Trade Manifesto

"

Azorien wrote:

How about have a 1 minute purchase cooldown in automated Trade House?

"

Sarno wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

As mentioned in today's news post, we are changing the "Online API" to expose the AFK status of players. This API is currently consumed by community trade sites, so it's easy for them to add functionality to allow users to filter searches to just online players who are currently available to trade. In addition, players in DND mode are no longer shown as online, because it would be impossible for them to receive any messages sent to them.

Any plans in future to also expose the League they're currently playing in?

Messaging people who are in Standard / on an alt in SSF is a bit of a pain. :/

"

ACGIFT wrote:

The minor change has been needed for at least a couple years now, (I'm aware of price-fixing rackets being rampant at least since 2015) but to be honest, this whole manifesto comes across as... Kinda winded... And also showing that perhaps GGG might benefit from seeking further playing experience with game economies.

"

Chris wrote:

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?

There's going to be debate over anything, at minimum, because there can be a difference in opinion, and there's few things people hate more than others DARING think differently from their own group's shared mentality.

One thing to be cautious of is that it's all too easy to mistake louder voices for being more correct. Because humans are creatures that like to group together and defend their groups, it's important for any developer or content creator to realize that a lot of those defending them aren't doing so out of logic, but simple loyalty, and will change their tune instantly should their "leader" make an about-face on their decision.

Read: a lot of the folk backing the "status quo" on trading will back whatever decision GGG makes. This is what we saw, for instance, back pre-2.0 when Desync was a huge thing; there were TONS of fans eager to make up excuses for its presence, and agree to developer claims that it was "necessary." Then 2.0.0 came out, GGG announced the effective end to it, and the very same players did a 180° to praise the new status quo.

"

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!

While NOMINALLY true, this is problematic on multiple levels, actually:

• The "longer journey to gear a character up," has another, one-word term: grind. While it might be considered fun on-paper, for those of us actually playing the endgame, it's a "necessary chore" at best.
  
  
• Endgame character progression has always been about trading. You'd be conceited to think that, in the exact same document where you stress how important you considered trading as central to th game, you bemoan that trading would DARE supplant other mechanics as a means of progression. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either PoE is all about trading, and trading is the most important advancement mechanic, or trading isn't available as much.
  
  
• No, for anyone who's actually played the endgame, it's safe to say that a monster is NOT going to drop something that improves your character. Rare loot hasn't been relevant since 2.0.0 came out, item filters became a thing, and Dominus farming CEASED to be a thing. Anyone can watch anyone play either in-party or in-stream, and notice that it's standard to just ignore rare items, even if they are, say, iLvl 84-86 on basetypes like Astral Plate, Harbinger Bows, etc. Grinding loot is not a motivator. There's a REASON we only talk of "exalts-per-hour/day." The expectation is that we might find one of a few possible drops that commoditized enough to TRADE 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.

• This is actually a classic fallacy of "affirming the consequent." While it is definitely true that, if you restrict trade, you must allow for better drops to compensate. However, it is fallacious to assume the inverse is equally true: that if you make trade easier, you must make drops worse.
  
  
• There's a confusion of "challenge" and "difficulty" there; "Challenge" means it's a matter of player skill, while "difficulty" merely implies some form of wall, either an arbitrary block (such as a buildwall) that stops one, or just a wall to scale. (through grind) As the latter ("difficulty") has very much been overtaking the former ("challenge") as the primary obstacle in Path of Exile, and increasing number of players are wising up to the difference!
  
  
• As implied above, right now there's not much challenge to be had in Path of Exile, but there's a LOT of various difficulty bumps/walls to be found, that have only been exasperated by a lot of the new content introduced with 3.0.0. While difficulty may achieve the aim to slow player progression, it does so at the expense of their enjoyment, rather than adding to it as challenge does. Hence, it also increases the rate that a player's response to being slowed/stopped is to just give up entirely, rather than gird themselves to push back.
  
  
• The part that makes a difference between SSF and non-SSF, and WHY the inverse assumption made can't work, is the concept that individual items are NOT universally useful, by your own design: Both a Kaom's and a Shav's are rather nice drops, (even post-3.0, when nerfs made Shav's lose a lot of worth) but one cannot simply say one is outright better than the other, because there's zero known viables builds that could have anything CLOSE to comparable use for both.
  
