how to fix short sellers and market manipulation

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vio wrote:

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

Your idea doesn't work nearly so well as you think: by compressing the market, all you achieve is that those same players reprice to hit the "visible" target, something they can do experimentally by consulting the API / indexer: simple bump the price up or bisect the range until they find something that works.

To really make it difficult you would need to impose some sort of listing cost on items, which is currently not a thing, and which definitely changes the whole dynamic. (Also, doesn't stop this sort of behaviour, in games where there is a universal auction house, so global price visibility, where historic price tracking is easy and widespread, and where the market is huge. So probably won't work here either.)

It also definitely fails to stop purchasing the lowest priced items (which, of course, are now "items at 20% of the lowest price"), since you can simply make multiple rounds of purchases until you achieve what you want despite things popping into view ... if they ever do.

It also doesn't stop people making money via trade in the slightest: you can still buy low and sell high, you can still buy out all the low price visible items, you can still flood markets with low or high priced items to manipulate perceived value, etc.

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vio wrote:

questions
- will players accept that their offer isn't advertised if it's price is too low?
- does it reliably prevent item price deflation?

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vio wrote:

No, why would it? Price deflation happens because people list at a price, and are undercut. Nothing in your model prevents that happening, as any "average" price can still move, just without perhaps quite the same jumps that it could now.

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vio wrote:

- how can it be abused?

Almost all the things you believe this will resolve ... won't be. Especially the ability to manipulate the apparent price / value of items.

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vio wrote:

- does it prevent experienced players getting upgrades very quick?
- does it still allow newbs getting leveling items (which are mostly uniques)?

It really doesn't change anything much. I mean, it adds an artifical 40 percent reduction in number of items for sale, which theoretically reduces demand, but it also provides a large amount of stuff to "backfill" when items are bought, so that smaller visible set of offers will stay fully populated for longer.

Ultimately, this is not going to work, for exactly the reason most technical solutions to the problems you are trying to fix don't work: they are not technical problems, they are people / economic problems, which are extraordinarily difficult to make go away by technical means.

I've been using the pathofexile/trade site / page today, and already the easy ignore, afk, and DND has made the market a much cleaner place for me to live in.

I know who are often manipulating the market and they were easy to spot and deal with. Granted they are still technically influencing the market but not by much.

Granted at this point in a league it's hard. The other part is leagues are a very dynamic aspect. When you have the economy hitting refresh every 3 months. it's hard to do anything about balancing supply and demand curves.

Traders manipulate because people let them, by providing some means of value, a fast sell usually.

Other traders just want to simplify their time, aka "I know this is worth about 5c" but it's going to get put into my 1c sell tab, cause I don't want to sit on it for long.

I'm not trying to manipulate i'm just playing how i want to.

If they did this you would learn why flippers make things better after trying to buy currency.

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DrDraids wrote:

If they did this you would learn why flippers make things better after trying to buy currency.

why should it be easy to exchange currency?

what's to lose for the game when only players meet for trading where each person just wants the other currency for ingame purposes?

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and yes, it will be harder to bulk exchange currency. is this a problem? account bound currency would be a problem. it's the game setting the rules and conditions for the game play and players making the best out of it.

being able to bulk exchange currency is the worst option a free market game can provide because it opens all doors to manipulating the currency market. you got a taste of this in harbinger where ex:c went down to 1:30 and then up to 70:1 in the middle of the league.

and i intentionally didn't mention the worst outcome for some players getting ultra rich by running trading bots because they don't care for the game, which is advertising orbs for real money.

The ex going from 30c to 70c has happened in every league for years now.

It has nothing to do with market manipulation and everything to do with their actual value.

You do know EX have a game function right, they allow you to add a stat to a rare. This has almost zero face value at low levels of the game, aka when everyone is just getting into league.

What is however valuable is a tabula, cause no one has amassed the 1500+ fussings they need to 6l crap. They go for around 30c, at start of league cause of this. Which is about what their ratio is to what people can muster. Meaning 30c is achievable pretty quiickly if you know what you are going. Any higher though and tabula's wouldn't be a good ratio. I would grind past their value before i got 30c pulled together. That is why about a week into a league tabulas fall to about 15c, and slowly make their way down to 8c or so.

EX's do the reverse, they have little value behind trading for a tabula at league start, but as people start getting 6l armors, that are well stat built, people start to want to take risk of going for another stat on that sweet item. They have enough currency to toss a thousand alterations, and regals at items to get perfect gear, and they want to spend that ex to make it godly gear. So the value goes way up, thus the demand, while supply typically will remain the same.
Edit addition: Also you need tier 8 masters to fully craft and they take ex to do so.

As most people know demand vs supply = cost.


The typical ratio is around 70-80c depending on how many people are playing in the league.

So it has nothing at all to do with manipulation, it's who the items work and their values.

It's why certain uniques are worth a bunch at start and then fall off, cause they are "leveling" uniques. People seek them out in troves cause they double your leveling speed. Later in league it's less important. People keep them for running with alterate builds if they do alot of builds in a league, or sell them or in most cases vendor.

So there is no currency manipulation going on, really. Been playing for about 6 leagues now, and each league follows the exact same curreny pattern and ratios.

Same for almost all the items. The only items that really get into a ton of flux is uniques, and it's usually around when someone figures out some super unique way to build with them that ends up over powered.
Which is usually often since mathil spends his whole life, making money doing it.

The only problem with trading related to players themselves is when they post an item for a given price and then don't answer the buy requests. For example someone just lower prices items to have fun reading messages for others to beg for sell. I once saw, some retard posted 10ex+ worth vaal regalias for about 20c. Or someone simply doesn't want to switch to std. Well I don't care. Some ppl play challenge league others play in standard high level chars incubator. If one doesn't want to sell, take off the item from indexer. Simple.

All the other stuff is handled well by typical free market demand/supply rule. The item is not worth the value that seller or buyer wishes, but more like the average of some recent transactions. E.g. recently I wanted to buy a shield listed for 6ex, I asked the seller if I could buy it for 5ex. The guy said no. I bought just slightly worse shield for my build for 3ex. That is how the market works. The guy overpriced the item and simply nobody buys it.

There is no such thing as short selling having any influence on item market value. That is because if the item e.g. has nominal price like 1ex, someone sells short some amount for like 40c, then they will be extremely quickly bought and the price will go back closer to original value. And if very many ppl short sell similar item than it simply means the supply is much higher than demand, so the prices go down.

The problem is that typically in standard and challenge leagues after starting period, end game players just sell a lot of items that are too weak for them or simply not for the build. E.g. I sell lot more than I actually buy new for exchange. That can be fixed by changing drop rates. Lower uniques drop rates, raise currency drop rates to non-currency. Limit lower lvl rares drop in higher tier maps etc.

So to summarize, two things can be done:

1) Ban ppl who deliberately don't answer buy offers for posted items from poe.trade. Temporarily. Regardless the reason, except the situation when price is asking and the buyer offers some ridiculously lower price. If you don't have time for selling, simply don't sell.
2) Adjust drop rates of items, so that we don't end up with ridiculous prices of many items.

All other stuff is nonsense. 1,2 and the rest is free market supply/demand rule.

There are only 2 ways how to "fix" this

1. GiGiGi themselves would have to be setting up prices , completely turning "free market" the other way around

2. give the indexers possibility to blacklist certain sellers so you won't see the items. It won't fix the problem, but it will fix the problem for you :)


Banning someone because of intentionally screwing market in their favor is unreasonable. It's one of the aspects people like on PoE. You don't have to play the game, you can play the players, and players should know better than falling for a scam.