Sent 427 Direct Whispers, No Response

GGG has said it multiple times that MOST players do not use trade and dont give a damn about it. It is of my opinion that the loot drop rate was set based on this trade system so nothing is functioning nor does it make sense. The only correction to this madness is the crafting system which is not ready or added to PoE2 yet. If this is what they intend to keep the crafting as, well then you may as well just toss items into a slot machine as they made gambling boxes the standard of the game.

As time goes on you will find less items and less people willing to trade. Make an auction house the same way D3 did(killed the game) and you will find bots price fixing and nobody willing to buy or trade still.

Where in the world anyone got the idea to make ARPG itemization games into trade simulators is beyond me. I can see why nobody gets the formula right for these types of games. The game play can be amazing but if you rely on a trade/auction house, then the game is no longer about grinding loot. It is about buying stuff in a hyper inflated market.

I remember selling a robe in D3 auction house for millions. Ruined the game for me since I was now just buying items. They removed auction house and fixed loot drop rates so it was actually fun to play. Not a good game but it was no longer a trade simulator.

And somehow, there have been auction houses in countless games for years and years and the sky didn't fall.

How about people trade window scamming, so you have to be super careful not to click accept and pay for an item you didn't even want to buy?

People price fixing with listings they will never sell to trick people into listing their item similar to that price?

If people don't know what something is worth, that is a completely separate problem that the trade site nor the auction house will fix.

With an auction house, your item is listed. If you login and your item is sold, great. Versus logging in, the markets have changed, and now your prices are out of date, and you're selling at prices above or below the market.

You cannot fix the problem of people being uneducated about how to price an item with either system. They need to learn how to price items.

What killed D3 was not the auction house. What killed D3 was loot being bound to account.

IMO the trade site *at its core* is fine. They just need to automate the process so you're A) not reliant on whispers and meeting up to trade, and B) implement a "buyout" at the current price.

When you list an item in the trade site at a given price, and someone clicks "buy" it should just automatically complete the transaction. The seller should be free to de-list an item to price-adjust if needed or if they make a mistake if it hasn't been purchased yet, but it would be a "gotta be quicker than that" situation. If your item sells in 2 seconds you will know that it should have been priced higher, and next time you can do that. But all these price-fixers that never reply just to jack up the price after a certain amount of interest are cancerous at best.

If an item is listed at a set price, we should be able to just buy it at that price. if your item sells fast for less than it maybe could have, thats on the seller for not pricing it accordingly.

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Scriplin#0237 wrote:

And somehow, there have been auction houses in countless games for years and years and the sky didn't fall.

What killed D3 was not the auction house. What killed D3 was loot being bound to account.

How many of those games are still around or even slightly popular for the game content? A lot of the hardcore long term players are min-maxing trade markets since they enjoy trade and economics games. I know a few that had trade and auction systems that had to be removed since it breaks the itemization process and balance

The auction house was not only ripped out of D3, they expressly said it was a terrible idea and ruined the game dynamics. The devs said this during multiple interviews. They also said that loot drops were based on the idea of an auction house. They were slowing down loot drops based on what was sitting in the auction. You could run bosses all day long and get nothing because it was not possible. They turned the drop off until enough sold in the market and if they didn't sell, then they stopped dropping. Forcing players to use the auction house.

The game was a disaster until they removed the auction house and redid the loot drops. Once you could actually get loot in the game, people started to enjoy it. The reason they added that terrible account bound idea was due to the auction house. All the problems stemmed from that crap

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Scriplin#0237 wrote:

And somehow, there have been auction houses in countless games for years and years and the sky didn't fall.

How about people trade window scamming, so you have to be super careful not to click accept and pay for an item you didn't even want to buy?

People price fixing with listings they will never sell to trick people into listing their item similar to that price?

If people don't know what something is worth, that is a completely separate problem that the trade site nor the auction house will fix.

With an auction house, your item is listed. If you login and your item is sold, great. Versus logging in, the markets have changed, and now your prices are out of date, and you're selling at prices above or below the market.

You cannot fix the problem of people being uneducated about how to price an item with either system. They need to learn how to price items.

What killed D3 was not the auction house. What killed D3 was loot being bound to account.

I mean....you really aren't thinking deep enough about this. You are going completely off of surface gut knowledge and lack of foresight and hindsight. Sure...there have been auction houses in countless games. What genre were those games? What was the itemization like? How did the auction house functionally shift the gameplay loop? Because I can guarantee you ALL of those things are important to consider.

You say the AH didn't kill D3. No, it explicitly didn't. But it was a MAJOR contributing factor and.....Blizzard removed it, never again putting an auction house back in the game in D3, nor in D4. Why is that? Have you asked yourself?

