I to judge ?)

let's get to the next

"

Consequences of Easy Trade

So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile's formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not. While easy trade sounds great on paper, there are some important considerations!

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.
People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!

So that's a pure lie, if trading is hard, you will trade fewer times, so you will upgrade less. If trade is easy, each time you have a decent amount of currencies, you will trade them for upgrade, and not hoard like people usually do in poe.

Most people do farm and hoard a lot of currencies to then buy an expensive upgrade, much more than buying many less expensives upgrade.

And no, you don't do one last level for the hope of droping a valuable item for your build because most items are garbage and the drop rate is so trash that most people just take currencies/consumable and trade with them, because best items are crafted (or best unique are obtained through harvest divination gamble).

"

Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can't be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can't use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.

Yeah whatever you, GGG, have butchered the drop rates since years, the game drop jack shit, it's impossible to drop an upgrade to your build, you drop currencies, then you trade currencies, then you buy your item or you craft it, you don't drop it. So why making the trading hard ?

You say "easy trade and low drop OR harder trade and nice drop"
Why poe have low drop AND hard trade then ?

"

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.

The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.

LMAO seriously this one is the biggest joke of all, there is already VERY VERY huge gap between high end traders and "low level" players, some people amass dozen of mirrors in league while casual can't even amass 100 divines, if trading was easier, at least the casual would have decent gears and being able to do end game.
If you look at steam stats, only 2% of the whole player base have killed pinacle boss, and it count carry, and not, it's global, not for the league, it's for the global game.
And again, if most people don't trade, why don't you want the game to have better loot ? Because again, the best way to farm gear ATM is to farm currencies and them trade them, even for a casual, it's better to farm essences in low level maps.

"

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players.

Sooooo, PoE is already plagued by bots, and no, putting an AH in the game will ACTUALLY LESSEN THEIR IMPACT.
there is many online games with huge focus on economy, and with AH, and bots don't harm it that much. (Hi eve online).
You know why ? because with easier trade, most people would actually trade, and sell stuff, so more items on the market, so no, bots would not be able to control the market as they do now.
And dear god thank you that there are bots on trade league, because it would be impossible to trade your currencies to actually get items...

"

Trade in Path of Exile

From the start, we knew that Path of Exile needed the ability to trade items and that we had to be careful not to make it too easy. We had seen what happened in other Action RPGs when characters could be upgraded trivially. We added trade chat and a secure player-to-player trade screen so that people could negotiate transactions and complete them without counterparty risk.

With insufficient foresight into how it'd eventually affect trade, we also added the ability to link items on the official forums. Linking items is a way of showing other players that you actually own an item, because the system automatically checks that you still have the item in that form and marks it as verified. This system was intended so that players could show off their awesome finds to other players, in a similar way to the in-game item linking system. Because items matter so much in Path of Exile, it was important that we provided many ways to prove ownership of items. We even intended to allow people to Tweet their items from within the game, though never got around to implementing this feature.

Before long, people used item linking to set up shops within the trade forums. This was expected, because the goal of item linking was to prove ownership of items (so that people could know that you still have the item before they make you an offer). These shops became complicated and people made tools that let users manage their shops and post to them efficiently. So far, so good.

Then came the forum-scraping bots. Smart community members worked out that they could automatically crawl the forum and insert all of the items into a database, creating an instantly- and accurately-searchable index of all items for trade in Path of Exile. There was nothing we could do about this, because it's almost impossible to stop people gathering information from a public website.

A trade ecosystem evolved where players would search for items on trade websites to quickly find what they need, but would have to manually contact the user in-game to perform the trade. While this was a lot quicker than before, we grew to accept it but were worried about one aspect in particular: To create trade forum threads easily, users would download third-party programs and enter their account details (or at least web session IDs). While these tools and their authors never took advantage of this in an illegal way, it was a potentially dangerous situation for our users and we really needed an official solution. We made it so that Premium Stash Tabs can expose their contents to trade sites on a public API.

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 remaining frustration is the only thing standing in the way of trades being basically instant. While we understand that this sounds like a positive thing, we are very concerned regarding what will happen if that does eventuate. We have to prioritise the long-term health of Path of Exile.

