The trade system is so BROKEN!

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trixxar wrote:
Question of blame and fault are kinda silly. Like a child pointing fingers.


If there is an easy way to change trade to improve the game and make the currently scamming impossible, like auto trades going through and moving the trade postings ingame so you arent alt-tabbing likes its 1995, the question is what are the arguments against that?


First of all, "liability and fault" are literally what over 90% of civil court cases are about. As in, grown up stuff.

1 - It would enable bots or organized groups of players to instantaneously corner the market on any semi-rare build enabling item and lead to abusive price gouging.
2 - It would be incredibly punishing to anyone capable of misclicking an item into the wrong stash tab or selecting the wrong currency from the drop down menu, which are both FAR easier mistakes to make than agreeing to a trade after visually verifying your purchase. If you've set up a gem affinity public tab, for instance, and you try to control-click an Enlighten into your dump tab... WHOOPSIE, it's gone a half second later because someone was running a live search. Better luck next time!
3 - It would drive the value of everything except BIS gear absolutely into the dirt, making 99.999% of items in the game worth even less than they already are and driving the value of said BIS items into the stratosphere, making them even less attainable for anyone who plays under 600 hours in a league.
4 - It lowers the figurative weight of the items.
5 - It would force players to sell items to people they don't want to interact with. Admittedly, this is only an actual problem when you're talking about ultra high level trading but most people would at least like the OPTION of not selling to a guy with 4 different racial slurs in their name.
6 - GGG doesn't want to and it's their game (trade manifesto, etc).


Tell me you've never sat through one of the childish cases without telling me... You give a perfect example of petty childish people playing a blame game.

1 - If automated trade would increase item availability per your comment #3, it would make it exponentially harder to corner the market. Right now to corner the market you only have to buy up items from the few people willing to put up with this awful system and actually online and responding. Thats it.

So you're trying to have it both ways. Inflated items online, but then somehow thats easier to corner? Which is it?


2 - So you dont want PoE to fix scamming in the current system, but youre so concerned about players misusing a new system? Again, trying to play both sides.

3 - I thought you said in #1 that people could corner the market, driving prices up? Again with noncoherent arguments.

4 - As opposed to ignoring them laying on the ground? Please explain how throwing them in a stash tab is lower than ignoring them.

5 - You dont interact with them at all, you dont need to see their name.

6 - Not really, its Tencents game if you want to try this argument.


Last edited by trixxar on Mar 4, 2024, 6:17:12 PM
At the end of the day, if ggg implemented a system for in game trading without using the trade site it would probably take an impossible amount of dev time considering they have 3-4 month dev windows for new seasons already.

Read whats in the trade window. There i solved your problem.

The best judge of the problem involves a little math:

How many folks are playing during X time frame?

How many many trades (gear only?) happened in that same period?

How many scams took place?

I would suspect that the percent of scammy trades is pretty low. One scammed player forum post every day for a 3 month league is only 90 scams reported over the league. If we multiply that by 10 (for all the scams not reported), we get 900 scams during the league. I have no idea how many gear trades happen per league, but I think it is likely to be quite a bit more. That calculation would identify the actual scope of the problem. Individual anecdotes are sad stories but no indication of how serious the problem is in actuality.

It would be interesting to know just how many times gear is traded over a league. A breakout by type would be even better GGG.
"Gratitude is wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk." Rumi
US Mountain Time Zone
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trixxar wrote:
Question of blame and fault are kinda silly. Like a child pointing fingers.


If there is an easy way to change trade to improve the game and make the currently scamming impossible, like auto trades going through and moving the trade postings ingame so you arent alt-tabbing likes its 1995, the question is what are the arguments against that?


You are very much wrong here. The question of "fault" is core to the argument because it ALREADY IS essentially impossible to be scammed in the current system without player-controlled error. You are already making an assumption of "blame" on GGG allowing these scams in order to defend a system of auto-trading.



The reality, and the very center of this issue, is that PLAYERS are not utilizing the scam-free trade system in place. And thus, blame and fault are central to the argument of improving trade.

An example for you, looking from the opposite side of things: what if we HAD automatic trade, but (likely) price-fixing runs rampant and there are new and potentially worse problems with trade. How would your argument be formed then? No blame to be had? No fault in the system?

