Scrotie wants YOU to help prevent PoE's economy from becoming more like D3's

Well, I did not know about this site till I read this post. just checked it and used the buy option, it redirects me to the seller here in the forums, to me its pretty handy.

I been playing D2, then WoW then D3, and Im going to tell u, the more variable statics the game have, the more difficult and annoying trades become, ahvind an indexing database that lets u search tru all this info in a few seconds really help a lot, really, as a lot of people said, the trade chat in game is painful like u dont know, its not as bad as WoW for example, or like D3 that all the time is full of store bots selling gold and other stuff, in the past days I even got 2 pm from some shit store selling PoE stuff, that I still dont know where to report by the way.


And for the AH ruined D3, I have my own opinion about that, blizz failed in his attemp to do this game online only promising that it will be free cheating/bots/hacking and they failed, really, just go and check the trades in blizz or other 3rd party trading sites, there are people selling tons of uniques all the day, tons, some people say that bot make items cheaper but isnt the case, they also flood the game with a lot of currencies, and that make inflation going crazy, and everyone blames AH for that.

If u have millions of players wanting to trade, u are not going to make tons of trade chats, do u imagine the spam, it will be epic, and the trade forums here are kinda chaotic, a few traders have a lot of stuff for sell, and u cant sort those, well, u can do it, but u need to do it urself (the seller), and as any other farmer game, u will keep getting stuff and more stuff, I dont see any problem with this 3rd site, there are other where u really trade for currencies outside PoE, even real money and dunno if those also hurt the game to the point of being paranoid about becoming the next blizz failed D2 clone attempt.

I tried a few hours ago to sell multistrike and trade some fusing vs chaos orbs, it took me like 1 and a half hour to sell the gem vs 8 c while I traded pretty fast the currency, I think that the market will collapse eventually, as any other game always do after the new content is finished by the player base, then the ladder will come and we will start fresh again, maybe with new content, thats why blizz did with D2 for years and they still sell the game, isnt the ladder going to reset this month too?

poe current trading sucks, on top of the fact that one has to spend hours in the tradechat/tradeboard just to find a potential buyer/seller we have olso to deal with a completle overpriced market thanks to botters / hardcore grinders that can offer a lot more and as a result encourage vendors to increase their prices thinking everyone has 100+ exalts in their stash.

i am not a big fan of third party sites selling stuff either but if they can put a halt to the overpricing by making it easier to find buyers/sellers i am all for it. but to be honest GGG should have implemented an ingame auction house and problem solve, i know that at this point i will see a lot of rage mostly pointing out how bad was the auction house for D3 but guys try to see a bit further than the word " auction house", d3 AH ruined everything becouse one could buy stuff with real $$$ wich resulted in lots of players running around with imba gears from day one, poe wont have $$$ trade so it wont end like that.

anyway if i have to choose a side i will choose the self found league side and send all this trade to advance to hell.

That's one hell of a manifesto, Scrotie. I disagree fundamentally with the premise that buyout-based trading is a bad thing.

Many people, even experienced players, are mystified by the process of assigning value to items. You seem to think this is a good thing, because people will barter and haggle and that's part of the fun. That's a nice theory, but it doesn't line up AT ALL with my experience.

Before discovering XYZ, I simply did not trade. I stockpiled items that I thought might be valuable, but I had no idea which ones were *really* valuable. I had no idea how to even begin offering items for trade in a useful way. Spamming trade chat with lists of items and either asking other people to make the first offer or making up an arbitrary price was frustrating and entirely unproductive; I never actually completed a single trade that way. I almost quit the game out of frustration.

Then, I discovered XYZ. I now have a shop thread with buyouts for every item, and I buy and sell items actively. I barter and haggle over price, and I'm a lot more willing to do this because I have some idea of what my item is 'really worth' and don't constantly worry that I'm accepting a way lowball offer.