  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. 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. By contrast, the core concept that makes a market economy work is the concept of equivalent values. pre-3.0, it was widely accepted that a Kaom's and a Shav's were both equally nice overall, even if any specific character would only place ANY value at ALL in one or the other. In fact, this means that virtually ALL uniques have SOME value; even a common leveling unique can often fetch an Orb of Alchemy.
  
  Hence, the inverse logic fails here because one of the shifts doesn't exist: SSF means items have their values ELIMINATED ENTIRELY, while easier trade simply adjusts values. There's no mathematical counterpart to oppose going to zero, simply because, well, you cannot divide by zero.
  
  

"

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.

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.

This is also incorrect, because it follows the wrong line of reasoning, and conflates "more trading" with "more VALUE gained per trade." This is very much false:

• While it's true most players don't engage in trade, there was absolutely zero thought given in the above writing as to WHY that might be the case. A simple survey would show the real reason: it's too painful. I've managed to get a number of friends I know from outside this game to play, and NONE of them engage in trading on a level remotely close to what I do. Every last one tells me that dealing with running a search, (and often having to modify/refine the search repeatedly) and spamming dozens of players to find one who'll actually respond and trade to be more trouble than they wish to go through with; at times, they'll ask me to acquire/sell items for them, but usually, they just plain don't try. As a result, they just plain play the game less, because trading is effectively mandatory for endgame content.
  
  
• On the other side of the logic, it assumes that easier trading would make the payoff for investing time into the trade metagame would increase. This is patently false, because it fails to understand an economic concept known as "opportunity cost."
  
  The logic presented in this claim assumes that if a system allowed players (for example) twice as many trades per hour as a prior system, they would see twice the profit, because it assumes the profit per trade would be the same. But this fails to account for this meaning that the ENTIRE SYSTEM would see twice as many trades going on that same hour. This means competition, and fewer unexploited opportunities... An example would include un-met demands made by shifting values in currency, that are a key to a currency flipper's livelihood.
  
  The truth is that easier trade would actually PUNISH flippers and scammers, as their entire operation relies on there being a HIGH "opportunity cost;" because trading is a pain to sort through, it often MIGHT be easier to pay a big premium to conduct business through Trade chat.

So no, the claim presented by GGG here didn't really offer much beyond an implication that their more dedicated players are somehow people out of touch with the rest of the userbase.

"

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.

I do apologize, since I'm not TRYING to be mean, but... This paragraph actually made me laugh:

• This paragraph contradicts the whole point of the post; the slight API improvement to help weed out AFK/DND sellers does, in fact, make it easier... And simultaneously reduces abuse.
  
• Bots have the advantage of never getting tired, and could already simultaneously spam dozens/hundreds of other players at once.
  
• Bots have been able to talk to and trade with players for a while now.
  
• In short, as I mentioned above about "opportunity cost," the current system's intentionally labourious and frustrating setup actually EMPOWERS bot-users and other exploiters.

"

Chris wrote:

Trade in Path of Exile

From the start, we knew that Path of Exile needed the ability to trade items and that we had to be careful not to make it too easy. We had seen what happened in other Action RPGs when characters could be upgraded trivially. We added trade chat and a secure player-to-player trade screen so that people could negotiate transactions and complete them without counterparty risk.

I'd like to see an example of one of these cases of what you guys had "seen;" after all, you're the guys that weren't even aware whatsoever of Ultima Online's vendor system until a couple years ago.

Also, that's a bit too much credit to take for basically just copy-pasting Diablo 2's trading windows with only mild improvements.

"

Chris wrote:

So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade. This remaining frustration is the only thing standing in the way of trades being basically instant. While we understand that this sounds like a positive thing, we are very concerned regarding what will happen if that does eventuate. We have to prioritise the long-term health of Path of Exile.

The long-term health is based upon how much people are frustrated, actually. There's a good reason why Path of Exile experiences a steeper drop-off after each major release than other games. It's pretty damning evidence that "an hour added is an hour added" is a really poor philosophy.