Also.....the responses to Caribbean's list...did you even read the post? None of what you said makes any sense compared to what HE wrote.
#1: He said nothing about auto-trade INCREASING availability. He said the OPPOSITE
#2: He's simply pointing out the juxtaposition of "easily avoidable scam" in the current system vs. "actual systemically created mistakes" that would come from auto-trade. I totally agree it is FAR easier to accidentally throw thing in a tab that would IMMEDIATELY get pounced on, than to have to go through the entire trade process to confirm it and realize that you mis-priced or mis-clicked into a single-cost tab.
#3: BOTH can and already do happen.
#4: Items that WOULD have weight lose their value. Garbage is still garbage
#5: The POINT is that you get to control who you sell to. When only a handful of players are exchanging the top tier items (like he said), everyone KNOWS who is getting what regardless of whether you can see their names. The same people keep coming up over and over again.
#6: No....tencent has almost no creative control over (at least) our version of the game. Compare this version to Chinese version. One is GGG, one is tencent. WILDLY different game environments. Tencent owns the company, but GGG remains in the driver seat (for now).
Last edited by jsuslak313 on Mar 4, 2024, 10:58:56 PM
just chiming in

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jsuslak313 wrote:


You are very much wrong here. The question of "fault" is core to the argument because it ALREADY IS impossible to be scammed in the current system. You are already making an assumption of "blame" on GGG allowing these scams in order to defend a system of auto-trading.


there are many ways to get scammed in poe. if we're talking about trade. some players do try and post similar items other than originally posted. this happened to me back when i was buying up a nice starforge. person dropped in a voidforge.

for sure if i didnt check i would have been scammed.

am i missing some context? our current system is not scam free. players need to properly check every single trade before trading to avoid scams. and even that doesnt prevent people scamming when dealing with large amounts of currencies that sometimes require multiple trades.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

The reality, and the very center of this issue, is that PLAYERS are not utilizing the scam-free trade system in place. And thus, blame and fault are central to the argument of improving trade.

An example for you, looking from the opposite side of things: what if we HAD automatic trade, but (likely) price-fixing runs rampant and there are new and potentially worse problems with trade. How would your argument be formed then? No blame to be had? No fault in the system?


price fixing will happen either way.
[Removed by Support]
^I edited my post. It isn't literally impossible to get scammed, but to get scammed involves player error and NO fault of the system. There are not "many ways": there is only one way, and that is accepting a trade without checking the item. A completely preventable scam within the boundaries of the system we currently have. Multiple trade for one item: this one isn't even worth being in the argument because its not a scam...its just stupidity. This is again the fault of the player...there are NUMEROUS ways to protect yourself with this. DONT even attempt a "trust" trade, or insist on collateral. If you are just going to hand someone 600 divines or an item....that isn't even trade.

How quickly we also forget that its called TRADE. You aren't at a store where you can ONLY pay in divines....you can offer other items and other currencies such as mirror shards, div cards, etc. to make it fit into one window. If the buyer refuses the trade, then move on to someone else. No one is FORCING you to trade with that person, and no one is forcing you to "trust" a total invisible stranger with massive amounts of your currency or valuable item. Doing such a high value trade that it wouldn't fit into one window? Take the time to do it RIGHT.

Price fixing: of course....but it would be WORSE with auto trade. Easier to scoop items and control a wing of trade. Imagine the current fixers, that have to use the SAME trade system people have such a problem with to gather their stores of items, can now do it instantly?
Last edited by jsuslak313 on Mar 4, 2024, 11:11:42 PM
On reflection, I think the only way to stop trade bot abuse from being an issue is changing the game fundamentally so a character can reasonably farm and craft their own items without like 30 layers of RNG crap that can brick attempts every step of the way.

I was thinking about the odds of crafting like a 600+ phys dps axe. Kind of a entry item to the endgame for a lot of builds... really bad odds. lets look at essence crafting a 600 phys dps axe, using a despot axe base.

Napkin probability math talking about mod weights from CraftofExile
Spoiler
Basically using an essence mod for a increase phys roll with either crit or attack speed. so that is 3/6 mods. the rest don't matter and are just nice extra stats.

What is a mod weight anyway
Spoiler
Think of mod weight like rolling a many thousand sided dice. it produces a number and where it fails is mod of the item. Overly simplistic, but this conceptualization makes math really simple. so a mod weight of 100 means that 100 results would give that mod out of the total weight. this is a rare mod. Extremely rare mods are like 25. Feel free to check out https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Weight for more info. The important thing is that it makes a ratio that GGG can balance to adjust the game to their desires. And as always take the datamined info with huge ass grains of salt because no one has really verified them to be accurate. This is kind of best guess stuff and GGG has very good reasons to not confirm these kinds of numbers.


Since essences guarantee a decent flat phys, we only care about the %added and the attack speed really. The attack speed is likely to be crafted so for this example we only consider the probability of getting two common prefixes, which one being a guaranteed essence craft. So we only need to hit one mod to make 600 dps if the suffixes aren't full.

