We are seeing first hand why GGG needs to step in..

I agree that its to late to change to a traditional auction house now, however ggg could implement for example trading that occured without both players being in the same location.
Despite what chris says about trading i cant see them designing poe 2 (if that ever happens) with the same cumbersome dated system as poe.

"

Having a functional auction house in a game where killing & trading are literally the only things to do is not only almost mandatory, but it's such a simple system to add, it would take very minimal effort.

They don't want an auction house and D3 properly showed why it is a bad design. They could create their own tool to list items in game and essentially show of items, but right now I don't see a reason why they should do that, the additional value that is added is minimal.

And honestly I didn't even mind the actual old trading, which happened entirely ingame, because it meant effort and encouraged you to try to get things ingame. I don't feel that having players actually meet and do a deal is a bad thing.

And the amount of trading required in PoE isn't massiv. You can get a lot of things very easily and even crafting is a decent option. But considering how massively unique a lot of uniques are (compared to the Statsticks that D3 uses with usually only single unique mods and just regular stats) they are hardly interchangable. In D3 a lot of uniques can simply be switched for another or you can just switch your whole class. In PoE this doesn't work so unless you are able to find any single unique maybe until you hit lvl75 you cannot expect to play purely selffound unless you avoid any of those specific items even though some of them are not too powerful. However just buying items you need like an Eye of Chayula isn't in any way hindered by those tools.

And I also think that is what GGG have in mind with their trading. If they say that they balance their game about trading it is this kind of trading. Just filling holes in your build with some items. Chayula is not an expensive item, you can get it for 10 or less chaos, however you cannot expect to drop it. Other items are similar. Midnight Bargain costs 1c or less, but again if you need it for a build you cannot expect to drop it. Or even getting a bit of resists or items with missing stats is easily done by that.

And honestly I don't like that poe.trade even includes currency, this is not really useful for most players, because that was something the trade chat worked pretty well for and to be fair except for crafting you hardly need to exchange currency the best use of it is to sell all the jewelers, but you could also just use them. But a currency market essentially just encourages flipping and this wouldn't change with any official currency exchange unless they include an agency that regulates trade or include taxes.

PoE.trade is the perfect place to do these small trades to get those gloves with resists you need to be capped, to get your an Alphas Howl if you need it or Pledge of Hands, to get a tabula or a cheap clean 5l or 6l. And if you use it for that it is highly doubtable that whatever manipulation someone tries to pull off does even matter for you. While exalts prices are rather jumpy at times chaos are pretty solid, you have a very constant income of those and there is a high demand. And the higher demand and supply of an item is the more stable and the harder to manipulate it is. And most people will do transactions that only care about chaos, because they can't afford highly priced items that might be affected by a price change on exalts.

So yeah they could make improvements and they propably should make them, but it is hardly one of their priorities. The current system provides propably what they want from it and of course it fails in situations it should fail, because it was not meant to do that and I'm not sure if it should ever be able to.

^^ the problem for me with poe.trade is all the little trades for maps. I dont mind whispering to buy gear. But literally whispering 8-10 ppl to buy 1c items up to say 80x for atlas completion is a pain in the ass.

"

鬼殺し wrote:

Ah, but then you're removing 50% of what you do in the game, Paige. From a player's perspective you're right: if killing+trading is literally all you do, you want a smooth, simple trading system so you can focus on killing. But from the perspective of a dev company that never quite found its footing regarding making "just killing things" fun and compelling, streamlining a shitty, clunky trading system that has kept people occupied for years might not be the best idea.

I agree with pretty much everything you said in that wall of text, but you put this part as if functional trade made all the trading fun (for some people it is fun) disappear and time spent on trading is reduced to something very close to 0. From other games I have played I can tell that functional auction house, cross instance and asynchronous (they call it that, I think?) trading does not do that. There are plenty people who would still log in to the game and trade all day, I have seen it in a MMORPG(s) I spent a decent part of my life in.

From my point of view, in a game with more effective trade the traders simply do more trading in the (same) time they invest in the game and killers can spend more time killing.

Sadly this does not matter as much as I would like it to, but you already explained the situation and it leaves me somewhat empty inside...

Personally I don't care, because I trade so little it's irrelevant. I don't allow the game to bother me with this too, but I understand that people who do trade a lot are annoyed.

