The trade system is so BROKEN!

For real lets talk about D4 and what happens when you pander to player demands some more:

Remember when the entire idea of D4 was to have lively "open world" zones and dynamic scaling was needed so you could be level 15 anywhere or level 70 anywhere?

Then they made Helltides "always on" somewhere in the world because players want it.

And now the game may as well NOT HAVE OPEN WORLD ZONES. They've quite literally turned the entire world into: "the zone that has helltide". There's essentially no reason to ever be running through the world. You can be instantly in a NM dungeon or instantly in a helltide.

This is what pandering to popular reddit threads gets a game. I really hope POE2 can be great but without someone like Chris to say "Nah we're just never going to do that because its opposite of our core philosophy" its going to devolves real fast.

Honestly I see all this pressure to make its combat "faster and more screen explody" and I already expect POE2 to devolve into a clear speed meta mess, there's almost no hope in my mind that it escapes it. They keep talking about it and each time they're a little more placating and appeasing.

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exsea wrote:

ITT: boomers normalizing scamming.

thats what you gleaned from this? I see a nuanced conversation where we acknowledge cause and effect despite some people wanting it to not be so.

If I have the choice between POE's amount of "scam-ability" (say what you will about how much that really is. I've literally never once been scammed in POE FWIW despite years playing trade league.)
or a system with instant buyout.

I'd choose option 1, because Option 2 will inevitably worsen POE's already bad "ground loot problem". Making everything you drop EVEN LESS LIKELY to be valuable and exciting is not what I want in a ARPG that's already pretty terrible in this regard.

I've played online games since the 90's I've seen quite literally every sort of trade system. Ultima Online had (past tense) the greatest trade system compromise (which will not enirely work the same in an ARPG), Diablo 2 and POE have the second best despite obvious issues they both have.

And everything with an Auctionhouse/instant buy (outside of perma-death/HC) that I've ever seen becomes a shopping sim, with lottery ticket items that most players never see, and all other items become valueless weightless background noise. items that are not exciting to drop or find. This foreshortens the gamepolay loop and ruins those games replay value because you get BORED OF PLAYING WHEN THERE"S NO DOPAMINE HITS FROM ITEMS.

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alhazred70 wrote:

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exsea wrote:

ITT: boomers normalizing scamming.

thats what you gleaned from this? I see a nuanced conversation where we acknowledge cause and effect despite some people wanting it to not be so.

If I have the choice between POE's amount of "scam-ability" (say what you will about how much that really is. I've literally never once been scammed in POE FWIW despite years playing trade league.)
or a system with instant buyout.

I'd choose option 1, because Option 2 will inevitably worsen POE's already bad "ground loot problem". Making everything you drop EVEN LESS LIKELY to be valuable and exciting is not what I want in a ARPG that's already pretty terrible in this regard.

I've played online games since the 90's I've seen quite literally every sort of trade system. Ultima Online had (past tense) the greatest trade system compromise (which will not enirely work the same in an ARPG), Diablo 2 and POE have the second best despite obvious issues they both have.

And everything with an Auctionhouse/instant buy (outside of perma-death/HC) that I've ever seen becomes a shopping sim, with lottery ticket items that most players never see, and all other items become valueless weightless background noise. items that are not exciting to drop or find. This foreshortens the gamepolay loop and ruins those games replay value because you get BORED OF PLAYING WHEN THERE"S NO DOPAMINE HITS FROM ITEMS.

actually i dont get the "make everything less valuable" part via "option 2/instant buyouts".

i've been selling double corrupts this league. after the item listing is propogated in the system i get 2-3 whispers. the trades are fast. the limiting factor is their loading speed to get into my HO and the actual trade. i would argue its more or less instant compared to how it used to be where we needed to rely on forum listings.

when you mention ultima online etc and even diablo 3. i would actually agree things devalue FAST. but if we take d3 on release as a benchmark. there is a double edged sword effect. high value items become extremely valuable fast. while very good and decent valued items become affordable to the public.

the barrier for entry to higher difficulty is lowered when you can actually farm for upgrades and extremely valuable items will still exist.

i would also highlight that one key difference POE has going for it that games of the older years do not experience is temp leagues.

every temp leagues, things start fresh. in a fresh economy things still have value. in fact things are MORE valuable. it doesnt matter too much on instant trade. its a simple supply and demand thing.

i would say affliction can be used as a benchmark of "what if POE had instant trade", "what if things got devalued". divines went all the way down to 120c and even lower this league.

