We players want an auction house
"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. "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. "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). "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. "They will still trade if they do progress, because they'll find items they can't use which others will. "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 18, 2013, 12:14:04 AM
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" 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" " 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 " 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 " 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 " 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. " This will just feed point #1, which will just stabilize prices even more " 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 " 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, 1:52:39 AM
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"If by "endgame content" you mean low maps, then you are wrong. I've brought several characters to that level on almost pure self-found; I have complete confidence that I could have traded for one or two less support gems, used something else instead, and been just fine. (Actually, now that I think about it, every support gem I traded for I eventually self-found later.) If by "endgame content" you mean high maps, then I think you're right about the facts but wrong about it being a problem. Tackling the most difficult post-game content in the game should mean pulling out all the stops; if that means trading and partying — or, alternatively, grinding for days — then I have no problems with that. " "Why do you think a game should be like real life? Here's a little quote from Mark Rosewater, who's been an important figure in Magic: the Gathering design at Wizards of the Coast for years: "So yes, I understand Economics 101, I understand human psychology... and I'm fighting them. I want GGG to set up obstacles, not to utterly prevent players from using Economics 101, but to challenge them, to force them to rely on new and interesting means of thinking out a problem. And most importantly, I want finding a new item from my character to not feel like searching for a damn tablet on Amazon.com. "Now you're just being obstinate. Increasing item valuation variance — in other words, increasing the variance of what people say an item is worth — cannot possibly stabilize prices even more. Necessarily, increasing variance is price destabilization. It's pretty much impossible to have a sane conversation with you on this topic. "I think you've mistaken me as someone who is advocating bartering; while I'm not against it, it's not the main thrust of what I'm going for here. I'm advocating independent valuation of items, rather than relying on a search engine to tell you what something is worth. I'm not against searching for an item by stats (so long as no buyout is displayed in said search), and although I'm not against it, I'm not advocating haggling over price — "take it or leave it" is fine with me. My aim is to isolate the player from resources which tell him what items are worth and force him to determine the answer on his own, using his own thought process; no cheat sheets. This means: no searchable buyouts. Which means: no buyout listed whatsoever, because any listed buyout would necessarily be indexed by third-party sites. Which means: no ability for the seller to provide any text description whatsoever. Yes, that's a very difficult goal. In order for it to have a hope of succeeding, it would have to be implemented as an in-game system, offering some conveniences which third-party sites could never hope to offer — perhaps the ability to receive bids made while offline, and complete trades with bidders who are offline — as well as conveniences third-party sites do offer, but wouldn't impact the no-buyout objective — such as searching for items by affix. Naturally, current bids would be invisible, so third-party sites couldn't index them. The trickiest part would be that, without the ability for sellers to say what they want, bidders would have to predict, to the best of their ability, what sorts of things sellers would want. It's difficult to know in advance just how well they'd be able to do that, and how picky sellers would be about getting precisely what they want. That's the kind of system I'd like to see. And, as it just so happens, it's 100% haggle-free. 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 18, 2013, 2:31:32 AM
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I frankly dont care if you think flipping is a good thing, its not going to be common place in PoE unless PoE makes trading/online economy less prelevant
And your point about value relevance is in a vacuum, if you try to increase the variance in items (to try and increase the variance in value), thats just going to drive more people into trading (because higher variance means less of a chance of people finding what they want naturally) which will just stabalize the prices Variance of value on a product is driven by lack of information on the product. How that is achieved is irrelevant, but making more people trade those produts does the exact opposite, it creates an open market which gives people freedom of information. The only reason why know, that a legacy kaoms is roughly 60 exalts in standard, is because so many people are trading it for that price. You can try and flip as much as you want on that Khoams, but its not going to happen Look at it in real life, laptops have a huge amount of variants or "variables", arguably more than a PoE Item (ram,cpu,build material, screen size, screen density, OS, company, support) etc etc. Yet if you try to sell a laptop to someone for 10000, unless that person is a complete moron, they won't purchase that laptop The only way PoE can make flipping and bartering, and the whole premise of flipping and batering is abusing lack of information (the only way to barter an items worth is by one person arguing how much they think an item is worth, and the other person countering that but what they think its worth, but if a person already knows that item X costs Y because there already exists multiple instances of item X at roughly price Y, you can barter as much as you want, but unless the person is really desperate, you are not going to get anywhere). Bartering is independent valuation of items, thats the whole definition of bartering. The only way bartering works is if someone things an item is worth something thats significantly different to another item, and that happens due to lack of information about the item. Increasing the amount of people trading does the opposite of restrict information about the item. You argument about interesting is shallow and simplistic. An item is not more interesting if it has a higher range of potential value, interesting is a purely subjective thing, and many people see interest in different ways And for your information, I don't think a game should be like real life, I am explaining why things happen they way they are. If it was my way, I would make PoE completely ignorant of any economy, just like D2 and TL and TQ are, that is, screw any concept of maintaining an economy. When you deal with massively online games (and I mean online in the general term online, as in you have a huge number of people interacting with eachother), you start dealing with human behaviour and psychology, and the best example of that is real life |
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Didn't feel like quoting deteego in a strictly chronological order.