You might consider that GGG is just fine with such design and its consequences. They seem to be very fond of the economy (dynamics) and some of the top brass seem to be convinced that the economy is the main focus of ARPGs. Smart people (scammers, flippers, fixers) who take advantage of others are a valid part of the game's economy.

Gladly most of the game can be played SSF or with very little trading.

"

morbo wrote:

Personally I don't care, because I trade so little it's irrelevant. I don't allow the game to bother me with this too, but I understand that people who do trade a lot are annoyed.

You might consider that GGG is just fine with such design and its consequences. They seem to be very fond of the economy (dynamics) and some of the top brass seem to be convinced that the economy is the main focus of ARPGs. Smart people (scammers, flippers, fixers) who take advantage of others are a valid part of the game's economy.

Gladly most of the game can be played SSF or with very little trading.

I'm in the same boat as you. I never buy, but I do sell items from time to time. But I puke my guts out on the thought of an automated AH, where there's no communication between buyer and seller.

But I do feel that a lot of players are over-thinking this quite a lot. An "in-door" version of PoE.xyz, where the API is kept hidden, seems like a good idea. Trading is easy enough as it is. Items are accessible enough.

Removing trade manipulations is close to impossible.

"

Phrazz wrote:

... But I do feel that a lot of players are over-thinking this quite a lot. An "in-door" version of PoE.xyz, where the API is kept hidden, seems like a good idea. Trading is easy enough as it is. Items are accessible enough.

Removing trade manipulations is close to impossible.

Between 50% - 75% of my time spent "trading" I either wait for a response that never comes, or reading "in a lab, sorry", "in a rota, sorry", "in a map, wait a minute" (and never heard of egain), or silence (~in a breach).

And the best part. With every expansion, there comes NEW reasons why you cannot do a trade right now. I sincerely hope someone from GGG reads this a thinks about it, in case trade is so important for them as they claim.

Please, stop adding content leading to "sorry, cannot trade, in a XYZ". Just stop. Or give us asynchronous trading already.

Trading is many things right now, but definitely not easy enough. It is tiring, borderline depressive experience.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

morbo wrote:

Personally I don't care, because I trade so little it's irrelevant. I don't allow the game to bother me with this too, but I understand that people who do trade a lot are annoyed.

You might consider that GGG is just fine with such design and its consequences. They seem to be very fond of the economy (dynamics) and some of the top brass seem to be convinced that the economy is the main focus of ARPGs. Smart people (scammers, flippers, fixers) who take advantage of others are a valid part of the game's economy.

Gladly most of the game can be played SSF or with very little trading.

I'm in the same boat as you. I never buy, but I do sell items from time to time. But I puke my guts out on the thought of an automated AH, where there's no communication between buyer and seller.

But I do feel that a lot of players are over-thinking this quite a lot. An "in-door" version of PoE.xyz, where the API is kept hidden, seems like a good idea. Trading is easy enough as it is. Items are accessible enough.

Removing trade manipulations is close to impossible.

You are literally as close to an AH as you can get. There is very little to no bargaining on prices of items. You 95% of the time have to pay the listed B/O because sellers will simply ignore you otherwise.

"

鬼殺し wrote:

Oh, the sheer number of hours I spent trading in EC tunnel on eq1...and EVE, good lord...

But in an ARPG? Yeah, no.

Edit: I did play enough D3 on pc in the early days to know I saw the ah like a supermarket or Amazon.com rather than a haggling market where I felt the need to actually engage with sellers. I came to see PoE.trade the same way. That was when I realised GGG had failed to foster and nourish a true trading environment wherein people haggle and bargain.

to be fair that is really hard to do in an arg because fundamentally haggling and bartering is a time sink and arpgs are built around the whole loot and go vibe.. trading is actually supposed to be a minimal part of it

this is probably why on paper an ah was a decent idea for d3 as it theoretically minimized the need to waste time dealing with trade bs .


But with all things if you dont actually have any kind of quality assurance or monitoring it all goes to shit when some asshole or group of assholes decides to exploit it.

it happened in steam green light , it happened in d3 frankly i am impressed it has not been that massive an issue with poe until effectivly this league.. sure previous leagues have always had some group dominating the market

but from what i can tell they still have a few lines they wont cross (mostly) which kept the market from going total ham.


If nothing else it does make standard look more attractive when alot of us already have enough stuff so as to avoid most of this bullshit