I disagree quite strongly that this makes trading as formulaic and sterile as the auction house in D3. That just isn't my experience at all. Searching for an upgrade on XYZ is more art than science. There are a near-infinite number of possible combinations of mod rolls on rares. The ones that have near-perfect rolls for every mod, and the exact combination of mods I want, are obscenely expensive and usually involve an open auction thread. Bartering, haggling, and outbidding competitors is the order of the day. For items that are more affordable, there is still a ton of variation in how players assign value to items. I search a bunch of different combinations of mods, find items in my price range that could work, then negotiate with the sellers to see which one I can get the best deal on.

Frankly, I don't really care if you like the way I trade or not. I like it. I find it enjoyable. XYZ is the reason I like it and find it enjoyable. If you don't like indexers, don't use them, but you're not gonna convince the rest of us to go back to the dark ages of trading in the early beta days before indexers.

"

johnKeys wrote:

"

acylus wrote:

I also have a feeling anyone for Scrotie is one of those people who are taking advantage of those who are not knowledgeable enough of this game.

no they are not.
I know some of the people voting for Scrotie here.
good people.
their only problem is short-sightedness in this specific matter.
Scrotie's is too.

Quite mistaken. Everybody is viewing trading from a consumerist perspective; that is where the shortsightedness lies. If you look beyond being a consumer, beyond buyouts and price tags, and saving your minimum wage scraps and lottery chaos-to-exalted value sales, beyond speculating the market and flipping items for profit, in pursuit of saving up just enough to finally buy that much sought after item, you will see a whole new realm of possibilities. I'm sorry mate, but you're being short sighted here; your perspective is limited by the existence of toxic features that make your life slightly more tolerable in an otherwise broken environment.

"

johnKeys wrote:

"this orb is one-of-a-kind rare, has the same chance to drop from Normal Hillock, Merciless Dominus, or the next random barrel/rock, and 50% chance to add Thorns to the one rare item you are trying desperately to craft - thereby leaving you both poor and with a broken item".

You are only made poor because within our economy the item is inherently worthless beyond its relationship to an orb's perceived value as a bank investment. You are only made poor because you are stuck being a consumer.

"

johnKeys wrote:

I have absolutely no idea what an item I'm after, is worth on the "economy market".
if buyout didn't exist, EVERY SINGLE trade I would attempt will end up either me getting ripped-off, or flamed and personally attacked for "lowballing".
if trade indexers didn't exist well, I probably wouldn't be playing any more. I have no hidden masochistic desire to sort through the multiple-channel trade chat and trade forum car wreck.
to put up a "WTB" in game, and have all the hungry vultures swoop in.

is that the "economy" you guys are after? because it damn well looks like it.

Absolutely not. These are all symptoms of a consumerist economy. If changes were made that shifted the focus of orbs away from being an investment portfolio, there would be no lowballing, there would be no market value to items; there would be only relative values to their usefulness to you. The economy we are after (and Scrotie and I disagree about how to achieve it, but I'm sure he'd agree we're after the same thing) would eliminate these afflictions. Look beyond the price tags, and consider what the game would be like if you were able to trade a decent ES chest that you don't need for a decent AR/EV chest you do need. I think you would see that the majority of the complaints you have would be nonexistent.

Furthermore, these changes to the economy would not preclude the existence of an indexing service to facilitate smoother trading, it would merely change the nature of the indexing service. It would no longer be a pseudo-AH. It would instead function solely as an item affix search engine to locate sellers of items you need, and instead of listing b/o's it would list the item mods the seller is looking for. Streamlined, easy access trading is not compromised in any way.

"

Crackmonster wrote:

Then there is the question of how healthy it is for the game to have its culture more developed, which means it becomes common knowledge what items are worth and what going rates are for common items.

An item's worth is relative. In this case, it is relative to market speculation where items have an investment value to help you obtain a price tag. In a currency-less, pure barter economy, an item's worth is relative to how my "unneeded" items are useful to you, and how useful your "unneeded" items are to me. Unneeded meaning, they do not directly benefit your character, but seem to have some intrinsic value beyond vendoring for a few shards.