WTF, you say that trading is frustrating and this is a positive thing ? So you want your players to be frustrated with trading ? So why making trade so important in the game ? The most you try to make it limited and frustrating, the more people will find ways to go around this, like TFT (and this is not a good thing, as it split the community and players even more between the rich who are organized and trade a lot and the poor who don't trade often (because trading is, as you say, frustrating).

"

The Trade Market

The version of Path of Exile published by Tencent in Mainland China uses the "Trade Market" rather than a system of exposing items via public stash tabs and forum posts for searching on web pages. This system is also in use on the Xbox One version of Path of Exile - as you can imagine, web page searches and textual trade conversations aren't well suited to the controller input of a console.

On the trade market, we're experimenting with the opposite end of the trade spectrum, where it's very easy to complete trades but more difficult to find the exact item you're looking for. You can search broadly by a specific item class or type, but have to look through a lot of search results to find the one you want to make an offer on. This system intentionally makes the search process harder and the trade process easier, for quite a different trade experience. We're not planning to bring it to the international PC version of Path of Exile.

So you says China have AH, it does well, but because you still want to annoy your playerbase, you made it tedious to use, and won't add AH on international version of PoE.
At this point just admit that your goal is to frustrate players and incite them to waste more time so they are logged more often in PoE looking for gear to trade.
Because easier trade = easier gear to obtain = faster to get end game and clean the game.
You are basically admitting that you want to frustrate us, waste our time by looting nothing valuable in maps and do trade that takes time and is hard to do just for the sake of it, because you want us to stay on the game the most time you can make us to.
It's mobile game strategy and it's really a dirty move.

"

The Role of Solo Self-Found Mode

Players who don't engage in trade are at a significant progression disadvantage in Path of Exile. However, some people are happy for the game to take longer to complete and enjoy the challenge that comes from living off the land. Historically, these players could choose to play alone, but would receive no recognition and had no way of proving that they had done so. Anyone could accuse them of having traded, invalidating their accomplishments.

We officially added support for a Solo, Self-Found mode in Content Update 2.6.0 (Breach League). This optional mode allows players to create characters that can't trade or party up. They have separate ladders to show how long they lasted in this mode before opting to convert back to regular characters. It's important to note that even in this mode, items can be easily moved back to the regular game to be traded (albeit not for any advantage in SSF).

While this mode eases the situation for people who purposefully never engage in trade, it was not intended as a precursor to us making trade massively easier in the regular game.

Sooooo, you want so bad people to trade that even in SSF, you want people to go back to regular league and still do trade, that's why to this day, we don't have a pure SSF league lock with better drops. Because you want people to trade.
Are you alright Chris ? You seems pretty confused aren't you ?
So you say you want people to trade because your main focus with path of exile is balacing the game around trade, but you don't want people to trade so you make the trade hard and frustrating but in the end you want people to trade but to not trade also because trading means items too easy to obtain but you lower the drop rate to force people to trade but trading is not that good ?
This don't make any sense to me.

"

Today's Changes

As mentioned in today's news post, we are changing the "Online API" to expose the AFK status of players. This API is currently consumed by community trade sites, so it's easy for them to add functionality to allow users to filter searches to just online players who are currently available to trade. In addition, players in DND mode are no longer shown as online, because it would be impossible for them to receive any messages sent to them.

We have also launched an experimental version of our own trade site: www.pathofexile.com/trade. Please try it out and give us feedback!

The goal of our trade site isn't to fundamentally change how trade works, it's just to provide an alternative to other community sites for players who want to have options (or use a language other than English!)
Lead Developer. Follow us

"Hey guys ! The drop rates in the game are so low that people HAVE to trade to make progress, but we don't want you to trade, but damn, you made third party application to still trade and that was risky because account were stolen in the process, so we made our own thing to allow trade but we want to still annoy you with trading so we made it bad lol"

And that's how people are now using TFT, bots, and other alternative to still get what they wants, items, and still deepen the gap between "casual" and "hardcore" gamers.


So can't we all agree that the "trade manifesto" is a huge fail, and it's time for GGG to ease the trading on path of exile (or really upgrade drop rates, or make a true SSF mode with better rates ?) so we can actually play path of exile and not the trading simulator that the game has become ?

