how to fix short sellers and market manipulation

don't include the lowest and highest 20% of non-rare item offers in the api stream.

advantages
- should stop item price deflation
- stops currency flipping as it prevents lowball offers
- stops "short sellers" also known wrongly as "price fixers"
- prevents "fast selling" for those guys without much selling space
- prevents driving prices up by mass buying the cheapest offers
- people could actually use the api stream to check prices
- item prices are more stable
- makes the economy much less interesting for gaining whealth and people would have to play the game again
- stops the downward pressure on items


problems
- some items of players who are unfamiliar with the game would not appear on the market
- uniques fluctuate in price because of their variable stats, perfect items are worth more so removing the upper limit for those items could be considered


feedback so far
- probably too complicated
- i could solve the issue for myself
- based on the average price is bad, rather take the median price
- it's offical market manipulation; (yes but poe.trade currently listing only the cheapest offers is the same but on the wrong end imho)



questions
- will players accept that their offer isn't advertised if it's price is too low?
- does it reliably prevent item price deflation?
- how can it be abused?
- does it prevent experienced players getting upgrades very quick?
- does it still allow newbs getting leveling items (which are mostly uniques)?

You can filter this sort of thing out yourself. I see no reason why GGG would need to do this for you.

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goetzjam wrote:

You can filter this sort of thing out yourself. I see no reason why GGG would need to do this for you.

i don't want them to fix the item display for me, i want them to have more stable prices, help those "item price fixing complainers" here and on reddit who are obviously not capable to ignore the cheapest "too good to be true" offers, get rid of item flippers and eventually reduce the amount of item offers because item supply far outstrips the demand for items.

tl;dr the aim is to fix trading, not me.

problem is any set changes will just be manipulated as well.

If you say well the lowest X amounts are not shown, then I can flood 1 ex itesm for 1chaos, to push the base values out of the api stream.

What needs to really happen is poe ninja and poe trade need to have a baby.

poe-ninja-trade

that way you can see what a historic average of all the postings for an item are and if the item is treading up or down in price based on the mathil impact.

Hell add a filter for has mathil did a build with this item within 2 weeks flag, and boom you are set to go.

The problem for most people is they just don't use all the tools they have to figure out the right values, meanwhile the pro's have the tools setup running inside the game, for mouse over price values and such, so they quickly know what they have and how to sell it instantly.

It puts a steep learning curve on newbies though to figure out where all the tools they need are. I still say a nice tutorial guide that lists off all the poe sites, like poe lab, ninja, trade, wiki etc are would be a huge help for newbies. Maybe even a web site top navigation button, "getting started" that has the same content as the ingame tutorial but also covers all the 3rd party tools that are usable. It would solve about 90% of the problems.

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keeperofstars wrote:

problem is any set changes will just be manipulated as well.

sure. every system is, to a certain degree.

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keeperofstars wrote:

If you say well the lowest X amounts are not shown, then I can flood 1 ex itesm for 1chaos, to push the base values out of the api stream.

the values i stated are to be defined. also one could take the median price as a base for calculations (from 100 items on offer, ordered by price, you take the price of the 50th).

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keeperofstars wrote:

What needs to really happen is poe ninja and poe trade need to have a baby.

what they want to avoid like the plague is some auto pricing tool for rare items cause that would ruin the economy.
for that reason, ggg ever tried to keep item affixes as flexible and encrypted as possible to prevent automatisation of their market. like hybrid affixes with overlapping stats towards single affixes for example.

like you said, it doesn't make it easier for tool builders and new players though, althought, for item affixes, i don't really see a problem installing autohotkey and double click a script before starting the game. you click on a rare item and if there are alot of t1 and t2 it's likely worth something ;)

How would that even work with cheap items? No common uniques that are worth 1c iwould show up unless priced at 2c. How is artificially inflating prices making anything better? Additionally, GGG would have to build in an exchange rate. You list something for 40c and somebody else lists it for 1ex. The api would have to decide how many chaos and exalt is worth. Same with all the other currencies.

Edit: i don't see how that could possibly even work at all. As soon as people list something too low and see their item doesn't even show up, they'll raise the price. After everybody raises their price just to be seen, there won't be any more at a lower price, whcih makes the new price the lower price. Now everybody sees their not even showing up on the list so everybody raises their prices again. Your plan only works if there are people who don't care if they show up or not.

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mark1030 wrote:

How would that even work with cheap items? No common uniques that are worth 1c iwould show up unless priced at 2c. How is artificially inflating prices making anything better? Additionally, GGG would have to build in an exchange rate. You list something for 40c and somebody else lists it for 1ex. The api would have to decide how many chaos and exalt is worth. Same with all the other currencies.

good points.

all those cheap 1c items wouldn't appear except the median price is 1c. which should be the case for most leveling items like wanderlust and co.

exchange prices? they would need to have a internal list for that but i haven't really thought about consequences.

"artificially inflating prices" solve their problem of cheap items spoiling the progression of trading players, at least i think it does. and currently, poe.trade artificially deflates item prices by listing the cheapest offers first. don't know what is worse, inflation or deflation.


ggg's main problem is that most players have very few space to sell which puts downward pressure on item prices. they somehow need to motivate players to vendor some of that stuff. darkshrines were also good as item sinks but sadly didn't make it into the game.

I have no shortage of storage. I still price my items to sell fast. Managing a large shop is a pain and I want currency in the bank so I can purchase my next upgrade. I don’t care if I give some flipper a 20% margin. If he wants to take the time and effort to flip items then good for him.

The only legitimate problem this solves is fake listings and it’s downsides of eliminated a whole bunch of valid trading practices and unintuitive mechanics way outweigh the benefits.

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Vesuvius079 wrote:

I have no shortage of storage.

so you're not pressured to sell fast, good.

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Vesuvius079 wrote:

The only legitimate problem this solves is fake listings and it’s downsides of eliminated a whole bunch of valid trading practices and unintuitive mechanics way outweigh the benefits.

manipulating the market can be seen as "unintuitive mechanics" and "valid trading practices" but i'm not really interested in single user experiences.

question is if the game and it's economy would profit from it.

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vio wrote:

- prevents "fast selling" for those guys without much selling space

... and that is an advantage?!? I would call it a massive drawback. Also, if I want to sell stuff quickly, why should I not be allowed to do so, at a discounted price?

They did a good thing with the ignore button on the official trade website though, that is a great start.