Trade Manifesto

Why worry how others acquired items? If you are so focused to show how good you are (better that all of mediocre like me players) then feel free to play Solo Self Found and show that you are the best, play hardcore if you like or whatever.

Main reason for not making trade more easy is that GGG do not want that and will never will!
I understand that, I do not like it a bit but control is the key here (drop rate, prices, ...)

There is no good nor acceptable reason to keep trade direct as it is and complicated as is.

Trade must be just a tool, simple and efficient, not complicated and anarchistic, more importantly must be within game (fraq alt-tab or in window play, not all have beasts of computers and 60fps)

I do not wish to spend more and more time in trading, if I wanted that I would play Trader on Android (or Merchant, whatever the name of a game is)!

Being a game developer myself, I understand and respect your philosophy on player trading. I furthermore respect the decision to post it. Regarding your 'beta' trade page, it's not bad at all. I could name quite a few usability/visual enhancements, but I'm sure they'll come as the product matures. I will be using this in lieu of poe.trade as you now have key usability features that appeal to me personally. In summary, thank you for an excellent product and the continued dedication the GGG team has to transparency and fairness.

I really like PoE, except the looting/crafting/trading part of it. This manisfesto explains a lot on your vision about those topics for your game. Yet I feel like you’re making in this manifesto multiple assumptions that are hard for me to understand and so acknowledge. To be honest it’s like you’re completely fooling yourself or you’re fooling most of your players.

One important part is you clearly stated that “Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league.”

And yet most of this manifesto tries to justify how the current looting/crafting/trading aspects of the game do NOT fit with those players (and will not). It’s even like you want to keep the game pleasing for the 1-10% of people mastering trading, external tools (legit or not) and hugh playtime to the detriment of the rest of the player base. Time will tell.

Just my word .100% agree with you Chris ,auction house would kill this game in long run ,current trading system it's not at best state but is more that i need to enjoy PoE.Again thanks for being best gaming company out there .

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Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.

The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.

LOL.

In other words, maintaining the current system will keep reddit elites happy, and the peons will remain peons. Good to know before I buy any more supporter packs.

This manifesto seems as controversial as the US presidential election. lol. PoE is a great game. Minus the annoyances being addressed, I'm happy with the current state of trade. Ultimately, PoE is a business and GGG has the right to do what they think will generate the most revenue, which typically means making a great product. PoE IS a great product. :)

Still waiting for a reasonable solution to trading for people who are mainly end game map runners and lab runners. In lab you can't leave and people will find someone else to buy items from and in end game maps such as Shaper and uber atziri many people do not want to waste portals for trades and noone feels like waiting around to buy that item, they will find someone else.

Also I'm not sure that you understand the bad part about exposing the "afk" players. I know of many people that get bored of playing the game but have valuable items to sell so that they can get currency for new builds so they watch a movie or something on a second screen, this way they are afk ingame but can instantly reply to a trade - You will make these people get less trades.

I hope this is not the end of how you want trading to be but rather a steppingstone to a good system since this will solve nothing of the issues we've had by using poe.trade. It might save us a few seconds to continue scrolling in a list but, as Raiz mentioned in his video on reddit, the layout isn't too great and will probably cost us a few more seconds than poe.trade so it's a tradeoff.

Will give the game a new shot in the upcoming leagues but my expectations are low right now..

I made this thread in 2K16 on how to have an auction house and there it comes... almost one year later :))
https://s2.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1775234

doesnt it seem funny too you that GGG had to think about it for years untill even considering adding it to their own main website, when in fact, when the chinese version of PoE got released in their testing phases, they ALREADY had a poe trade of their own on their main website? i mean how come they did see the need of something like that in their early stages of poe game launch and GGG didnt for years....?

Just tried the new trading site. Went for the bulk currency part and to my surprise you fucked up big time.

Listings are generated using the phrase "is worth".

So now you are techincally defining ratios; and anyone selling or buying at other ratios than the defined "worth" will automatically be either a scammer or a noob.

For people who put so much importance on words you sure took your time during the 1 year development of the site to analyse the words you use and their potential meaning to people.

If I buy orbs at a 10 : 1 ratio and someone else sells at 7 : 1 which is the real value of the ratio as defined by "worth"?

But then again having used for so long ambigue language it must have slipped out since shady stuff is your second nature.

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Saevan wrote:

"

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.

The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.

LOL.

In other words, maintaining the current system will keep reddit elites happy, and the peons will remain peons. Good to know before I buy any more supporter packs.

no hes saying exactly the opposite of what you have posted. The easier trade is the more powerful the 10% of players who trade get, while the 90% who dont trade remain at the same power level. So no, its not about favouring the elites over the masses, its making sure the elites dont become even more elite, its protecting the 90% who dont trade. It couldnt be further away from your summery, its the polar opposite of what you have summed it up as.

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zepitou wrote:

One important part is you clearly stated that “Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league.”

