Automated Trading!!!

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Phaeded wrote:

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AkumaNoTsubasa wrote:

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Phaeded wrote:

1. Search trading site for item.
2. Whisper seller.
3. Wait for response, or move to next seller and repeat #2.
4. Party with seller.
5. Travel to sellers H/O.
6. Initiate trade with seller.
7. Complete trade with seller.

All those steps is something a bot doesn't care about.
The bots in poe whisper you, accept your party invite, join your hideout, accept your trade, put all their items into the trade, accept your stuff.

If they are the seller it's even easier...

You can not stop botting by making this tradesystem we have. And does it make any change if they use the trade api or poe.trade to check for underpriced items to buy them or to check an "auctionhouse" (auctionhouse being just a word for every tradesystem that makes everything automated) and do the transactions there? It does not. The bot user in both cases just starts their bot and comes back a few days later with a stash full of currency. The only people that are suffering in all cases are the players.

In our current system real players suffer from needing to ask 5398905 players for one single item, the bot doesn't care how many players they whisper, they don't want to play.

The player suffers from permanent scam tries like "I give you this item" or "can I pay you 50% less then you ask for?" stuff. The bot just doesn't care.

The player that runs maps and actually plays is forced in taking breaks from actually playing to do a trade just to have wrong items/currency from the other player because they try to scam you, lose portals from that, playtime (not everyone can play all day)... the bot? doesn't care. He can sit for hours and wait for the right currency or just automatically end the trade and trade with the next player, he doesn't play or have patience.

I can go on with this for hours.
The only one that suffers is the real player.
In an automated system you also have price fixers, bots and stuff. But that doesn't change the market in terms to now. If some fixer wants to fix, they do it. No matter if tradesystem or auctionhouses. They buy all stuff, sell it for more.

But the normal player could finally buy their little 1 alc - 5c item without the need of up to 50 minutes or more time to find a player that is actually selling the item. Also would an automated system stop the players from pricefixing downwards as the item would be instantly sold for that low amount. The normal players would only benefit.

You are conflating a lot of different issues and trying to link them and failing IMO. But more basically, you've missed the point or I haven't made it clearly enough. Of course you can't completely eliminate bots in any computer game but you can make it more difficult so that only dedicated botters will bother. That's usually the bar that games aim for because completely eliminating botters is impossible.

My even more basic point is that all of the stuff you wrote is irrelevant to GGG. Again, players keep making suggestions that are in direct conflict with how GGG feels about trade. Those suggestions are going to be ignored by GGG and inflame the player base. That's not conjecture. It's based on evidence. However, if we look for ideas that are in line with GGG's philosophy and aren't game breaking (i.e. not bot enabling, meaning making things easier for botters) then we might have a chance of getting some sort of improvements. My suggestion is merely a small, incremental improvement in convenience for the real player while not providing an easy button for botters. It makes trade better but not easy. And it's not the only idea like that out there. It's not even the best of them. Just my own flavor of an already fairly common concept.

At this point I've written (and rewritten) just about everything I have to say. These topics are becoming an anathema at this point since the bottom line is they all result in endless debates and more often than not devolve into flame wars. Regardless, I firmly believe there are some truths that if players would just accept would allow us to generate a critical mass of more reasonable suggestions:

1. We will never have an AH.
2. We will never have fully automatic, instantaneous trades.
3. We will not change GGG's mind about those two positions. It is a core belief they have.

So I keep trying to figure out what can make trade less annoying yet stops short of asking for something they have clearly stated will never happen.

In any event, like the other threads on this topic I already stopped responding to, I'm pretty much done with this one and don't have anything further to offer. It's all just opinion anyway. There are no rights or wrongs despite people's attempts to make it seem that way. There is only preference.

You seem either not to understand how bots work or how they are being created.
There are currently 3 bigger bots out there. 1 was elimited thanks to a big ban wave. The other 2 were smaller but might now get more interest, since the biggest fell off. So there are only 2 teams creating bots (let's keep out those peeps that create their own bots because that is an extreme minority). Behind those teams there are typically 5-10 people working on it. They create a core and expand on it and then it is mostly a back and forth with the developers of the game that is being botted.

So if you make it "hard" for a bot, it's just 2-4 more steps you need to enter into their protocol.

Our trading system is absolutely NOTHING for bots. It's not hindering them in any way. Hell, even a 12 year old kid can automate trading in full with AHK in less than 5 days.

Nowadays Players have way too many tools at their exposal to do stuff that they shouldn't do.

The only thing that makes auto-buying stuff a bit "annoying" is the website check. But that is just another like 3 hour work to check for posted items via livesearch and get their whispers by scripting. You don't even need the whisper button. Read name, values, currency and you can create your own whisper, so even if the clipboard would be secured, you could instantly whisper and there are a few scripts out there that instantly put a newly posted livesearch item into your clipboard so you don't even need to go to the browser and it doesn't even go against the TOS because it doesn't send even one command to the game servers but just fiddles with your computer outside the game.

Really, you can't fully block out bots without having something running in the background like big games do, but even then it's hard to do so, as tools, file signatures and all that stuff can be reset at any given time making their detection hard to impossible.

So if you wanted to block bots out you'd need some action that only a human can do and that would be nasty captchas and even these can be automated, with some work but captchas in a game and you had a game. (not talking about browser games here)

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Phaeded wrote:

The GGG Trade Manifesto has some information you might find interesting.

You're not wrong, it illustrates perfectly what's wrong with GGG's way of thinking. Some choice examples:

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The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile - if you're lucky, you can find amazing stuff that you can trade for all the items needed to create an entire new character build.