A gold standard economy sounds excellent because gold is orbs and there is a genuine sink for them.

You guys know humans quit using barter economy for a reason, yeah?

One last point: linking to the Reddit suggestion thread and instructing people to downvote it is a blatant violation of Reddit's vote manipulation policy. Not cool, man.

"

reboticon wrote:

A gold standard economy sounds excellent because gold is orbs and there is a genuine sink for them.

Hoarding orbs is an item sink? I never knew! Logic win.

"

reboticon wrote:

You guys know humans quit using barter economy for a reason, yeah?

Off topic, but I suspect it had something to do with the expansion of governance and establishing a means to extort power, and had nothing to do with farmer Joe requiring some means of soliciting blacksmith Jack's wagon repairing service.

Edit: But to come full circle, back on topic: wealth in a barter economy is generated by exchanging goods between producers; wealth in a gold-standard economy is generated by producers at the cost of consumers.

In a loot find aRPG, everybody is a producer. In an AH simulator, most people are consumers. The root of the problem is that our trade environment fails to achieve the primary goal GGG set forth when they designed the orb system, which was to sustain a gold-less barter system where the currency has an inherent sink to regulate the economy. Investment Orb Banking circumvents that sink.

"

kez1304 wrote:

"

pathofwarcraft wrote:

with all due respect you need to get your head checked the sites
are needed your being way to hardcore about this
trading is possible because of them if you bump your post
now it will be on page ten in less then five min's

This, anyone who thinks forums are a good way to sell stuff is living in a dream world.

More to the point, anyone thinks that forums, that are over inflated with "fluff" images and excess lines of non-uniform text, in different colours and fonts, complete with all kinds of highlighting/mouseover colours is living in a nightmare of a dream world.

Even more to the point, anyone who thinks that forums, without enforced uniform buying and selling thread topic wording, might as well be dead, because a dream world obviously isn't for you.

"WTB GG spell dagger!"

Tells you absolutely nothing, and is a waste of time reading or looking in.

The ability to search by attributes and compare products is just time saving, and I don't know about you, but having a long drawn out process isn't enjoyable, especially when I'm using my free time to do it. It gets to the point where you might as well just be doing something else that doesn't feel like work.

I never said that the current state of trading is good IT SUCKS the sites help but it is
not a solution neither is the op bad idea. I do agree with you on what you said.

Without a way to find items nobody will be able to buy or sell anything but uniques and godly rares. It has to stay until GGG can implement a better trading system.

I enjoyed the read, CanHasPants, but I can't say I understood it all.
after all I'm a coder, not an economist.

if we all are Consumers, who is the Producer?

and how is a "barter economy" different, than an economy where you barter?
you barter, within some price range [X,..,Y] - where X is the ideal price for the buyer, and Y is the ideal price for the seller - trying to find a good price somewhere in the middle.
that price range, is indeed defined by the data in the indexer.
the "Auction House" if you will.
otherwise, you would offer lower than X and be flamed, or higher than Y and be ripped-off.

remember our own real-life economy, has evolved from "give me a sheep and I'll give you a goat" to price tags.
from singletons to an organized, standardized structure.
I don't know what made that happen - because I'm neither an Economist nor a Historian - but I'm sure there were reasons.

truth be told, I'm not here to play economic simulator. I'm here to hack monsters and find loot.
but when monsters suddenly hit harder than you can take, and you get no upgrades to counter this - because drops are a barren random desert, and crafting has more potential to destroy what you do have, rather than upgrade it - you are forced to enter the economy.
yes, as a consumer.

and as a consumer, I ask of GGG to have the following priority:

1) make the game an actual ARPG - loot drops, risk and reward, real crafting - so I won't need to even know there is an economy, if I don't wish to participate in one.

2) if 1 is a "no", and I am forced to venture into the marketplace, make it easy enough so I can get in, get what I need, and GTFO back to killing monsters.