Trade Manifesto

Practically all of this is wrong. Please hire someone with an economics degree and stop letting programmers create and manage economies.
"
Chris wrote:


Consequences of Easy Trade

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. While easy trade sounds great on paper, there are some important considerations!

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!

Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can't be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can't use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.

The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players.
About the Automation side of things, i°m pretty sure its easy to check out bots, because its kinda simple, most common botters dont keep items on their account, because the bot by default will auto-sell2vendor everything to gain currency, and MAYBE keep the uniques, so if you find an account that has a very high activity on the market, but all he has on his account is only currency and like no items, thats a bot, plus if you add the option to "Report", you will find plenty of people will report pricefixers and bots, or any other abuse found on the market, also when you suspend an account that had a bot running it, you will not get a reply on it, so you can put a timelimit suspend, like 7 days, if the player that got suspended for 7 days doesnt reply back, then you can have it auto-banned by default, until or if the player ever comes back. but in the end i think its not that hard to check their behaivior, its either one of these, 1 only has currency on the account, only has currency + uniques, keeps all stash tabs full of crap unsorted and cleans it every day at a certain time, while also having currency stored in normal stash tabs, since i dont think any botter will spend real money to buy premium tabs:) the problem with bots when it comes to the currency, i bet it will be a better idea to suspend their accounts after they gain an X amount of currency, that way you dont have to deal with them like every single day, plus suspending accounts after they have gained a little of currency its very descouraging, think about yourself as a player getting d/c while having an ex dropped in a map and when you come back the map is gone, its really really annoying, same goes with the botters, they get pissedasf when they loose so thats a good thing :))
Last edited by ClaudelGFX on Nov 5, 2017, 9:54:08 AM
Nice API work, GGG.

I will chek it out :)
Interesting mechanics enthusiast.
"
saj14saj wrote:
I am bitterly disappointed that a GGG branded and skinned version of POE is the best solution GGG could come up with to address the huge problems that trade has after so many years. It still isn't even integrated into the game client itself.

The problem in my opinion is that GGG deeply misunderstands the fundamental problem: the real issue they should be trying to prevent is not having trade be too *easy*, it is preventing trade being too *fast*.

With that realization, the proper way to address the issue is by having some sort of rate limit on trade per unit time per account. While not a trivial exercise to analyze, this would have the following benefits:

* The UI, affordance, and discoverability for trade could be made maximally polished
* Trade could be properly integrated into the game client
* Asynchronous and offline trading could be permitted
* The ability for trade flipping and monopolistic behavior to control the game would be vastly reduced
* The ability for gold farmers to function would be reduced
* It would narrow the gap between non-traders and top traders
* It would prioritize playing the game over the meta game of trading


I agree with this. Trade should be easy and limited.

Tedious and unlimited, as it is right now, feels like the absolute worst way of going about it.
- here's my sig
Currency trade is broken -when you try to choose what u have to trade,it clears everything and does a basic search of everything.

The item function is clunky and underdeveloped. Very unintuitive and such a pita to use that it's useless.

Why have affixes to choose from that an item can't have, especially without a sanity check?

This is just lazy coding.

This new search engine just reeks of half arsed lazy work.

And after a year of so called working on this... Im seriously surprised this was released and the fact that it was is just so telling as to the general attitude ggg has about this game. I would've fired anyone who took a years time to come up with this crap pile.
Theamazonbasin
I want very simple thing: offline and afk trade.

Also plz don't invent wheel again and use poe.trade style and functions search engine.
This part of what GGG said has got me worried.

"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!"

I've played in this league more than I have in any other. Not because the league was any good - it was just timing. What worries me is that GGG actually believes that situation has ever happened with any sort of way that would keep me playing this game. I can count the amount of tri-resist gear with life I've self found on 1 hand. 99.99% of the stuff I even bother picking up is a waste of time. I just cleaned out a quad stash tab full of high tier rares and found 2 things worth keeping. I don't think I've ever found a decent item for a character once in my 1000 hours of playing this game. I've found higher end items that are build enablers that i end up making a character for.

And it's not like I'm running around in mirror gear. I spend a max of 5c per slot to get into maps most of the time. I pick up more rares and ID them then is really sane (especially at the start of leagues). I've stopped that recently because the loot drops in this game are so awful that it's clearly a waste of time to pick up anything but the highest end bases and even then it's not likely to pay off.

Nerfing drops wouldn't make trading harder. It would make it more expensive and crafting more attractive.
"
Chris wrote:


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!


Are you even playing your game? :( Nobody is slowing upgrading their gear because before you get better item, you'll be already high enough level to get another upgrade. This is why people trade for leveling uniques WHICH ARE TOO CHEAP. Because you have made too many of them and their prices are too low.
THIS is why trading makes leveling up easy, and why people get little upgrades. Your loot system is broken. Trade is just way of mitigating it.

"
Chris wrote:

Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can't be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can't use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.


Getting good rares is hard enough already. UNIQUE ITEMS ARE THE PROBLEM. You should have made them rarer ages ago. Good rarer are in the right place now - great ones cost a lot, but there are some which are DEVALUED BECAUSE OF COMMON UNIQUES THAT ARE TAKING THEIR PLACE.
This has nothing to do with trade being easy.

"
Chris wrote:

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.


BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. Holy shit guys. Making the trade as stupid as it is makes the disparity huge. People who knows how to trade take all the benefits of the trade, while those don't want to (or don't know HOW) trade are being screwed over. There are dedicated flippers because people don't want to fuck around with this broken trade system full of AFKs, price fixers and other kind of nice stuff this dumb trade system brings.
The disparity is CAUSED by how bad this system is.

"
Chris wrote:

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players.


Yeah, because there are no ways of dealing with automation and bots.

I really have no more hope for PoE. Time to move, I suppose
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
https://joeduncan123.imgur.com
https://joeduncan1234.imgur.com
Last edited by Perq on Nov 6, 2017, 1:55:11 AM
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žutivrag wrote:
I see only one way for peoples who love Path of Exile to respond on this "Manifesto" and show our dedication, absolute boycott on all assets/support packs from Micro-transaction shop.


+1

Started that year ago. Was thinking to break that and buy first time support pack with 3.0 content, rlly i dont need that forum title etc, already spend few times before some bucks on tabs and skins so that was my kind of support. When I saw what we get in 3.0 LoL, crap work with too much nerf and 0 hours spent in balance, dont need to add 0 new end game content, and Harbinger league is new standard for bottom makes me left game completly.

I come back because friend linked me turmoil/mayhem events and saw this crap named manifest what makes me to not ever come back.

So conclusion is when I saw for start actual in-game offline trade system, trade is waste of time in game for me and i hate it in way how is done in PoE atm (nightmare), i want easy trade where i play game and have fun, so if i have something or need something i sell/buy without to much hassle, that is only way to my wallet again because I don't support procrastination.

If Chris and GGG want to continue with already broken trade mechanics in game, where trade is hard (and you need 5 background application to properly trade) then PoE is not game for me anymore.
After all that requirements is what made that gap in player wealth because most of us didnt come to do job PoE we come to play one online ARPG and only application and tool for play what include trade need to be client application "PathOfExile.exe" no some web pages, automated scripts etc.

Lets trade be easy and something what fit with description "Online ARPG", so PoE can be true online ARPG fun to play.
Last edited by Coolmer on Nov 6, 2017, 3:48:32 AM
One more thing to clarify: I will not spend single dollar on PoE until we got offline and afk trade enabled. This is basic stuff, if you want respect and profits plz respect quality of my gaming time.

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