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

Yeah no thanks. The economy is the worst feature of PoE. The sooner they get rid of it, the happier I'll be.

Wow, this is like the dumbest idea ever.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Your action is needed in the fight against Path of Market Simulator. The creator of one of the most popular third-party shops indexers, xyz, is trying to expand his power.
Suggestion Thread: Itemlevel on forums

Spoiler

xys' Reddit thread

poe.xyz.is is one of the more destructive influences in the game in terms of making trading less about haggling and more about searchable buyouts. It transforms item valuation from a difficult puzzle into a cheat-sheet exercise. For trade-centric players, these eventually increases the feelings of grind, because as market valuation becomes increasingly "solved," the market value of monster-dropped items is increasingly demystified, taking the mystique out of loot-finding and creating numb, emotionless farming.

I have tolerated poe.xyz.is' existence for one simple reason: if GGG makes the information publicly available on its website, then someone will make a third-party site for it; if not xyz, then someone else, perhaps with more sinister (read: RMT) intentions. Third-party sites are an inevitability, so no use fighting them. However, what should not happen is further expanding their power by having GGG make even more information public, at the third-party site's request.

I urge those of you who care about keeping trade haggle-based and keeping the emphasis of the game on loot-finding, not loot-swapping, to downvote xys' suggestion thread. He is advertising on his site to get upvotes from his path-of-least-resistance supporters; I feel it's only fair I advertise in this forum to get upvotes from those who care about the future of the game.

TL;DR: Click on the suggestion link above and downvote it.

QFT. Too bad the thread has been polluted by AH3 players.

Here's my view on why the auction house is considered to have killed Diablo III: In a word, itemization.

First of all, we must state that games must have some amount of difficulty, otherwise they are too boring (of course, not too much difficulty, or else they are frustrating).

What happens when you hit a difficulty wall in stereotypical Diablo III? Well, you sit there and you're frustrated. You log out and see an Auction House button, as prominent as any other. It sorts all the items out there based on DPS or Vitality or what have you.

What other options do you have? Well, you could farm for a while, or gamblecraft a while at the Blacksmith. But you're very unlikely to farm or gamblecraft an item with higher DPS. In fact, it's nearly impossible to farm or gamblecraft an item with higher DPS or Vitality as quickly as it would to just buy an item with higher DPS or Vitality on the auction house. 5 seconds of 'Buy Now' enhances your character more quickly than hours and hours of farming. Thus, the choice is clear for most players. Just buy a better item.

This trivializes the difficulty curve. Okay, you have a better item! Wow! Now you're slaughtering enemies with no problem. Oh. Okay. Then the next challenge comes along. What do you do? New tactics! New skill setups! None of it makes a difference because you don't have enough eHP or eDPS. Okay, better go back to our options. Hmm, 2 seconds to buy a better piece, or hours of farming for nothing. Okay, let's buy it.

In this way, Diablo III becomes "auction-house simulator": you run into a challenge, but instead of options to face the challenge through strategy or skill, you have a "Buy Now" button.

Here's my view on trading in Path of Exile as it currently stands: It is very, very close to optimal/perfect.

What happens when you hit a difficulty wall in Path of Exile? Well, you go over the most important stats, like Life, your defensive stat, resistances, and your DPS. How do you increase your DPS? Well, who knows? You can increase real DPS even with a lower tooltip DPS just through certain strategic advantages (lowering enemy resistances, being tankier so you flee less often, stunning the enemy more often with more damage per hit so that you flee less often, etc.) So you have to solve that puzzle. Then, you have to address how you can obtain it. Passives, gem setup, and items.

Suppose you need a gem you don't have for a new setup that may be better. What are your options? Trade chat or a third-party indexer. Most gems have stable buy/outs, so you can just hit the "Buy Now" button by going to a third-party indexer. Uh oh. This sounds familiar.

But don't worry, my friend. You had the satisfaction of coming up with the new gem setup yourself. Moreover, once you test it, it might not even be better after all. Another thing - it's a new gem for you to level up, something new for you to grind that takes away the potential tedium of losing EXP over and over in a vain attempt to grind out the next level. There's a world of possibilities. Using an indexer saves a couple of minutes or hours of spamming trade chat, but does that take away the satisfaction of coming up with the setup and testing it yourself? Does it take away from the satisfaction of a new gem setup's new experience? Compare to the alternative choice, grinding an alt. character for the gem from a quest. Is it a challenge lost, or tedium lost, to trade instead of grinding an alt?

