The Plague that is GGG's "Trade" system. & the Predatory dance feeding its lowkey P2W mechanism.
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After bouncing off PoE several times over the last decade, it now finally stuck with me. I've been playing for 3 leagues now.
During those 3 leagues, the "trade" system in eventually the reason why I quit the game way before completing anything. 1) Buying maps to finish the Atlas Buying maps is terrible. Oftentimes the first 50 results are by the same dope who does not actually sell the goddamn maps. Buying a single map off the trade market is a terrible experience. 2) Buying crafting materials I love my CA Ranger and the end game itemization comes down to crafting. Mostly buying fossils. Which are rarely sold in high volume. In the end, the game turns into copy/paste simulator. When people mock EVE Online for not being much of a game, they have never played PoE. It's easy to spend 10-15 minutes per item, just pasting messages in the chat. The root of the problem is that GGG already got my money at that point. They don't care when I drop out after 50% of the league. Also, the trade manifesto is probably the single most cynical piece of content I have ever read. It almost literally spells out how making trading easy is bad because it might cause you to spend less time in the game. So GGG is fine with their customers doing atrocious and tedious grinds (copy/paste spamming) just to get more face time. For me, the opposite is true. Easier trading would just allow me to complete a season for once and actually enjoy what I'm doing past 70% of my playtime. In a modern context - this is the concept of UX flipped onto its head into an evil twin caricature. Last edited by mccready on Mar 9, 2020, 3:40:50 AM
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" Because it requires an activity that is 99% outside of the game loop. It's like saying "If you want to get item x, fold 100 envelopes first". It just makes no sense whatsoever. If you want trading to be hard, hide the entrance to the auction house behind a tough boss. The way it's written right now, the way you read it of their paper, actively encourages every prohibitive and negative trading interaction, such as price fixing and posting offers without the intend of trade fulfillment. | |
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trade was better when we didnt have public api.
I'm serious. you only traded for items when you really had to have that item, youd browse it in forum shops and stumble upon some beast item selling for peanuts, that is perfect for your build. back then there was no mastercrafting and you couldnt afford to exalt many items. a rare item drop was always a potential BiS. all other time, you simply played the game. | |
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It's funny to me how when everytime an automated solution to trade is brough up (like say an AH), there will always be people who say how "terrible" and "awful" it is going to be for the game... Except for the fact that a lot of people already, as we speak, use automated trade tools by running bots on alt accounts that sell their junk and flip currecny (basically make money out of thin air through exchange fluctuations) all day while the player is actually playing the game.
So it's not that people don't want to have an automated trade system, they just don't want YOU the average player to have it as well, since it will make it harder for them to gain in-game wealth and do rmt (for those who do). So of course everytime an AH or something is brought up, there will always be people actively fighting the very idea of it and bringing up some nonsense examples like D3 on launch or making vague baseless statements about it "crashing the economy" (yeah, crushing their economy that they profit from). Why would they want their convenience tools to be shared by the masses? | |
" I dont use anything like that There are actually theoretical issues of an AH explained clearly in this thread and there is a practical example of those issues in the past That this is such a hard concept to understand is mind blowing. There is no conspiracy, its not ggg being evil Its the same reason it has NEVER been done successfully and PoE wouldnt be that game that cracked the code but just another failed game economy Go back, read whats been said previously and try to understand and when your mind starts going "theyre flippers,ggg wants to make mtx money, its trumps fault, oh and earth is flat" because you really really want an AH. Take a break and try again later Last edited by Nidal on Mar 9, 2020, 5:24:22 AM
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" There is no point in saying whether you do or you don't use something, since no one in his right mind would admit practicing a bannable offence on the official forum (not saying that you do). I know plenty of examples of MMOs (especially old super grindy ones) that used automated trading either in form of player shops or AH successfuly, and people had 0 issues with it and no "economy crashes" happened, it just allowed people to play the game more and have more stuff to play it with, helping the average player. Moreover, other people also pointed out games that had successful automated trading, so this is at best an anecdotal evidence vs anecdotal evidence. Right now, automated trade is a heavily beneficial tool that is lacking in PoE, and those with knowledge filled this void by using (admittedly against the rules) a solution in a form of a trading bot. You can't possible deny their existance, they are rampant. So plenty of people already have automated trading and profit from it greatly, but god forbid regular Joe to have some sort of convenience (which would also slow down rampant RMT economy that exists around PoE that the devs combat constantly). Even diablo 3 is a counter example, because when they removed AH (a tool to make gearing more convenient), they replaced it with... Very high drop rates and ease of gearing in general through regular gameplay, something that AH existed to do instead. So they didn't take away player's ability to gear up, they just swapped trading with SSF-friendly drops. I wouldn't mind something like this in PoE, but this is not the case, is it? The case is that regular players have no convenience features and either give up on gearing or no-life the game, while others use third part software to amass curenncy while also playing the game instead of playing a crappy trading simulator all day. | |
" You can't compare PoE to an MMO like WoW, in most MMO items on the high end have other ways of limiting them (BOA,BOP etc) and these games are not focused on loot and character development like an ARPG is. Your comparing apples with donkeys. Also your D3 comment is another complete fail. The AH and the current game have nothing in common. What the AH did in D3 was that farming was pointless. The only thing you could do in D3 was farm gold. And even that was slow. There was no gearing up at all because all GG gear was to expensive and to rare. You want PoE to turn into that? | |
" What? To get an item through trade - you have to trade for it. How on earth does that equal something completely different? In an automated system, the GAME handles the transaction between both currency and items. Why should the game handle that? As we all should know by now, limitations to trade are there give value to your play time. You should play to PROGRESS, not play to HIT THE AH. With limitations to trade, we have a nice balance there. If you have other ways of limiting trade without pissing off more people than the current system, I think GGG will hear you out. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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" Yep, just as I predicted, a bunch of weak defences to avoid implementation of a basic convenience feature that is of incredibly high demand (hence why there are so many trade bots) and which proved to work perfectly in other, grindier and more gear reliant games. I can and I will compare PoE to MMOs, because both rely on gear to progress and do endgame. Every single MMO I have ever played required gear, just like PoE, and usually had even more ridiculous grind and RNG requirements, and some also had gear based PvP. They were ABSOLUTELY focused around character and gear progression and loot and yet it didn't stop basic trade automation to work and not break anything. The only thing you could farm for in D3 was gold? Well excuse me, but it sounds EXACTLY like my PoE experience, where I essentially grind for currency to buy what I want, kind of like gold, and this is what wast majority of players f*cking do all the time, this is why basic currency flippers are so rich. In the entirety of my PoE gameplay I dropped exactly 2 (!!!) unique items that were more expensive than a couple of chaos orbs on the market. Even f*cking shaper runs were a net loss, because I would gain more by selling sets for currency rather than expecting a good drop. 99.9% of all my gear was bought and farmed for in terms of currency (aka gold)... And I agree, this IS a failure of a system, the difference is that you are, for some weird reason, trying to pretend that PoE is not like that as well. PoE is like that already. | |
" If you don't even understand the difference between an ARPG and an MMORPG how is anyone ever gonna explain more advanced stuff to you? Like basic 101 economics supply/demand. So I will withdraw from responding to you. You aint looking for a discussion, you are blind in your own little bubble. I'm glad Chris is smarter then that. |
