Alternative Trade System concept?

I'm one of those casual players that get to play maybe 30 mins a day (sometimes not even able to play for several days due to work), so I'm not really swimming in divines (I haven't even seen a single one yet but I'm only at T5 maps at the moment). I try to buy some cheap levelling gear with whatever little currency I've managed to cobble together and like many others it seems, I too am getting frustrated with the trading system. I message 10-20 people but none reply. I suspect this is because the stuff I'm buying usually just costs 1-2 exalts (sometimes 5), and the seller is probably making way more than that if they don't leave the map or boss they are farming just to sell this cheap item to me (which still begs the question as to why they posted it in the first place).

I know that POE's trade philosophy was something like 'easy to find, hard to execute', and although they have since reconsidered this with the inclusion of the Currency Exchange market, they appear to still stick to this philosophy with the gear trading.

I was thinking if rather than an outright auction house, you instead implemented an NPC you can place in your hideout that will sell your items for you. You get the link/key to the seller's hideout through the trade site listing, then you have to physically visit an instance of the seller's hideout, locate the NPC vendor and search for the item you want to buy.

This vendor system coupled with the use of non-tradeable gold to charge for purchases I believe is enough to deter bots from abusing the system. You could even add a captcha system to it if you're really worried about bots.

This also means that we still get to see other people's hideouts (and you get to sell more MTX). Sellers don't need to leave what they are doing and continue playing the game, and buyers don't need to waste their time hopelessly messaging sellers. It still abides by the 'easy to find, hard to execute' philosophy.

Anyway, just an idea.

How do you protect inexperienced new players from underpricing their items?

Currently if that happens they will get flooded with messages which will hopefully prompt them to investigate. Doing so will teach them about the item, why it's valuable, and make them a better trader.

That's a good point, but currently in my experience what is happening is that because buyers are desperate for someone to respond and messaging anyone and everyone that posts the second they post it, inexperienced sellers will still get inundated with messages regardless, even if it is priced correctly, and they are getting the wrong impression about the real value of the item. This happened to me recently when trying to buy a unique item that had a standard price of 1ex. The seller did not respond but then I saw that they then reposted the same item for 10ex, despite there being more than 10,000 copies of that unique on the market.

I agree it's not a perfect system but there are also other ways to learn if an item is valuable such as by comparing what's actually on the marketplace. Also, I think it's ok to make these kinds of pricing mistakes. With time and experience of playing the game they would eventually be able to learn and understand which mods are valuable and which ones are not. POE2 seems to subscribe to this philosophy as well, the same way it wants you to learn (and die) from boss mechanics. I do think the benefits of this model outweigh this potential impact on inexperienced sellers (because the consequences are short-term as they will eventually become experienced players).