the interesting observation is that prices are adjusted. accordingly. when you compare POE to other games, you have to realize POE's economy is structured around consumable currency. there will ALWAYS be demand. the economy self balances and fixes itself within POE.

divines become easy to get? then everything becomes more valuable. mid league, exarch/eater invites/maven writs were 3-5 divs.

trade is FAST. it might as well be instant. i really think many forummers here are downplaying the significance of POE's unique consumable currency and only solely see the trade system as the biggest factor.

things value and devalue regardless of trade system used. temp leagues and consumable currency/currency sinks balance it all out.

poe has gone a long way from where it started. i would still argue that poe originally was made with standard as the main core. temp leagues were added later and were actually testing grounds for new mechanics to be added to standard/core. ggg realized not enough people were playing temp leagues, and kept adding incentives to the point that a huge chunk of players now focus on temp leagues.

why do i bring this up? making instant trade happen doesnt effect standard much. inflation has already set in. things are already devalued.

the most important thing is how instant trade effects temp leagues.

ggg's trade manifesto was to discourage trade to encourage people to play the game more.

ggg themselves designed temp league items with the intention of them being traded (charms/ultimatum) etc.

trade in temp leagues is so integral that making trade easier now actually keeps players playing the game more rather than waste their time trading.

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exsea wrote:

trade in temp leagues is so integral that making trade easier now actually keeps players playing the game more rather than waste their time trading.

I do disagree with a lot of what you wrote, but this is an EXCELLENT point and one I totally agree with.

Any chance to spend more time in-game and less time hanging out in the hideout or minimizing the game is "almost" always a GOOD thing. You just have to weigh the pros and cons.

I am all for an easier trade system, the whole "scamming is the game's fault" thing irks me, but altogether I am STILL on board for trade improvements.

An anecdote from my perspective on why I still think instant trade / auction house is a mistake: I played D3 during the AH dark ages.....I was super excited to play the game because D2 was basically the ONLY game I played for 10+ years prior. BUT...the auction house just made it too easy to instantly turn on godmode and trivialize the game. There is something about instant trade, and incredibly EASY trade, that exponentially decreases my enjoyment of the game itself. No need to farm when I can buy something 100x more powerful than anything I'll find...for next to nothing. No need to even play the game when there's no real sense of improvement because I'm stomping on everything like they are ants right from the start.

Live trade, non-instant, mild friction....has a different feel and creates a different play environment. I simply don't make the decision to buy twink gear the second I can afford it in PoE. And it is because the effort of searching for items, messaging people, and going to my hideout just isn't as valuable a use of my time as playing the actual game. However, with instant and easy trade, its like leaving free money on the table...impossible to avoid.

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exsea wrote:

actually i dont get the "make everything less valuable" part via "option 2/instant buyouts".

i've been selling double corrupts this league. after the item listing is propogated in the system i get 2-3 whispers. the trades are fast. the limiting factor is their loading speed to get into my HO and the actual trade. i would argue its more or less instant compared to how it used to be where we needed to rely on forum listings.

when you mention ultima online etc and even diablo 3.

I can't get to everything and don't necessarily agree or disagree but let me touch on the part I quote and clarify.

D2 not D3, if I said D3 my bad. Yes current POE trade is faster but D2 style trade friction was the intention for POE (if you're interested Chris Wrote a whole trade manifesto thats still on the forum) and is what I'm talking about when I say its one of the best compromises. The current POE system is still a better compromise than AH style instant buyouts though.

They are ALL compromises and the worst ones are the AH, which I've seen to be the case over and over in countless online games (mostly MMO's).

The difference between even current POE and instant buyout is actually massive at scale. You said yourself there's a propagation time (AH's tend to take a couple seconds and then instant because they're not scrapping an API every so often for new stuff). They have to be online they have to answer take a few moments to come make a trade. This difference is massive over the entire playerbase at scale.

Literally instant versus even just a couple seconds will be a huge number statistically over several hundred thousand players making thousands of trades. I'm talking about that systemic friction not the significance of that friction to a specific individual player.

This is ignoring that there's an entire sleep/login cycle where almost every traders items are not available in some cases for days weeks or leagues and yes some bots and increasingly AI scripts will ruin this but right now? We all know its not currently dominated by bots (excepting currency ofc) because this thread and a million just like it over the years CONSTANTLY tell us that Bots aren't running the item trade system of POE, REAL PEOPLE ARE. Bot's do not ignore your whispers.

