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.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Nov 17, 2013, 7:08:14 PM
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.
Build of the week #9 - Breaking your face with style http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EcQDOUN9Y
IGN: Poltun
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:
Spoiler
If we are going to force players to trade in order to move forward in Merciless, then we need an auction house. If we are going to actually balance the game and abolish this dependence on trades, then I don't want an AH anywhere near it. If we absolutely must continue with this unbalanced, trade-focused gameplay then an AH is the only way to go for me. Other people are flaky, and the system feels dated.
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.
@faerwin
"
faerwin wrote:
"
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.
As I said, margins were low.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Nov 17, 2013, 9:33:19 PM
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
Last edited by deteego#6606 on Nov 17, 2013, 10:00:35 PM
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.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Nov 17, 2013, 10:23:19 PM
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
Last edited by deteego#6606 on Nov 17, 2013, 10:38:06 PM
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.
Many games have more. Hearthstone has more. And I love me some Hearthstone.
You completely neglect to explain how more of a good thing starts being a bad thing. I'm not going to say you don't have a reasoning for it, just that you didn't post it; I'll wait until you do to comment further.
"
deteego wrote:
"
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 the item that drops isn't useful to them in the immediate future, they will find the most efficient way to trade, which are indexers/auction houses
First, no one is forced to trade. This is kind of like saying you're forced to kill Kole in Lunaris 2; no, you're not. Trading is, however, encouraged by game mechanics, just as you are clearly and obviously encouraged to face Kole, and changes to game mechanics can increase or decrease that encouragement. (By contrast, you are forced to kill Brutus, who is a lot like Kole.)
Second, it's not irrelevant. There is a difference between undermined and irrelevant; poe.xyz.is undermines the objective, but it doesn't render the objective irrelevant, because that is still how things should be.
"
deteego wrote:
Flipping is currently minimal for reasons I stated earlier. Flipping will only ever happen at noticeable levels when the amount of trading that is needed to progress is decreased
If players have less incentive to trade, by what twisted logic will this increase flipping?
There are two ways to increase the potency of flipping: 1) Increase push to trade. Because increasing item diversity increases push to trade, this will always exist to some degree. However, I don't believe that increasing it further; trading is a mini-game which I understand not everyone wants to play, hence the popularity of suggestions such as the Self-Found League. (Misguided as their proposed solution is, I respect their distaste for the trading mini-game, and agree that excessive push towards trading is a real problem.) If it means increasing item diversity further, then it's a cost I'm willing to pay, perhaps for some other kind of benefit it's also a reasonable cost, but it's a cost, and you don't pay a cost for nothing; if anything, you look for ways to mitigate costs. 2) Increase item valuation variance. This is by far my preferred way to increase the viability of flipping. Note that this is something which the Diablo 3 auction houses virtually destroyed, thus destroying flipping options in that game (not all of them, but the vast majority).
"
deteego wrote:
"
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
Chaos damage isn't common, and it's not quite true that any Chaos damage will kill you, just that you're very, very weak to it; high Chaos resistance is a way to partially mitigate this weakness. Until very recently, I had a level 77 tank character running maps in Nemesis with -60 chaos resist; I RIP'd to a map Brutus + desync combination (plus noticing the desync several seconds before death and still sticking around instead of fearing the danger), not to any form of Chaos damage. The benefit of Shavronne's Wrappings is overestimated.
"
deteego wrote:
"
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.
They will still trade if they do progress, because they'll find items they can't use which others will.
"
deteego wrote:
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), 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
Still not forced, but I already said that.
With the possibility of you possibly getting ripped off comes the possibility of you possibly ripping off someone else. Increasing valuation variance isn't a benefit nor a penalty from the perspective of how well a trade will go for the average trade. It's increasing the standard deviation, not changing the mean.
As I said before, the push to trade is a necessary cost of item diversity, but I have no desire to increase it further. I understand people feel forced to trade, and I don't advocate any change which would have solely the effect of increasing that push.
