Suggestions to fix Trade before it needs to be euthanised

POE2’s trade system is already heading toward the same broken state as POE1—cumbersome, inflated, and disconnected from actual gameplay. The lack of built-in regulation leads to price manipulation, item dumping, and an economy that alienates new and casual players without providing ways to address RMT. Endgame mapping is way overtuned with poor rewards, widening the gap between elite and average players even further.


Proposed Fixes
Remove drop and direct trading. As long as unrestricted trades exist, any market reforms will be ineffective. Nobody will like it, but there’s no way around it. Also when you think about it, how much functionally different is getting an item from a friend based on an outside relation/transaction from RMT?

Introduce an in-game marketplace as the sole trading hub:
o Listings are click to buy, with no player interaction needed apart from listing and buying.
o If selected players have the option to give a counter offer for the seller to accept, and vice versa (only one time each).
o Listings require an exalt-equivalent price, reserving the item until sold or cancelled, reducing scams and streamlining transactions.
o A gold fee (scaled by level and price) applies to listings, ensuring trade capacity ties to playtime, discouraging overpricing and item dumping.
o Gifting is allowed, but marked items become untradeable for the recipient.
o Any items dropped in co-op play can be shared within team members without repercussions, incentivizing team-play
o Purchases can be made with any currency-equivalent via the already present exchange.
o Sold items have a 48-hour trade cooldown to curb flipping and speculation.
o A pricing guide helps players by providing similarly rolled item-examples currently listed.
o It couples the currency exchange directly to the item-market, removing buy/sell-difference speculation.

Separate economies for trade league and SSF to balance very fundamentally different playstyles. There really is no way to balance both well with the same ruleset.

If player interaction needs to be present; think about hideout item stalls or in-person auction events. Forcing players silently through loops is not player-interaction when nobody likes it.

Remove item-rarity affixes from gear, this only caters to elitism and stifles build diversity and balancing.

Give players a one-time option to exchange their bought trade-tabs for a random unique or different in-game reward to compensate for their reduced functionality.


---~$~---


This system absolutely isn't perfect, but it’s integrated, policeable, and playtime-linked, addressing many issues like inflation, RMT and market abuse to some extent. Furthermore it’s fast and much more fun than the current state of dm-ing unresponsive players from an external website filled with scam-postings. Trade has to be either free and broken or restricted and stable—you can’t have both, no economy in the world does.

GGG nailed POE2’s core gameplay but needs to overcome its unrealistic resistance to modernizing trade before it spirals out of control and alienates a (new/casual) player base that simply expects streamlined trading in a modern ARPG centered around trading.

+1

BTW, I feel I'm one of the few oldschool POE1 players that thinks POE2 is a much better game in most aspects and look forward to it's bright future.

"Solving" trade is really the biggest thing holding it back right now, and maybe end-game balancing, but these two are strongly linked.

GGG has clearly shown they can look past their 'vision' with this release, I hope they can do the same for trade.

BUMP because I think GGG needs to see this

>A gold fee (scaled by level and price) applies to listings, ensuring trade capacity ties to playtime, discouraging overpricing and item dumping.

I'd go way further and add a sale tax (can't really call it VAT) - some (say 6-11%) on the value in the specific currency would be destroyed. It would not apply to too cheap (below regal) items. That would reduce the amount of currency in circulation naturally.