Trade Manifesto

LiquidSnakeBlue, D3 was broken regardless of an auction house. PoE could succeed with a proper trade system where garbage games like D3 were bound to fail anyway.

Also, easy to bot system? The crap do you think happens in the CURRENT system? Bots everywhere! The system isn't perfect. Maybe it's perfect for a small minority of players, but it screws over the average player so much. It's a terrible system and needs to be replaced. This isn't 2002 anymore.

Theis is complete nonsense, let me break it down for you. Once I an done pointing out all the obvious holes in your logic I will offer some simple suggestions that would be perfectly viable solutions to the problems you are claiming.

"Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!"

No, just no. This is not how this works AT ALL. Nobody is motivated to play by monsters dropping gear they want to wear unless they play SSF. Players in trade league are motivated by monsters dropping items they can SELL to BUY items they can wear.

"Easy trade means reducing drop rates"

No it doesnt. No other game needs to reduce drop rates because "trading is too easy" and neither does PoE. Supply and demand does not simply fall apart just because the supply can get where it needs to go. For that matter, drop rates are ALREADY so abysmally low in this game that trading is critically necessary and SSF players are strictly limited on the build options available to them as a result. If you are keeping trade deliberately bad so you dont have to use abysmal drop rates, why did you go and use abysmal drop rates anyways?

"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."

Ya, and thats because you made the trading system so horrible most players dont even know how. Then when they find out that the trading system is handled either through an API or a freaking website they say, "uh, nty, thats stupid", get frustrated when they hit a hard wall because they refuse to deal with this garbage trade system, then quit the game, often forever. Nobody who doesn't trade plays the game like that because they just dont wanna trade at all, they play the game like that because you guys made trading an inaccessible nightmare. I have met more people that refuse to play this game until it has easy trade then I have met people who continued to play this game after finding out how absolutely asinine the trading system is. I am half way between myself. I play the game and engage in trading because I managed to navigate this mess, but every time I am forced to stop playing to do trading for hours because I need a niche item it frustrates and annoys me. Eventually that frustration builds and I just decide, "f this nonsense, this game sucks" and stop playing for months. Then I come back and its rinse and repeat.

"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 (now Divine orbs, pretty important to clarify here) 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."

This would not be the case if trading wasn't an anti-fun time wasting mess. If trading was accessible that gap would close and more players would actually get to see the whole game instead of being hard-capped half way through because trading is absolutely required to progress (without enough prior research to be able to claim a PHD in PoEology) but isn't accessible to them.

"Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it"

And are you going to explain to me how exactly it is that your ideal system is one where most players never get to see half or more of the atlas? The fact that being deterred from trading makes the average player unable to progress and thus unable to ever experience the lion share of the games content is a problem that needs to be fixed. If game balance is such a mess that players are blasting through endgame content at light speed and getting bored too fast then maybe you should address THAT problem by actually balancing overpowered builds and items when you discover them instead of walling off half the game to players who arent willing to put up with your broken trading system while the ones who are willing to suffer through it (yes, SUFFER through it) get to continue to break the game and get bored quickly?

"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."

And what about the MASSIVE group that you and all your sponsored streamers constantly promote that holds exactly that power because they stepped up and used your API combined with Discord to create a workaround that makes this garbage trade system actually workable at all? They have created a fast trade system where you have failed to do so and as a result they now have complete control of the games economy. What about THOSE economic consequences caused by your refusal to do the very thing they did? Why is it that you cant just implement some of the same kinds of systems used in other MMO's to curb botting and market manipulation? Why are THOSE economic consequences not ok but the economic consequences of the owners of a Discord server having a stranglehold over the games economy are perfectly fine to you? If you added a normal in-game auction house system like every other game has and does just fine with then these peoples Darth Vader force choke would lose much of its power because players would no longer depend on them for trading and would no longer be at their mercy. Did you know people follow TFT's rules better then they follow your TOS? This group is effectively rewriting the code of conduce for YOUR game because you refuse to take the necessary action that would take that power away from them.