It's on GGG, not on you, to make poe.xyz.is a less appealing option. As a gamer, you should be expected to use all tools at your disposal, with the exception of things labeled as bannable cheats (and making poe.xyz.is a "bannable cheat" would solve nothing, as GGG would have no way to prove its use). If GGG released PoE with cheat codes, it should not be surprised that players would use those cheat codes; it would be on them to remove the cheat codes from the game. I have nothing against you using shop indexers or searching by buyout; I do have a problem with GGG encouraging such a system and not taking steps on their own to prevent their use. (An example of something GGG could do to discourage buyouts is here.)
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Nov 17, 2013, 11:14:04 PM
Many games have more. Hearthstone has more. And I love me some Hearthstone.[/QUOTE]
You completely neglect to explain how more of a good thing starts being a bad thing. I'm not going to say you don't have a reasoning for it, just that you didn't post it; I'll wait until you do to comment further.
Hearthstone does not have more RNG than PoE....
I already gave explanations, your responses are subjective "I like random better because its more fun"
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
First, no one is forced to trade. This is kind of like saying you're forced to kill Kole in Lunaris 2; no, you're not. Trading is, however, encouraged by game mechanics, just as you are clearly and obviously encouraged to face Kole, and changes to game mechanics can increase or decrease that encouragement. (By contrast, you are forced to kill Brutus, who is a lot like Kole.)
That anology is riduclously stupid. Without trading, you can't feasibly do endgame content. You can more than easily progress through the game without killing kole. In fact, many pros do it because its more often than not, not worth the effort with potentially dying
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
Second, it's not irrelevant. There is a difference between undermined and irrelevant; poe.xyz.is undermines the objective, but it doesn't render the objective irrelevant, because that is still how things should be.
poe.xyz.is exists because GGG failed to realize that bartering and trading are ineffecient systems that only exist when the scale is very small or when trading isn't deemed to be required.
Unfortunately neither is the case, GGG is now very large scale, and trading is very mandatory to progressing
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
"
deteego wrote:
Flipping is currently minimal for reasons I stated earlier. Flipping will only ever happen at noticeable levels when the amount of trading that is needed to progress is decreased
If players have less incentive to trade, by what twisted logic will this increase flipping?
Do you understand economics 101? The only reason why flipping exists is because the market is not saturated. In real life, when you purchase products which are deemed necessary, there is no flipping. If I go out to buy some apples, there are so many providers of apples, and apples being seen as an essential product (its food, and so if its not apples its something else) has provided a market where there are so many people trying to sell apples, that they compete against eachother, saturating the market and reducing the ability to flip massively, because if some guy starts charging 3 times more for apples than everyone else, its highly likely that he is shodding someone
Contrast that to go to an auction (in real life) where you have unique non essential goods being sold (like an antique table) where its possible to massively bid to change the price. Or going to a garage sale and purchasing old records
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
There are two ways to increase the potency of flipping: 1) Increase push to trade. Because increasing item diversity increases push to trade, this will always exist to some degree. However, I don't believe that increasing it further; trading is a mini-game which I understand not everyone wants to play, hence the popularity of suggestions such as the Self-Found League. (Misguided as their proposed solution is, I respect their distaste for the trading mini-game, and agree that excessive push towards trading is a real problem.) If it means increasing item diversity further, then it's a cost I'm willing to pay, perhaps for some other kind of benefit it's also a reasonable cost, but it's a cost, and you don't pay a cost for nothing; if anything, you look for ways to mitigate costs.
This will decrease flipping not increase it. In fact, this has already happened, there is evidence of this. Because so many people are trading now, everyone knows what the standard price for a shavronns is because if you look it up in poe.xyz.is, you get a baseline price. The more people trade, the more items, and the more users, the more that prices stabilize. This is irrelevant to RNG or not.
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
2) Increase item valuation variance.
