can we talk about price fixing?

Hey

ggg i think by letting RMT people do as they please you loose a lot of revenue and a huge number of players!!!

if someone with a job decides to invest 30 dollar in POE do you (ggg) think he will invest those 30 in a MTX or that he will buy a mirror and evade 80 hours of grinding (which is impossible for people with a job anyway)?

if you remove rmt you would probably get those 30 dollars for an mtx ;D

and we would need to grind less since no more bots overprice items!

you can stop reading here since i will go more into detail now ;D




in poe 1 i just gave up.

why? cause trade is taken over by certain people that overprice all important items.
this in return forces you to grind extremely long times....
for items that would be worth way less.


the mechanics are pretty simple
if you make items more and more and more expensive with bots what happens?
well first u buy items worth 1 div and sell them for 5 making huge profit and you end up with a large pool of divines. since for 5 divines its still possible to buy those items. they just get one and not 5 of them but they will still buy it. so people with bots get rich and in return players get less value from the divines. all because of bots.

so now they are ready for stage 2. make items even more and more and more expensive what happens?
most player can no longer afford those items. or need to grind way way way longer for those items.
meanwhile the people owning those bots now sit on thousands and thousands of divines.
just check an rmt site and check their stock. its 100 000+ divines. AND mirrors.

by making items that much more expensive it also makes the time to grind them LONGER AND LONGER AND LONGER until it hits a wall of absurdity for people who do not no live the game.

if it is do i grind 1 hour or invest real money to buy the item.. most of course CHOSE to grind.

so how do rmt people win?
they just make stuff more and more and more and more expensive. and since most items are trash and good ones rare its pretty simple to control the market.
and thanks to bots it is also automated and it does not matter if more items land at trade then they just need more bots to handle the workload.

until the question FOR THE SAME item is. do i grind 40h or do i buy it with real money?

well no people with a job will decide on real money. or just quit the game. simple as that.

and even the people like me who opted for grinding a mirror item for 80 hours...my achievement totally got deleted by my friend coming online... oh you got your first mirror bow? nice i just bought 3 for 60.

im a student so i do have time. if i took a side job in my country as a waiter for TWO hours i could get more MIRRORS than when i grind 80 hours ;D

so yeah i normally quit after i reach the point where i have a mirror bow and now would need to grind another 80 hours for the mirror quiver. no thanks.

sure in poe 1 its not really 80h since once you have enough divines so you can start crafting! you can take a shortcut with a bit of luck.
but also this shortcut is only there because bots make prices higher and higher and higher and higher
so when you craft an item like that you can also sell it for higher and higher and higher ;D


so one of the controversy items is the mirror

that mirror items need a lot of grind would totally ok! if RMT would NOT exist. they are the best you can get after all. and you don't really need them to play the game. t17 shook that a little but yeah i still managed to clear them with a good ele bow.

but the mirror also creates the opportunity for RMT people to say like do you really wanna grind 80 or rather pay us 30 dollar?^
and once they control the market they also control the prices for mirrors to some extend. and by controlling the prices for mirrors they control how much time the normal player has to invest to afford one.
and THAT is the big problem.
normally this decision is the DEVELOPER. we think if people spend 20h in our game we want to award them with the ability to COPY one OP item.

but thanks to bots and RMT that decision now lies with the RMT people.
thanks to the bots they own the most currency in the game. thus if they decide a mirror is now 1000 divines others will adabt.
like that they can decide how long WE the PLAYERS have to farm to get a mirror.
and of course the higher they make the amount of time needed the more customers they get.
and this should NOT BE ALLOWED! because it destroy the economy and turns off a lot of people to even bother who just quit.

the problem are also all the other items that are made way way way way more expensive artificially with bots.

if prices were dictated only by supply and demand they would be 100 times lower or even more.
then the game would be definitely less grindy and way more fun. and time you had to invest to get certain things would also be considerable less and more casual friendly!!!!! and thus it would certainly have more players.



so lets go to poe 2


there is a mafia (or just many independently working farmers trying to make profit) organized or not does not really matter. they have an army of bots buying most good items and selling them at unreasonable high prices

THATS NOT OK and undermines your philosophy we are a free game.
yeah until you try to get certain items while having a job ;D

you let them do as they pleased for years. TFT is the poof of that.

so i kinda was hoping with poe 2 you implement a system that detects and bans those bots??? you do know you loose A LOT of revenue thanks to them right?

no of course there is no such system.
when i sell something the only buyers are bots and modded chinese names.
and i know for a fact they only buy those items to relist them much much much much more expensive.
if i list them higher no one buys them. since at this point of the game only a few people would have the currency to buy expensive items. but those PLAYERS have better items already.

often the people who then buy those items once i list them cheap enough are lvl 1 characters that do not even have a hideout and you have to tp to the starting area! so clearly people who do not play the game but just mess with the economy!!!!!

why do you let them do as they please? make it harder for them.

did you ever check prices for stuff like HH in week one? 600 ex to 900 ex in one day. week one????

at this point i had 50 ex and 2 div and played quite a lot.

so they buy those things and price them higher than 99% of people can afford.
trying to force people to no life or RMT
for items that without them would be WAY cheaper.
and they do not care its EA they already do their thing.

