We players want an auction house

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deteego wrote:

Without trading, you can't feasibly do endgame content.

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.

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deteego wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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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.

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deteego wrote:

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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

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:

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Game (and puzzle) design is very different from most types of design. For example, let's say you're designing a lamp. You want every component of the lamp to be as obvious as possible. The switch to turn it on should be where you would expect it to be and the switch should be as simple as possible – most likely on/off. Every element of the lamp from how to move the light to what plugs in should be as clear and intuitive as possible. The goal of lamp design is to make the lamp easy to use.

Game design though isn't about removing obstacles but adding them. Let's suppose that a game designer set out to design a game lamp. Well, how to turn on the lamp wouldn't be obvious. The switch wouldn't be where you expect it or even necessarily look like a switch. How the lamp moved or plugged in would not be simple and the reason being that the point of a game lamp would be for users to figure it out.

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.

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deteego wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

2) Increase item valuation variance.

This will just feed point #1, which will just stabilize prices even more

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.

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deteego wrote:

Your ideal world of bartering can only exist in an environment where products and sellers are scarce, just like bartering in the real world

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.

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

Didn't feel like quoting deteego in a strictly chronological order.

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deteego wrote:

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

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.

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deteego wrote:

(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.

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.

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deteego wrote:

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 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.

"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:

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deteego wrote:

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.

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.

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

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deteego wrote:

GGG cannot limit the information to players, its just not possible...

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

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.

I am a player and I do NOT want an auction house.

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dawg6 wrote:

I'd like an easier way to trade items in game.

If an AH is the only way to do it, then I'm fine with an AH.

I'd really like to see someone come up with an alternative to Auction House (other than the existing trade channels/private messages).

There has to be an easier way to trade items.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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deteego wrote:

GGG cannot limit the information to players, its just not possible...

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

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.

As long as I can log onto the website, and I can get all item info I need to (which I can, thats how PoE works), there is nothing that GGG technically can do to stop this

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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...

If only we told D2JSP that.

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Veta321 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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...

If only we told D2JSP that.

D2JSP operates based on user-provided data, it doesn't and can't go into D2 (or any other game) and extract information unless the developer makes it possible.

I'm not suggesting this in a vacuum; a solid in-game trading system of some kind is required, or else players will go to places like d2jsp, because that will be the only thing to do.