False. The necessity of trading items is a great detriment to enjoyment. The only reason people are excited to trade is because the RNG loot system makes it impossible to find useful items yourself. If the drop rates weren't shit and players weren't forced into trading, they wouldn't touch it.

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Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.

People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!

Wrong. If trade is hard, I'm more likely to push ahead with whatever items I have and only engage in trade when absolutely necessary. If trade is easy, I'll trade for better items more often, increasing the number of times my character improves their items.

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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.

I'm completely speechless. "Trade is hard, therefore few people engage in it, therefore the disparity between those who do and those who don't is great. Making trade easier and therefore increasing the number of people who engage in it would make the disparity worse." That's insane troll logic, and at this point in reading this manifesto I'm starting to suspect its author is being deliberately disingenuous. It can't be possible to fail basic logic this badly, surely!

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The Role of Solo Self-Found Mode

Players who don't engage in trade are at a significant progression disadvantage in Path of Exile. However, some people are happy for the game to take longer to complete and enjoy the challenge that comes from living off the land. Historically, these players could choose to play alone, but would receive no recognition and had no way of proving that they had done so. Anyone could accuse them of having traded, invalidating their accomplishments.

Literally nobody gives a fuck. People play alone because they have no friends and they don't trade because it's a pain in the ass. Nobody plays SSF so they can show off their 'accomplishment'. What SSF should be is a place where you don't have to trade, where drop rates are buffed such that it's actually possible to progress through the game at a pace not measured on a geological time scale. Of course that would require making it impossible to transfer items from SFF to Standard, but literally nobody would mind, since people only use that transfer function after finding out how pointless SSF is and giving up on it.

Overall this manifesto is an incredible read. In the words of Luke Skywalker, "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong." I expected to find some things I disagree with but I never would have imagined it was possible to get literally everything completely backwards. It does explain the baffling design decisions GGG has taken with respect to trading. Of course they can't come to the correct conclusions when their premises are wrong. At least now I know there's no point sticking around hoping for the game to get better, because with this mindset in charge it never will. Oh well, maybe Wolcen will turn out good.

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Sordid wrote:

Literally nobody gives a fuck.

you cared enough to type up that novel.

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Sordid wrote:

That's insane troll logic, and at this point in reading this manifesto I'm starting to suspect its author is being deliberately disingenuous. It can't be possible to fail basic logic this badly, surely!

I have always felt the same thing about most things Chris has posted over the years.

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Sordid wrote:

Literally nobody gives a fuck. People play alone because they have no friends and they don't trade because it's a pain in the ass.

Yup. I play solo because the game client cannot handle groups well.


You are right on the reasoning for my self-found play. The external trade system is the reason I do not trade. Never again anyways. I did trade for a ring once using the trade chat channel (I think this was during the shrine league? Maybe during onslaught? It was a while ago).

I do not play games to have a pain-in-my-ass, so I just don't trade in this one. Yeah sure, I want to trade, but not so badly that I would stop playing (literally... alt-tab out of the game...) to do so.

No


Many of the excuses people use are pretty silly. "item swap scam"

Can you really be that naive to not see whats in the window before you click?

No


Many of the excuses people use are pretty silly. "item swap scam"

Can you really be that naive to not see whats in the window before you click?

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SudianX wrote:

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Sordid wrote:

That's insane troll logic, and at this point in reading this manifesto I'm starting to suspect its author is being deliberately disingenuous. It can't be possible to fail basic logic this badly, surely!

I have always felt the same thing about most things Chris has posted over the years.

I just can't get over how he bemoans the fact that only a tiny minority of people engage in trading in the very same post where he brags about deliberately making trading a tedious pain in the ass. Bruh...

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People complained about how horrible the odds were for gambling orbs to actually work at fusing something and his reply was, "Would you prefer it just require a flat amount, say, 1500?"
I thought, "surely he realizes that number is ridiculous..." It would take me roughly 500 characters playing through the game to find that many. Oh, I could trade up orbs at the npc vendors. Ok. 100 characters then. Still. Ew.

And then... yup. They introduced masters...

Sigh.

Oh don't even get me started. The currency system and the costs of crafting are a whole other can of worms. As far as I can tell there are three huge design problems weighing down PoE:

One, as discussed, the pure RNG of drops, which means it's impossible to find or craft useful items yourself, which means it's necessary to engage in trading, which is deliberately designed to be a pain in the ass.

Two, the byzantine currency system which serves no purpose other than to make it more difficult to tell how much money you have, because in Chris' mind that makes the game more fun, somehow...?

And three, the fact that loot and currency have to be manually picked up one at a time into a microscopically tiny inventory and moved over to the stash the same way. While of course requiring you to manually select the correct tab; god forbid we actually automatically put currency into the fucking currency tab you bought with real money, oh no, that would be convenience, a dirty word in GGG's dictionary. Having to manually sort shit into the proper stash tabs makes me want to kill myself after running just a couple of maps.

You'll notice all three of these problems exist not because the designer didn't know any better, they exist because the designer deliberately decided to make them a pain in the ass on purpose.

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This game is not designed for me. I do not have 20 hours a week to devote to playing a video game.

Oh well.

I knew POE was not designed for me when I hovered over my XP bar one day and saw "XP per hour" calculated there. No. Just... no.

That's sadly what it boils down to. It's a f2p game, it's designed for the no-lifers who can afford to spend fifty hours a week playing it and hundreds of dollars buying every single supporter pack using mom's credit card. It's designed for them because they're the ones who keep it financially afloat, they're the whales. Guys like you and me, we don't matter to anybody.

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goetzjam wrote:

No


Many of the excuses people use are pretty silly. "item swap scam"

Can you really be that naive to not see whats in the window before you click?

over time, people have become more and more (self)entitled.

they'll mouse over the item, click accept, and still blame someone/something else for their own actions.