"People being uneducated about how to price an item": that is not the point. Again, you need to read and think more carefully. The POINT is that, with an instantaneous system completely out of the seller's control, they don't even have a choice and WILL get screwed over, and often. If you are a player that lists 10, maybe 20 items you don't understand.....there are traders that sell 10 maybe 20 TABS of items, all with different prices. Probably even more than that. With the current system, if they get whispered about an item after being offline for a while, they have the OPTION to check to see if their price is still relevant. AH....nope.


You do not fundamentally understand what price fixing is. ONE way to price fix is the current way, a much much much harder way to pull off, by trying to trick other people into mis-pricing their items. The far easier way is to be the controller of the supply: this is where an AH is and will be absolutely devastating for mid to high tier items. If someone had the currency and really wanted to, they could spend less than a day scooping up every single Headhunter on the market early (likely 100 or less), and then they will be in complete control of the value of that item for the rest of the league. THAT is price fixing.


It's very clear you haven't really thought about the cons AT ALL when it comes to an auction house. Your whole argument is: its been done in other games, therefore it works here. That's not good enough.

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Johnny_Hotbody#4829 wrote:

If an item is listed at a set price, we should be able to just buy it at that price. if your item sells fast for less than it maybe could have, thats on the seller for not pricing it accordingly.

This does not work in all scenarios, say you were playing first week of the league and you set all your prices on items.
Then have to log out for a week and when you come back the economy is completely different, all the "expensive" items you have are actually really cheap and you log in and everything you own was now sold at previous market value.
You never had a chance to check the market.

D3 developers were a disaster. The auction house wasn't the problem. The problem was them basing drop rates on what was in the auction house. Then once they removed the auction house and made loot account bound, the game died.

When they removed the auction house, that is what ruined the game.

"The D3 devs said..." Diablo 3 was not even a Diablo game to people loyal to the franchise. It was WoWablo with Whimsydale. Their dev team was tone deaf in most regards at best.

Another reason that holds Diablo back is not having enough storage for loot. PoE got that part right. Being able to purchase stash tabs is a wonderful solution. Marvel Heroes, made in part by Diablo's original lead dev David Brevik, had unlimited storage, and it was an amazing game until they shut it down for financial reasons. Their monetization model was totally different.

ARPGs need a thriving economy to be successful long-term. In fact, the economy is what has kept PoE popular, in addition to the fact that they continually release new leagues, mechanics, etc.

However, the new leagues, mechanics, etc., wouldn't matter if there was no economy, it would die.

ARPGs are random loot generators where 99%+ of the items you get are not suitable for you to use for your build, and you benefit from selling them to people who can use them.

With an auction house, it's not dependent on you being logged in to the game. The item is listed for sale whether you're online or not.

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Scriplin#0237 wrote:

ARPGs need a thriving economy to be successful long-term. In fact, the economy is what has kept PoE popular, in addition to the fact that they continually release new leagues, mechanics, etc.

However, the new leagues, mechanics, etc., wouldn't matter if there was no economy, it would die.

If we take GGG at their word....this is just plain false. If the majority of players don't engage in trade, then the logical conclusion is that the "economy" is NOT a driver for the majority of player engagement with PoE.

And....you just said here PoE has been popular (for a decade, mind you) because of its thriving economy. So why does it need to drastically change then?

Your thoughts on D3 are simply not based in fact. You also ignore the literal statements by the developers of that game. If you are being purposely ignorant or writing them off because "it wasn't faithful to D2"....that's really silly.

No matter how you feel about them, they are game developers: they know what they made. They know what worked and didn't work, and one of the FIRST moves they did was completely remove the AH. Brand new game comes out 10 years later, NO auction house. That is a powerful statement on how big of a role the AH played in the early problems of D3. If it WASN'T the case, presumably they could have added it back in to RoS at any point across the last DECADE.

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Jixa87#1706 wrote:

This does not work in all scenarios, say you were playing first week of the league and you set all your prices on items.
Then have to log out for a week and when you come back the economy is completely different, all the "expensive" items you have are actually really cheap and you log in and everything you own was now sold at previous market value.
You never had a chance to check the market.

you're not wrong, but if you aren't planning on loggin in for a while you can always uncheck public on your premium tab. If you come back a week or two later you should be free to adjust pricing accordingly and relist the items. I also don't think that would be as huge of an issue if the economy wasn't wildly flailing from one side to the other because of price fixers. If the economy was balanced the values probably wouldnt be so drastically different from one week to the next.

It's not a perfect solution, and I dont claim it to be, but if they want trade to be viable to everyone instead of just the people who treat it like a day job, they need to figure out a way to reign it in somehow. I've sent so many non-replied whispers at this point that I might as well just be playing SSF.