The Plague that is GGG's "Trade" system. & the Predatory dance feeding its lowkey P2W mechanism.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

They added premium tabs.

They added functional trade "API" what ever that means.

They added onsite trade listings.

You're wrong that they haven't changed trade in 5 years.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The game thrives because people enjoy overcoming difficulty. Removing difficulty is the last thing a game wants to do.

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allionus wrote:

I've been here since 2012, seen the best and the worst of ideas been implemented and pulled.

Today I'll write here, about the worst of the worst (sinister, but profitable) ideas GGG ever had.

with over 4000 hours combined experience with this game, and tens of thousands of hours in other online games with ingame, "player-driven" markets, I have finally spent enough time analyzing PoE's "market system", and come to the realization that this is subtle predation at its maximum optimization to the point where it disgusts me.

They have not made a single change to improve how players trade within the game, how currency moves, the steps a player must take to sell any commodity ingame. They actually waited for 3rd parties to build a comprehensive system for trading, then just copy pasted it into their own site. (still making NO improvements in the game itself)


And I will write here why for some reason, the trade system just doesn't seem to be improved on. Almost as if they forgot it exists. But how they deliberately keep it this way to drown players in "pinch points", prodding and compelling them to make purchases of things people otherwise would have no need. Basically how GGG worsens situations, which inflate the NEED to buy ingame MTX (not cosmetics).

Let's begin :-


Trade system's been the same since the last 8+ years.
The idea's been (before premium tabs came around): You find an item, you wanna sell it, You put it up for sale by either Spamming $Trade channels with your items, or using a Third Party tool, such as "procurement", "acquisition" etc., then make a forum post, then link the post to the tool, and keep updating it as time goes by. Then you get a reply from a potential buyer, then you invite them, then they teleport to you (there were no hideouts early on), then you initiate a Trade with them, They put in the currency, You put in the item, then you count the currency, and both people accept the trade to finalize it.
And everybody is happy.

Except they're not. Here's why -

1-> Price Fixing. When the seller has total control over whether they give their listed item (despite having put it for sale). Or just hang it over the economy's head, in what is called "price fixing". Where a "seller" puts multiple items of a certain type, damage, value, and flood the market with those items, with NO INTENTION of ever selling the item. Instead, only using it to poison the economy, and forcing the prices to drop, then "Sniping" the newly listed items by other players, only to Poison the economy further. And once you have hundreds and thousands of people doing this, you really get a full blown economy poisoning orgy going.

2-> Tediousness. There are a ridiculous amount of hoops players have to jump through just to get a transaction done. Instead of the conventional, far superior method of ingame AH(auction houses) where you list an item for x Price. And the buyer can instantly pay for it, and the payment is delivered to you (sometimes with a minor "servie tax"), price fixing is non-existent, because the prospective price fixer has no choice, once the item is listed, it can be bought instantly.

3-> AFK MODE ON. PoE has an ingame timer of around 15 minutes, where if you are idle for 15 minutes, it will put you on AFK mode, meaning your name on trade sites will show as a Yellow AFK compared to the green ONLINE, which means players are already less likely to message you, predicting a non-responsive seller/price fixer (especially if you have more than 1 item in the same search criteria. And AFK is even worse for currency exchange than it is for item buying - You often have to First copy the info from the site, then message the seller ingame, Only for them to NOT RESPOND, or be straight up AFK (and even offline in some cases because of HOW SLOW THE TRADE SITES UPDATE).

4-> TIME ZONES. If you live in Texas, Good luck being awake when The Asian market is playing and looking for items to buy. If you are European, Good luck getting the Russians to respond to your item listings. If you live in South East Asia, all you'll meet are the nightwalkers from the states. Aussies, may god have mercy on your shops. Basically, There's no flipping way you are able to list your items 24/24 hours in a day. If you are a Person with a life and a job, Enjoy trying to sell your items in the few hours you get to play. The desperate option is to underprice your items by a longshot just to improve the odds of people who are awake that time buying the item, and often the "Flippers" can buy it off you and sell it for its real value in their time zone.

5(the big one)-> ARTIFICIALLY STUFFING/CRAMPING PLAYER STASHES. Obviously, to make people buy more stashes than they would of THEIR OWN 'FREE WILL'. The Slower and clunkier the whole trade process is, the More disparity there is between "Total Items in" VS "Total Items out" in any given timescale. Meaning due to having a worse trade systems than the Ancient Egyptians, you are Guaranteed to put in more Items into your stash, than the Incompetent trade system is capable of taking out for sale. This means GGG calculatingly keeps The Trade system so insultingly pathetic, that You are forced to buy More storage just so you don't lose out on the currency you worked hard to earn, or create an item worth keeping.