This is all a matter of not letting perfect be the enemy of good. There's massively more friction even in POE's undermined API based system. There's no instant or even low friction system of trade in any RPG like game I've known of that doesn't ruin Dopamine from ground loot by undermining the perception of value of items. POE already has a culture of earning Div per hour and going shopping meta game problem. Mark my words, instant buyouts WILL make this worse and result in 1 alc and 1c items becoming 1 transmute items. it will also make the job of automating trades easier for bots.

It might even result in in 5 and 10c items becoming 1 transmute items once the automation that ruins every MMO AH digs into POE's

Anyway the best system is even a matter of a lot of debate among ARPG developers. I think both Exilecon's had panels that touched on trade but they all seem top agree that easy trade quickly makes your game a shopping sim, instead of a game about finding cool loot off slain monsters.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I do disagree with a lot of what you wrote, but this is an EXCELLENT point and one I totally agree with.

Any chance to spend more time in-game and less time hanging out in the hideout or minimizing the game is "almost" always a GOOD thing. You just have to weigh the pros and cons.

I am all for an easier trade system, the whole "scamming is the game's fault" thing irks me, but altogether I am STILL on board for trade improvements.

An anecdote from my perspective on why I still think instant trade / auction house is a mistake: I played D3 during the AH dark ages.....I was super excited to play the game because D2 was basically the ONLY game I played for 10+ years prior. BUT...the auction house just made it too easy to instantly turn on godmode and trivialize the game. There is something about instant trade, and incredibly EASY trade, that exponentially decreases my enjoyment of the game itself. No need to farm when I can buy something 100x more powerful than anything I'll find...for next to nothing. No need to even play the game when there's no real sense of improvement because I'm stomping on everything like they are ants right from the start.

Live trade, non-instant, mild friction....has a different feel and creates a different play environment. I simply don't make the decision to buy twink gear the second I can afford it in PoE. And it is because the effort of searching for items, messaging people, and going to my hideout just isn't as valuable a use of my time as playing the actual game. However, with instant and easy trade, its like leaving free money on the table...impossible to avoid.

my disagreement with you stems from the lack of automated trade. if a player manually trades another player they find in trade chat of forums, i actually agree with you. you need to take precaution and check.

however, in this day and age many players use poe website's trade function for trade. we are just one step away from automated trade. not all trade should be automated, manual trading should always exist. my argument is more on automated trade should exist and one of the many reasons is to prevent scamming. any trades done via automated trade will eliminate any notion of scams. players who are afraid of scams can avoid manual trade while those who are mature enough to check and take the risk can use the manual trade when required or if preferred.

i too have played d3 during the dark AH days. i would actually say that the issue you had was not 100% AH's fault. the way i remember it is it's d3's itemization at it's core. all the time if the item did not roll crit chance/crit multi/speed/mainstat then the item is trash.

of course you felt grinding boring. you were not picking up anything good. i remember going to hell? or was it inferno? its not balanced. it took forever to kill anything while anything slaps me a few times and i'm dead. we were all capped at level 60 but the enemies were at level 63. i tried grinding it out. killing ONE rare. took literal minute or two AND we had to worry about it not getting enraged. after i finally killed him what did i get? a bloody level 53 item which had mods worse than what i m currently wearing.

you have to remember that gear was only good if it dropped specific mods. a mod trifecta. the gear progression was basically getting the trifecta on all gear slots. then we graduate from rares to uniques/sets which also needed the trifecta.

gear simply was NOT rewarding. crafting was bare bones. there were not many avenues for goldsinks and we primarily gambled our gold away.

this is a fundamental gearing problem that existed in d3 during release. i would argue AH was actually GOOD.

for me and my friends we were WEAK. we couldnt farm in hell. but AH actually gave us an avenue for progress. we farmed gold like mad and bought our upgrades and finally we could farm hell ourselves.

but due to the nature of the items and how they dropped. any upgrades were almost always found in the AH. it was always the best option to trade for upgrades. upgrades started having steep price ramps. we graduated from using 100k gold items to 1 mill. then 10 mill then 100mil. it was the best way to progress. and this is by design.

i bet if players needed to use manual trade, it would not solve the inherent issue of getting shitty drops. nothing you dropped felt ever good. a piece of gear can remain BIS for too long until you farmed enough to buy an upgrade. you COULD get lucky but more often than not, that wil not be the case.

its weird but i would say older games like titan quest has better itemization than d3.

you mentioned about twinking. thats actually a solid issue to me. early league people are selling GOOD items for 1-2 chaos. they're starved. they want it. but once it hits mid league, many players tend to ignore trade. they listed an item for 1-2 c? good luck getting them to actually trade with you if they're earning more than that. what happens is the items become expensive to make it worth the seller's time.

