We players want an auction house

What's this 'we' shit? Stop acting like you speak for everyone.

Trade chat blows, to establish an economy there needs to be set levels. The current system is bullshit.

"

fourthx wrote:

What's this 'we' shit? Stop acting like you speak for everyone.

^

"

iamstryker wrote:

An AH would just make it easier for flippers to do nothing but flip all day.

Exactly the opposite. Flippers find their job impossible when everyone has searchable, instantaneous buyouts; flipping pretty much didn't exist in Diablo 3, and to the limited extent which it did (timezone/weekday-to-weekend) the margins were very low. Flippers depend on trading being somewhat difficult, that way some players won't put in the time, thus sell low and buy high.

I'm against an AH, in part because I'm pro-flipping.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

iamstryker wrote:

An AH would just make it easier for flippers to do nothing but flip all day.

Exactly the opposite. Flippers find their job impossible when everyone has searchable, instantaneous buyouts; flipping pretty much didn't exist in Diablo 3, and to the limited extent which it did (timezone/weekday-to-weekend) the margins were very low. Flippers depend on trading being somewhat difficult, that way some players won't put in the time, thus sell low and buy high.

I'm against an AH, in part because I'm pro-flipping.

Flipping existed in d3 but it was less frequent because of the huge AH fee.

"

AnubisMan wrote:

Trade chat blows, to establish an economy there needs to be set levels. The current system is bullshit.

While you did word this more bluntly than I would have, I agree with the sentiment. Trade Chat systems have always been at a great inconvenience to all but the most dedicated. After thinking poignantly about the way trades are treated as necessary in this game, I went in and decided to watch the trade-chat for five minutes. What I found was not a single item I could even use. On top of this, it moves too fast for anyone to seriously pay attention to. This was an issue in World of Warcraft as well.

In all honesty I can't think of a trade-chat system that wasn't awful. Not even in the most expensive of multiplayer online games.

In regards to how I feel about an auction house, my answer is this:

Let me go over the case why having flipping in the game is a good thing.

1. RNG is a good thing. Farming is boring as fuck if you have a steady income per hour. It's a hell of a lot better when sometimes you get very little, and sometimes you get a nice, high-value item. Farming should be like a slot machine, and attempts to reduce RNG are misguided.

2. This principle also applies to the item itself. If you know instantly (or nearly instantly) that a dropped item will get offers for 3 or 4 Chaos, that's a lot less interesting than knowing a dropped item will get items for 1 to 6 Chaos; the first is a more deterministic, grindy system than the second. The idea here is to increase the range of offers, giving a player-originated behavior a kind of pseudorandomness. The best way to do this is to force players to determine the value of items themselves, without outside help.

3. Although the reasoning for increasing the pseudorandomness of offers is based on loot-finding enjoyment, it also enables flipping. Additionally, making flipping profitable ensures there are enough flippers online to smooth over trading for those who despise it, offering to buy low and sell high for the players who are willing to buy high and sell low for the convenience of not having to deal with the trade system any more than they absolutely have to. A pro-flipping economy creates a trade environment where the amount of time you decide to put into trading is proportional to what you get out of it, giving players options on how they decide to split their time between farming and trading in a way where time and effort are rewarded regardless of the method chosen.

4. Attempts to solve the economy and equalize prices within the economy — in other words, anti-flipping mechanisms — just make things worse. The worst among these is searchable buyouts, which is precisely the service poe.xyz.is offers, allowing players to know the consensus price on items with a simple web search. With third-party sites, any buyout is a searchable buyout, because any publicly available information will inevitably be made searchable. Thus, the key to a better economy is for GGG to attack the buyout system — instantaneous buyout or not, it doesn't matter.

Except, all of what you said ScroteMcB is thrown out the window when players feel like they need an excessive amount of farm (or particular items) to progress, which is what is happening

Regardless of RNG or not, a lot less people would be using poe.xyz.is to find an item they need if they didn't need to find such an item in the first place

For example, if I want to do a low life build, I have to get a shavronns. The odds of me finding a shavronns are practically zilch, so whats going to happen? I am going to go to poe.xyz.is, find a god damn shavronns, find the currency and buy it

GGG's dream of a bartered flipping trade economy is not going to last because they made the game so gear dependent when you hit merc3, and there are no mechanisms in the game to help with this as its all RNG based. People don't have anything against random drops, but when you start putting RNG into crafting, then we have the situation we have currently

I said it before and ill say it again, an actual AH will be released at some point in time, and its going to do the exact same thing it did with D3, it will turn it into a game where players spend as much time trading as playing.

That may not be a bad thing, because unlike D3, PoE has a very good item customization system, just put it aware that this is going to happen eventually.