"

Chris wrote:

We officially added support for a Solo, Self-Found mode in Content Update 2.6.0 (Breach League).

2.6.0, as I recall, was Legacy league; Breach was Update 2.5.0. Though yes, it was 2.6.0 when SSF was added.

"

ACGIFT wrote:

The minor change has been needed for at least a couple years now, (I'm aware of price-fixing rackets being rampant at least since 2015) but to be honest, this whole manifesto comes across as... Kinda winded... And also showing that perhaps GGG might benefit from seeking further playing experience with game economies.

"

Chris wrote:

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?

There's going to be debate over anything, at minimum, because there can be a difference in opinion, and there's few things people hate more than others DARING think differently from their own group's shared mentality.

One thing to be cautious of is that it's all too easy to mistake louder voices for being more correct. Because humans are creatures that like to group together and defend their groups, it's important for any developer or content creator to realize that a lot of those defending them aren't doing so out of logic, but simple loyalty, and will change their tune instantly should their "leader" make an about-face on their decision.

Read: a lot of the folk backing the "status quo" on trading will back whatever decision GGG makes. This is what we saw, for instance, back pre-2.0 when Desync was a huge thing; there were TONS of fans eager to make up excuses for its presence, and agree to developer claims that it was "necessary." Then 2.0.0 came out, GGG announced the effective end to it, and the very same players did a 180° to praise the new status quo.

"

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!

While NOMINALLY true, this is problematic on multiple levels, actually:

• The "longer journey to gear a character up," has another, one-word term: grind. While it might be considered fun on-paper, for those of us actually playing the endgame, it's a "necessary chore" at best.
  
  
• Endgame character progression has always been about trading. You'd be conceited to think that, in the exact same document where you stress how important you considered trading as central to th game, you bemoan that trading would DARE supplant other mechanics as a means of progression. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either PoE is all about trading, and trading is the most important advancement mechanic, or trading isn't available as much.
  
  
• No, for anyone who's actually played the endgame, it's safe to say that a monster is NOT going to drop something that improves your character. Rare loot hasn't been relevant since 2.0.0 came out, item filters became a thing, and Dominus farming CEASED to be a thing. Anyone can watch anyone play either in-party or in-stream, and notice that it's standard to just ignore rare items, even if they are, say, iLvl 84-86 on basetypes like Astral Plate, Harbinger Bows, etc. Grinding loot is not a motivator. There's a REASON we only talk of "exalts-per-hour/day." The expectation is that we might find one of a few possible drops that commoditized enough to TRADE 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.

• This is actually a classic fallacy of "affirming the consequent." While it is definitely true that, if you restrict trade, you must allow for better drops to compensate. However, it is fallacious to assume the inverse is equally true: that if you make trade easier, you must make drops worse.
  
  
• There's a confusion of "challenge" and "difficulty" there; "Challenge" means it's a matter of player skill, while "difficulty" merely implies some form of wall, either an arbitrary block (such as a buildwall) that stops one, or just a wall to scale. (through grind) As the latter ("difficulty") has very much been overtaking the former ("challenge") as the primary obstacle in Path of Exile, and increasing number of players are wising up to the difference!
  
  
• As implied above, right now there's not much challenge to be had in Path of Exile, but there's a LOT of various difficulty bumps/walls to be found, that have only been exasperated by a lot of the new content introduced with 3.0.0. While difficulty may achieve the aim to slow player progression, it does so at the expense of their enjoyment, rather than adding to it as challenge does. Hence, it also increases the rate that a player's response to being slowed/stopped is to just give up entirely, rather than gird themselves to push back.
  
  
• The part that makes a difference between SSF and non-SSF, and WHY the inverse assumption made can't work, is the concept that individual items are NOT universally useful, by your own design: Both a Kaom's and a Shav's are rather nice drops, (even post-3.0, when nerfs made Shav's lose a lot of worth) but one cannot simply say one is outright better than the other, because there's zero known viables builds that could have anything CLOSE to comparable use for both.
  
