Trade Manifesto

"

Prostitute4Money wrote:

"

John_Kacey wrote:

Hi, interesting read.

As a player who has traded for 14+ years in WoW, Rift, ESO, and the D3 Gold Auction House (never made it into the D3 Real Money Auction House), I have a fondness for trading. Not to get rich, but to get some better equipment. One reason: Example: I started playing D3 on launch day, and it was 11 months later when I found my first Legendary (I think this equals your Unique level). I'm retired and played that game almost all day and night. Obviously, their drop-rate left a lot to be desired lol. NOTE: I got my first Unique in this game, an amulet, on my fourth day of playing.

I've only been playing PoE for about two weeks, and am really enjoying it.

I understand your reason for not having an auction house, but like to pass some info on to you. As I'm getting more comfortable with my characters, I can spend more time reading the chat, and noticed the past 3 days that several players made comments about the inability to sell/buy stuff. The reason was that the players selling things are not in the Standard league (I'm playing standard only). Comments such as, "I sent a note to 25 players and not one replied to me." The last three or four players sent between 23 to 25 notes out. I don't know exactly how it works, but I guess those players have to leave wherever they are and come into the standard league, and they're just not willing to do that. So, trade in standard seems to be almost non-existent.

I think if we could solve this problem, and with your continuing support we may be able to do that, it may get easier to trade with others.

Regards,

KC

Players who start new league forget to make their tabs from previous league non public, thus it seems they still want to sell those items.
Trying to buy anything in standard in the first month of new league is very hard. You better ask in global and add friends. Chance is, dedicated std player has 2 copies of every unique already (like me).

Plus, the auction house in D3 was a big failure and got removed in the 2.0 patch, which included a full redesign of how loot works. Part of the problem was that the low drop chances combinded with easy trading ruined the feeling of looting items making it less rewarding. Many (but not all) people in this genre dislike such mechanics. GGG is fully aware of this and even introduced the solo-self-found option to support this group of players disliking the trade option.

WoW trade is not close to be comparable with PoE trade because WoW makes massive use of character/player bound items which PoE does not. Plus, WoW is a game of a different genre than PoE. Don't mix MMO with ARPG when it comes to trading. This mistake was made once by D3 and we all know how it ended.

I appreciate that GGG is aware of these effects around trading and is not willing to repeat mistakes made by others before easily.
Trading is fully optional in PoE and for that reason not made easy but supported in some limited ways. You may say that it is a fragile compromise for all kind of players we have in PoE. Though, every change requires much care and some sacrific from both, the traders and the solo-self-found-players (and everyone in between).
IMHO any change to the current situation has a high potential risk of breaking the game in the one or other way. I like PoE because you can play it in so many ways without caring about all the other possible ways. It is like a "sandbox" for ARPG and this makes it a unique gem in a genre laking of new ideas and just trying to copying the Diablo-series. In no other genre you see so many reference to existing games when it comes to explain how a game is like or not. In its early days PoE got the lable "how D3 should have been". Today it is a reference of its own.

If you want to trade a lot, check out the trading site out there. I never use them but hey ... this game is designed to be played in your own way.
Welcome to PoE! Enjoy exploring the game and have fun. :)

"

Synopse wrote:

Trading is fully optional in PoE and for that reason not made easy but supported in some limited ways.

Yet GGG states:

"

Chris wrote:

Trade is Important.

And their reasoning is completely off. There's no easy trade because of the big difference in wealth between heavy traders and low traders. And thus heavy traders will be able to buy all the top gear for their characters.

Well, they can do that anyway, easy trade or not! Easy trade isn't going to change much for the heavy traders. Yet if trade was easier, more people would trade and/or trade more.

I for one don't sell stuff because I only play a few hours a week and don't want to spend them going back to my hideout every time to sell something. So yes, easier trade would mean I would put items up for trade and therefore gather more wealth.

A lot of builds require specific (kinds of) gear. The chance of finding them are low, so trading is required in most cases. On the other hand, a lot of good items cost a lot, more wealth than most casual players would find (without selling items themselves).

I don't mind the current way to buy items. Contact a player, visit hideout, trade.
But for me to sell items, it's too cumbersome and intrusive. I don't want to spend my limited time trading, I want to actually play the game. And GGG sometimes seems to forget that!

The Xbox version clearly shows that GGG's vision of trade is completely twisted. It's making trade difficult just to make it difficult, without actually thinking about the user experience!

"

Synopse wrote:

Part of the problem was that the low drop chances combinded with easy trading ruined the feeling of looting items making it less rewarding

Low drop chances combined with difficult trade and specific build requirements doesn't make it feel rewarding to me either! What's the use of playing, knowing I need to buy certain items and not finding enough currency to buy them or craft a good replacement myself...
Sure, if I find a Kaom's Heart I don't need for my characters I would sell it. But I'm not going to sell a bunch of 1c items and ruin my user experience.