And now we come to the juicy part. Items. Suppose you think, "I could do better if I had +60 life and +20% lightning resist on these gloves instead of high ES and +20% cold resist, because I have a cool ring that gives me +40% cold resist which can make up for the loss." Now, how are you going to get a pair of gloves with those stats? You open your stash and are greeted with items you've saved up, and currency orbs for craftgambling. Often times, you can gamblecraft a magic item with precisely the modifiers you want. But maybe you're a new player, and you don't have any rare items saved up and a couple of Orbs of Alchemy haven't gotten you what you want. You tried gamblecrafting and it failed you. What do you do?

Well, you could farm for more orbs, possibly trade for more alcs, and then keep gamblecrafting. In fact, I'm sure it's already what many players do, because why would they look up a third party trade site?

Suppose you do grind for a while, and your drops and gamblecrafting still don't produce what they want. You're down on your luck. Maybe you should just stop playing. Maybe for a long time. But hey, you heard about poe.xyz.is. So you go and you try it out. Hey, cool, you found an item with the stats you want! And it's only 1 fuse buy/out! Sweet, let's contact him. Oh, he isn't online. Well, let's look for another pair of gloves. Ooh, this is nice. He's online, but no buy/out is specified. You contact him. He wants 2 chaos. You say, hey, there's a similar pair of gloves up for 1 fuse buyout. I'll pay 1 chaos tops. Maybe he takes the offer. Maybe he doesn't and you have to wait for the 1 fuse guy to log on. The point is: You just had a trade encounter. Not a "Buy Now" button. A trade encounter.

It's important to note that using a trade indexer was also a last resort. There were many viable options before going to a trade indexer that you attempted and failed, possibly because of bad RNG, possibly because of high demands on your part, or possibly because of a lack of game understanding. There is a huge range of complexity here due to the fact that in Path of Exile, different stats have different levels of desireability to different characters. There's trade tension. You won't ever find item value nailed down to a tee as Scrotie warns about because individual needs on the strongest items are different.

The beauty of the indexers in their current state is that difficulty level of trading scales up with difficulty level of the game. Oh, you're just in act 2 merc and you need some more resists? Some guy has godly leveling boots available to you for 3 chaos buy/out. But now you're mapping and your +80 life +25% resist all chest just isn't cutting it? Well, now you face a hard choice. If you want to buy/out a different chest for a reasonable price, you'll probably have to give up one stat or another, like one of the resists. IF you want to buy/out a more godly chest, the buy/out starts to get pretty high. Items that both have the mods you're looking for, and that have a buy/out listed, start to get really scarce.

When you scale up in difficulty, you're more likely to have to start haggling.

When you want to buy the godliest items and reach the top of the mountain, there's no way you'll find items with buy/out listed unless they're exorbitant. So you're forced to haggle.

Scrotie loves suffering through the pains of haggling and wants all players at all levels to share in those pains. The other extreme, which he imagines poe.xyz.is to be creeping towards, is Diablo III-style "buy now to win game" buttons. Remember that games are about fun, and fun is about challenge. You can't have too much, or too little. To me? We're smack dab in the middle. Those who love to barter and haggle and trade are given room to do so, and finding that everyone else hates haggling; those who are able to face the challenges in front of them without trading do so; those who prefer the convenience of buying out are only given that convenience for items that have appropriate trade difficulty; and probably some other points I'm forgetting. Itemlevel in forum code is going to nudge us the tiniest bit closer to an Auction House III-style difficulty line (not curve), but won't come even close to bringing us there.

The posts of support in that Suggestion thread indicate that many players agree.

Personally, I would be just fine with itemlevels on the forums or no itemlevel on the forums. It makes little difference to me. But I can't see it ruining the game in a way that Scrotie describes.

EDIT:

"

Doitfrlulz wrote:

as long as system NOT AUTOMATED for AFK TRADING it not become D3 system, its simple

Quoting you in order to highlight the truth. (QFT)

EDIT2:

adghar wants YOU to help prevent people from becoming mindless sheep by thinking for yourself and analyzing what posters have to say, Scrotie included, for any biases or flaws in logical argument. Examine the facts and objective evidence in front of you and make your judgment based on what you see. Don't let sensationalized language sway your opinion, including mine. If you see that I have used an opinion and stated it as fact, then don't believe me until the facts you see accord with that opinion.

