Sent 427 Direct Whispers, No Response

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Scriplin#0237 wrote:

The free market, supply, and demand necessitate that cornering a market is not a concern.

Let's say that an entity, such as TFT, actually has the resources to do so and decides to corner a particular market, and they do so successfully.

Now the participants in that economy can decide whether they are willing to pay TFTs price, farm it themselves, or wait for someone who isn't part of TFT to list an item for sale, and try to buy it before a member of TFT.

Remember, this is already possible with the currency exchange in an auction house kind of format, and it hasn't happened.

It could also be done with extremely rare chase items. If they wanted to go buy every "insert chase item name here," they *potentially* could, or try. However, these items are continually being generated, and they have to continually invest in their position, and if their sale prices are unreasonable and they don't sell, then they lose their liquidity.

I'm so not concerned about price fixing in an auction house unless the player base is incredibly small, at which point, game is dead anyway.

Except it HAS happened! And it IS a concern! Perhaps even THE concern of an AH. The whole point of our current system OVER an AH is that it SLOWS DOWN the possibility of this happening. It doesn't remove it.

They do NOT have to continually invest in their position, that's precisely the point. If they do it early enough, which they would, then THEY determine the price moving forward. It doesn't matter how many drop later...the damage has already been done, and it will be incredibly difficult or even impossible to re-right the ship later.

Faustus DID cause price fixing across currency and all sorts of issues. Thing was...most people didn't notice or care because they couldn't be bothered to "shop around" for the best prices. It actually shows an even more "sinister" side of the AH, that it can "cover up" rampant price fixing in a way never before seen. And Faustus is the perfect example of how destructive an AH can be for the seller: the price was almost constantly in flux, even in the few seconds you were attempting to list a trade. While Faustus was convenient, both the sellers and the buyers were constantly being ripped off and KNEW they were getting ripped off with bad rates and bad trades.

Now make this the norm across the board? We are in for a bumpy road.


"The free market, supply, and demand necessitate that cornering a market is not a concern.": here is where you entirely lose the argument. There's no coming back from this statement. This is EVERYTHING. Literally Everything. And you write it off as not a concern.

They DO have to continually invest in their position.

Example:

They buy all 100 of something with prices ranging from 5-10 div. They invest 750 divine in their position.

Every minute, more of these items are dropping, people are listing them for just under their set sale price of 15 div. So they list it for 14 div. Then for every item listed they have to invest another 14 div to hold their position. People slow down buying the item.

They're sitting in an investment that isn't profiting so great, and they have to keep investing more into holding their position.

This falls apart so fast.

They do not set the price, the prices change minute to minute on every currency item.

You say they set the price going forward, and then you say the price is constantly changing, so which is it? It's that the price is constantly changing.

To corner a market when every member of the economy has the freedom to generate the thing you are trying to corner, you can't really corner it effectively. This isn't like the real world where you can buy every hotel and then set the price for a room because new hotels aren't popping out of the ground every five minutes.

Even items that only have like 20 copies on the market don't fall into this, because even though there are 20 copies on the market, there are more copies hitting the market every 3-5 minutes. And to jack up the price to an intolerable level just leaves them invested in a position where their liquidity goes down.

The long and the short of it is, it's not worth their time. Especially in a game where you can farm currency so easily with rarity.

Also consider that mirror tier items are their own mini cornered markets. There is only one of something and if you want a copy of it, you pay a fee for a copy of it plus a mirror to make the copy. And again, the sky doesn't fall.

This is not even a problem in the current state of the game, where if you have the omens to do it, you can produce mirror tier items in less than a minute. Belton has demonstrated this repeatedly on his live stream.

There's so much doom and gloom over things that are not an actual concern because every player has the ability to generate any item in the game, and players are constantly generating items.

There's no winning or losing this "argument." We are both sharing our opinions and we disagree. I don't agree with your position at all, and you don't agree with mine at all. It doesn't make either one of us "right," and at the end of the day, the purpose of this post is to highlight the terrible user experience of the trade site, primarily the inconvenience of it.

How GGG decides to implement an AH if they decide to do so is up to them. We're debating all kinds of market economic stuff down a rabbit hole that is completely beside the point I made by starting this post, which is that the trade site is an abysmal user experience.

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Scriplin#0237 wrote:

Build the auction house. So many posts on this, including other posts I've made.

The problems with the trade site are so bad at this point.

Can you clarify what you were trying to buy specifically?

I've never had this issue before.