"Although I'd like that as well, for the purposes of this thread I'm focusing on increasing valuation variance for players looking at the same item. In other words, more disagreement between players on what a particular item is worth. To very briefly address the topic of item affix diversity: I want to see more balance between builds, and more specialization of itemization towards those various builds, to make the most diverse (and — dare I say it? — interesting) itemization possible. "No, it's not. Barter is a system of exchange by which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as currency. Trading a bow directly for a ring, rather than trading the bow for 5 Chaos then buying the ring for 5 Chaos, is barter. Haggling (or bargaining) is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service dispute the price which will be paid and the exact nature of the transaction that will take place, and eventually come to an agreement; it is an alternative pricing strategy to fixed prices. ""Abusing" is such a harsh word, and as I said earlier this post, by "bartering" you mean "haggling." But yes, it is a limited-information game, not necessarily as refined as but nevertheless using elements similar to poker. Thus, you're absolutely correct in bringing up information-limiting as the key game design issue here. A great example was the once-hidden knowledge of the 20% quality gem formula, which I thought was a really cool thing to have in the game; it's a bit of a shame it was spoiled. And now, for your best point thus far: "Well that there is a decent point. For example, the most commonly traded items in PoE — currency items — have the most established prices, while gear tends to be more flexible. However, what I'm really trying to refer to valuation difficulty per unit of experience. As a means of explanation, take making level 80 in Hardcore. This is a bit of a skill-tester, beyond just putting in time, because if you make a mistake you might die and have to start over from the beginning. Even given large amounts of time, one might never reach the objective, while a few would reach it relatively quickly. In the same way, I imagine that players getting more and more skilled at valuation is to some degree inevitable, and a function of time elapsed. This does not, however, mean that it cannot be made more challenging, and even have experienced players debating the value of a particular item, giving significantly different valuations. The aim here is not so much to make trading extremely difficult for the neophyte, but to make trading remain difficult for those who have a lot of experience with it — in other words, (relatively) easy to learn, but difficult to master. I'm not looking to create arbitrary restrictions which get in the way of trading, nor am I actively seeking that trading noobs will be ripped off by pros, but I am trying to make it so that even trading pros have to focus and think hard, lest they get ripped off themselves, rather than having all the answers at their fingertips. I want the "trading endgame" to be a true skill-tester. And if that means that some parts of trading chew up some noobs, that's acceptable in my book; one can't increase the difficulty for the pros and expect zero collateral damage on the noobs. I want trading to be just as much of a skill-tester, just as hardcore, as farming, rather than the easy-win pseudo-cheat-mode it is now. Nevertheless, it's true: the harder the push to trade, the more trading happens, and the more trading experience players get. Although I still believe increasing push to trade would increase independent item valuation in an absolute values sense, I definitely will concede to you that it decreases the ratio of independent item valuation compared to price-flattening, valuation-consensus behavior. (In a way, it's much like the armour formula, where the more damage you take, the more damage armour prevents absolutely, but the lower the percentage mitigation becomes.) And since I actually do care more about the percentage than the absolute amount, I can actually agree with you: decreasing push to trade would have a net positive effect on independent item valuation. I guess I was wrong on that one. 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 18, 2013, 3:53:16 AM
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GGG cannot limit the information to players, its just not possible, which is why your page long response along with your idea goes down the drain. Any kind of system they can think of will be ineffective, its like combating piracy. Its either going to be impossible to police, or completely impractical to enforce
If I wanted to, I could D3 auction house system for PoE, and there is nothing that GGG can do anything about it unless they want to shut down their website Last edited by deteego#6606 on Nov 18, 2013, 5:52:30 AM
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"Not linking items in the forums (nor in trade chat, if you had a bots on their monitoring the trade chat and sending you itemdata that way) would probably stop your third-party site cold. Simply stopping third-party sites is easy, the problem is what to replace it with; obviously, they'd need a much better system than that which they have now if they were going to seriously consider shutting down item linkage. I've already described the type of silent auction system I'd like to see; I linked it earlier in one post, and described it briefly in another. That's the kind of system I'd like to see them make available in-game, and, in the long run, removing the ability to link items in forum or chat is exactly what I'd like to see happen. 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 18, 2013, 6:40:37 AM
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I am a player and I do NOT want an auction house.
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