This means that we can discard the mod weight for the flat phys which leaves a total mod weight for the desired prefix of 45324 and 87750 for the suffixes (which we really don't care about)

so we need basically a t3% increased phys with the contempt essence to eek over 600 dps. A t3 increased phys has a mod weight of 100 out of 3775. A better roll is acceptable so we don't need exactly 100, so in theory it we add the weight of t2 and t1 increased phys for ilvl 83 items, so we get 175 for really scuffed math) so our probability once we get the roll for increased phys is 175/3775 or .046 (4.6%) this doesn't seem too bad on its face.

In fact if we wanted to napkin math this item it would be something like 175/41549 (we can discard the mod weight for all the increased phys that doesn't help our outcome to make this simpler) or .004208 rounded or .4% to create an item just using essences.

But lets say we couldn't craft attack speed because suffixes were full or we didn't remember we could. Or we are crafting a different item

we get a staggering low chance to get a really basic item

so we now our percentage is .46%, or .004208. and our second probability would be 8000/87750 or .09116. The overly simplistic way to express this probability together would be event A x event B or P=(AB), or P=(.004208*.009116)

there are different ways to calculate this stuff. Feel free to disagree. I was just doing simple basic stuff, I am sure insurance actuarial math would be much much more accurate. The fact is we don't know exactly how POE generates mods, we have very educated guesses.

therefore Probability is roughly .0003833488 rounded or 0.04% to roll any two desired mods to create an entry level endgame item. and with crafting the attack speed we get .004208 or .421% on each essence to make a 600 DPS axe if the attack speed can be crafted.

Granted we can do stuff like block rolls with crafted mods, fractured bases, or fossil crafts. the odds of getting a relevant fracture are much smaller than this, fossil aren't technically cheaper and require more setup to get like 5% success rate over .05% success rate. Some combos of mods are better for fossils. And lord help you if you are going to craft between every essence use to increase your odds.

This kind of math is why alt regal spam isn't enjoyable. Even starting with 2 guaranteed mods, the 3rd one is a really rare hit.

This is why we trade, not because we want too, but because we have too. if we look at this another way. for every 175 weapons created using this essence method, 41,529 of them would fail. And if we absolutely need to craft the attack speed it would be much much worse because we have to add the entire mod weight of the suffixes to the ratio.

The game doesn't generate the items our characters want because almost 90% of the mod weight is filled with utter trash that can't really be equipped. Hell just getting a six link or getting the link colors right is enough RNG to make people quit. If people can't handle a 1/1500 roll than why does GGG want them to handle a 175/41529 roll? it honestly baffles me.

Let alone think about upgrading this thing with this method. think about moving from needed a t3 mod and making it t2. we would lose 100 acceptable mod weight out of 175.

In my opinion I would be happier if I could just SSF the entire way, and the game was balanced around that with powerful targeted crafting and farming options. But the game isn't balanced that way and I would rather not just pointlessly grind a .5% chance to improve my character for every like 30-100 maps depending on what item I need. Instead I need to message 100s of people who don't respond because they have an item that I need and may be one of the few that exist. If the game let us get what we want by playing it, there would be less profit and reason for cornering the market. Groups like TFT would never have existed if the normal crafting options actual worked. The marketplace shenanigans exist because they are the most optimal way to play the game. You aren't going to get your upgrades from farming monsters, you need to farm players. You need their mats or their item to progress. And that feels weird.
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jsuslak313 wrote:
^I edited my post. It isn't literally impossible to get scammed, but to get scammed involves player error and NO fault of the system. There are not "many ways": there is only one way, and that is accepting a trade without checking the item. A completely preventable scam within the boundaries of the system we currently have. Multiple trade for one item: this one isn't even worth being in the argument because its not a scam...its just stupidity. This is again the fault of the player...there are NUMEROUS ways to protect yourself with this. DONT even attempt a "trust" trade, or insist on collateral. If you are just going to hand someone 600 divines or an item....that isn't even trade.

How quickly we also forget that its called TRADE. You aren't at a store where you can ONLY pay in divines....you can offer other items and other currencies such as mirror shards, div cards, etc. to make it fit into one window. If the buyer refuses the trade, then move on to someone else. No one is FORCING you to trade with that person, and no one is forcing you to "trust" a total invisible stranger with massive amounts of your currency or valuable item. Doing such a high value trade that it wouldn't fit into one window? Take the time to do it RIGHT.

