Trade Manifesto

Great Manifesto and 100% accurate why I'm in SSF train. Trade makes the game for me less fun, more easy and boring at the end. I don't care that I will not finish all bosses, maps, challenges, content etc in the league just because I do not have gear for that. The game should be fun and it is without trading for me ;) But very nice that you bring small trade improvements for others. Official trade site may bring more players for trading since they do not need to use third-party tools to do it anymore.

That is good news for me, at least you know what is taking fun out of your game.

"

Deadfire1 wrote:

I find it comical that many of these players think this copy to clipboard, out of game trading system is fine. While at the same time either asking for a certain portion of trading that they don't enjoy to be made instant or worrying that they cant easily afk all day (and night) trading anymore. I like the current system, just don't make it anymore inconvenient for me!

So pricefixers will now have to spend 30 seconds writing a script that prevents afk. Thank god we slowed them down.

Can filter out /dnd now. Woot! That causes a solid 5% of unfruitful buy requests.

Still can't see the sellers location? WTB your 1alch item. Oh, you're in Uber Lab? Yea, I definitely plan to wait 10 minutes instead of asking the next guy.

Hell, why not prevent the game client from accepting clipboard pastes. Make players type out their buy requests. This would slow me down.

Now of course, one almost never fails to receive a timely response when attempting buy 1ex+ items. It's those pesky common items that you need every once in awhile. I frequently rebuild my Animate Guardian with 1c uniques, usually takes 3-5 mins to get all 5 items. Its just a matter PoE in window mode, multi-monitors, and spam the list until someone responds. If you haven't sent out over 10 buy offers in 15-20 seconds, you're doing it wrong. Ignore the several people that respond 10 seconds later. Respond or try to invite me to party more then once? Ignore. Nice? No. But trading in this game is not about being nice. Player interaction. Check.

There is very little tedium for anyone who has actively traded throughout PoE's progression over the years. Even during the acquisition days, it was easy. It's only a road-block for casual players that want to kill monsters, not use the clipboard and test their search engine skills. What is the exact wording for that mod I needed? Added lightning damage.. Adds to lightning damage... Increased lightning damage...

Does the current trading system slow me down? Not really. I mean, I hate spending 10 minutes buying a bunch of leveling gear to twink a new toon I'm working on. High end stuff? Yea, top tier gear can take a few days to put together(or longer if you are insane about BiS pieces). When will JoesMomHasCrabs login, damn it! I guess I'll throw in this less optimal placeholder for now.

I seriously don't even understand the point of this "manifesto". There is nothing new presented here that couldn't be derived from your actions over the years. Trading is, and will remain, the playground of serious players. No shiny stuff for you new/casual players, buzz off.

Absolutely this! Trading is ok as it is for experienced players it is the lower end of the community which suffers the most...
Especially the new players who can play for a few months before they even know about poe.trade.

"

Fedotsinichkin wrote:

"

Deadfire1 wrote:

I find it comical that many of these players think this copy to clipboard, out of game trading system is fine. While at the same time either asking for a certain portion of trading that they don't enjoy to be made instant or worrying that they cant easily afk all day (and night) trading anymore. I like the current system, just don't make it anymore inconvenient for me!

So pricefixers will now have to spend 30 seconds writing a script that prevents afk. Thank god we slowed them down.

Can filter out /dnd now. Woot! That causes a solid 5% of unfruitful buy requests.

Still can't see the sellers location? WTB your 1alch item. Oh, you're in Uber Lab? Yea, I definitely plan to wait 10 minutes instead of asking the next guy.

Hell, why not prevent the game client from accepting clipboard pastes. Make players type out their buy requests. This would slow me down.

Now of course, one almost never fails to receive a timely response when attempting buy 1ex+ items. It's those pesky common items that you need every once in awhile. I frequently rebuild my Animate Guardian with 1c uniques, usually takes 3-5 mins to get all 5 items. Its just a matter PoE in window mode, multi-monitors, and spam the list until someone responds. If you haven't sent out over 10 buy offers in 15-20 seconds, you're doing it wrong. Ignore the several people that respond 10 seconds later. Respond or try to invite me to party more then once? Ignore. Nice? No. But trading in this game is not about being nice. Player interaction. Check.

There is very little tedium for anyone who has actively traded throughout PoE's progression over the years. Even during the acquisition days, it was easy. It's only a road-block for casual players that want to kill monsters, not use the clipboard and test their search engine skills. What is the exact wording for that mod I needed? Added lightning damage.. Adds to lightning damage... Increased lightning damage...

Does the current trading system slow me down? Not really. I mean, I hate spending 10 minutes buying a bunch of leveling gear to twink a new toon I'm working on. High end stuff? Yea, top tier gear can take a few days to put together(or longer if you are insane about BiS pieces). When will JoesMomHasCrabs login, damn it! I guess I'll throw in this less optimal placeholder for now.

I seriously don't even understand the point of this "manifesto". There is nothing new presented here that couldn't be derived from your actions over the years. Trading is, and will remain, the playground of serious players. No shiny stuff for you new/casual players, buzz off.

Absolutely this! Trading is ok as it is for experienced players it is the lower end of the community which suffers the most...
Especially the new players who can play for a few months before they even know about poe.trade.

