Trade Manifesto

ACGIFT absolutely has every point down perfect. It's sad, because I love PoE, but it is becoming more apparent that none of the devs play the game anymore, so they just don't realize how the game plays now.

I'll only address one paragraph:

"

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.
People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!

This is actually the exact opposite for me. If trade is easy, meaning I can find an item I want and acquire it easily with the currency I have, I will do it *MUCH* more often. If I know it's going to take me 2 hours of messaging fake posters, scammers, afks, dnds, different leagues, ssfers, etc etc etc... just to get one simple item, I simply won't trade unless I *ABSOLUTELY* have to. I'll use items that are 20-30 levels under my level simply because it's near-impossible to get anything better (I am not a lucky man when it comes to RNG).
The only way character progression is not about trade is it 1) I get a ridiculously lucky drop [i.e. never], 2) I craft it [which requires piles of currency, which requires exceptional amounts of trading].
More often than not, what happens in reality is, I get excited for a drop that could make my character better... but it doesn't, it makes someone else's character better. I've only played 2 rangers in my 4+ years of PoE, 1 was early in the game, in HC, where I only got to level 37, and the other was in Perandus... but my loots *heavily* favor rangers, over all my years, I've geared more rangers that I didn't play that I could even count.
If the game's goal is to actually make us excited for the next drop, because it might be useful to ME, and not exciting to sell to someone else, then the game would need an adaptive loot system, that drops loot based on what your character is/can use... but that would actually be stupid.

The bottom line is, the more time I spend in this terrible trade system, the less time I play the game. I didn't mind it once, but the longer it's been like this, the more bitter I've gotten. I don't even want to play with other people anymore, and I've switched near-exclusively to SSF (except the odd experiment in Standard where I have tons of full remove-only tabs to play with).

So congratulations! You've pushed a serious and excited gamer, who loved to party and trade with people into the true exile of SSF.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

the trade and drop systems dont punish players, they give the game longevity which gives the players more time to enjoy the game. They are positive things for players, its just that players are not always perceptive enough to appreciate this.

lol yea players are having fun with the current system of trudging through poe.trade and whispering a bunch of AFKers/DNDers/price fixers to find an upgrade because the game throws huge amounts of garbage items at them so much that item filters are a thing in a loot based game, they just don't realize it

This is awesome! I mean the API bit that filters AFK and DND, that will be a huge QOL change, and should at least put a dent in the price fixing that's been happening.

The beta trade site is...not good, but it's irrelevant as long as poe.trade updates to the new API.

"

kompaniet wrote:

Seems to be pretty good as is now. The afk/dnd problem is resolved. Thanks for that and the new trading site here.

Afk problem is not resolved.

GGG You are mumbling in this thread about disadvantages that easy trade brings. I don't say that selling for real money and player inventory wealth disproportion isn't a problem. It is. But there are also advantages that comes with easy trade and you forgot them in your manifesto.
Easier trade means you are more friendly to casual gamer's. I'm casual gamer. I play for about 2 hours a day. I don't want to grind too much. Grinding is ok, but extreme grinding is too much for me. I work, I have wife, I have various problems and after active day i just want to play my favorite game and relax. I find pleasure in doing "one more map", planning another character, searching passives tree, gems, gear for even more insane combinations. I don't find pleasure in searching for unique item I want. I'd like to buy it instead from other player.
There are probably 50% of players that thing the same as me and there are probably second 50% of players that think opposite to me. You have leagues system and maybe there should be one "easy" league with even something like auto trading in-game system and another "harder" league with more restricted trade (only self-found).

"

Redreaper21 wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

the trade and drop systems dont punish players, they give the game longevity which gives the players more time to enjoy the game. They are positive things for players, its just that players are not always perceptive enough to appreciate this.

lol yea players are having fun with the current system of trudging through poe.trade and whispering a bunch of AFKers/DNDers/price fixers to find an upgrade because the game throws huge amounts of garbage items at them so much that item filters are a thing in a loot based game, they just don't realize it

yeah they are. they fixed the afk/dnd thing, price fixers are mainly in currency vs currency trade where imo they should put a proper auction house, in item trades for gear theres little price fixing and its easy to spot and not get caught spending any significant time messaging those people.

Regarding the game throwing garbage at them, loot filters are there and a case can be made for dropping less garbage in terms of whites and blues in endgame. But you can find upgrades if ur only finding gear, if u trade for gear thats better than u can expect to find in a reasonable time frame then of course almost all the gear you find will be garbage in comparison. Thats an inescapable reality of taking part in trade.

