Trade Manifesto

10 years pass by

Can you please just add a the ability to add a merchant to our hideout. It would work something like this:

1. Place merchant in hideout. Merchant can have, say, 1 merchant tab by default. You can purchase up to 4 more for a maximum of 5. More profit - you're welcome.

2. I interact with Merchant and add items to tabs. You'd basically use the same UI we use in our stash to do it, except on the merchant.

After the Merchant is added people can come to my hideout and purchase items from it just like they do any other NPC vendor in the game.

For the vast majority of transactions this system would work great. It would only be tricky around the edge cases, for example with very valuable and underpriced items. In this case the hideout could quickly get swarmed by bots.

To combat this let's create a "reservation" system for newly listed items. If I see an item on the trade site I want to buy, I click "Reserve". This would reserve the item for 1 minute. If I'm the first person to reserve it, I get a notification in game to enter their hideout. I then join their hideout as usual and purchase the item and any other unreserved item(s) I'm interested in.

Let's say 2 people reserve an item. The first gets a hideout invitation that lasts 1 minute, and the other gets a notification that they're in queue position 1. If the first person doesn't buy it, the second person gets notified they're up to buy the item.

The key here is that only one player is allowed to purchase the item. Even if a friend joins their hideout they can't purchase that reserved item.

We would punish players who frequently reserve items and don't purchase them. This would stop people from smashing reserve to "think about it" and then letting it expire. This is behavior that absolutely needs to be punished. If it happens too frequently - give them an escalating timeout duration from interacting with the market.

For items that are over 30 minutes old with the same price we abolish the reservation system. This indicates the item is either niche or overpriced. Players can freely come and purchase these items at any time.

Anyway, I fiend for an improvement of the current system. As it stands now the frustration generated from the current trading scheme actually fatigues me to the point where I don't play POE1 very often anymore.

"

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.

This is.... such a blatant misunderstanding.

The easier trade is, the smaller that disparity gets.
More people can trade, more people are willing to trade, more people do trade.
The people who are non-traders without the easy system become traders.
The people who won't bother with an out of game trading function (website) do bother with the in game trading function.
More people are getting good items for their build, power disparity goes down, not up.

Likewise, the harder trade is, the bigger that disparity gets.
The more of hassle trading is, the more it is the case that only the most "dedicated" players willing to put up with displeasing tedium bother with it, and they become the only ones getting that gear.
More players become non traders or barely traders, and fall farther behind the few traders. Power disparity goes up.

This is going to kill poe2. This isnt challenge for any legit reason, this is mental gynastics.

@Chris - Look. I understand your desire for sand in the gears. But right now trade is not just non-instaneous. It isn't just slow. It's a pain.

It's a pain to buy. You have to ping half a dozen people for items. Then wait for a response (instead of playing the game). Then depend on their courtesy, and patience to close the trade.

It's a significantly bigger pain to sell. Forget about discoverability etc. You need to step out of whatever you're doing (lab/ boss-fight what not) to sell.

Have you considered making trade still clunky, but less... inconvenient for normal players.

Asynchronous and remote approval of trades using some sort of escrow model. Items can be locked in trade stash tab when placed for trade. Currency cost gets locked when placing a buy order for an item. Buy order needs to be approved by seller in-game before closing trade.

If you don't want anything selling for cheap, just put a minimum floor price (E.g. exalt) on all items. It's currently not worth the effort involved to sell anything for cheap anyway (without bots that is).

At the moment, the current policy just encourages more skilled botting accounts, or dedicated trading accounts, who just sit in a camp and approve trade all day. Honestly, they are the best guys to buy from, because they can respond quickly. Isn't that unfair to other players who want to sell items. Aren't you just creating an elite class of more skilled botters/ outsourcers.

The magic of finding a good item, which might be useful to somebody else, and selling it for mutual benefit, is completely lost.

You already showed a fair deal of courage by the changes in PoE2, but the adherence to this ancient trade manifesto (coupled with low drops in SSF) is just discouraging to new to PoE players on PoE2.

