Developer Q&A - Part I

Fixing trade doesn't need an auction house, just let people trade without having to be in the same zone.

John whispers you asking to buy an item for 5c, so you invite him and without having to switch zones and open a trade window with him. Have a little icon next to the trade window that opens a window to your stash. You cant move items in your stash from this window,but simply clicking them adds them to the trade window.

There trading in POE still has player interaction and isn't a time consuming chore.

I feel that this company wants to remain amateurs that got together and created a game. It's an easy way to not have to deal with basic stuff that playerbase in 2019 demands.
All this "we're working hard for our next expansion, we don't want to stress our team",may work for new players,but the rest of us who are here for 4+ years are tired of this bs.
All of your content is hasted
and full of buggs that ruin the fun. You have good ideas that are poorly executed and create more problems than they solve.
People have to wait years for solutions and when old problems are resolved,new problems arise.
It's comic to see how you try to manipulate people into waiting for solutions.

-set premium tab to public.
-set price for an item.
-some person finds it.
-They want to buy it for that price.
-They have the money.
-They buy it from the little public zone in your hideout.
done?

...NO WAIT!
This is bad! We need to add at least 15 additional steps into this process because itz moar fuhn dat wei. People are here to waste their time, so let's make sure we take that to heart and really make them feeeeel the waste of time. Easy trade is bad mojo! Trust me, you don't actually want easy trade.

"Trust me you don't want that. You think you do, but you don't."
Blizzard's tormented spirit is haunting PoE -_-



Making trade tedious doesn't PREVENT automation it ENCOURAGES automation.
People shouldn't feel obligated to use macros just to trade.
You don't have to go full auction house to make trade better.



2nd thing for me to complain about is the question about every new league making clear speed more important. It wasn't a question about clear speed in general, it was a question more like: why do you force us into having insane clear speed? Pick any random league mechanic and there is a pretty good chance you landed on one that somehow requires you kill everything at a certain speed. Killing things faster is already a massive benefit without so many things laying around that require it to proceed. ex: incursion stat-checks your DPS and if it's not high enough it kicks you out in 10~15 seconds.

Placing huge amounts of content behind DPS stat-check walls invalidates any build that doesn't pass the DPS stat-checks. This seems to be an ongoing trend with every new league and eventually everyone will need to be playing one of only a few mega DPS builds in order to have access to all the content, instead of the default scenario where the DPS just makes you clear it faster. "Clear Speed" is increasingly becoming a metric directly responsible for how much of the game you are allowed to interact with. It's still somewhat reasonable now, but it's an ongoing trend and will continue to dissolve build variety over time. That was the actual point of the question.


These are my primary complaints, which are hopefully understood.
Good answers overall, in my opinion.

i like the answer and ty Chris u doing ur best, pls keep the simple and great game of adventure u already know about... i just like it more stable in mechanincs... and not change so so much everytim :) ty

"

SnowfIy wrote:

If there wont be improved trade coming to pc version.

Does that mean GGG gives currency bots their blessing?
If so can we get official statement on this.

I am assuming that Trade Botting is ok, because more and more people are doing it. May be give it a shot.

About trade - recently it became so tedious, started messing with buyers like "oh the price has doubled in last 2 seconds" just to see their reaction, or put item in the trade chat and not trade, making someone wait in my hideout for 10-15 minutes. Or some other mean things. Just to spread the "trading joy" to others. Playing with people in the "trading game" sometimes more fun than playing the actual game.

May be as more and more people become frustrated with PoE Trading, then GGG will finally do something.

Doing what I can and what i know how.

-"the economy is super important"

-"trading should be a tedious and miserable experience"

-"if you want to delve more or do certain maps, you can, by trading"



You know, if D3 still had an auction house, I would still play D3.

Initially, people thought D3 was bad because of the real money auction house, until it was removed, and then they realized it was just a broken unfinished game. Then a ton of things got fixed over time, and people have forgotten how gimped the game was after removing the auction house, so they draw a line from the broken game with an auction house to the current game without one, and now they once again think the problem was that it had an auction house. Actually though, D3 on release was a complete disaster, except for the D3 RMAH which was the single most impressive thing I have ever seen in any game ever, despite being a total PoS from a technical and game balance perspective (no listing fee, max 10 items, no anti-inflation mechanics, minimal sorting and filtering, etc.).

Despite these major flaws and a long list of smaller problems, the RMAH would have set a new bar for online gaming economies once it had its roots in place. Except Blizzard fumbled around and ragequit, subsequently making every other development team think it must have been a bad idea to begin with. It wasn't. It was an amazing idea rushed and broken, added onto a rushed and broken sequel to one of the most iconic games ever made for which people's expectations were astronomical. The problem being in execution, not the auction house itself.