Ived played this game for over 12k hours and had a ton of fun. Go play a game like D3 where the drop a ton of bis gear on you very rapidly and tell me how many hours u can play that game and have fun. Why are you here? Why are you not there? A extremely high variance loot system with a time and effort sink trade system is what gives this game the capacity to be played for as many hours as its given me and still having room to play as many again in the future, so yeah, if players dont realise the truth in this then its on them and their lack of perspective.

"On the trade market, we're experimenting with the opposite end of the trade spectrum, where it's very easy to complete trades but more difficult to find the exact item you're looking for. 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 and the trade process easier, for quite a different trade experience. We're not planning to bring it to the international PC version of Path of Exile."

NO NO NO.. this is a terrible idea .. On the xbox you currently have to sort through 10 + pages of 100 items each that you have to HIGHLIGHT first to see the stats.. this is extremely tedious and gives me eye strain.. why would you ever want to go this route????

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

yeah they are.

No they aren't. It's why this poe.trade copycat was created in the first place

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

they fixed the afk/dnd thing

We'll see about that.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

price fixers are mainly in currency vs currency trade where imo they should put a proper auction house, in item trades for gear theres little price fixing and its easy to spot and not get caught spending any significant time messaging those people.

Wrong. There is plenty of price manipulating in items too, and it's one of the reasons it makes searching things on poe.trade so tedious. Bots will undercut items even in very tiny amounts to bait people into posting theirs for cheaper. Even a 1c orb profit per trade is worth it when you have a bot running trades for you all day. It's also a way to take advantage of newer players who don't know how to value their stuff.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

But you can find upgrades if ur only finding gear, if u trade for gear thats better than u can expect to find in a reasonable time frame then of course almost all the gear you find will be garbage in comparison. Thats an inescapable reality of taking part in trade.

I don't even understand what you're trying to say here. "Garbage in comparison"? People trade in the first place because otherwise they will have to spend dozens of hours grinding hoping to find just the tiniest gear improvement for a particular slot, because most items are straight up garbage with affix combos that are not a single build uses.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

Go play a game like D3 where the drop a ton of bis gear on you very rapidly and tell me how many hours u can play that game and have fun. Why are you here? Why are you not there?

Because this game is free and the other isn't?

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

A extremely high variance loot system with a time and effort sink trade system is what gives this game the capacity to be played for as many hours as its given me and still having room to play as many again in the future, so yeah, if players dont realise the truth in this then its on them and their lack of perspective.

Lolno, what the "varied" loot system does is artificially extend the grind

"

ACGIFT wrote:

If someone's playing a life-based RF build, they'll be excited to see the Kaom's drop, but have no use for the Shav's; if they're in SSF and only care about SSF, it's basically vendor fodder.

this is ONLY under assumption that you for some reason decide one and only one character in SSF

a drop like shavs in SSF makes a lot of people design a toon around that drop, because thats the way SSF often plays out- you design build around your drops.

so no, unless you ONLY want play life-based RF this league, a shavs will NEVER be vendor fodder. at the very least it will be in your stash waiting for you to equip it. at best, you are already making a low life toon

"

Therefore, it *IS* necessary, for the sake of being fair, that they need to ramp up the drops to compensate for the fact that the bulk will have absolutely zero value to the player.

nonsense. what you're saying is make drops so any arbitrary build can use the items. because PoE has so many builds with so many nuances, its virtually impossible to 'guess' your build with any precision. this leads to the game having to SHOWER you with loot to make sure some items are useful for your build.

"Items Matter. Trade is Important.
[...]
Items are a player's reward for playing Path of Exile."

After thinking, if think you're wrong here.
Currently:
If you trade, items are not a reward for playing, it's a reward for trading.
If you don't (SSF), it's a reward for spending infinite amount of time identifying crap or farming currencies.

REMOVE TRADING, and increase the currency drop rate for everyone to be able to craft themselves.

The crafting system, especially with the new annulment orb (same goal but far less OP than eternals, that could be restored in-game with a low drop rate) and the masters specials (especially lock prefix/suffix), already has everything to craft good items, it's just currently too hard to craft regarding the drop rate of currencies.

I don't understand why trading would be so mandatory, you get so much more fun crafting your own items than just clicking "accept" to buy it.

Where's the fun to play if the way to get your gear is not by playing the game ...