In game trade channel is Completly fucked up

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Deciding how much to bid on an item — when no buyout is displayed, no bids are visible, no method to search the buyouts of comparable items — that's a tough choice

my guess is it takes one day for specialists to setup an external webpage where sellers can specify their expected prices and current bids and expected buyouts.
that's because it's in the sellers interest for getting more profit.

let's face it, implementations based on obscurity don't work in online games.

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geradon wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Deciding how much to bid on an item — when no buyout is displayed, no bids are visible, no method to search the buyouts of comparable items — that's a tough choice

my guess is it takes one day for specialists to setup an external webpage where sellers can specify their expected prices and current bids and expected buyouts.
that's because it's in the sellers interest for getting more profit.

let's face it, implementations based on obscurity don't work in online games.

Fair points. Fighting third-party websites is very hard. It comes down to determining which systems third-party sites would likely exploit, and cutting the legs out from under them.

For example:
* completely hide the name of the seller from bidders and searches.
* remove the ability to link items to the forums (since the trade forums are pretty much auctions anyway)

With those two gone, I imagine it's still true that players could take screenshots, and some variant of a CAPTCHA-solving bot could parse said screenshots into searchable text. However, at that point that particular method has lost a lot of convenience, enough where I'm not overly worried about it.

The last link would be sites like poetradechat.com... which means you might have to go to the admittedly extreme extreme of preventing linking in trade chat as well. This would pretty much limit trade chat to currency exchanges and to sales of "standardized" gear (such as 17q Multistrike, 6L Shavronnes, 14/68 Andvarius), which may or may not be a bad thing, since trade chat isn't particularly efficient at other types of sales, anyway.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I sincerely believe we should have a silent, non-buyout, multi-bid, escrow, bid-retract auction house system.

Silent means that other players bids are not visible, so bidders would be encouraged to make bids they thought were truly fair. Non-buyout means obviously that you can't set an automatic buyout, but additionally you can't describe the auction, so you can't set an informal buyout either. Multi-bid means you could submit two separate bids on the same item, so if the seller didn't want your first bid he might still accept your second. Escrow means your bids are held while you're bidding; bid-retract means you can retract your bids at any time. The seller would be able to set the duration of the auction, but the bidders wouldn't be able to see when the auction ends (no sniping, and if you want your bid back you can just retract it); once the duration is set, it is fixed and the seller cannot retract. Sellers must choose a bid on each of their closed auctions in order to regain the ability to add or remove items from their stash.

Very nicely thought-out, nothing to add but my sincere support.

I just realized I'd be remiss if I didn't think DalaiLama for his assistance in helping me work out the kinks of the silent auction idea; he plays a mean devil's advocate and was invaluable in identifying problems which forced me to iron out better mechanics.

Ever since anarchy merged with standard the trade chat and overall prices are just out of control.Common uniques are being sold for outrages prices ,high end/rare uniques for at least double their price prior to the merge,same with good rares or 5L/6L items.

And of course the "offer" mentality has opportunely returned:people NEVER price their items no matter the item,NEVER bother responding when you do offer and just expect outrages prices for every crap item they are selling .Even if that means constantly spamming every 1 minute all the trade chats the entire day.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

...once the duration is set, it is fixed and the seller cannot retract. Sellers must choose a bid on each of their closed auctions in order to regain the ability to add or remove items from their stash.

I was with you until here. What is the purpose of set duration and no seller reservation? Why should the seller have to accept offers? What you describe may work for low value items, although those can already be acquired without trade, but I foresee problems with high value items. Traders would be encouraged to act outside the system to maximize profits, or worse flip things they find on the AH. I think I get what you were going for, a 'set it and forget' way to trade that doesn't involve market precision, value comparison or buyouts but I'm concerned it would facilitate rapid gear progression while undermining actually finding loot. Finding loot is what these games are about, we cannot lose sight of that. The existing trade system already undermines finding loot in any long term league.

Take for example the D3 strategy of auctioning twink gear. Buyers would be rerollers or first time players and would use the AH for convenience. Assuming a short auction duration, the next day buyers would find their twinks conveniently in their stash. They are now many standard deviations ahead of where they were in the loot chase. They will not be finding much useful loot for a while. That's not so bad I guess as you can already do that, with less convenience.

