Developer Q&A - Answers Part 2

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With all the talk of trade improvements over the years but very little concrete to show for it, it's clear that GGG wants to take steps, but is being held up by various concerns. What actual goals and restrictions are you guys working with in your efforts toward improving trade? Are there concerns that these goals are even attainable?

Being able to trade items is critical to the success of an Action RPG. This is why Path of Exile has no item binding and why SSF items can become regular items with the click of a button.

Sorry to say, but this sentence does not make sense buddy. ;)

You mention how you feel that trading is important to an ARPG and later mentioned, that you balance the game with that in mind, so that non traders miss out and have it harder.

At the same time, you don´t even offer us a system to actually get involved in trading... This is a contradiction don´t you think?

If trading is so important for you, then why not offer it to every player? Right now, we must go to a third party website and buy premium tabs, to get involved, which is very problematic and limits trading to a few elite players, while everyone else plays Bingo with the lack of valuable drops.

Why not offer a vendor in game, where each player can make 5 trades a week, while being limited to list five as well. Make having finished Act 10 a mandatory criteria to unlock trading and of course we are talking of five trades per account!

It would automatically remove the bots and flippers from the economy, while giving everyone access to the as you called it "critical feature" of an ARPG.

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Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable. If you have ever felt that it's going to take too many 1-alch sales to finally save up for that 80 exalt item you want, then this is the reason.

This statement hits the nail on the head. All of these people complaining about trade improvements seem to completely gloss this over. The simple addition of the public trade tabs in the inventory dropped the selling price of lifesprig from 5c to 2c (on hc). Thats a 50% price cut making it even harder to hoard currency in order to buy that one special item. Market item saturation was a huge issue in d3 and one of the reasons I switched over to POE back in closed beta. Every trade "improvement" or "quality of life" change has caused the devaluation of lower level items. The main reason I play hc only is because lower level items retain (some) sales value which means you hit less of a wall in the later stages of the game when you want to upgrade your gear.

I won't say that trade should be painful or limited but I am very glad that GGG isn't taking a knee jerk approach to this problem. There are plenty of changes that are reasonable and I hope to see in the future.

As far as the "reliance on a 3rd party" argument goes, I would counter with the Wiki. EVERYONE uses the wiki in order to play this game. Do you think GGG should stop relying on a 3rd party database and spend the time creating an encyclopedia of POE instead of creating new content? poe.trade is well vetted and well produced so why spend all that time recreating it ingame? I haven't talked to xyz about his profit margin but if he can afford to run the servers based on ads then I would assume he is in for a loss if he were to shut down his site. Decentralized models tend to work well for economies and also tend to balance themselves out quite well, so when GGG starts meddling with it there could be some pretty harsh consequences.

Can't say I'm happy that our MTX won't carry into the Xbox version. I assume this means guilds and our stuff there won't cross over either.

This is good qanda.

Thank You for that.

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Chris wrote:

The gap between traders and non-traders widens. This gap is apparent when you see feedback that the game is too hard for some people and too easy for others. Most of the time, that is proportionate to how much they have traded.

With in game trading, there is no "gap" because the person, clearly informed of trading availability at this point, is CHOOSING not to trade.

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Chris wrote:

Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable. If you have ever felt that it's going to take too many 1-alch sales to finally save up for that 80 exalt item you want, then this is the reason.

You must be God, to know exactly how people will price every single item (ok, good, better, great, amazing) to know these will be lumped into two categories of "very-cheap" and "very-expensive."
I find this excuse naive and lazy.

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Chris wrote:

Progression is trivialised. While trading for an item to get a leg up on difficult content is of course fine, being able to trivially and cheaply quadruple your clear speed on a whim isn't something that should be expected on your first character in a league. In addition, the fewer item upgrades you make on a character before capping out your items, the lower chance you have of sticking around for a decent portion of the league. Upgrading items more times (in smaller steps) is more fun than jumping right to the perfect gear.

Honestly, quadrupling clear speed isn't much of a stretch. As the first character of a league is basically SSF for a while, getting actual upgrades by playing the game is unlikely, hell, even identifying every single rare item you find for upgrades will likely result in having no wisdom scrolls and no upgrades. So quadrupling shit clear speed becomes quite easy with a single trade. Do you even play PoE? I would agree gear upgrades in increments is a plus, however, bringing player retention into that statement is misplaced in my opinion. WHY the barrier when character progression is not just about what items are equipped, what about passive tree? skill choice? Character Level? The item system seems to solve the issue you bring up, as there is a level requirement for items, and a level 1 cant wear the best items, so what does it matter if a player wants to buy an item instantly to help them progress, they will replace it later when they get higher level.

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Chris wrote:

The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

You say convenience, as if it should be inconvenient to trade. Please, let that sink in. Community tools make the system bearable, barely. Crisis? You really have a way with words. Consider this: how many people would play POE without poe.trade? xyz provides a much needed service, to the best of his ability, and you consider this a crisis. There is no other way to describe this than "fucking brutal dude"

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Chris wrote:

I know this explanation doesn't mention any solutions, but the things we're experimenting with aren't ready yet. Thanks for your patience.

I do not wish to be harsh or rude, but this topic never gets resolved. I mean, how long did it take to prepare the trade "answer" you provided? I'm sure many appreciate the thought of things you are experimenting with, but is it just another hallow promise to bait a few more $ out of people until they get fed up? People are here giving feedback on a subject, yes of course because they want it. If we didn't care we wouldn't bother giving feedback. People want to be able to trade, and be satisfied with the trading experience, not infuriated by it.

There are always some nasty guys say something about "lab is good for checking the build, or you cannot beat down guardians and shaper".
Lol, without desyc and crush, or the problem with life+VP/evade build, lab may be much better than it is now. However, it does NOT!

#love lab, hate troll