Price fixing: of course....but it would be WORSE with auto trade. Easier to scoop items and control a wing of trade. Imagine the current fixers, that have to use the SAME trade system people have such a problem with to gather their stores of items, can now do it instantly?


i find it awfully weird that in 2024, over 20 years after diablo is released players would blame other players for getting scammed. we no longer use forum postings to trade. for sure if you're talking about trading via trade chat, we need to check properly on what we're trading.

but for stuff that we've openly listed with a fixed price via public stashes? this "issue" has been solved by 1001 different game devs via automated trade.

then you talk about divines and using alt currencies. so you expect people to buy cards/shards to facilitate trading?

dude. whats with your masochistic attitude? thats a really boomer "i like things how they were". why are you so afraid of things being different. we're in 2024. even my parents who are ancient have adopted using ewallets.

or are you one of those fucking scammers? is that why you are so against all these player safeguards? why does it have to fall to players doing it right?

just in case you didnt know. POE china already has automated trade. GGG has the technology. tencent knows its a convenience and made GGG do it for the china client.

my best guess is that boomers such as chris and people like yourself as well as scammers really dont want trade to be modernized just so that you can have the weight of 1990's diablo 2 trading and experience getting scammed.

if you're against automated trade because you're afraid of people manipulating the market. ok fine, thats a good concern to have.

but when you victim blame so relentlessly and even calling it stupidity. i really think you're just a grumpy boomer not wanting things to be better for others.

it really makes me wonder if you are a scammer. i do not know why anyone would want to victim blame. dude.
[Removed by Support]
"
roundishcap wrote:
On reflection, I think the only way to stop trade bot abuse from being an issue is changing the game fundamentally so a character can reasonably farm and craft their own items without like 30 layers of RNG crap that can brick attempts every step of the way.

I was thinking about the odds of crafting like a 600+ phys dps axe. Kind of a entry item to the endgame for a lot of builds... really bad odds. lets look at essence crafting a 600 phys dps axe, using a despot axe base.

Napkin probability math talking about mod weights from CraftofExile
Spoiler
Basically using an essence mod for a increase phys roll with either crit or attack speed. so that is 3/6 mods. the rest don't matter and are just nice extra stats.

What is a mod weight anyway
Spoiler
Think of mod weight like rolling a many thousand sided dice. it produces a number and where it fails is mod of the item. Overly simplistic, but this conceptualization makes math really simple. so a mod weight of 100 means that 100 results would give that mod out of the total weight. this is a rare mod. Extremely rare mods are like 25. Feel free to check out https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Weight for more info. The important thing is that it makes a ratio that GGG can balance to adjust the game to their desires. And as always take the datamined info with huge ass grains of salt because no one has really verified them to be accurate. This is kind of best guess stuff and GGG has very good reasons to not confirm these kinds of numbers.


Since essences guarantee a decent flat phys, we only care about the %added and the attack speed really. The attack speed is likely to be crafted so for this example we only consider the probability of getting two common prefixes, which one being a guaranteed essence craft. So we only need to hit one mod to make 600 dps if the suffixes aren't full.

This means that we can discard the mod weight for the flat phys which leaves a total mod weight for the desired prefix of 45324 and 87750 for the suffixes (which we really don't care about)

so we need basically a t3% increased phys with the contempt essence to eek over 600 dps. A t3 increased phys has a mod weight of 100 out of 3775. A better roll is acceptable so we don't need exactly 100, so in theory it we add the weight of t2 and t1 increased phys for ilvl 83 items, so we get 175 for really scuffed math) so our probability once we get the roll for increased phys is 175/3775 or .046 (4.6%) this doesn't seem too bad on its face.

In fact if we wanted to napkin math this item it would be something like 175/41549 (we can discard the mod weight for all the increased phys that doesn't help our outcome to make this simpler) or .004208 rounded or .4% to create an item just using essences.

But lets say we couldn't craft attack speed because suffixes were full or we didn't remember we could. Or we are crafting a different item

we get a staggering low chance to get a really basic item

so we now our percentage is .46%, or .004208. and our second probability would be 8000/87750 or .09116. The overly simplistic way to express this probability together would be event A x event B or P=(AB), or P=(.004208*.009116)

there are different ways to calculate this stuff. Feel free to disagree. I was just doing simple basic stuff, I am sure insurance actuarial math would be much much more accurate. The fact is we don't know exactly how POE generates mods, we have very educated guesses.

therefore Probability is roughly .0003833488 rounded or 0.04% to roll any two desired mods to create an entry level endgame item. and with crafting the attack speed we get .004208 or .421% on each essence to make a 600 DPS axe if the attack speed can be crafted.

