Why is there no auction house in POE?

Pretty much everyone who wants an AH has almost no understanding of the impact it would have on the game economy and fall into one of several misguided groups with the biggest being those who just sees it as a means to make buying and pricing easier. The truth is it would almost certainly cause catastrophic harm and would open up the game to more automated abuse not less.

Game economies have to deal with the issue of unlimited item generation and rapid item inflation. PoE has two main ways of combating this problem. The first is that the currency/crafting system has strong self-sinking mechanisms. The second is the the supply side is heavily limited by the need for face to face trading. In other words as things are now the supply consists of players online/willing to trade/available to trade. On top of limiting supply it also creates a time cost for the transaction that gets added to the value of items being traded and incurred as a convenience fee to the buyer. Hence why buying in bulk is more expensive not less.

Adding an AH completely changes the supply side as it now consists of anyone who has posted a trade within the time frame the AH allows. So if this was for example 24 hours this could be equivalent to 10x the amount of items to buy. This increased supply would force extreme pricing competition and those online will be heavily incentivized to undercut those not online and those not consistently checking the AH to see if their prices are competitive. Lastly, because the AH provides convenient trades there would be no added value or value floor to items from time lost. Drops and farming will just rapidly lose value relative to playing the market and AH.

Then there will be the 3rd party apps people will almost certainly need to have any significant chance of selling in a meaningful way. Apps that can cross reference prices, allow user set rules for pricing, auto-post/cancel trades, snipe undervalued items, etc... Websites for item/trade heat maps, trader activity to track competition, and a bunch of other seller degen stuff.

tl;dr - The part people hate about face to face trade is the whole point and the reason they want an AH is why its a problem. Why? Because economics.

They actually want to see automated shops (working offline), not auction system. Only pricefixers / abusers vote for AH, not buyers.

Go read trade manifesto, you have it explained there like to a 5 year old, why are you still asking questions.
Here, I'll even link it for you:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

"

Go read trade manifesto, you have it explained there like to a 5 year old, why are you still asking questions.
Here, I'll even link it for you:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

I have read it and find completely untruthworthy.

Basicly it says:

We made a game with little content and all content is 1000x repetetive to obtain items.

If players will do it fast, they quit fast we will not have online.

We make life worst removing all automatisation, forcing player to spend precious time online clicking stacked decks one by one.

That's not fun, but that's the price of free to play with no pay to win. Live with it.

And I just want play game, and have so little time, cause you know work, kids etc.

Don't give a f about items, chasing all that stuff. Time is precious.

"

(working offline)

This is the last thing we need.

I've said many times that I've reached a point where I no longer care what they do with trading, AS LONG as they keep the requirement of being online to trade, as well as an active accept.

Don't get me wrong here; I absolutely think they should do some serious improvement to the trading system, but offline and automated? No thanks. The two things they SHOULD do, are 1) to move the search engine into the game and 2) when someone sends you a trade request, you get a notification in the corner of your screen (no matter where you are). Clicking on this, would bring up a preview of the item you are selling, the price and the offer - where you click "accept" or "decline". Accepting would automatically transfer the item and the currency to some kind of "inbox tab" in your stash.

I agree with Hackusation here, and think the urge to "sell and buy quickly" is clouding their judgement regarding what an automated, offline enabled system would do to the game (and the economy) as a whole. Either that, or they just don't care - which is fine, we all want different things from the game.

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Disagreeing with GGG on the "no AH" stance is totally fine. But from there, to not understanding why just shows a lack of perspective and history.

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Phrazz wrote:

the price and the offer - where you click "accept" or "decline".

So you're basically trading without interacting with the buyer in your / his hideout (or same location) keeping your current farming process?

Does it mean u saved some of your time, right? It means the drop rate will be slightly reduced and I (and many other ppl) will be penalized for YOUR wishes.

No thanks. I think it is better to make trade harder because even in the current state the wealth aquisition for the traders comparing to non/low traders is so huge, that makes the trading process is mandatory to progress. Maybe introducing some sort of timeout, tax or maximum currency limit per day?

Here are GGG's reasons

- Trading is PoE's primary form of player interaction. Party play is another, but most players do not ever engage in any form of content with another player, other than trading.

