On ARPG economies from a game design perspective

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Gravethought wrote:

I specifically mentioned the duping.

"There is no universally useful unique in poe to be the SoJ, and even if there was there is no duping to make it common enough to be used as currency."

APOWOGIZE!!

Your sentence structure was so incoherent I couldn't tell what kind of duping you were talking about.

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RogueMage wrote:

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Gravethought wrote:

I specifically mentioned the duping.

"There is no universally useful unique in poe to be the SoJ, and even if there was there is no duping to make it common enough to be used as currency."

APOWOGIZE!!

Your sentence structure was so incoherent I couldn't tell what kind of duping you were talking about.

Not sure if troll or serius.

Why u no english?

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RogueMage wrote:

I agree it's debatable, with pitfalls on both sides.

Interestingly enough, making currency items untradable makes bots lives a living hell. They'd pretty much only profit from really rare drops like andvarius and dream fragments.

Of course, so would players leveling new toons. Them tradeoffs.....

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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RogueMage wrote:

I agree it's debatable, with pitfalls on both sides.

One word:

bots.

Ugh, have to agree that's the ogre in the room. With an escrow system, I suppose the botters would focus mostly on the big-ticket Uniques and Orbs, leaving the midrange Uniques and Rares unmolested. That would be fine by me.

I agree with the "make trading difficult, but in the right way".

It's not "difficult" having to spend hours and hours going from thread to thread, sitting idle checking the chat channel, etc, just to get a measly upgrade or something, that's just plain frustrating.

GGG have EVERYTHING under their control: the forum, and the game (with the exception of 3rd party stuff of course, like RMT). They CAN improve the trading system, or basically control the economy any way they want, there are no limits.

This game's economy doesn't necessarily have to follow the good ol' economic model. In the real world, changing said economic model is difficult as hell (for many many reasons in each and every country). But this is a game, it's a sandbox, and an easy one to modify at that.
If GGG wanted they could restrict the number of trades someone can do, by just spending one weekend coding and some cups of coffee. In the real world you'd need funds, enforce laws regarding it, create a regulating entity, educate the people, etc etc.
The same could be said about ANYTHING regarding the "economy" of POE. It's basically at GGG's hands to do what they please with it.

With that said, GGG could basically do whatever they wanted to "improve" the trading system. I agree with the "make trading have a skill-check" thing. But this "skill-check" could be a "skill-check" in economics (know when to trade, how to haggle, etc), or could be anything else at all.
Hell, you could make it so if your player has a level divisible by 5, he automatically gets 5% discounts on everything he trades (or rather, gains 5% of what he spent back). It can be as trivial as that, and GGG can code that in no time (hyperbolicaly speaking).

The ONLY thing I can think of that would prevent GGG from doing this, is that they would need a lot of balancing, fine-tuning, and most importantly theoretical analysis, etc, to know if said changes are viable; while if they kept doing what they do know they wouldn't, since the analysis and stuff is already done (it's "normal" capitalism after all).
But GGG do have to balance other stuff, like skill changes, nerfs, etc.Technically they can try and balance these types of changes in a similar way.

...my point is that the "trading system" and "POE economy" is boring, kind of bad (cba to post reasons), but has the potential to be anything in the world, yet that potential is being wasted...

This was a good thread. I remember posting here.

With regards to purposefully obstructing trade, I have (2) points on that: First, obstructing trade doesn't actually solve the problem which trade exacerbates. As noted multiple times previously, the problem is loot depreciation which trade catalyzes. I'd rather we focus energies on solving loot devaluation than purposefully obstructing trade. Second, a bad trading system is one which undermines gameplay. Whether a trade system is bad or not depends greatly on the economy's vulnerability to loot devaluation. Games like Diablo 3, with shallow itemization, are especially vulnerable. POE is only slightly less vulnerable. Neither game would do well with an efficient auction house. Further on that note, the best trade systems don't break immersion. Instead of an ebay style interface you could give items to an NPC which later would report bids.