Trade Manifesto

Nice manifesto as always, thanks. Nothing i didn't know here but still interesting for anyone to read.

What a great addition to the game!
The afk and dnd feature is very, very welcome.
But what about people being in different leagues?
I spend so much time telling people I'm in a different league. On the other hand I personally like logging over if the trade request is worth it.
We should have an option to choose if we want to do league or standard trades only or get both results.

Well said Chris, this explains very well why I'm strongly against an AH. I imagine I'll be linking this in the not too distant future when fools ask for an AH again.

Wow thanks for giving us exactly no trade improvements. Could have had someone extend the API for AFK/DND in a day rather than supposedly spend 1 year of resources to build another alternative to something we already had.

Also,

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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.

Really? Even if I believed it, I wonder why...

If you're that scared of people leaving your game early in leagues after making a few trades, maybe it's time to look at the endgame and what you can do to improve player retention.

Hey Chris, how do you feel about the 180° attitude flip the community has had over the years regarding trade?

I remember in beta Auction House was literally satan and mentioning it would get you murdered on the forums. Now everybody is clamouring for an auction house

yeah, all good except we need this to be in-game. alt-tabbing to do in-game stuff is just plain ridiculous.

and honestly I don't agree with most of your points about easy trade. the only reason I don't do upgrades gear while leveling is because thinking of having to use the current system makes me sick to my stomach.

as much as bots are a legit issue making trades at least half-automatic, with required confirmation from the seller or something so that we don't have to suffer.

This whole fucking post is absolute atrocious. You dont even try to hide you fuck up player and force them to suffer hours of intently shitty designed trade system. Your whole team are incredibly competent experts with thousands hours of experience and deepest game knowledge. You single-handedly took the new rock bottom that EA, Ubisft and Blizzard trying to achieve for years. Congrats.

This is exciting news. I do have a few concerns:

• AFK status updates are pretty laggy. If I change my status and refresh a searched item in my stash, it takes several minutes for the web page to reflect my new status.
• This does make it harder to trade when someone is alt-tabbed to another program (Netflix, whatever) but is actually available for prompt trades. One could argue that this prevents big players from trading too much, but it'll do the opposite. Big traders will just make scripts to prevent their client from going into AFK mode. It'd be nice if there was a way to differentiate between someone who is really AFK and someone who is just alt-tabbed away.
• At the start of every league since the API came out, it has had severe lagging issues. Separately, for most recent leagues, poe.trade has also had its own additional level of lag beyond the river's lag. Will enough server resources be given to this new trade site to make it still work during the busy surges? When the news post came out, the new trade site was already very slow.

Thanks for the insight, I agree with most of it. I think trade is at a pretty good spot as-is, especially compared to years ago.

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jerkmcgee wrote:

I don't think it is very helpful to throw around phrases like 'easy trade' without explicitly defining what that means. "Easy" to one person means entirely a different thing to another.

"Easy Trade" basically means the amount of time/effort/energy that goes into any given trade. if it takes you all of twenty seconds to filter for your item, find exactly what you need, pay the listed fee, then grab the item out of the aether, that's Easy Trade. And it comes with the pitfalls GGG mentioned.

Trading for items, in the system GGG has built and which they laid out in this Manifesto, needs to require a specific level of time and/or frustration based on how powerful/desirable that item is. That's part of what gives the item value and makes engaging in trade worthwhile at all. Games with a free-and-easy trade system have to be balanced and itemized completely differently than a game with no trading at all, or with a kludgy half-baked trade system the developer sorta had to play catch-up to and didn't anticipate or desire (i.e. Path of Exile).

Trading being Annoying is what allows people to build trade strategies in the first place, rather than just vomiting every single drop they get onto the market for an alt and letting time do their work. It's lousy for folks like (presumably) you and I who blow goats at the "selling" part of trading, but without it GGG's system falls apart completely for us.