And yet most of this manifesto tries to justify how the current looting/crafting/trading aspects of the game do NOT fit with those players (and will not). It’s even like you want to keep the game pleasing for the 1-10% of people mastering trading, external tools (legit or not) and hugh playtime to the detriment of the rest of the player base. Time will tell.

again, its the exact opposite of what you are saying. What chris is saying is that if he makes trade easier the 10% who trad become vastly more powerful, while no adding any power to the 90% who dont trade. So this is a reason why they dont make trade easier, because they dont want to have to adjust the game and make it harder to match the increased power of the 10% which will fuck over the 90% who didnt get the power buff because they dont trade. Youve taken the completely opposite message from what hes said.

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Elendarulianreo wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Trade is not the cliff, generating items is the cliff, you want and need items, when you have them then the loot hunt is done and you fall off the cliff. A loot hunt game is an inherently self destructing system, it has a life span just like a story based game, you cant change this fundamental nature.

This is incorrect. Having items doesn't necessarily cause someone to be "finished" with the game. Items aren't the end goal; they're simply the means to the actual end--the acquisition of power. In good aRPG's like this one, items don't simply offer a linear progression of power (which is why D3 failed), but also offer a transformative experience. That is, the thrill of finding an item isn't just that now my character can do harder content, but that my character can do (fun) things they couldn't before. In other words, if 10000 mirrors suddenly appeared in my stash, I wouldn't be done with the game, because there are always interesting builds to try.

But even if you were right, your conclusion doesn't follow, because the value of trade (outside of the rare player who genuinely enjoys the economic simulation aspect of trading itself) is faster progression. That is, however quickly an SSF player progresses, the trader will always progress faster. I'd also argue that the trader misses out on the thrill of naturally progressing his character. Thus, it doesn't matter what the mechanism for trade looks like (an AH, a mailbox system with COD payments, the current boondoggle), because all forms of trade necessarily circumvent the natural progression.

its entirely correct within the discussion we were having. If you say having items doesnt mean you are finished with the game then trading for items doesnt make you finished with the game either.

Trade is simply faster than finding, it is no different fundamntally, its gaining items. You tried to say it shouldnt be in the game because its fundamentally bad for the game in a loot hunt, that they have based a game around something that shouldnt be there. That is incorrect, trading adds massive value to items you find, in a game about finding items this is extremely important.

Traders miss out on the thrill of natural progression, well Im gonna strike the word natural from that statement because its a weighted word that has no place in there, its not less natural to trade in a trade centered arpg than to find items, even trade itself can only occur once youve found items to trade. A trader misses out on the thrill of the slower progression that comes from self found, yes I absolutely agree. They miss out on the trill of finding smaller things that are important but taken for granted when trading. Ive played ssf many times, not since they introduced the ssf leagues, but going back way before that Ive done ssf runs in hardcore temp leagues because ssf hardcore is the real challenge and thrill of the small game.

But an ssf player misses out on the thrill of finding something that is completely useless for them but hugely valuable to another player. Its not a 1 way thing, the amount of great items I find that I want to keep because they are great for me is probably about 1:100 items I find that to me are literally vendor food but to other people are valuable and being able to then trade them for crafting materials means I am super thrilled to find them. The amount of loot I value thanks to trade is increased by astronomical amounts. Whenever I played ssf, and I did it many times, I would get to about lvl85 and quit the character because at that point its just grinding for the sake of grinding, without the trade environment it was redundant to keep going. At modern leveling speeds Id probably get to about 90 in that timeframe. By the time I had made 3 characters in the same ssf environment I had so much gear lying around that finding stuff was entirely meaningless and the game had no real challenge, I could just twink faceroll through everything then faceroll maps and Im left just plodding through maps with no real drive. SSF is great, but its limited, trade adds massive dimensions to endgame, no matter how impossible it gets to find an upgrade for yourself, being able to find upgrades for other people means you can stack currency and craft or trade for actual upgrades. Ive played over 12k hours in this game, I play leagues to get items for standard, I trade gargantuan amounts, Im selling 10, 20, 30, 40+ items a day non stop, and on standard I have heaps of bis gear, mirrored weapons, endless 6L chests in every stat configuration, and Im still trading, 4 years of building up op gear, making 100s upon 100s of exalts and spending them and Im still going, still getting more gear that thrills me.

Trade adds so much value to looting that to say its bad for a loot hunt game is crazy. Ssf is great, and its there for those who want it, it always has been. But for endgame grinders trade is an essential part of the game that doesnt remove time, it adds time, vast vast amounts of time because GGG have managed to make such a high variance rare item pool that even with 10k hours invested 95% of those people probably dont have a single perfect rare item.

You said trading was the cliff, trading is simply faster item acquisition, its the same thing as looting just faster, so if trade is the cliff then so is looting, its just a faster way of jumping over it. Thats an indisputable piece of logic, its obvious.