as a direct result, i dont bother listing anything under 5-10c. i dont want to deal with it. if you're new and have shitty gear, you need to spend more chaos in order to buy upgrades.

a lot of our gear has value. maybe 1-2 chaos. but its still value. but we dont get any of that value because trading takes our time away from gaming. this also impacts newer/weeaker players who by luck managed to get a few c but have to farm much more to get decent gear.

my compromise for automated trade is it should be "online only automated trade" where both parties are online for it to happen.

i would also add that there are 2024 POE has too many "uninteruptable" events that warrant this automated trade.

busy in sanctum? busy doing labs? busy in delve? busy in heist? blight? even regular mapping can have engaging content that the seller could be simply too engaged to bother with a trade request.

theres also the decency aspect. i ALWAYS whisper everyone that requested an item that another bloke managed to snipe to tell them the item is sold. but sometimes it can get so overwhelming i just log out.

i would in fact argue that offline trade COULD be warranted too. sometimes during a league some bloke may sell that absolute beast of an item that you want but you dont have the currency for. you keep farming and when you have enough, the player is "last online 2 months ago" faaaarrrrrkkk. in some cases the player may have even quit the game or dont care about standard.

for sure it can be assumed that it was not mine to begin with but for sure its frustrating.

regardless of all that i would emphasize that we really cant say that the friction is what's keeping the drops valuable. perhaps the friction HELPS keep the drops valuable. but POE's itemization is very unique to the point its "one of a kind". we have no "gold". and even our "gold" has various uses for crafting and etc. the devs made many ways to balance out the economy. not only do we have currency sinks, multiple currencies we also have temp leagues. i believe it really isnt fair to compare POE to other games because of that at a surface level for sure they're all the same, but all these differences add up.

The main problem is the friction of trade hasnt stopped it from still being 10x better than self craft from an efficiency standpoint.

So move in either direction. Make the game more self-reliant.

Or stop punishing players for using the option that GGG has made more efficient.



Or do nothing, and let others learn from your mistakes (and successes, to be fair).

"

alhazred70 wrote:

Anyway the best system is even a matter of a lot of debate among ARPG developers. I think both Exilecon's had panels that touched on trade but they all seem top agree that easy trade quickly makes your game a shopping sim, instead of a game about finding cool loot off slain monsters.

i actually agree to this somewhat, but i would also say GGG themselves have molded POE to be increasingly trade centric.

we have a "gazillion" different extra mechanics. a single player should not be expected to reasonably progress in all of them in a reasonable way. there definitely are players that have the time but not all of us do.

when POE first launched league mechanics started off by adding quick to complete and self contained mechanic. the best example is ambush.

but as the years past, GGG introduced many different leagues that have their own ecosystem with very unique rewards.

it is simply not reasonable to assume everyone can do everything. first of, we have the masters. for jun, you can get items to quality 30, white sockets, and syndicate crafts. then we have niko with a huge ass mine to mine. from that mine you can get aul's which can be crucial for certain builds, as well as fossil crafting. alva provides double corruptions. einhar provides beastcrafting.

thats just the masters. we still have essence, influences, awakened gems, alternate quality crafting, synthesis base/implicits.

so where are we left at? trading. i actually would say you have many solid points, but mine is quite simple. POE is different from other arpgs or even mmorpgs. it also has so much content that trading is crucial.

market manipulation can happen and will happen. theres no avoiding it. but this is negated/slowed down by temp leagues. we cant use the same measuring stick that was introduced 10 years ago. POE now really is not POE of 10 years ago.if it was i'd be using dreamfragments in one of my ringslots.

i am biased and i definitely would want some form of automated trade. but one thing remains for certain. no matter whatever opinion/logic/reasoning i spit out here. its all for nothing as GGG isnt doing anything. i dont think they want to do anything as well at least not until poe2 is out. so either way nothing will actually change for some time. (a long timne actually lol)

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trixxar wrote:

The main problem is the friction of trade hasnt stopped it from still being 10x better than self craft from an efficiency standpoint.

So move in either direction. Make the game more self-reliant.

Or stop punishing players for using the option that GGG has made more efficient.



Or do nothing, and let others learn from your mistakes (and successes, to be fair).

this is one point i m bringing up. theres way too many things that a solo player cant do alone efficiently. trade is kinda compulsory for majority of the players.

but i wont say its a "learn from mistake" sort of thing. its more of GGG needs to just wake up and realize POE now is not POE of 10 years ago and start evolving their systems together rather than just leaving it stuck because of an ancient trading manifesto that no longer reflects today's standards