Now for the simple answers.

There is no reason the current system needs to go away. To quote an old taco shell commercial, "Porque no los dos?" Add an auction house system and limit the number of trades you can do through that system per whatever time frame you decide is appropriate. If we can only buy and/or sell a fixed number of items in a given day or per hour using the easy trade system then that solves botting by hard capping any bot that tries to use the new auction house. Bots will be forced to keep doing what they're doing now because they will be hard locked out of the new system.

You want item acquisition to take time? Well guess what, getting currency takes time. If you apply a tangible trade cost to the auction house like literally every other game with this system does then you can set a fixed cost for item acquisition, (which most games do as a percentage of the value of the sale to compensate for differences in player knowledge and capability, stronger players will pay more trade tax because they will buy and sell pricier items) because as it stands now we have a cost of trading in the form of currency that is not only relative to each players capability, but has a STEEP element of randomness applied to the cost on top of that. As an example I was talking to someone in general 5 earlier and they put it like this. They went to buy a cheap unique for their build that there were HUNDREDS of listings for, it costs them 20 Chaos Orbs, except it didn't. The actual cost of that item was 20 DIVINE Orbs (The new replacement Exalted orb) because getting anyone to even respond to their trade request for an item that cheap took them half an hour. Half an hour for ME is only about an extra 20 Chaos, but this person makes 40 Divines per hour, so for them to WASTE half an hour being FORCED to STOP PLAYING THE GAME to obtain a cheap item that they should have no business struggling to obtain (but do thanks to this broken trading system) means the cost of that trade was 20 Divine Orbs even though the player selling them the item only made 20 Chaos orbs on the deal. All that just because they wanted to try a new build they came up with. (which if you ask me is the REAL point of PoE and is its greatest strength, experimenting with cool creative new build ideas, and those who play it for THAT reason aren't gonna get bored and move on just cause they killed uber shaper once this league) I get wanting trading to have a cost, but the cost needs to be consistent, and a cost THAT steep on a CHEAP item is just absurd.

Please stop disrespecting your players by feeding them this nonsense, because at this point it just feels like gaslighting. There is no reason for this, there is no excuse. PoE is the ONLY game whose dev team seems to think that a feature as basic as an auction house would somehow obliterate the games economy. It wouldn't. You know it, I know it, most of us know it and we are all SCREAMING to be allowed to play the game instead of being forced to stop playing the game for sometimes hours on end just because you refuse to admit that not adding easy trade was a BIG MISTAKE and is the very thing keeping you from having easily twice the audience size. Frustration should NEVER be used as a balancing tool in a video game. If you want to make a game better, you make better features, not deliberately worse ones. There are ways you could add easy trade to the game without destroying it that don't involve deliberate inconvenience.

Hey GGG, what would happend if you had open trade event for the temporary league after 2 months had passed since the start for items that have been sitting in trade for 2 months? In other words, would it work if we had automatic trade, but only for temporary leagues for items that are equal or more than 2 months old? I could see it giving us a chance to find forgotten treasures, for example some common unique item with exceptional corrupt implicits.

You could also experiment with this thing by changing how the open trade works in each league. One league could have an auction house npc, while another has a dealer npc who takes a large item accusation price for the trade deal.

I fully agree that the only thing that should take time for trading is gathering the necessary currency. Thats hard enough with the abysmal drop rates.

An additional sales tax and a limit on trades per hour (5 or 10?) and all the problems are solved.

No reduction in drop rates necessary.

Regarding low drop rates another thought I had:

I can totally see myself trying SSF - UNTIL I find my first divine orb. Those things would be REALLY useful in crafting, but with the ultra low drop rates I would never use one for this purpose, so I guess I'd go back to trade league the very moment the first divine drops (usually in a heist). Using a divine orb for crafting would be the same as using a 500 Euro bank note to lighten a cigar or something.

