Path to a leaner economy and a healthier game

"

Sepelion wrote:

[xyz is] making money on selling a shortcut that is effectively disruptive.

And thanks to all of this, PoE is going the same way as D3 did with an AH, rather than the original glory of D2 most of us hoped for.

Oh, take off the rose-colored glasses already.

If we wiped out poe.xyz.is, it wouldn't do anything. There are other third-party shop indexers trying to compete against it.

If we wiped all the shop indexers out, it wouldn't last long. New ones would spring up in there place.

If we made it so you couldn't link items on the trade forums, and thus third-party indexers couldn't index the trade forums, it would add nuisance but the items would get indexed anyway. Ever heard of CAPTCHA-solving bots? Well, a screenshot of an item with its properties is essentially one big easily-solved CAPTCHA. You'd just end up with a site which is some kind of hybrid of poe.xyz.is and imgur.

If we made indexing actually against the terms of use, it would stop some of the good users from doing it. But there are still bad users, and essentially it would be like the war on RMT we're engaged in now. It would still happen, but it would be only the criminals who do it.

What Diablo 3 showed us was how auction houses can rapidly accelerate an economy, allowing it to reach stages of maturity in a matter of weeks which, in the era of Diablo 2, would take years. Minor imbalances in trade, itemization, and inflation can quickly spiral beyond developer control.

What Path of Exile showed us is how, in an age of social media and interconnected custom web applications, auction houses are inevitable. You can't fight it, it will happen, regardless of whether the developer graces them with official approval or not.

If you think about it, it's this way for things other than the economy, as well. With wiki and YouTube and Twitch, pretty much anything GGG wishes would stay hidden won't. Hell, Atziri unique stats were datamined before they ever dropped. Anything which isn't balanced will be found and cause much larger problems than it would have two decades ago. It's all part of a much more savvy, much more connected, much more... cloud min-maxing?... playerbase than we think of when we think of D2.

Therefore, the challenge from a development standpoint is not to decry how in-game economies are impossible under an auction house system, but instead find ways to make a balanced, thriving economy despite them. I do not believe the task is impossible, although I do believe failure is extremely punishing; vulnerabilities will be quickly found and mercilessly exploited using automated techniques. The standards are far higher than they were before, but if one manages to meet them, it's still possible to have an enjoyable ARPG experience under an auction house system.

The trick is to confuse the cloud; this is done through diversity and balance. Don't allow the cloud to settle on which build, or small number of builds, is/are the best; balance the top tier builds against each other. Don't allow the cloud to settle on which items are best for a particular build; balance items against each other. Allow the general conception to be a misconception, and you allow innovation. Give a single, clever individual, who knows something the cloud hasn't figured out yet, a chance for some clever trading.

Notice that D3 was horrible at having a balanced itemization, even if you don't consider AHs; there were good Barbarian, good DH/Monk, and good Wiz/WD items, that was it. Build didn't really matter, and to a large extent class didn't either. It was a pure spreadsheet game. You could still fool noobs, and people did, but you couldn't really fool the cloud; the numbers were too cut-and-dry. Individuals who wanted to be clever either noob-poached or gave up trying to break an unbeatable establishment.

Path of Exile is doing better, because it has better build variance, and much, much better itemization. But it's not perfect, and yes, the cloud is capitalizing on it. The changing times mean it's a bigger priority for PoE to ensure build and item balance than they may have anticipated, and I hope GGG sees this.

+1 to scroties awesome post.

Diversity of gear is what helps an economy the most. In d3 if you wanted a weapon, it didn't matter if it was a wand, a staff, a dagger, a spear. You just looked at the dps numbers.

When looking at gloves, you looked for the same thing regardless, only variation being maybe wanting dex, int or str for your personal class.

And this made the auction house easy, because you could search for them.

But it also made it inflate super easy, because everything was either good or bad, and it was easy to measure how good or bad it is.

In PoE it is much harder. Does this item which gives you slightly more armour+ES, but slightly less life, benefit you more. Does the fact it gives you fire res, which you already have maxed, make it still worthwhile when you will have to change another gear to cover for cold res?

haahahhahahaha

1 year ago:

"one of the big differences between poe and d3 is the lack of auction house. fucking auction house ruined d3!!"

now:

"eh it was inevitable that we had our own third party auction house. that wasn't what ruined d3. it was the simplistic item system and how easy it was to sort good from bad!"

as if it is actually hard to tell a good item from a bad item in poe...

just goes to show people are basically making shit up as they go along

...btw, if you ask most people about the d3 auction house experience, it wasn't bad because of how easy it was to sort good from bad. thats not why everybody hated it.

people hated it because it was more effective to get good gear by sitting around watching the auction house than it was to actually play the game. that, and the fact that blizz then balanced around the fact that you'd be farming the auction house like this. kind of a circular problem.

...kind of like how GGG balances around players trading. which means the more efficient the playerbase gets at it, the more the power creep will happen. man, this is like eerily familiar!

"

Veruski wrote:

haahahhahahaha

1 year ago:

"one of the big differences between poe and d3 is the lack of auction house. fucking auction house ruined d3!!"

now:

"eh it was inevitable that we had our own third party auction house. that wasn't what ruined d3. it was the simplistic item system and how easy it was to sort good from bad!"

as if it is actually hard to tell a good item from a bad item in poe...

just goes to show people are basically making shit up as they go along

Yes, I said exactly those things one year ago. Yes, I'm saying exactly those things now. And yes, I'm making shit up as I go along.