GGG are you really ok to let those people run amok in YOUR game again? and to make more profit THAN YOU?
because think about it. People who work have less time to play the game but they decide to invest 30 dollar.
do they buy a MTX or a MIRROR? or just some divines to get the overpriced items they need for the build?

people always spin the narrative stuff is so expensive on meta build cause everyone plays them.
that is only true to some extent. because then it would still be in a price range all those people who play those builds could afford.
unless...they buy currency and drive the prices above the lvl one can farm if you have a job ;D

and by buying all good items with bots and pricing them above what a normal person has time to farm...
you loose a lot of money for MTX

cause people rather spend it on RMT
which with normal demand and supply would not be necessary.
HH would always be expensive of course its one of the better items for that slot if not the best. same for meta build items
but it would be FARMABLE and a REASONABLE price without bots.
that people who play a lot could actually afford. because if you price items higher than people can pay you would just not sell them and then make them cheaper!!!!
unless your the guy with all the bots that makes them to expensive for a reason. to extort casuals to buy currency!

so please crack down on those people soon enough this time.

i know the game just launched and you have other problems like keystone
sustain...
random deaths from rares that stealth off screen and 1 shot me despite 80% evasion out of stealth.
or those bird guys with the leap slam attack. if they leap into an obstacle the leap slam does not happen where they are but where they would have landed without obstacles....so also goes through walls ;D
but all this stuff is fine.
its EA after all.

what i don't like is that already know prices get fixed to unreasonable high amounts in the hopes to make profit of players that just think o man i am so bad at this game the only way to ever have a HH is if i buy currency
not realizing it makes those items even more expensive to ensure influx of real money.

The top mods for rares only drop in T18s (I think) so the supply is going to be pretty low right now. The supply of top uniques is going to be low for the same reason. Very easy for someone to buy up the entire market and 10x the price, especially because currency is worthless atm. It'll get better as people get better at the game.

This would go over a lot better if you used better formatting, paragraphs, and/or bullet points.

A long post is okay, but a long, poorly formatted wall-o-text is not.

Best wishes for you - it seems you tried to put forth some good ideas, but the atrocious style will not be tolerated past the first few lines by most readers.

"

superbomb1967#5561 wrote:

This would go over a lot better if you used better formatting, paragraphs, and/or bullet points.

A long post is okay, but a long, poorly formatted wall-o-text is not.

Best wishes for you - it seems you tried to put forth some good ideas, but the atrocious style will not be tolerated past the first few lines by most readers.

+1, you lost me on the 2nd paragraph

There has always been and will always be price fixers as long as a game can trade with currency. In WoW for instance, with their AH, you'll see someone come along and buy ALL of a single type of herb and resell at a higher price. And anytime that herb hits the AH lower they'll snap it up using a UI Addon. ESO has entire guilds that do this. You won't find a simple solution that doesn't also limit well meaning players.

sorry for the bad formatting i got disturbed several times while writing it and i could totally work it over. but no thx.
it got longer than anticipated and its ok if you just read the first paragraph it sums it up pretty nicely ;D


and yes other games also have rmt
to name WoW is kinda weird since blizzard does the RMT with wow tokens. those let you buy whole raid gear sets.
but still in wow to get an item is a fixed time!
and rmt does not change that time you need to get the item.
the same is true for materials since you can target farm most of them. fixed amount of time. while rmt prices change.


poe is the opposite!

the one who controls the value of a divine/mirror decides how long you have to farm for an item since the drop rate of divines and so div/h stays more or less the same. minor fluctuations aside.

so rmt changes the amount of time you have to invest!!!!



that is only possible cause they can use an army of bots.
its a huge difference if u have a guild of real people fixing prices in a ah that all pay subscription or if ONE guy can make 100 accounts and run 100 bots to do the fixing automated.

so they will own all good items. not just in one area but all of them.
and again div/h is fixed so if they buy all HH and price them all at 1000 div

they decide how long you farm for that HH. with 10div per hour
thats 100 hours. if that does not force ppl to rmt make it 2000 div.

in wow no one forces you to rmt ;D

The only true solution is SSF. If you hate market manipulation, you do have that option.

GGG does their best to keep the market balanced. They will ban accounts that are flagged for boting, they made a gold system to try and balance faustus.


As far as your grind times go, if your only income is a slow and steady div/hr farm, youre always going to be a victim of market inflation. Even if there were no bots, price fixers, or RMT, the league market will inflate over time as more divines enter circulation.


Wealth Tips:

1. Invest to beat inflation (don't store your wealth in divines long term)

2. Learn to craft for profit

3. Dabble in jackpot/gamble strategies with decent odds of profit

Word of advice: next time make your post more concise and to the point. More is not better.