99% of all the press and marketing surrounding D3 was about the RMAH and just look at the massive sales. It would have had a ton of sales either way, but not that many. Not even close to that. Because the items had real value, and people would buy items from me knowing the item had value, and knowing that it did because they could turn around and sell it just as easily as I could.


PoE is 'free to play', sure, but D3 PAID ME to play.
You want PoE items to feel like they have value?
Then treat player time as if it has some value.
Make a $20 TRADEBOT STASH TAB or something.



Even while being a total clusterf__k, that broken borderline-prototype of an auction house in D3 had a more dynamic economy than PoE, simply because 90% of all players were actively participating in that economy - opposed to this game where only the most hardcore players will ever go through the process of trying to sell things, and most of the casual players will never even know buying from other players is an option.

You expect a random new or casual player to turn on trade channels and ask around, be told to go outside the game to trading website, search for items there, find something to buy, message the player, and even after all of that the trade can just fail because the guy is AFK, already sold the item, not online, it's a fake listing, he just ignores you, or any number of other things. Then there is more insanity for the person trying to sell things.

You need to find some middleground between this trade system that relegates itself to only the most devoted and masochistic people and something that a casual person with only 1 monitor can interact with. I absolutely love how hardcore and complex this game is, but keeping something intentionally tedious is neither of those things.

At the very least, please remove some of the friction involved with trading.

Thanks for being a great company caring about your users opinions!

This development team, all of GGG. Thank you for this game. This game does so well because you have people who's jobs it is to just sit there and look at feedback, you listen and talk to the community. And Betrayal did so good, because Diablo 3 had just given their playbase the middle finger, and they all flocked to the game. Best game, with the best team. <3

My primary issue is that they don't know that making trade easier will damage the integrity of the game (paraphrasing). Has there been any testing? The manifesto seems to be all theory and no experimentation. They are more than willing to release league game mechanics that are not adequately tested (beyond their mea culpa about Synthesis), and fix them in later patches, yet a trade revamp is verboten.

Why not at least attempt a different method of trading? Mechanics are either removed or reconfigured at the end of every league. There's no legitimate reason for them to refuse some sort of experimentation given that a significant percentage of their player base (no reason for a manifesto at all unless there's an issue to reply to) is asking them for something to lessen the tediousness of trading, and that they have the ability to march back said changes if necessary.

So the only reasons left are illegitimate (as in not transparent). The content of a game like this has to be fed to us over time to avoid the possibility of burnout. Making each trade painstakingly frustrating is a good way to slow people down. As is information withholding that forces reliance on external sources of often outdated info.

How do you keep someone playing while consistently locking content behind ignorance and frustration? Offer rewards in a variable-ratio schedule while making the most effective means of obtaining rewards in a deterministic fashion a grueling undertaking. Other popular (ARPG, MMO) games do this - just not to the extent that GGG does.

Gating a random drop behind random resource acquisition behind more random resource acquisition behind..., behind..., etc - is exploitative in the extreme when Wilson explicitly states player retention being the primary goal, rather than a byproduct of a good game.

Talk about tone deaf, and not seeing the forest for the trees. You chose wrongly when you decided to make league content drop maps and then NERFED map drop rates in maps. You chose, wrongly again, when you balanced your game around trade and are dead set on making trade interruptive to the game itself. You chose wrongly a third time when you made synthesis a league where the reward results of crafts had to be DATAMINED and looked at on 3RD PARTY SITES to determine what you could get. You chose wrongly yet again when your Memory Nexus rewards that are supposed to be "Valuable" were not. How can we as paying players (I have bought $20 in tabs/points every league since essence, when I started, up until betrayal) trust you to not release game-breaking bugs like the current intervention lag, or decay spreading from the wrong stabilizer? You're enforcing clearspeed by abusing timers, you're over-relying on gimpy one shot mechanics, your engine is so buggy and poorly optimized that even a 1200 dollar pc can't run it without chewing through processing power at absurd rates.

You do not have the luxury of being the "ethical indie developer" any more. You've been bought out by a mainstream company. Act like it and put out product you've tested and debugged beforehand. Fix your issues or you will continue to hemorrhage players. Hire more coders and take less profit in the short term to sustain longer term viability. Learn to adapt and grow, or fail.

Lastly as to constructive points for you, I have a few. Make trade less interruptive to the game. I'm not going to trade a 3 chaos map when I'm in the middle of ulab if I have to sacrifice my 5 chaos offering to do it. If you can fiddle with the code to make it so I don't have to leave my map or lab or whatever I'm doing to sell the item that's all the game needs, it doesn't need an auction house or "in-game marketplace". Also, stop putting timers on every damned league you launch. And finally, maybe if you had a person who actually read and replied to your forums more than once a blue moon you might wind up with something truly magical.