This will just feed point #1, which will just stabilize prices even more
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
With the possibility of you possibly getting ripped off comes the possibility of you possibly ripping off someone else. Increasing valuation variance isn't a benefit nor a penalty from the perspective of how well a trade will go for the average trade. It's increasing the standard deviation, not changing the mean.
Ignorance of human psychology, the negatives of a risk always far outweight the positives of suceeding. If someone asked you to gamble their house, for the possibility of getting a house 3 times better? Of course not, because you rely on that house, you earned money on it. Almost everyone would rather spend more time to slowly improve their house (knowing it will be improved) rather than losing massive potential
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
It's on GGG, not on you, to make poe.xyz.is a less appealing option. As a gamer, you should be expected to use all tools at your disposal, with the exception of things labeled as bannable cheats (and making poe.xyz.is a "bannable cheat" would solve nothing, as GGG would have no way to prove its use). If GGG released PoE with cheat codes, it should not be surprised that players would use those cheat codes; it would be on them to remove the cheat codes from the game. I have nothing against you using shop indexers or searching by buyout; I do have a problem with GGG encouraging such a system and not taking steps on their own to prevent their use. (An example of something GGG could do to discourage buyouts is here.)
GGG can't do anything to make indexers less relevant baring physically controlling what people do. They have already failed, they want a game with an online economy, people will find effecient ways to manage an economy, and bartering/flipping is the most ineffecient way to manage an economy, which is why no god damn country with an economy that isn't trivial in size does bartering as their central economy, it just doesn't work.
Bartering happens in countries like PNG where they trade pigs, because they are isolated in small communities and its infeasible for anyone to flood the market with too many pigs because they have to bred. The minute those communities find that their pigs aren't useful enough, or their population starts growing, they will start changing their currencies, using markets and auctions, until they start mimicking what every country of significant size does
Your ideal world of bartering can only exist in an environment where products and sellers are scarce, just like bartering in the real world
If GGG wants to make bartering more relevant, they need to make the economy less relevant. People do not barter in well established economies, they use indexers and trade with everyone else, and variance has nothing to do with it because when the market becomes flooded with all the variations of the product, it becomes normalized and things become priced accordingly (just like a 5L Shavronns, a variant of a 6L shavronns, is cheaper and priced accordingly as such)
Many games have more. Hearthstone has more. And I love me some Hearthstone.
You completely neglect to explain how more of a good thing starts being a bad thing. I'm not going to say you don't have a reasoning for it, just that you didn't post it; I'll wait until you do to comment further.
Hearthstone does not have more RNG than PoE....
I already gave explanations, your responses are subjective "I like random better because its more fun"
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
First, no one is forced to trade. This is kind of like saying you're forced to kill Kole in Lunaris 2; no, you're not. Trading is, however, encouraged by game mechanics, just as you are clearly and obviously encouraged to face Kole, and changes to game mechanics can increase or decrease that encouragement. (By contrast, you are forced to kill Brutus, who is a lot like Kole.)
That anology is riduclously stupid. Without trading, you can't feasibly do endgame content. You can more than easily progress through the game without killing kole. In fact, many pros do it because its more often than not, not worth the effort with potentially dying
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
Second, it's not irrelevant. There is a difference between undermined and irrelevant; poe.xyz.is undermines the objective, but it doesn't render the objective irrelevant, because that is still how things should be.
poe.xyz.is exists because GGG failed to realize that bartering and trading are ineffecient systems that only exist when the scale is very small or when trading isn't deemed to be required.
Unfortunately neither is the case, GGG is now very large scale, and trading is very mandatory to progressing
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
"
deteego wrote:
Flipping is currently minimal for reasons I stated earlier. Flipping will only ever happen at noticeable levels when the amount of trading that is needed to progress is decreased
If players have less incentive to trade, by what twisted logic will this increase flipping?