"

PlatoniusIII wrote:

Low drop chances combined with difficult trade and specific build requirements doesn't make it feel rewarding to me either! What's the use of playing, knowing I need to buy certain items and not finding enough currency to buy them or craft a good replacement myself...
Sure, if I find a Kaom's Heart I don't need for my characters I would sell it. But I'm not going to sell a bunch of 1c items and ruin my user experience.

I fully agree. That is one of the reasons why I refuse to trade. I go even further and say that trading is a root cause for ruining my experience in an ARPG.

In every ARPG with trading, I find myself in the conflict of either farming currency to trade for items or playing with the stuff I find myself.

Everything is about farming upgrades. For me, it is feels much more rewarding to find stuff by myself than farming currency and simply buy the item. I acknowledge that there are different point of views. SSF is a good answer to address this certain way to play for many.

However, PoE still has an issue with getting what you need. If you are fine with farming yellow maps and red maps feeling challanging, you will find everything you need, since there are many ways to get it. Though, this requires a deeper understanding of how everything fits together.
But if you want more, you have to play one of the these super specialized builds requiring multiple uniques having uber-stats (which are on top of it not available on rare items).

IMHO the powerful stats on uniques is a root cause of many issues in this game and a major reason for the ongoing trade discussion. Once figured out, builds are easy to copy, but though hard to achieve.

"

PlatoniusIII wrote:

A lot of builds require specific (kinds of) gear. The chance of finding them are low, so trading is required in most cases. On the other hand, a lot of good items cost a lot, more wealth than most casual players would find (without selling items themselves).

Yes, you are right, and that is my point. Today, most of the builds are designed around decent uniques which are really rare. Plus, it starts to feel like being the only way to play PoE, but as pointed out above that is not necessarily the case.

Anyway, there is such a big gap between builds with and without powerful uniques.
For me, this is the true issue, not the trading and not the drop chances.

It is an illusion that everyone can play these builds designed around significant rare uniques easily. Most of them are designed for end-game content, requires super rare drops and are therefore for most players unreachable within a single league.

But hopes comes with a chance of trading the stuff you need.
That is the true reason why trading is mentioned to be important but at the same time is designed to be not easy.

On the one hand, trading is the carrot for all those who are in lack of required items.
On the other hand, trading is an acknowledgement to have the freedom of choice.
But it part of the illusion, if you can pay the prices.

So why do a claim that trading is optional?
My argument is that you can ignore it, if you can accept that end-game content is end-game content.
You might want to check out older builds not requiring any uniques (most of them are 2.x and before). You will find lots of ideas how to get good performance with yellow stuff.
Though you have to accept at which map levels your equip excels and where not.

Stop crippling your user expirience by comparing with the hardcore gamers.
Or do you think that everyone who loves football is sad because they can't play champions league?

"

Synopse wrote:

"

Prostitute4Money wrote:

"

John_Kacey wrote:

Hi, interesting read.

As a player who has traded for 14+ years in WoW, Rift, ESO, and the D3 Gold Auction House (never made it into the D3 Real Money Auction House), I have a fondness for trading. Not to get rich, but to get some better equipment. One reason: Example: I started playing D3 on launch day, and it was 11 months later when I found my first Legendary (I think this equals your Unique level). I'm retired and played that game almost all day and night. Obviously, their drop-rate left a lot to be desired lol. NOTE: I got my first Unique in this game, an amulet, on my fourth day of playing.

I've only been playing PoE for about two weeks, and am really enjoying it.

I understand your reason for not having an auction house, but like to pass some info on to you. As I'm getting more comfortable with my characters, I can spend more time reading the chat, and noticed the past 3 days that several players made comments about the inability to sell/buy stuff. The reason was that the players selling things are not in the Standard league (I'm playing standard only). Comments such as, "I sent a note to 25 players and not one replied to me." The last three or four players sent between 23 to 25 notes out. I don't know exactly how it works, but I guess those players have to leave wherever they are and come into the standard league, and they're just not willing to do that. So, trade in standard seems to be almost non-existent.

I think if we could solve this problem, and with your continuing support we may be able to do that, it may get easier to trade with others.

Regards,

KC

Players who start new league forget to make their tabs from previous league non public, thus it seems they still want to sell those items.
Trying to buy anything in standard in the first month of new league is very hard. You better ask in global and add friends. Chance is, dedicated std player has 2 copies of every unique already (like me).

Plus, the auction house in D3 was a big failure and got removed in the 2.0 patch, which included a full redesign of how loot works. Part of the problem was that the low drop chances combinded with easy trading ruined the feeling of looting items making it less rewarding. Many (but not all) people in this genre dislike such mechanics. GGG is fully aware of this and even introduced the solo-self-found option to support this group of players disliking the trade option.

This is not true.