Agree, that's the point I was making too.

seems dope AF

Hey Chris, thanks for explaining your position and sticking to your vision of the game!
Looking forward to what else you guys have in store for us! :)

"

Chris wrote:

"So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile's formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not."

The ease of trade has absolutely nothing to do with the potential negative consequences of trade. It's simply a mechanism that drives the rate at which those consequences manifest. Consider that the current trade system sucks. Nevertheless, if every player gritted their teeth and rabidly traded, you'd presumably respond by lowering drop rates. This implicitly acknowledges that trade is fundamentally bad for the game, because it circumvents the paradigm of the loot hunt. An auction house might send you over the cliff faster, but it is not the cliff itself; trading is.

So now you're in the ridiculous position of admitting that you've centered the game's design around something fundamentally bad, but you're trying to mitigate those consequences by deliberately making your trade system frustrating to use. How does that make any sense? Why not just admit your design philosophy is flawed and change it?

Another way of looking at it: do you actually want trading to be required for players to progress, or not? If yes, then why punish players with a bad trade system? If no, then why punish players with terrible drop rates?

"

Fedotsinichkin wrote:

it is the lower end of the community which suffers the most...
Especially the new players who can play for a few months before they even know about poe.trade.

Which, funnily enough, are the ones they claim to be helping with this ridiculous sytem =)

"

Chris wrote:

You can search broadly by a specific item class or type, but have to look through a lot of search results to find the one you want to make an offer on. This system intentionally makes the search process harder

This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while. Intentionally making the process "hard" by obfuscating information is bad design and accomplishes nothing, it simply makes the process annoying without fixing the underlying problem.
Everytime I see ggg spouting this ridiculous idea I automatically view this as the game design equivalent of "security through obscurity", which, as the tech people out there know (and hopefully ggg), is not real security and doesn't work. To put it in game design terms for those who don't know about tech security, imagine PoE introduced a skill that would give you 10 trillion dps with a white weapon but in order to use it you would need to simultaneously press 13 keys. Would this skill be balanced just because it's hard to use? I think any rational person would say "no". Of course, this is an exaggerated example but it proves a point, difficulty of use does NOT affect balance.

Speaking in more general terms you keep bringing up this doomsday scenario without ANY evidence to back this up apart from Diablo III which failed NOT because it was automated but because it involved REAL MONEY. This is a major distinction that people seemingly fail to realise or ignore on purpose (in the case of ggg's public statements; I simply can't believe they think it was the automation and not the real money that caused its downfall). There are DOZENS of online games with automated trading where the system simply works (and has been working for years) and this doomsday scenario simply doesn't happen.

Wasting time emulating poe.trade is a ridiculous thing and it staggers me that so many people seem to like it and think this is a good idea. This time could have been spent improving so many other things (not even an automated trade system) but instead we get a clone of something that already exists, which won't change anything in terms of playing experience. What difference does it make if I alt-tab to browse poe.trade or ggg's trade site? What difference does it make when I have to stop maps to trade which website the request came from? What difference does it make when the first 50 results are price fixers? None. This was a stupid waste of time and resources.

"

Elendarulianreo wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

"So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile's formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not."

The ease of trade has absolutely nothing to do with the potential negative consequences of trade. It's simply a mechanism that drives the rate at which those consequences manifest. Consider that the current trade system sucks. Nevertheless, if every player gritted their teeth and rabidly traded, you'd presumably respond by lowering drop rates. This implicitly acknowledges that trade is fundamentally bad for the game, because it circumvents the paradigm of the loot hunt. An auction house might send you over the cliff faster, but it is not the cliff itself; trading is.

So now you're in the ridiculous position of admitting that you've centered the game's design around something fundamentally bad, but you're trying to mitigate those consequences by deliberately making your trade system frustrating to use. How does that make any sense? Why not just admit your design philosophy is flawed and change it?

Another way of looking at it: do you actually want trading to be required for players to progress, or not? If yes, then why punish players with a bad trade system? If no, then why punish players with terrible drop rates?

QFfuckingT. Someone give this man an award.

AFK statuses!
GG GGG!

Good but there's a few big problems remaining:

1. AFK / DND, and blacklisting are the only real improvements here (good ones, very helpful).

2. People playing more "might" get richer, but especially people not playing the game (sorry lads killing monsters is the game) and flipping are the ones getting rich.

3. Items drop are abysmally bad to the point were I want "gold" (currency, whatever, it's still gold) over items any day. I then buy the items I need / want (because let's get real I won't get them from playing which is really sad) or craft through essences (because rng bad mods are so many).

I remember the feeling of finding superb items in Titan Quest. This feeling is "almost 99.99%" to "totally" gone in POE in its current iteration.

Gold --> Trade / Essence craft , or ... Divination cards. End of story.

I'll be direct, your game is great and you've been creative over the years. That said if a well done game comes around that brings back this beautiful feeling of actually dropping something, I'll be on it in an eye blink.

Also, please, early gems (or just gems, e.g. new chaos spell) being ultimately superior to end game drops like for example an Atziri Disfavour? This is so saddening I have no words for it, and it illustrates the current issue with drops (Got a super rare Mjolner too? Congrats it's shit. There's a lot of that out there).

Edit: SSF can kiss goodbye to so many builds it's not funny!