Do you understand economics 101? The only reason why flipping exists is because the market is not saturated. In real life, when you purchase products which are deemed necessary, there is no flipping. If I go out to buy some apples, there are so many providers of apples, and apples being seen as an essential product (its food, and so if its not apples its something else) has provided a market where there are so many people trying to sell apples, that they compete against eachother, saturating the market and reducing the ability to flip massively, because if some guy starts charging 3 times more for apples than everyone else, its highly likely that he is shodding someone
Contrast that to go to an auction (in real life) where you have unique non essential goods being sold (like an antique table) where its possible to massively bid to change the price. Or going to a garage sale and purchasing old records
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
There are two ways to increase the potency of flipping: 1) Increase push to trade. Because increasing item diversity increases push to trade, this will always exist to some degree. However, I don't believe that increasing it further; trading is a mini-game which I understand not everyone wants to play, hence the popularity of suggestions such as the Self-Found League. (Misguided as their proposed solution is, I respect their distaste for the trading mini-game, and agree that excessive push towards trading is a real problem.) If it means increasing item diversity further, then it's a cost I'm willing to pay, perhaps for some other kind of benefit it's also a reasonable cost, but it's a cost, and you don't pay a cost for nothing; if anything, you look for ways to mitigate costs.
This will decrease flipping not increase it. In fact, this has already happened, there is evidence of this. Because so many people are trading now, everyone knows what the standard price for a shavronns is because if you look it up in poe.xyz.is, you get a baseline price. The more people trade, the more items, and the more users, the more that prices stabilize. This is irrelevant to RNG or not.
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
2) Increase item valuation variance.
This will just feed point #1, which will just stabilize prices even more
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
With the possibility of you possibly getting ripped off comes the possibility of you possibly ripping off someone else. Increasing valuation variance isn't a benefit nor a penalty from the perspective of how well a trade will go for the average trade. It's increasing the standard deviation, not changing the mean.
Ignorance of human psychology, the negatives of a risk always far outweight the positives of suceeding. If someone asked you to gamble their house, for the possibility of getting a house 3 times better? Of course not, because you rely on that house, you earned money on it. Almost everyone would rather spend more time to slowly improve their house (knowing it will be improved) rather than losing massive potential
"
ScrotieMcB wrote:
It's on GGG, not on you, to make poe.xyz.is a less appealing option. As a gamer, you should be expected to use all tools at your disposal, with the exception of things labeled as bannable cheats (and making poe.xyz.is a "bannable cheat" would solve nothing, as GGG would have no way to prove its use). If GGG released PoE with cheat codes, it should not be surprised that players would use those cheat codes; it would be on them to remove the cheat codes from the game. I have nothing against you using shop indexers or searching by buyout; I do have a problem with GGG encouraging such a system and not taking steps on their own to prevent their use. (An example of something GGG could do to discourage buyouts is here.)
GGG can't do anything to make indexers less relevant baring physically controlling what people do. They have already failed, they want a game with an online economy, people will find effecient ways to manage an economy, and bartering/flipping is the most ineffecient way to manage an economy of large scale with a saturated market, which is why no god damn country with an economy that isn't trivial in size does bartering as their central economy, it just doesn't work.
Bartering happens in communities inside countries like PNG where they trade pigs, because they are isolated in small communities and its infeasible for anyone to flood the market with too many pigs because they have to breed the pigs (and they are completely isolated). The minute those communities find that their pigs aren't useful enough, or their population starts growing, they will start changing their currencies, using markets and auctions, until they start mimicking what every country of significant size does
Your ideal world of bartering can only exist in an environment where products and sellers are scarce, just like bartering in the real world
If GGG wants to make bartering more relevant, they need to make the economy less relevant. People do not barter in well established economies, they use indexers and trade with everyone else, and variance has nothing to do with it because when the market becomes flooded with all the variations of the product, it becomes normalized and things become priced accordingly (just like a 5L Shavronns, a variant of a 6L shavronns, is cheaper and priced accordingly as such)
Last edited by deteego#6606 on Nov 18, 2013, 12:52:39 AM