Overall I'd say that the current system for trading in the context of the horrible drop rates and SSF is totally wrong.

I know that there is always the naysaying regarding "bots" and all that, but this is just a minor issue that can be solved technically.

I refuse to comment on the fallacious "items matter" "argument" because just reading this makes me lose 50-60 points of IQ.

"Gaslighting" is a good word to describe it. Sounds harsh, I know, but telling people that doing something that causes discomfort "for their own good" IS one of the possible ways to commit this.

I stand by it:

This game needs a comfortable, reasonable auction house with additional anti-bot measures in place. It would boost the game immensely and should be seen as the best possible QoL improvement.

Anti-bot measures I can think of:

* Sales tax
* Limited number of sales
* Limited duration for items on sale (3 days? 1 week?)
* IP based heuristics for trading
* Enforcing anti-bot rules with a zero tolerance policy
* Setting reasonable minimum prices for items by doing the same thing governments do to combat sports betting: they put a tax on the on the stake, so accumulating very small "sure bets" is not possible anymore (thereby reducing addiction by a lot, which is not the goal here, but the mechanism is the same) - think of it as some kind of "Tobin tax", which is a very reasonable mechanism that could be used to protect real economy from financial market fluctuations as well
* Log out users hard if they only stand / walk around in a town or their hideout for longer than, say, 15 minutes without doing anything meaningful (swapping gear, crafting, trading)
* Allow access to higher end trading only when certain account prerequisites (example: can only trade items worth more than 10c if player has at least once reached level 80?) are met
* Provide full market based currency conversion via NPCs (example: lets have an NPC in our hideout who can convert divines into chaos orbs for a fluctuating rate based on what the market does) - this would take A LOT of the power away from power traders, both human and bot

I haven't played since Heist—the reason because trading sucks ass.
And I read the manifesto, and I do understand the intention.
And I also read the counterarguments many players have made and mostly agree with them.

On the bottom line, I still have to trade in this game, and it's not something I want to do so I'll play other games in the meantime.

"

tuangd wrote:

I haven't played since Heist—the reason because trading sucks ass.
And I read the manifesto, and I do understand the intention.
And I also read the counterarguments many players have made and mostly agree with them.

On the bottom line, I still have to trade in this game, and it's not something I want to do so I'll play other games in the meantime.

I totally understand. The half way between "trade is good, but lets quasi-force players into a semi-SSF-style of playing by making trading a huge annoyance" is really bad.

Correct solution:

Either a) make it an SSF game with appropriate (100x) increased drop rates OR b) make trading a breeze by having an AH.

Everything else is like being a vegan who eats a tasty Doner Kebab (my favorite dish) everytime they had a drink too much.

I totaly agree with a lof of users.
Right now we have the worst of both worlds and it is very frustrating.
I would love a trial league/event for an actionhouse.
Maybe it wont change in POE-1 but I hope that they will make it easier to trade in POE2

I'm sure my feedback doesn't really mean anything but I quit playing maybe 3 or 4 years ago due to the current trade system. I used to buy a supporter pack every league too but I just couldn't deal with the archaic trading system anymore. The system just makes playing the game feel like work instead of being fun and ironically pushes people towards engaging in rmt so you can bypass trying to sell your loot. If POE2 is using the same system I don't think I'll be playing it either unfortunately.

Read it completely a few minutes ago. Sure, having a solid stand in your game design is a good thing. But this whole post gives off exact same energy as "You don't want that. You THINK you do, but you don't."

I have things I disagree with but I guess most of what I had in mind was said by other people above me. I just wished I don't have to spend an hour trying to trade items.

When we fix price fixers?

Can we have some kind of system, like, if u dont sell the item for like 3 wisps, u get out from market with a cd?

something?

Price fixers are dominating market right know, there is guild with 15 20 people price fixing a item.