The AH at D3 was a blessing, a huge improvement over the mess D2 LOD was. We players could actually list our items, without having to join an illegal third party website or spam chat. We were able to play the game in our free time, instead of spending hours in non game relevant areas.

POE does not have an AH, so it´s now back to wasting time somewhere else, instead of playing the game. The biggest issue, however, is the fact that drop rates are based on trading, which makes finding items not rewarding, but a chore.

You MUST trade and this is a terrible idea for an ARPG, which is about hunting monsters. I do not want to be forced into trading, I want it to be optional and there GGG has failed. Pretty much all items we find are vendor trash, it takes you a few hours on external websites and you have BIS loot.

Loot, that you will never have after years of playing, quite sad.

Not sure why GGG has not understood what the essence of an ARPG is (killing stuff). We are playing a trading simulation right now, which is really a big issue.

Either make trading in game, like an AH or remove the ability to trade, while making drop rates realistic.

GGG staff are such passionate people, but this is really something that annoys me a lot about their game.

Once upon a time an AH or QOL trade improvement would have been well received......



GGG has much bigger problems to worry about atm

"

Ygidua wrote:

The AH at D3 was a blessing, a huge improvement over the mess D2 LOD was. We players could actually list our items, without having to join an illegal third party website or spam chat. We were able to play the game in our free time, instead of spending hours in non game relevant areas.

I acknowledge that you liked it, but fact is that is got removed.
Btw. I played D2 LOD too and at the beginning it look like an improvement to me as well.
Yet, it destroyed the spirit of the game for me.
Anyway, I can live with different oppinions on that. :)

"

Ygidua wrote:

You MUST trade and this is a terrible idea for an ARPG, which is about hunting monsters. I do not want to be forced into trading, I want it to be optional and there GGG has failed. Pretty much all items we find are vendor trash, it takes you a few hours on external websites and you have BIS loot.

Yes, current trading needs loots of efforts and time, point taken, but it is yourself forcing to belief that you must trade. It really depends on what goals you have in PoE.
As I pointed out in my previous post, trading is an illusion that every item is in reach of every player's hand. You still need a lot of time and effort (either by farming currency or spending time on trading itself) to get the stuff you want.

"

Ygidua wrote:

Not sure why GGG has not understood what the essence of an ARPG is (killing stuff). We are playing a trading simulation right now, which is really a big issue.

Either make trading in game, like an AH or remove the ability to trade, while making drop rates realistic.

Now we are talking. Yes, ARPG is about killing stuff. Plus, it is about upgrading to kill even more stuff. I think that GGG is aware of that fact. Yet, they decided to support trading. For some players, it maybe is THE unique selling point of PoE.

However, I fully agree with you that trading is not suppose to be the core element of an ARPG nor should it be. Thenagain, I can live with trading that can be ignored (which is the case for me). In the end, it is every player's decision, if trading is an option or not. For me, the drop chances are good enough to get to the end content, yet, over time and not within the time of single league.
Yes, I wish, I could play the whole content of a league, but even with trading time is the bottleneck. Though, I take it slow and enjoy what I can achieve.
Yet again, I can live with different oppinions on that. :)

GGG add more chaos sink, more chaos sink will improve trading and make economy healthy.

"

Synopse wrote:

However, I fully agree with you that trading is not suppose to be the core element of an ARPG nor should it be. Thenagain, I can live with trading that can be ignored (which is the case for me). In the end, it is every player's decision, if trading is an option or not. For me, the drop chances are good enough to get to the end content, yet, over time and not within the time of single league.
Yes, I wish, I could play the whole content of a league, but even with trading time is the bottleneck. Though, I take it slow and enjoy what I can achieve.
Yet again, I can live with different oppinions on that. :)

Sort of my feeling as well. I don't have much time and don't want to spend a big chunk of that time trading. But I can't ignore trading, as I don't find enough good loot to improve my character... or I'm just not able to identify it! Already the game is difficult enough for those not spending 8 hours a day to know what gear will properly improve your character. Some wrong decisions kan kill your character.

I play leagues. With luck I can manage to get through the acts and do some mapping. So I want to enjoy it as much as I can. And trading isn't on the enjoying side of the game...

As for me the trade is poor balanced right now.
I think it is awful that you can buy very good uniques such as terminus est or rathpith globe almost for free. That ruins the game, you can just pay 1 alch for really good stuff, instead of searching for items to improve your character.
I think the problem is the drop rates of low level uniques at the endgame. There should be some option to utilize them in some good recipes, ir at least vendoring them for the normal price.
Or remove it from high level drop.

I like the idea of SSF, but i cant use it since i playing with my wife in party.

If there will be some party-self-found it could be awesome.

"

Nikuksis wrote:

I like the idea of SSF, but i cant use it since i playing with my wife in party.

If there will be some party-self-found it could be awesome.

Nobody is forcing you to trade with people.