  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. 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. By contrast, the core concept that makes a market economy work is the concept of equivalent values. pre-3.0, it was widely accepted that a Kaom's and a Shav's were both equally nice overall, even if any specific character would only place ANY value at ALL in one or the other. In fact, this means that virtually ALL uniques have SOME value; even a common leveling unique can often fetch an Orb of Alchemy.
  
  Hence, the inverse logic fails here because one of the shifts doesn't exist: SSF means items have their values ELIMINATED ENTIRELY, while easier trade simply adjusts values. There's no mathematical counterpart to oppose going to zero, simply because, well, you cannot divide by zero.
  
  

"

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.

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.

This is also incorrect, because it follows the wrong line of reasoning, and conflates "more trading" with "more VALUE gained per trade." This is very much false:

• While it's true most players don't engage in trade, there was absolutely zero thought given in the above writing as to WHY that might be the case. A simple survey would show the real reason: it's too painful. I've managed to get a number of friends I know from outside this game to play, and NONE of them engage in trading on a level remotely close to what I do. Every last one tells me that dealing with running a search, (and often having to modify/refine the search repeatedly) and spamming dozens of players to find one who'll actually respond and trade to be more trouble than they wish to go through with; at times, they'll ask me to acquire/sell items for them, but usually, they just plain don't try. As a result, they just plain play the game less, because trading is effectively mandatory for endgame content.
  
  
• On the other side of the logic, it assumes that easier trading would make the payoff for investing time into the trade metagame would increase. This is patently false, because it fails to understand an economic concept known as "opportunity cost."
  
  The logic presented in this claim assumes that if a system allowed players (for example) twice as many trades per hour as a prior system, they would see twice the profit, because it assumes the profit per trade would be the same. But this fails to account for this meaning that the ENTIRE SYSTEM would see twice as many trades going on that same hour. This means competition, and fewer unexploited opportunities... An example would include un-met demands made by shifting values in currency, that are a key to a currency flipper's livelihood.
  
  The truth is that easier trade would actually PUNISH flippers and scammers, as their entire operation relies on there being a HIGH "opportunity cost;" because trading is a pain to sort through, it often MIGHT be easier to pay a big premium to conduct business through Trade chat.

So no, the claim presented by GGG here didn't really offer much beyond an implication that their more dedicated players are somehow people out of touch with the rest of the userbase.

"

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.

I do apologize, since I'm not TRYING to be mean, but... This paragraph actually made me laugh:

• This paragraph contradicts the whole point of the post; the slight API improvement to help weed out AFK/DND sellers does, in fact, make it easier... And simultaneously reduces abuse.
  
• Bots have the advantage of never getting tired, and could already simultaneously spam dozens/hundreds of other players at once.
  
• Bots have been able to talk to and trade with players for a while now.
  
• In short, as I mentioned above about "opportunity cost," the current system's intentionally labourious and frustrating setup actually EMPOWERS bot-users and other exploiters.

"

Chris wrote:

Trade in Path of Exile

From the start, we knew that Path of Exile needed the ability to trade items and that we had to be careful not to make it too easy. We had seen what happened in other Action RPGs when characters could be upgraded trivially. We added trade chat and a secure player-to-player trade screen so that people could negotiate transactions and complete them without counterparty risk.

I'd like to see an example of one of these cases of what you guys had "seen;" after all, you're the guys that weren't even aware whatsoever of Ultima Online's vendor system until a couple years ago.

Also, that's a bit too much credit to take for basically just copy-pasting Diablo 2's trading windows with only mild improvements.

"

Chris wrote:

So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade. This remaining frustration is the only thing standing in the way of trades being basically instant. While we understand that this sounds like a positive thing, we are very concerned regarding what will happen if that does eventuate. We have to prioritise the long-term health of Path of Exile.

The long-term health is based upon how much people are frustrated, actually. There's a good reason why Path of Exile experiences a steeper drop-off after each major release than other games. It's pretty damning evidence that "an hour added is an hour added" is a really poor philosophy.

"

Chris wrote:

We officially added support for a Solo, Self-Found mode in Content Update 2.6.0 (Breach League).

2.6.0, as I recall, was Legacy league; Breach was Update 2.5.0. Though yes, it was 2.6.0 when SSF was added.