GGG, you are all about making players actually play the game and don't focus too much with trade, but, by making trade so tedious and by lowering the drop rate, you made trade even more important in the game to the point that the best way to play the game is to speedrun maps/contents and only take currencies that drop to sell them for chaos/div and then buying/crafting the items you need.

It's time to change that.

I've read most of your points (not all, I confess), and even though I agree there some annoying things about the whole trading experience in Path of Exile, all your points go around one basic point which, I assume, is not entirely true: Trading is not an essential part of the game. Or at least it shouldn't be.

Even though we all like to "check those builds" and "play those builds", the whole point of Path of Exile, even though we like to ignore it a lot, is that your whole gameplay shouldn't be concerned about "certain itens to certain builds". But, instead, the opposite. Certain builds to certains items.

You shouldn't be playing this game until the end of times hoping you'll drop a Mageblood and complete your build.

You should be playing this game by dropping a "Hyrri's Ire", or a "Shavronne's Wrappings" and designing your own build around that new cool item you just dropped, and how your current items fit better into that build.

The problem starts when you think that playing meta is the only way to play the game. And that's all cool if you like it. But you can't complain about trading experience because, this way, you're just closing a lot of the possibilites of the way the game can be played.

Think about that.

Because Chris does not want to give us ease of trade we just go to TfT for ease of trade.

We are free to talk about but it's a waste of time and breath really. GGG has their stupid stance on it and they won't change it.

The worst part is how outdated the manifesto is. Think about when they originally wrote the manifesto. This was back near the end of Harbinger league. The game wasn't so horribly powercrept back then, gearing up for the hardest bosses didn't have such a steep requirement.

The toughest boss back then was the Shaper. Compare that to Sirus, Maven, uber bosses, and ridiculous things like wave 30 simulacrum or flawless breachstones, you could get away with beating the game with gear we would consider to be mid at best today. That means you didn't need to depend too much on trade to reach the peak endgame back then.

Ergo, trade wasn't that necessary.

Ergo, ergo, the trade manifesto made sense at the time.

Now? You must have a significant amount of currency to either buy gear or for the crafting components to gamble "craft" for what you absolutely must have to have a chance at beating the hardest content GGG is now rolling into fucking league challenges.

And this doesn't even touch upon the sheer amount of item mods, influences, and other such things which have since been added to the game. This has resulted in significant dilution of loot quality which has not only made getting gear to beat these harder bosses rarer, but also a lot more expensive.

You must trade now, either for the desired item directly or for the means to gamble "craft" it yourself, to get anywhere in this game. The trade manifesto is outdated and GGG needs to either rebalance the game to a massive degree to bring it back down to what it used to be back when it was written or finally modernize their trade systems, up to and including automation, to keep up with increasing demand.

Removing trade entirely and balancing the game around ssf and small party play would remove 99% of rmt entirely. No more bots flooding the trade website to buy targeted items, no more bots to farm currency and it would also make an end to clowns being able to abuse a terrible system like mirroring items to generate a absurd amount of currency for rmt.

You can talk about it sure but in the context of POE today this has little meaning.

+1

"

Chickenwink wrote:

You can talk about it sure but in the context of POE today this has little meaning.

You say that, but I'm pretty sure they're still using it as a reason to not provide better means of trading.

Though as you pointed out, their reasoning is going to be very outdated for the current state of the game.

"

DoctaLinker wrote:

You should be playing this game by dropping a "Hyrri's Ire", or a "Shavronne's Wrappings" and designing your own build around that new cool item you just dropped, and how your current items fit better into that build.

This is an excellent point and one that seldom gets any mention in forums these days. This is how I used to play the game....you go into the game with a SKILL plan (not item), but the item drops along the way change and adjust your plan. An exciting unexpected unique drops, and you can revamp your entire build to use it.

There are numerous reasons why this ISN'T the PoE strategy today and actually CAN'T be. One is that regret orbs just aren't common enough....it is too hard and too cost-restrictive to respec at a moment's notice based on a drop. Another reason is that uniques and potential item drops have been created for years to leverage very very specific mechanics which really need to be planned for across multiple pieces of gear, not just a single drop.

Basically, GGG is actually signaling to players that the "build first, items second" mentality is NOT the way to approach their game.

Take your shavronne's example: if you drop a shavs and try to reroll your build to use it....you would likely need brand new gear for every other slot to make it work as an actual upgrade!