^dude....YOU were the one who brought up price fixing as a major problem in the current system and how the AH would "fix"it. Now you are saying it isn't a problem at all, even in the CURRENT system?

I'll say it again because its very clear: you. do. not. understand. price fixing.

Your whole description of the process and how it can "easily fall apart" just....isn't how it works! It's not an investment that they constantly need to upkeep. It's a one-time effect that deals lasting damage. Recovering from a price fix is an exponentially slower process than making and profiting on a price fix. All future drops fall "into" the new market value that has been created by the price fixers. And sure, it may fall a bit over time ( a LOT of time), but the "fix is already in" as the saying goes. No matter how many new HH's drop, the fixer will have made a profit on each and every one they sold at the "new" inflated price.

It's similar to how recovery from high inflation is INCREDIBLY difficult. When the "causes" go away, it doesn't just fix itself. The outcome remains. The whole point of the fix is to up-end the natural order of the market. Not to maintain it.

You are speaking on things you think you know enough about....but clearly don't. And now you've also just discredited half of your argument for an auction house by trying to refute (incorrectly) what I was describing.

lol, dude you are so heated about this you're losing track of which person's position you're replying to.

"Build the auction house. So many posts on this, including other posts I've made.

The problems with the trade site are so bad at this point."

I didn't bring up price fixing. One of the early replies in this thread brought up price fixing.

" It's a one-time effect that deals lasting damage. Recovering from a price fix is an exponentially slower process than making and profiting on a price fix."

You can sit in the currency exchange and sometimes watch prices change considerable amounts over the course of just a few minutes. "Lasting" is very subjective, and is more based on how much of something is dropping and not being used by the person who finds it and them deciding to list it for sale, and what they decide to list it for. They could list it at the current price, or they could undercut. And this happens repeatedly second by second. You can watch five or six people in a row all decide to undercut and a price drops by the amount they undercut. Then items get purchased.

Things fluctuate minute to minute, and so if they are going to truly corner a market, they have to be invested in holding that price against all of the listings hitting the marketplace that undercut leading to the price dropping. What they do on day one of a league does not set the price forever. Go on PoE Ninja and look at the graphs of how prices change over the course of the league.

I think you're giving too much credit to TFT to have the level of income in an economy of hundreds of thousands to manipulate everything and ruin the economy. If it was going to happen, it would have already happened when the currency exchange came out, and GGG would have taken action to remove the system or add controls to the system to make it more difficult to abuse.

^just for reference: you have brought up price fixing in at least 2 posts on page 1 and page 2 of this thread as being a problem with our current trade system.

"Why? Because the trade site is ripe for abuse and a terrible user experience.
You don't have to worry about price fixers if their auctions can be purchased"

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


I'm done with this converation: you are very dug in on your misunderstanding of markets and trade, and have no interest in looking at ANY negative aspects of AH.

I should have known this is where the conversation would end based on the title "Sent 427 direct whispers, no response". No one that utilizes the trade site correctly would ever run into this issue. And one cannot assess the utility, benefits, and dangers of an AH correctly if they don't fundamentally understand the current trade system either.

Yes, it has come up in the conversation. I was not the first person in this thread that brought it up.

When I said "You don't have to worry about price fixers if their auctions can be purchased" I wasn't referring to cornering a market. I was referring to people posting fake listings that they have no intent to fulfill. That's the same way I was talking about it in the second quote.

That's great, because you're very dug into your misunderstandings and don't have any interest in looking at my position with any positive aspects, and this conversation has turned into a debate over market economics which wasn't the point in the first place and has nothing to do with the original post and the point I was making that the user experience sucks.

lol, the title of this post was a joke to make a point.

I fully know how to utilize the trade site correctly, and this same sentiment of sending lots of people messages and not getting a reply is echoed by tons of people in forums, YouTube videos of popular creators, and goes way back into the history of PoE 1.

I have used this utility for years. I have used auction houses for years.

I cannot asses the danger of the inner workings of an AH that doesn't even exist yet, and you're making points about how they inherently suck, when you haven't even seen a system that GGG hasn't even built yet.

I didn't say how to build the AH, what safeguards need to be in place, what potential pitfalls to look out for, the good and bad aspects of other auction houses, I simply said an auction house is better than this terrible user experience on the trade site.

This post wasn't a design document on how to build an auction house. It was sharing the feedback that the user experience of the trade site sucks, and in my opinion, an auction house would be a lot better experience.

it would be disaster on consoles, should't ever happen