EDIT:

And on another point, the thing with bartering is its an incredibly ineffecient form of resource trading, along with trading items that have inherit value. This is why the economy, in the real world, is not based on bartering, or trading on currencies that have actual value (i.e. gold standard).

Now the thing is, this ineffeciency only happens due to scale, if the amount of trading is kept to a minimum, and isn't something thats "required" (assuming you only need to trade if you want to roflstomp 75+ level maps with your eyes closed) than the bartering system will remain as GGG envisaged it to remain. The problem is, that you need to start trading as early as merc, which means that a lot of people will need to start trading as soon as merc, which means that people will start treating orbs as currency (regardless of their inherit value), in the same way we treat money in real life, and it means that we are going to have indexers and AH systems going out, just like we google to buy something on ebay, and there is one reason why this happens, its due to effeciency

"

deteego wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Spoiler

Let me go over the case why having flipping in the game is a good thing.

1. RNG is a good thing. Farming is boring as fuck if you have a steady income per hour. It's a hell of a lot better when sometimes you get very little, and sometimes you get a nice, high-value item. Farming should be like a slot machine, and attempts to reduce RNG are misguided.

2. This principle also applies to the item itself. If you know instantly (or nearly instantly) that a dropped item will get offers for 3 or 4 Chaos, that's a lot less interesting than knowing a dropped item will get items for 1 to 6 Chaos; the first is a more deterministic, grindy system than the second. The idea here is to increase the range of offers, giving a player-originated behavior a kind of pseudorandomness. The best way to do this is to force players to determine the value of items themselves, without outside help.

3. Although the reasoning for increasing the pseudorandomness of offers is based on loot-finding enjoyment, it also enables flipping. Additionally, making flipping profitable ensures there are enough flippers online to smooth over trading for those who despise it, offering to buy low and sell high for the players who are willing to buy high and sell low for the convenience of not having to deal with the trade system any more than they absolutely have to. A pro-flipping economy creates a trade environment where the amount of time you decide to put into trading is proportional to what you get out of it, giving players options on how they decide to split their time between farming and trading in a way where time and effort are rewarded regardless of the method chosen.

4. Attempts to solve the economy and equalize prices within the economy — in other words, anti-flipping mechanisms — just make things worse. The worst among these is searchable buyouts, which is precisely the service poe.xyz.is offers, allowing players to know the consensus price on items with a simple web search. With third-party sites, any buyout is a searchable buyout, because any publicly available information will inevitably be made searchable. Thus, the key to a better economy is for GGG to attack the buyout system — instantaneous buyout or not, it doesn't matter.

Except, all of what you said ScroteMcB is thrown out the window when players feel like they need an excessive amount of farm (or particular items) to progress, which is what is happening

Regardless of RNG or not, a lot less people would be using poe.xyz.is to find an item they need if they didn't need to find such an item in the first place

For example, if I want to do a low life build, I have to get a shavronns. The odds of me finding a shavronns are practically zilch, so whats going to happen? I am going to go to poe.xyz.is, find a god damn shavronns, find the currency and buy it

GGG's dream of a bartered flipping trade economy is not going to last because they made the game so gear dependent when you hit merc3, and there are no mechanisms in the game to help with this as its all RNG based. People don't have anything against random drops, but when you start putting RNG into crafting, then we have the situation we have currently

This isn't the case.

1) (minor point) Your example of Shavronne's low-life is about the most extreme example you could have possibly imagined. You don't really need Shavronne's Wrappings to play low-life (on softcore) anyway; it just helps, a lot. But more to the point, there are lots of builds which are much less dependent on specific uniques to be viable. Furthermore, the vast majority of players are using precisely those builds, which function perfectly well on nothing but rares.

2) Players do not trade because they fail to find items they need; they trade because they succeed at finding items which they don't need. The player with the best gear on the server, more than adequate to tackle the more difficult content, likely still trades, because he still finds items he doesn't need, and — even though his gear is better than anyone elses' — he would still like more usable gear. After all, a weapon even better than his might drop for someone else who can't use it, or he might like gear specifically tuned to fight Palace Dominus which isn't quite the same as his standard setup.

3) Any ARPG which offers a wide range of itemization diversity — as a good ARPG damn well should — is always going to have strong trading, because of point #2. Itemization diversity means finding lots of good stuff you can't use, which means a strong incentive to trade to turn stuff useless to your character into useful stuff. Absolute drop rates and gear dependency have nothing to do with it, it's all about drop ratios — not how often the stuff you want drops, but about how often the stuff you want drops compared to the stuff which other people want. Increasing both drop rates equally does nothing to change trading. If anything, I'd like to see even more itemization diversity, which would mean an even stronger push to trade. (To compensate and show some love to self-founders, I have other suggestions like this one.)

