Trade Manifesto

I agree with a lot of the complaints. I can understand making trade harder, but it shouldn't be prohibitive, annoying, and intimidating. Trading in PoE is convoluted with multiple layers of inconvenience built into it. It's TOO inconvenient and inconvenient in the wrong ways- it's annoying. For one, it shouldn't need 3rd party programs, that's just bad design. Second, it shouldn't require you to physically meet every single person for every single transaction.

Trade is a major part of the game yet many players don't want anything to do with it, to me, that sounds like a failure of a game mechanic. It feels like it was intentionally designed poorly to create a large disparity between elite players and casuals, something that seems to be a core design philosophy with this game (Path of Bureaucracy). Most people don't bother with learning the "tricks of the trade" because they find putting a hive of bees in their pants more preferable to handling bureaucracy. Same goes for their taxes and other major financial decisions in their life: nobody likes being bogged down with middle men and a million hurdles.

I don't think anyone is asking for "easy" trades, we just want something that is designed well enough that even regular people would use it. If you really want to know whether you're implementing trading well, the first sign of success is as to whether people actually enjoy doing it or not. If 90% of your players hates doing it, then you're doing something wrong. Look at other games, learn from them and DONT FORCE PEOPLE TO USE 3RD PARTY PROGRAMS. What's funny is that even with the current horribly inconvenient system, there is still abuse. So I have to ask, how can you defend the current system?

As others have said, all a trading system really needs in order to prevent abuse is item limits or trading costs. If an item could only be traded 1 time, it would severely limit flippers and price fixers. There are other options as well- you could also put a trade "time limit" on certain items or put in a transaction fee. Trade tabs are already a thing, simply allow people to buy the items from the tab instantly from an IN GAME (without a 3rd party) market explorer. You then put in a transaction fee (20-40%) that gets eaten up by the system- that 20-40% is not given to the seller. If that's too "easy" for you, just add something else like "1 time trades" or "timed" trades, as mentioned in other posts. The good thing is, you could make it so 1 on 1 trades are still encouraged- all limits and transaction costs would be removed if done in person. The most important thing though, is that we can compare prices and see the items in the actual game. I've seen other games implement similar systems and it seemed to work well and was actually FUN to use...

trading is a huge pain in the butt atm i use 2 programms just to price check and trade to make the moniez and stay in the game and even with the tools i have its way to freakin annoying, i had a bug in my stash this week where my item was sold 3 days ago and people still kept writing me about it, i had to remove this stash tab from public and left it unused for a day and this fixed it.

the other thing is if you are realy that concerned about an auction house and botters just make it a quest line where you have to beat idk the shaper for example to gain access just make it hard for botters to obtain.

an auction house can be a great thing if done correctly also diablos AH didnt work because of the game itself it was designed around the auction house not the other way around thats why it failed, their limited stat system on gear and difficulty settings were a major problem for the auction house.

i personally feel like you guys can pull it off you managed to dethrone diablo with constant updates and new ideas so just think about it and tell me is poe.trade realy so much diffrent then an auction house ?

Here's my opinion as a new player: I found the game during my holidays over New Year's Eve and have played for some time since then. All in all it's a lot of fun for me, only the trading system keeps me in a bad mood. I spent extra money to get the premium stashes with the trade function, only to find out that you still have to hand everything over by hand.

I'm still a beginner in the game, don't have a large stock of currencies, nor do I race through later maps without any problems. Now, after my vacation, my evening usually turns out like this: I adjust my prices again, including many cheap items, and start a map that in many cases I don't even know yet. I only have six portals. I play a little, die maybe already one or two times and then I get whispered and asked to hand over smaller items (1x Alch, or 1c). Now I can either walk out of the map, interrupt my game fun and risk that I don't finish the map anymore because I have to waste 2-3 of the portals to trade, or I have to do without the currency which I also inevitably need.

In both cases a lose-lose situation for me.

Later in the evening, when I desperately try to buy a map that I am missing, and just sit bored in my hideout - then of course the requests stop, because I have already been undercut again, or the people after I have not responded have bought somewhere else.