I understand some of these points, but at the same time this system is built for masochists by sadists or something, slight hyperbole.. or maybe not. Anyway, too bad I wasted points for a premium tab just for trading.

I actually liked trading in D2, here I don't see myself trading that much.

"

SalvatoreBlack#1468 wrote:

@Chris - Look. I understand your desire for sand in the gears. But right now trade is not just non-instaneous. It isn't just slow. It's a pain.

It's a pain to buy. You have to ping half a dozen people for items. Then wait for a response (instead of playing the game). Then depend on their courtesy, and patience to close the trade.

It's a significantly bigger pain to sell. Forget about discoverability etc. You need to step out of whatever you're doing (lab/ boss-fight what not) to sell.

Have you considered making trade still clunky, but less... inconvenient for normal players.

Asynchronous and remote approval of trades using some sort of escrow model. Items can be locked in trade stash tab when placed for trade. Currency cost gets locked when placing a buy order for an item. Buy order needs to be approved by seller in-game before closing trade.

If you don't want anything selling for cheap, just put a minimum floor price (E.g. exalt) on all items. It's currently not worth the effort involved to sell anything for cheap anyway (without bots that is).

At the moment, the current policy just encourages more skilled botting accounts, or dedicated trading accounts, who just sit in a camp and approve trade all day. Honestly, they are the best guys to buy from, because they can respond quickly. Isn't that unfair to other players who want to sell items. Aren't you just creating an elite class of more skilled botters/ outsourcers.

The magic of finding a good item, which might be useful to somebody else, and selling it for mutual benefit, is completely lost.

You already showed a fair deal of courage by the changes in PoE2, but the adherence to this ancient trade manifesto (coupled with low drops in SSF) is just discouraging to new to PoE players on PoE2.

I have to agree here. Trade in PoE is just archaic and incentivizes all the wrong things. (PoE 1 and PoE 2).

Rather than playing the game earning loot, you grind in hopes for abysmally low currency drops to just trade for it via an external site. You play a waiting game or "Hideout Simulator" and you don't actually spend time "playing the game."

I should be able to play a game and earn items in game w/o trading. Trading should be for those exceptional items to tweaking in fine tuning a character. Not for general progression because RNG is bad on purpose.

Running into a wall, have to stop playing and check a website. Guess what, no one is selling the item you need? To bad suffer. You can't target farm it yourself either.

Is the player base small or dwindled (Settlers and Necro Settlers for example) there is usually no items or items so over priced you may as well give up.

I've seen a few videos now of people who are obviously using 3rd party to expedite their experiences and play PoE (games) as a living. That shouldn't be the bar set by developers for players to have a good experience and progress.

I see that some of you missed the point entirely, those few of us who actually talk on the forum are the ones who trade. 10% is being generous. Most people do actually just play the game and not trade and get their dopamine from actually finding loot, not currency to trade with, maybe currency to make good items with. You think he's making this up? The numbers don't lie, they can probably see exactly how many people trade and how many people dont.

Thank you for not making the loot in this game horrible. Items matter! It's all about knowing you can trade your item if you want to. If you choose to play Auction House simulator that's on you.

edit: remember for many people its christmas now, time they want to spend with their family, its early access after all, level up some more characters :)

"

Consequences of Easy Trade

My friend, trade is already easy and the consequences are happening.

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items? You can basically jump to good items with 1 exalted per slot. The game is all about using trade for good items.

Easy trade means reducing drop rates? You already have reduced drop rates due to trade. Try playing SSF as a casual. It's painful. I'd expect SSF to have greatly higher drop rates, so the player can make a choice.

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great? The disparity exists and it enormous.

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation? It's already automated. There are bots for automatic price adjustment and trading. Some even named their accounts like that..

Buying things is easy but tedious, not harder—just cumbersome. The best auction house (AH) system I've seen is Black Desert's, with fixed price ranges and universal access. To improve, implement an AH with a gold cost to list items and a dedicated stash tab for AH storage (to support the game). The listing fee should be a percentage of the item's asking price.