"

deteego wrote:

I said it before and ill say it again, an actual AH will be released at some point in time, and its going to do the exact same thing it did with D3, it will turn it into a game where players spend as much time trading as playing.

That may not be a bad thing, because unlike D3, PoE has a very good item customization system, just put it aware that this is going to happen eventually.

I said it before and ill say it again, it's already happened; it's called poe.xyz.is, with "Buyout only" and "Online only" enabled. And it is a bad thing.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

1. RNG is a good thing. Farming is boring as fuck if you have a steady income per hour. It's a hell of a lot better when sometimes you get very little, and sometimes you get a nice, high-value item. Farming should be like a slot machine, and attempts to reduce RNG are misguided.

They aren't misguided because the amount of RNG that PoE has is extreme. PoE is the most RNG game I have played, ever, its not just some RNG, its RNG everywhere, its in PoE's blood.

You take anything to an extreme, you have a problem, PoE took RNG to an extreme, they suffer the consequences.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

2. This principle also applies to the item itself. If you know instantly (or nearly instantly) that a dropped item will get offers for 3 or 4 Chaos, that's a lot less interesting than knowing a dropped item will get items for 1 to 6 Chaos; the first is a more deterministic, grindy system than the second. The idea here is to increase the range of offers, giving a player-originated behavior a kind of pseudorandomness. The best way to do this is to force players to determine the value of items themselves, without outside help.

Which is irrelevant, if people are forced to trade, because they item that drops isn't useful to them in the immediate future, they will find the most effecient way to trade, which are indexers/auction houses

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

3. Although the reasoning for increasing the pseudorandomness of offers is based on loot-finding enjoyment, it also enables flipping. Additionally, making flipping profitable ensures there are enough flippers online to smooth over trading for those who despise it, offering to buy low and sell high for the players who are willing to buy high and sell low for the convenience of not having to deal with the trade system any more than they absolutely have to. A pro-flipping economy creates a trade environment where the amount of time you decide to put into trading is proportional to what you get out of it, giving players options on how they decide to split their time between farming and trading in a way where time and effort are rewarded regardless of the method chosen.

Flipping is currently minimal for reasons I stated earlier. Flipping will only ever happen at noticable levels when the amount of trading that is needed to progress is decreased

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

1) Your example of Shavronne's low-life is about the most extreme example you could have possibly imagined. You don't really need Shavronne's Wrappings to play low-life (on softcore) anyway; it just helps, a lot. But more to the point, there are lots of builds which are much less dependent on specific uniques to be viable. Furthermore, the vast majority of players are using precisely those builds, which function perfectly well on nothing but rares.

You do need a shavronns to be a viable endgame low life build, else any Chaos damage will instantly kill you, and running around on low life without ES will get you killed even faster

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

2) Players do not trade because they fail to find items they need; they trade because they succeed at finding items which they don't need. The player with the best gear on the server, more than adequate to tackle the more difficult content, likely still trades, because he still finds items he doesn't need, and — even though his gear is better than anyone elses' — he would still like more usable gear. After all, a weapon even better than his might drop for someone else who can't use it, or he might like gear specifically tuned to fight Palace Dominus which isn't quite the same as his standard setup.

Those perma trading players you talk about make up like the 1% of players, which means I don't give a 2 hoots about them. What matters, is the mid tier players, and if they don't progress enough due to self found techniques (for whatever reason, and RNG is one of those reasons, but not the only one), then they will trade.

And the more people that trade, the more indexers and auction houses and anti flipping mechanisms you will get. Indexers are a form of normalization, it is human nature to do this stuff for efficiency reasons. If I am getting gear checked at merc3 because I am stuck with an armor that has 300, when I should really be having an armor of 1k (because I am a melee), than I am going to use an indexer, because its faster and its more effecient. More importantly, I HAVE to use the indexer if I want to progress. I have no way of knowing if my crafting will succeed, or if I manage to find an item that has 1k+ armor, so I will continue to use poe.xyz.is, just as everyone else will

Why the flying cheese cake would I bother with bartering and possibility of getting ripped off when I can just use an indexer? And the only reason that indexers work is if they have enough content (items and users), which means exactly what I said it means, the amount of people trading in PoE is ridiculous, and its that high because people are forced to trade

This is exactly what happened in D3, and the only difference is that the trading in PoE has more depth due to item customization

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I said it before and ill say it again, it's already happened; it's called poe.xyz.is, with "Buyout only" and "Online only" enabled. And it is a bad thing.

And its never going to go away, its going to get worse