Suggestions to trading to improve player experience

Hi GGG,

I have been playing on console since 3.6 and several other occasions on PC including as far back as 2015.

Playing on console is great all round. The trade market is a really sensible introduction in the absence of easy trading in game with mouse and keyboard. There are a few things to put the icing on the the cake and ultimately counter some of the problems trade market has unintentionally introduced that I hope you can consider.

As the seasons progress, players with more experience and time are latching onto exploiting the trade market by flooding it with price fixed currency and tradeables at both high and low prices to achieve:
-new or inexperienced players to misinterpret price fixed items and unintentionally sell items at lower prices (the rich get richer)
-spend absurd amounts of time offering on items with a price that are never accepted (because they are listed by players flooding the market to alter the economy to meet their objectives)
-its difficult to avoid searching for long periods of time due to the inability to filter and order your searches (which I understand is a whole separate issue but still adds to these problems here)

The reason I bring this up is that these are issues that will affect the ability to sustain a player base and ultimately player retention league to league:
-spending hours offering on items that are not accepted is draining and is a horrible player experience, particularly for those that are inexperienced and don't understand these tactics. This particular issue is a draining experience for players of all levels.
-this problem has and will continue to grow until there are only a percentage of players who control the entire economy (like an oil company!)

The solution appears to be as simple as adding an option for listing items in trade market with "auto buyout". It would be fine to still leave the current model in too "negotiable price".
This would allow
-players to avoid items with "negotiable prices" and reduce the ability for these exploits
-this would help to keep the economy competitive and healthy in a reduced player base compared to PC and create a good player experience!

I hope you consider my suggestions and thank you for bringing us this enjoyable game.

Cheers
Dave

There have been many extensive posts on the trade market, and GGG doesn't usually bother to even acknowledge that players are upset, or that the current state of the market is bad for the game.

I'm going to add some of my thoughts on the trade market here, in hopes that maybe GGG will see some of this in a new light.

We (the players) complain about Price Fixing a *lot*. I feel like GGG doesn't understand that there are several factors that make this problem far worse than the term for it makes it sounds.

1) "Price Fixing" is a way to scam new or experienced players. It is not some "playing PoE as a trading game" tactic. It exists solely to rip people off. If an experienced player gets ripped off due to price fixing, that's pretty much on them, but new players have no way to know that they should watch out for this. How do you think new players feel when they discover the item they priced at 10c (due to dozens of pricefixed listings) is actually worth 1ex? And they've never even had an Exalted Orb before. Sad, angry, frustrated. This is the sort of thing that makes players quit the game. Console already suffers from small playerbase. We *need* new players. And players who quit don't buy any more MTX.

2) "Price Fixing" on PC results in people receiving the advice "just scroll down 10 or 20 listings" or "go to page 2". Uh, yeah, we have no option to sort our listings, so we can't do this. If you want to "go to page 2", you have manually look through *tons* of listings, and mentally keep tabs on what all the prices were. And since we can't see the account name that listed the items, we can't tell if there are 50 listings from the same person. PC players can easily see that at a glance, and just ignore that person.

3) "Price Fixing" wastes *tons* of time for players who want to buy high-end items, especially divination cards. Often, the only high-end cards listed with a price are price-fixed, but the only way you'll ever find this out is to make offers on each and every one. Since we're limited to 10 offers at a time, and limited by our own currency (since, unlike PC players, we actually have to put put up the cash for our offer), this can take several days. Literally. It also makes it extremely difficult to make decisions based on the Marketplace. Say I want a Headhunter. Should I buy cards, or an already-available belt, or maybe Ancient Orbs? Looking at the market full of price-fixed listings, it's extremely difficult to know how much it's going to cost you to buy those cards, or maybe the Ancient Orbs. Heck, it's difficult to even know if there are even a full set of cards actually available for purchase. Such a large percentage are price-fixed, there could be 40 or 50 listings on the market without actually having a total of 8 purchasable cards available. But there's no way to know that before you start buying them. And then you get stuck with half a set of cards when you really should have been saving up for the whole belt, since a coalition of jerks is price-fixing all the cards. And, at that point, it's extremely difficult to even reverse your position and sell the cards, except at the very low price-fixed price.

Some things GGG could to that would help ameliorate the situation:

1) LIST ACCOUNTS NAMES ON THE MARKETPLACE LISTINGS!!! This will dramatically hinder price-fixing and other nefarious market tactics. The price-fixing Guilds (there are at least 2 active price fixing guilds on PS4, and if I know of the existence of 2, there are probably a dozen) will still be able to get away with some of it by spreading their listings across members, but it would still be a huge improvement to the situation. Bonus points if you let us set people on "ignore" from their marketplace listings, or at *least* from a rejection of a marketplace listing.

2) "Punish" listings from accounts with a high percentage of rejection or no-answer (ignored) transactions. Move them to the back of the market listings. And/or prioritize listings from accounts that have a high percentage of accepts. Even if scammers "game" this system by making a bunch of other cheap listings at low prices just to get the "accept" percentage higher, that will create flow in the market (a good thing) AND increase the cost (both time and game currency) of market manipulation. Both also good things.

3) Auto-accept OPTION for exact-price offers. Making it optional destroys all the objections anyone has had to this (what if I forget to update the price on my Div cards when I put more in the stack, etc). Anyone who doesn't want it doesn't have to use it. But I can guarantee that all the buyers will favor "instant-buyout" listings, and this 95% shuts down "price fixing", solving or heavily mitigating ALL the problems I listed above. Combine it with the other two offered solutions, and it's a 99.9% fix. Then all that's left is grow the console playerbase.

4) Let us have Group SSF or Group Found or Guild Found. Or Private Leagues. I play Trade because I like to play with friends. The game is, without a doubt, more fun when played with friends. But the current trade environment is SUPER toxic. Yes, technically, I could play Trade and pretend it was SSF except for grouping up with friends, but invariably something would tempt me into the trade market. Either getting lots of bad RNG toward finding some piece I desperately need (but could be bought for 1c on trade), or finding some crazy-valuable item that I have no desire to use. Lots of PC players have fled to Private Leagues for the same reason. Trade is toxic. But in a small-ish private league, players are MUCH friendlier and more helpful to each other. At least offer us this same refuge, if you won't fix trade.

Love the ideas lads. There's no doubt the small playerbase (and presumably same as PC drop rates) are making it too easy for a few people to corner and crush the market on PS4.

I'm not confident I have a remedy for it but add me to the list of people hoping a buyout option is added. Buying items at the moment is a joyless experience, and while GGG seems opposed to buyouts, I think there's definitely a place for it in a market where there's barely a page worth of some items (watcher's eyes, timeless jewels, most high end div cards), many of which become heavily price fixed throughout the league.

Keep the ideas and thoughts coming, and hopefully we can find a way to improve the console trade marketexperience.