And as for me... I write dozens of people I find at Poe-Trade, of whom 1 out of 20 answers with luck. These people don't answer because they either have already sold the item, or don't want to leave their map for such a small amount.

It's just frustrating and I don't see where there's any advantage in the current system. Is it Oldschhool? No, it's not. Is it demanding? No, the economy is tiny and flat compared to an Eve. Does it provide player-to-player contact? Not really, I get a copy-paste-whisper and someone I never see again pushes their currency into the trading window and then disappears again. Is it just annoying and hinders progress and fun? Yes it is.

As madix said: if you add a condition that traded item cannot be traded for a week or so, then it would get rid of flippers. Just put some checks and limits in place for hoarders and you're done!

Soooo many easy solutions... yet GGG just ignores everything...

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PlatoniusIII wrote:

Soooo many easy solutions... yet GGG just ignores everything...

at this point I believe its only because the GGG is unable to code the goddamn thing.

Same as when they said they had problems making "search" options happen for stash tabs.... like what?

this game is probably a clusterfuck of bad programming that shows in other areas, making me think the only reason why they giving these bullshit excuses is because of their own inability to make a fucking trading system that actually works FROM WITHIN THE FUCKING GAME.

also yea anyone saying having a REGULATED MARKET in the game would somehow ruin the trade and allow people to cheat, pricefix, scam, flip and bot more... has no fucking idea what he is talking about.

Give me 1 instance where A REGULATED MARKET resulted in more people cheating and abusing the system. Please GGG, Chris, ANYONE at this point, I have been asking for this example for a month now everyone keeps silent.

You know where else people flip, cheat, pricefix and bot? the stock market. You really think there is more people doing it now after a century of market regulation then they did before? gheez. The logic of these GGG fanboys is beyond retarded.

I would advise re-reading trade manifesto, to all who complains that much, the first post in that thread.
Coding easy trade is not hard, but it will kill the fun of finding items and will hurt the economy.
Trading is hard intentionally.

There is room to improve, for example they can replace third party search apps with ingame search.
But the rest, like party invites and that stuff is intentional. And probably should stay.

GGG pls start anything to stop bots! Anything to remove all bots!

And add more veiled mods, more new craft mods pls!

Also allow us to trade white base items somehow without search in 3rd party sites!

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castanedalad wrote:

But the rest, like party invites and that stuff is intentional. And probably should stay.

Yes. But ANY game that states in their manifesto that "Trade is an important part of the game" and where you have to look up a "how to trade guide" before you know how it works is DEFINITELY doing something wrong!

And like I said, the fact that if I want to sell something I need to stop what I'm doing and portal to my hideout stops me from selling anything. INCREASING the wealth gap that GGG mentioned will increase with easy trade. Isn't that a strange line of reasoning?

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PlatoniusIII wrote:

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castanedalad wrote:

But the rest, like party invites and that stuff is intentional. And probably should stay.

Yes. But ANY game that states in their manifesto that "Trade is an important part of the game" and where you have to look up a "how to trade guide" before you know how it works is DEFINITELY doing something wrong!

And like I said, the fact that if I want to sell something I need to stop what I'm doing and portal to my hideout stops me from selling anything. INCREASING the wealth gap that GGG mentioned will increase with easy trade. Isn't that a strange line of reasoning?

I agree that necessity in third party tools is bad, and i also feel the same about trading, i wanted to sell some maps, but after selling 10-20 of them 1 alch each i just stopped responding. Something has to be done here, but something what will not break the fun of finding items.

On the other hand trading expensive items is exiting now, when you have to communicate with other people.

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castanedalad wrote:

On the other hand trading expensive items is exiting now, when you have to communicate with other people.

Whisper copied message from trade site, join party when invited, travel to hideout, press "Accept" at the trade pop-up, insert goodies, hoover over what you want, press OK, type "ty", travel probably to you own hideout and leave party.

Yeah... that's a brilliant piece of player interaction right there...