- If trade is easy, obtaining items is easier, which means progression is faster, and the opportunities to find upgrades for your character diminish quicker and quicker.

- Progressing to quickly has the potential to cause a player to quit playing a league early. As such this results in decreased player retention rates, which on paper looks bad, particularly in marketing, and with investors (Although I doubt Tencent cares much about what GGG is doing atm, unless it is destroying the game)

- The less time a player spends playing the game, or really the league, the less chances GGG has to potentially convince you to spend money on the game.

- If an Auction House existed, there would be little no player interaction in the game ever. There is potential for market manipulation (even though that happens right now), and there is greater potential for bots to generate income quickly to sell for real money.

- They have no problem with a real Auction House, the old school put an item up for sell, people bid on it, and eventually after some set duration the item is sold. While GGG constantly says this, it is inherently antithetical to the design of the game even if this was something that actually existed in the game, as the only items people would bid on to purchase is mirror tier worthy items, an amount of currency the vast majority of the player base has not even seen in the entire life time of their account.

Despite this, I see no reason why an Auction House with limited sell slots could not exist, like 1 to 5 slots, and the items can be bought or sold while you online, or offline, no matter where you are or what you are doing.

The current trade system has many problems

- You have to stop what you are doing to trade. There are many pieces of content in this game now where you are not able to stop what you are doing to trade, like Lab, Sanctum, and so on.

- Finding things to trade for requires leaving the game, or using third party tools. At the very minimum the trade website should be able to be opened, and browsed through, with in the game itself, in a much more aesthetic way.

- Selling items requires knowing its value, having a tab that allows you to list items for sell, and using the website to find and message people for trades. This means trading costs money, and its clunky, even if it is nice that you can click a button and it automatically whispers the player.

- You can not trade people without being in the same location. It would be better if you could trade people from anywhere.

- The current trading system allows people to be scammed, and people are encouraged to scam people when ever possible. When trading for an item you have found on the website, you should be able to send the trade to the player from anywhere. A player should be able to then open up the window, showing the requested trade. Both items required for the trade should automatically be entered into the window, without any ability to change it, and as long as the player who a trade is sent to clicks accept, the accepted items should automatically be put into a remove only tab in each players stash, even if this means adding a remove only stash tab for every single individual trade.

- Time spent trading is time spent not playing the game. By design after a week or two, most players stop accepting trades under a certain value, unless they are already in their hideout when the trade request is sent. There are also people who list items at fake values, usually as part of a trade group, to manipulate the market. This leads to a large amount of whispers to find someone who is actually selling what you want.

- Bulk buying or Bulk selling is extremely frustrating. You can easily do 1 thousand trades just to get rid of bulk surplus items you don't need. This is an unnecessary and unwanted amount of clicks to be forced to do.

GGG likes their garbage trading system, and that's probably how it is going to stay. However their fear that progression will be too fast, people will get bored, and quit faster is imo unwarranted.

The way I see it is people will have more fun, play the game longer, play more builds, and then spend more money on the supporter packs and cosmetics to support the company.

Somebody (I think it was a content creator I watch, not gonna name them cause that always causes issues) came up with the idea that if a trade request is made, the game pauses for the seller regardless of where they are, the trade window comes up, and they can either decline or accept the trade. No need for the BS of leaving your map, or going to your hideout or whatever.
Seems like a good middle ground between the cluster *&$% we have now, and an AH. At least this way the buyer and seller waste as little time as possible.

They have the tech, Ultimatum proved that.

[Removed by Support]

> the game pauses for the seller

And the seller doesn't need to worry about tons of mobs trying to overwhelm him while he's trading with. So it is just simplification and making the trade process easier. It means nerfing drop rates. Good idea, this is what we need in PoE.

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jdp29 wrote:

Somebody (I think it was a content creator I watch, not gonna name them cause that always causes issues) came up with the idea that if a trade request is made, the game pauses for the seller regardless of where they are, the trade window comes up, and they can either decline or accept the trade. No need for the BS of leaving your map, or going to your hideout or whatever.
Seems like a good middle ground between the cluster *&$% we have now, and an AH. At least this way the buyer and seller waste as little time as possible.

They have the tech, Ultimatum proved that.

Not sure about the idea of causing something to pop up on someone else's screen and freeze their game, could be misused to irritate the hell out of people while they are mapping.