Seriously. I was wrong a year ago. It would have been better if I had been correct then, but at least I have the decency to admit I was wrong. To be fair to me, I think a lot of smart people were thinking the same things. It wasn't exactly obvious that auction houses were inevitable, although I'll admit there was enough evidence to ensure Sherlock Holmes wouldn't have been fooled.

If you want me to apologize for not quite being Sherlock Holmes, I won't.

If you want to laugh at my expense, um, go ahead. I guess that's fair. A tad dickish, perhaps, but fair.

"

Veruski wrote:

...btw, if you ask most people about the d3 auction house experience, it wasn't bad because of how easy it was to sort good from bad. thats not why everybody hated it.

people hated it because it was more effective to get good gear by sitting around watching the auction house than it was to actually play the game.

...which was a direct consequence of how easy it was to sort from good to bad. Easy sort = new best items outclass vast numbers of old items = tons of items become "junk" = low prices on what were the best items just a week ago = much more effective to get good gear through auction house instead of playing the game.

The reason I was all down on the AHs a year ago was because I was really focused on that "easy sort" part. I blamed the AH for it, when I should have realized that, even without the AH, a group of players using a shared Google doc could easily have accomplished the same thing in a much more low-tech manner. The problem wasn't that someone (or something) successfully sorted them; it was that they were so easily sortable.

it's *not* hard to sort good from bad.

i don't know how you decided this. it's hard to *learn* the difference, initially, but once you understand what you need not hard to sort.

what i need more resists on my belt? oh ok which ones? oh let me just type that in, and lets make sure it also have 70hp

oh what, there are 847 belts matching my description? sweet! now ill just sort by cheapest buyout.

oh my skill only works with stabby weapons? ok ill just look for the highest dps stab weapon thats more than 1.5 a/s because fast weapons are the best in poe.

etc

its not hard man, it really isnt.

"

Veruski wrote:

it's *not* hard to sort good from bad.

Spoiler

i don't know how you decided this. it's hard to *learn* the difference, initially, but once you understand what you need not hard to sort.

what i need more resists on my belt? oh ok which ones? oh let me just type that in, and lets make sure it also have 70hp

oh what, there are 847 belts matching my description? sweet! now ill just sort by cheapest buyout.

oh my skill only works with stabby weapons? ok ill just look for the highest dps stab weapon thats more than 1.5 a/s because fast weapons are the best in poe.

etc

its not hard man, it really isnt.

And it should be harder. But not through bullshit trade restrictions; through better and more diverse itemization.

Item valuation should be a goddamn puzzle.

How would you do that?

Veruski, I wasn't saying it is "hard"

I was saying way way more complex than the other game.



Also regarding auction house. That had instant buyout. No participation/talking requierd.

poe.xyz at least has the requirement to talk tot he person, and then usually negotiate price. And it has varying price numbers unless you are an exalt pure trader

"

anubite wrote:

You completely contradict yourself.

"The problem with PoE is abundance."

That would be the exact opposite of what I said.

The problem with PoE is that everything is scarce and nothing is abundant.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

The idea one can effectively remove junk items from the economy is incredibly naive. I mean, you can remove some of them, but the only way to do it is to make trading more of a pain in the ass. Seriously, that's it. You can't make mediocre items stop dropping; they will always drop. And as long as they drop, there will be people flooding the trade chat/forums/indexers/whatever with spam for shitty items which have only the faintest hope of selling. Unless you actually make it not worth their time to list, which means: making all listings more difficult.

I mean, if you really want to stop players from flooding the economy with crap items, find a way to destroy poe.xyz.is. You'd piss a lot of people off, including me, but trading would be quite a bit harder, so people would give up on listing some of their crappy items. Of course, I'm kidding; the cure here is worse than the disease.

None of the changes you propose would fix the problem you are trying to fix.

The only thing I have to add to that is we really need to change the vendor formula for maps to "2 maps of the same area -> 1 map of higher level." Currently you need 3 of the same area.

I want to stop people from flooding the economy with crap items by, during the levelling process, greatly increase lower-level unique drop rates so that the relative value of those crap items tanks. I don't need to make listing more difficult, I just need to make the perceived market value of the crap item being listed drop so that even easier listing isn't considered worth the effort.

At higher levels I want maps to be trivial to attain, but locked initially into more difficult configurations (either through implicits on higher level maps or enforced rarity of higher level maps with a bias to more difficult mods). This would reduce the constant demand for small streams of currency to keep doing maps and thus come with a decrease in supply of the crappy items being sold to provide that stream.

I've no intention of completely removing crappy items from the economy. My only intent is to greatly reduce their presence. The items I do want removed completely from the economy are non-quality gems and maps.

In the end my aim is to directly reduce the reliance on indexers and to move away from the current direction of an AH. An Auction House is the direct result of a bigger economy, a bigger economy necessitates much more efficient trade. If we're to remain true to GGG's original vision of a negotiation-based economy without AH then we need a smaller economy with less items being traded, achieved by increasing abundance on certain items to effectively destroy demand for them.

A bigger economy needs more efficient tools. This is why most MMOs have Auction Houses, their economies are of the size that require them. This is why EvE goes beyond that and has an even more expansive market system.

This is why PoE needs to slim down it's economy because PoE is not a MMO and PoE shouldn't have an auction house nor an economy of the size that requires one.