Here is WHY GGG is doing this (They have obviously not confirmed it, but doing that would make them look like $$ predators) but it can easily be concluded because they are the only ones who truly profit from keeping things this way lol.

Simple;
It's all about that MOONEEEEY!

They introduced "Premium tabs", as a more Lucrative alternative to implementing an ingame Auction House/Marketplace, which are not "non-game-affecting cosmetics", but assets which give you a competitive edge to those without the same tabs (or same number of tabs). Everything from how fast you can list your items, to how easily you can modify the pricing, information, etc. Buying a stash tab that costs the same as an entire DLC of several games, on top of that you need to "UPGRADE" it to "Premium" just so you can list your items ingame, without having to rely on External tools(which you still end up relying on to find more details on the item, price check, etc).

Hideouts MTX are a thing - When a large part of Player2player transactions include you having to visit the seller's hideout(99% of the time), you can rest assured there's a good enough people who don't buy vanity MTX just because it pleases themselves (like real life), they often buy it to wow other people who are forced to visit their hideouts. and a "Mano a Mano" exchange also compels the same people to buy more player Cosmetics to wow the people who are forced to physically show up in their proximity simply because they have an item worth purchasing.

THE SOLE REASON why GGG never once bothered to Make an Ingame Auction House, was not because "it's too hard to develop it" or "it will take so much time out of their schedule and they have ImPoRtAnT things to do (like release new MTX every week, often twice in a week, or more), It's SIMPLY BECAUSE OF $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. They have realized their archaic system has so many holes that people have to bend over backwards just to figure out ways in which they can somehow try to make it less worse than it is. And a lot of solutions GGG provides, oopsie, but at a $$$ cost.





I'm sorry to break it to you
Ultimately, PATH OF EXILE is PAY 2 WIN. Where currency = advantage. And Not spending IRL money on Storage facility = You Losing out on CURRENCY. I.E - P2W. It would stop being PAY2WIN, SOON AS THEY IMPLEMENTED A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. BUT that is not as profitable as forcing people to buy stash if they don't want to lose out. So let's see If they Manage to make an ingame equalizer marketplace, or Die out before that happens. Cheerios!!!!


I'll be adding more Points as I remember, some surely slipped away for now.



sidenote -PLEASE AVOID REPLYING OUT OF A DEFENSIVE IMPULSE. Please AVOID RESPONDING OUT OF SYCOPHANTIC HABITS, TOO!
IF you have a valid Defense, I would like to see your take on it. Just avoid Base, impulsive "poo-flinging".


THANKS FOR READING!!!

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Because the game is a success because you value these things. Put them on an easy to access market and you'll stop valuing them... they'll just be points on a video game. The reason they're valuable is based on the difficulty finding them. Easy trade would remove that difficulty. It's pretty simple.

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Arrowneous wrote:

GGG will be walking on the high wire without a net. One wrong move and it'll mean their death. The same holds true for the current PoE economy.

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Arrowneous wrote:

However, any one defending the current trade chat mechanics doesn't see the problem clearly. Since any type of AH is going to foobar the item chase that isn't ever coming to PoE and that's good. The way forward with trade chat is to integrate GGG's own item search function into the game so that {ALt}TABing out to find an item isn't required. I've had way too many mysterious Metamorph crashes because of {Alt}Tab (PoE is being interrupted at just the wrong time) and GGG should have integrated the search into the game years ago. Then when we do find an item to trade for we only need to click a single button to whisper the seller. If in-game the seller should be able to respond without leaving the zone/map currently in. Streamlining trade-chat is what's needed, not replacing it.

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allionus wrote:

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HanSoloDK wrote:

Move to China and play PoE there so you get the AH you want. Problem solved. :=)

That only solves the problem at an individual level. Also, you did not read it entirely. The "problem" is predatory financial gain practices. and the Chinese only have an AH because of how eff'd their Internet access is.

They didn't do it out of some altruistic desire. They did it simply because what they do in the rest of the world, just doesn't work under "Chinese Internet supervision".

So telling me to move to China is a good joke, but it ain't no solution lol.