What's bad about that system is non-twink long term gear selling. Why would a seller purposefully agree to no reserve, no haggling and fixed duration, especially for GG gear? They wouldn't. They would sell outside the system to maximize profit. You saw that in Diablo 3 a lot, even before the auction house ran out of zeroes (LOL). So in the end that only facilitates what some might call a problem of trade, not a feature.

All that said, your suggestion with unfixed duration, seller retraction and bidder-seller communication would leave everyone happy. Although that's not much different than a regular auction house. And I suppose not much different than what we already have but much more convenient.

What I find interesting about POETradeChat is that you can only search recent listings. So listing an item results in a set amount of exposure and therefore interest, presumably less exposure and interest than would result from an auction house. A similar in game system would do away with spamming, although persistent regular listing would increase exposure. The benefit here is that gaining exposure for items and finding items is more difficult but not painfully inconvenient and results in slower gear proliferation than an auction house. In this system you could not set and forget overnight, you would have to deal with users playing at the same time as you. There is however a similar concern to your suggestion with regards to GG items. Because GG items are the most value and therefore most profitable their exposure is of the utmost importance and worthy of tedium. Therefore players may still seek exposure any way they can (forums, third party sites, etc.). Trade in ARPGs is a problem without a solution I'm afraid.

Edit: I wrote this before I saw the rest of the thread. I agree your system would work if it was impossible to organize trade outside of the AH and if chat linking was removed (oh dear...). But that's close to impossible and impractical. Furthermore, choosing auction duration is not a matter of skill. It's practically binary. Less profitable items receive a short duration to meet demand as quickly as possible. GG items would receive the longest duration to maximize exposure. The more valuable/profitable an item is the more exposure it can take advantage of. It's a question of 'is there more demand than supply or less demand than supply'.

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Veta321 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

...once the duration is set, it is fixed and the seller cannot retract. Sellers must choose a bid on each of their closed auctions in order to regain the ability to add or remove items from their stash.

I was with you until here. What is the purpose of set duration and no seller reservation? Why should the seller have to accept offers?

The motivation there was to ensure skill-testing on both sides of the transaction, not exclusively the bidder side. The bidder's skill test is the bid; the seller's skill test is the duration of the auction, and when that duration starts. This choice is meaningless if the seller can retract; instead, the seller keeps the item up perpetually until they find a bid they feel maximizes their profit, and thus the duration is essentially infinite, and the auction has an unspoken "buyout" below which the item will not sell. Like I said earlier, the point is to enforce difficult choices, without making those choices time-wasters.

Also, keep in mind that silent bidding is a seller-sided mechanic in general.

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Veta321 wrote:

What you describe may work for low value items, although those can already be acquired without trade, but I foresee problems with high value items.

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Veta321 wrote:

Why would a seller purposefully agree to no reserve, no haggling and fixed duration, especially for GG gear? They wouldn't. They would sell outside the system to maximize profit.

If by "high-value" items you mean high-demand items, then I predict those would give the seller the widest variety of quality bids to choose from, and thus present the least problem.

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Veta321 wrote:

Traders would be encouraged to act outside the system to maximize profits, or worse flip things they find on the AH.

I do not vilify flippers, nor should you. Trading is a mini-game within an ARPG; having a good, engaging, skill-testing minigame does not harm to the main, primary game. In particular, the skill-testing features of the system have the predicted effect of encouraging flippers. What discourages flippers? Searchable buyouts, a lack of build diversity, one-dimensional itemization — in short, the same things that kill the joy of loot-finding for farmers as well. Both farmers and flippers thrive when item valuation varies wildly from one person to another; the goals of both groups sync up.

The trading mini-game has gotten a lot of bad wrap from the whole Diablo 3 fiasco. However, with the exception of the anti-flipper mechanics, most notably searchable buyouts, it wasn't the trading system's fault. If people are flocking to the trading mini-game despite a profound distaste for trading, that isn't the fault of the trading mini-game — it's the fault of the ARPG portion of the game for being so brutally unappealing that players would rather play a mini-game in a genre they despise than play a shit game in a genre they love.