Granted we can do stuff like block rolls with crafted mods, fractured bases, or fossil crafts. the odds of getting a relevant fracture are much smaller than this, fossil aren't technically cheaper and require more setup to get like 5% success rate over .05% success rate. Some combos of mods are better for fossils. And lord help you if you are going to craft between every essence use to increase your odds.

This kind of math is why alt regal spam isn't enjoyable. Even starting with 2 guaranteed mods, the 3rd one is a really rare hit.

This is why we trade, not because we want too, but because we have too. if we look at this another way. for every 175 weapons created using this essence method, 41,529 of them would fail. And if we absolutely need to craft the attack speed it would be much much worse because we have to add the entire mod weight of the suffixes to the ratio.

The game doesn't generate the items our characters want because almost 90% of the mod weight is filled with utter trash that can't really be equipped. Hell just getting a six link or getting the link colors right is enough RNG to make people quit. If people can't handle a 1/1500 roll than why does GGG want them to handle a 175/41529 roll? it honestly baffles me.

Let alone think about upgrading this thing with this method. think about moving from needed a t3 mod and making it t2. we would lose 100 acceptable mod weight out of 175.

In my opinion I would be happier if I could just SSF the entire way, and the game was balanced around that with powerful targeted crafting and farming options. But the game isn't balanced that way and I would rather not just pointlessly grind a .5% chance to improve my character for every like 30-100 maps depending on what item I need. Instead I need to message 100s of people who don't respond because they have an item that I need and may be one of the few that exist. If the game let us get what we want by playing it, there would be less profit and reason for cornering the market. Groups like TFT would never have existed if the normal crafting options actual worked. The marketplace shenanigans exist because they are the most optimal way to play the game. You aren't going to get your upgrades from farming monsters, you need to farm players. You need their mats or their item to progress. And that feels weird.


the original reason why GGG/Chris was so anal and made trade difficult was to force players to play more than to rely on trade.

that was their original manifesto.

along the years, GGG made premium stashes have the ability to easily list items for trade.

along the years, GGG integrated trade searching INTO their own website.

GGG also integrated the actual trade with our game client so that the item is highlighted in the appropriate stash.

in recent GGG temp league announcements they actually mention how some items dropped might not benefit a player and encourage players to trade them off.

this is apparent in ultimatum, i vaguely recall them mentioning that if you cant do an inscribed ultimatum players are encouraged to trade them off.

this is a stark contrast of how it used to be and how it is NOW.

the game is 10 years old. things applicable 10 years ago no longer are applicable now.

give us automated trade.
[Removed by Support]
"
jsuslak313 wrote:

#1: He said nothing about auto-trade INCREASING availability. He said the OPPOSITE
#2: He's simply pointing out the juxtaposition of "easily avoidable scam" in the current system vs. "actual systemically created mistakes" that would come from auto-trade. I totally agree it is FAR easier to accidentally throw thing in a tab that would IMMEDIATELY get pounced on, than to have to go through the entire trade process to confirm it and realize that you mis-priced or mis-clicked into a single-cost tab.
#3: BOTH can and already do happen.
#4: Items that WOULD have weight lose their value. Garbage is still garbage
#5: The POINT is that you get to control who you sell to. When only a handful of players are exchanging the top tier items (like he said), everyone KNOWS who is getting what regardless of whether you can see their names. The same people keep coming up over and over again.
#6: No....tencent has almost no creative control over (at least) our version of the game. Compare this version to Chinese version. One is GGG, one is tencent. WILDLY different game environments. Tencent owns the company, but GGG remains in the driver seat (for now).


I should ignore trolling but whatever.

1 - So you are saying auto-trade would decrease availability? This makes zero sense, and goes against the trade manifesto and common sense. Nonsensical.

2 - This is just a word jumble, its just as much a systemically created mistake that someone can move items in and out of the window that look like each other as someone choosing the wrong tab. Both are avoidable, you dont really care about one over the other. Its just a word salad.

3 - So you try to argue both sides of the fence, nonsensical again. Both already happen? But there is no automated trade feature so this is pure nonsense. The question is would automated trade either increase availability making corning the market harder, or would it make buying out the market easier. Your answer, to something that hasnt been tested, is that its already happening both ways. Sheer, utter nonsense.

4 - Again, arguing that some items lose value because... why? Because more items are posted, but then those items have the same value.

5 - How does this help anyone? Your whole argument is that you can see exactly whats in the trade so how does this effect you?

6 - Tencent has exactly as much control as they want, thats what happens when you own a business.


This has been the least logical post Ive responded to in a few years.

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