For the love of Dominus, though, don't hop onto a bandwagon about something you've never experienced firsthand on the basis of sensationalized language.

This seems to be a hidden mimimi want more and faster gear thread.

I personally like that it takes time. I hate games that are done after 6-8 hours. So I do not play any triple AAA games that are out because they are designed for people that want things fast, easy, without brainpower spending console gamer attitude content. Btw thx to all gamers with this attitude that destroyed so many genres for me. Really love you that I do not have to spend money for shooters, RTS, RPGs, Simulations and so on.

Thats why I started with PoE and will stick to it as long as it is that way. If a small part of the community that i call "console gamers" ruin this game I will not cry. I will just quit but till you reached your goal I will try to fight it.

Trading should take time! It should require interaction between players and it should not turn into a game that gets huge amount of videos like: 3 Exalt Shadow XX Build". Do I think the system right now is perfect? Ofc not because you cant create a system that everyone loves. Thats just not possible.

But does the system we have work? Yes it does. If you like it or not is again not the question. You cant create a system that will get loved by all. And GGG has to understand it and not overreact.

And tradechat is ofc a mess because people try to sell items that are just garbage and they do not understand that what they try to sell just sucks. People will learn that some items are just not selling but it will take time. Ofc it will take more time because generation console is not able to use their brain. They just see "oh this chest has 79 life this will sell for sure" and start to spam like stupid...

btw the game has bigger problems and could need small additions that would improve the game

place itemlvl at itemtooltip and icon
UI costomazation (i would love to move the debuff/buff icons to the buttom center so much)
2 separte chats for wtb & wts

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Your action is needed in the fight against Path of Market Simulator. The creator of one of the most popular third-party shops indexers, xyz, is trying to expand his power.
Suggestion Thread: Itemlevel on forums

Spoiler

xys' Reddit thread

poe.xyz.is is one of the more destructive influences in the game

EDIT: Okay, I'll be less of a jerk.

You don't seem to understand that all an efficient trading system really does is show problems in the loot system or other areas of the game. It itself does not do a whole lot but just expose issues like loot you get being terrible. A non-efficient trading system encourages the usage of macros and bots for sales and tries to cover up the issues that are present.

PS: stop with the forum warrioring - play the game and you'll feel first hand how horrible the trading still is. Try to get to the levels where it gets really difficult to progress in gear without trading and then talk about how you want trading to be a massive pain.

"

ggwp1 wrote:

Too bad the thread has been polluted by AH3 players.

Sorry, but you're wrong. XYZ allows people to determine an average price by filtering what you're looking for. Lurking Trade chat for 3 months isn't something I'd consider time-worthy. If I had it my way I'd use EVE's market system where a ton of information is available to players, and that game is well known for scams. You can look at the history of prices for any item and determine how or why something has changed in price. In PoE (or any other game really) there is no history of prices. There is no method in determining if you (a new player) are getting ripped off by someone.

For the longest time I refused to do any trading in this game until I had a good grasp on the economy and general idea of what combination of affixes on rares were worth anything. During that period of time I did not participate in this "economy" because I avoid being scammed. This is a problem for the game.

I don't support this thread, as there is no better option for trading.

Without this trading becomes a 'no option to trade' system. There is no way you can use the trade forums succssfully. There is no way you can use the trade chat successfully.

As such you are left with one option of this.

In the new league I was attempting to buy a multistrike gem, spent ages posting in multiple trade chats, and getting ridiculous prices. Open the website, search multistrike, search online only, contact two people, second one offers normal price, successful trade.

There was still haggling involved. The idea there is no haggling is a bit rubbish.

But there was convienience.

I would support this, for when you want to buy a quill rain, or a searing touch. You want to eventually 6l that item, but you are happy to pay for the cheap 3l/4l options now as they are functional. But if you buy one and its max is 3l, you feel disappointed, and then have to buy a second one. You can spend all your time haggling with people about costs, only to go to the trade and see its ilvl 20 and then decline the trade.

Why are you against this when D3 died because of itemisation and instant trading. This still has contacting the person, and haggling (or accepting listed price). All that is improving is the method of being able to find the person, and thats not a bad thing inherently

poe would honestly not even be playable from a gear progression side if poexplorer and xyz did not exist.