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Veta321 wrote:

I think I get what you were going for, a 'set it and forget' way to trade that doesn't involve market precision, value comparison or buyouts but I'm concerned it would facilitate rapid gear progression while undermining actually finding loot. Finding loot is what these games are about, we cannot lose sight of that. The existing trade system already undermines finding loot in any long term league.

I agree with that last point, which is why I'm trying to shift away from a poe.xyz.is searchable buyout system towards something where item valuation is more difficult than a search form. When players are less clued in as to the exact value of the gear which drops for them, their imagination is allowed to work, and the joy of loot-finding is maintained; the closer the buyout system brings us to knowing the market value of everything, the closer we get to a boring, deterministic, joyless loot-finding where the answer is known as soon as the item hits the ground.

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Veta321 wrote:

All that said, your suggestion with unfixed duration, seller retraction and bidder-seller communication would leave everyone happy.

Tell that to a bidder whose low bid is returned to him, not because someone else outbid him, but because the seller wants to hold out for better.

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Veta321 wrote:

Because GG items are the most value and therefore most profitable their exposure is of the utmost importance and worthy of tedium. Therefore players may still seek exposure any way they can (forums, third party sites, etc.).

Although I strongly believe that high-demand items will auction very well, this kind of behavior is nevertheless at least partially inevitable. The only way to keep these kinds of users is to offer convenience over other methods of exchange, and even then, some are just inherently distrusting of risk and will spurn convenience anyway. The idea is to make their decision as difficult as possible.

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Veta321 wrote:

choosing auction duration is not a matter of skill. It's practically binary. Less profitable items receive a short duration to meet demand as quickly as possible. GG items would receive the longest duration to maximize exposure. The more valuable/profitable an item is the more exposure it can take advantage of. It's a question of 'is there more demand than supply or less demand than supply'.

You are greatly oversimplifying the problem. I believe that players are far more likely to bid while they're online, and far less likely to retract while they're offline; so the question becomes, which timezone are you trying to hit? US? Australia? Do Australians like different builds than Americans, or essentially the same ones?

Some good ideas here, although I don't think auctions should be silent. Part of the issue here is a concerted effort to raise prices. If me, my friends, and everyone on my friends list start telling people that "The last three multistrikes I sold were 12 chaos" and then we actively pretend to be selling them in chat, I promise you, if nothing else, someone is going to eventually offer me 10 or 11, even if the gem is honestly only worth 6-8. I see what appears to be this exact situation going on.

I think, with the implementation of a trade board or search feature in game, any items with offers should be visible. People should see what other actual players are actually paying for things. I realize you could still abuse this by having all of your friends place fake bids on stuff, but it would be slightly more difficult, especially on higher priced items. Especially if people see your Multistrike at 12 chaos current offer, and thirty others at 8 or 9 current offer, they might be able to more readily see the true value of the item.

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ggnorekthx wrote:

Some good ideas here, although I don't think auctions should be silent. Part of the issue here is a concerted effort to raise prices. If me, my friends, and everyone on my friends list start telling people that "The last three multistrikes I sold were 12 chaos" and then we actively pretend to be selling them in chat, I promise you, if nothing else, someone is going to eventually offer me 10 or 11, even if the gem is honestly only worth 6-8. I see what appears to be this exact situation going on.

I think, with the implementation of a trade board or search feature in game, any items with offers should be visible. People should see what other actual players are actually paying for things. I realize you could still abuse this by having all of your friends place fake bids on stuff, but it would be slightly more difficult, especially on higher priced items. Especially if people see your Multistrike at 12 chaos, and thirty others at 8 or 9, they might be able to more readily see the true value of the item.

I am strongly opposed to this. Searchable bids means sniping. In no time you have a "Price is Right" style degeneration of beating other people's bids by exactly 1 currency; a bid of 5 Exalts and 1 Fusing trumps 5 Exalts. Granted, without knowing the end-time of the auction make sniping harder, but that just means that bots, not humans, will be the final victors.

Players who use common sense will be immune to your tactic. In a system like this, convincing the other players they hold a weak position is often a power play, just as it is in poker; taking this type of chat nonsense at face value is equivalent to just straight-up believing an opponent in a poker hand who claims "I have you beat."

Naturally, some people will fall for it, as people have fallen for every con game ever conceived. A fool and his money are soon parted; oldest story in the book. Is this supposed to convince me the entire system needs to be changed?