Regarding RMT in POE I, I for one, have reported multiple accounts that engaged with it, yet GGG did nothing. This clearly signals to me; they don't care too much.

SSF is not a "solution", unless they specifically add a game mode like that where they rebalance the endgame difficulty as such and your items can never enter economy.

Regarding bots and RMT - this is sad but there is a positive flipside, top tier items will skyrocket in price for heavy players & RMT-world, mid-tier items and low-tier items become super accessible.

As long as you don't fomo, stop brainlessly copying #1 busted build, you still get huge power spike from trade and can clear everything but super-juiced content. Even now, 3 div is enough to get you there, as long as you are not in the fomo mindset.

"

Tomoee#7244 wrote:

Spoiler

Hey

ggg i think by letting RMT people do as they please you loose a lot of revenue and a huge number of players!!!

if someone with a job decides to invest 30 dollar in POE do you (ggg) think he will invest those 30 in a MTX or that he will buy a mirror and evade 80 hours of grinding (which is impossible for people with a job anyway)?

if you remove rmt you would probably get those 30 dollars for an mtx ;D

and we would need to grind less since no more bots overprice items!

you can stop reading here since i will go more into detail now ;D




in poe 1 i just gave up.

why? cause trade is taken over by certain people that overprice all important items.
this in return forces you to grind extremely long times....
for items that would be worth way less.


the mechanics are pretty simple
if you make items more and more and more expensive with bots what happens?
well first u buy items worth 1 div and sell them for 5 making huge profit and you end up with a large pool of divines. since for 5 divines its still possible to buy those items. they just get one and not 5 of them but they will still buy it. so people with bots get rich and in return players get less value from the divines. all because of bots.

so now they are ready for stage 2. make items even more and more and more expensive what happens?
most player can no longer afford those items. or need to grind way way way longer for those items.
meanwhile the people owning those bots now sit on thousands and thousands of divines.
just check an rmt site and check their stock. its 100 000+ divines. AND mirrors.

by making items that much more expensive it also makes the time to grind them LONGER AND LONGER AND LONGER until it hits a wall of absurdity for people who do not no live the game.

if it is do i grind 1 hour or invest real money to buy the item.. most of course CHOSE to grind.

so how do rmt people win?
they just make stuff more and more and more and more expensive. and since most items are trash and good ones rare its pretty simple to control the market.
and thanks to bots it is also automated and it does not matter if more items land at trade then they just need more bots to handle the workload.

until the question FOR THE SAME item is. do i grind 40h or do i buy it with real money?

well no people with a job will decide on real money. or just quit the game. simple as that.

and even the people like me who opted for grinding a mirror item for 80 hours...my achievement totally got deleted by my friend coming online... oh you got your first mirror bow? nice i just bought 3 for 60.

im a student so i do have time. if i took a side job in my country as a waiter for TWO hours i could get more MIRRORS than when i grind 80 hours ;D

so yeah i normally quit after i reach the point where i have a mirror bow and now would need to grind another 80 hours for the mirror quiver. no thanks.

sure in poe 1 its not really 80h since once you have enough divines so you can start crafting! you can take a shortcut with a bit of luck.
but also this shortcut is only there because bots make prices higher and higher and higher and higher
so when you craft an item like that you can also sell it for higher and higher and higher ;D


so one of the controversy items is the mirror

that mirror items need a lot of grind would totally ok! if RMT would NOT exist. they are the best you can get after all. and you don't really need them to play the game. t17 shook that a little but yeah i still managed to clear them with a good ele bow.

but the mirror also creates the opportunity for RMT people to say like do you really wanna grind 80 or rather pay us 30 dollar?^
and once they control the market they also control the prices for mirrors to some extend. and by controlling the prices for mirrors they control how much time the normal player has to invest to afford one.
and THAT is the big problem.
normally this decision is the DEVELOPER. we think if people spend 20h in our game we want to award them with the ability to COPY one OP item.

but thanks to bots and RMT that decision now lies with the RMT people.
thanks to the bots they own the most currency in the game. thus if they decide a mirror is now 1000 divines others will adabt.
like that they can decide how long WE the PLAYERS have to farm to get a mirror.
and of course the higher they make the amount of time needed the more customers they get.
and this should NOT BE ALLOWED! because it destroy the economy and turns off a lot of people to even bother who just quit.

the problem are also all the other items that are made way way way way more expensive artificially with bots.

if prices were dictated only by supply and demand they would be 100 times lower or even more.
then the game would be definitely less grindy and way more fun. and time you had to invest to get certain things would also be considerable less and more casual friendly!!!!! and thus it would certainly have more players.



so lets go to poe 2


there is a mafia (or just many independently working farmers trying to make profit) organized or not does not really matter. they have an army of bots buying most good items and selling them at unreasonable high prices

THATS NOT OK and undermines your philosophy we are a free game.
yeah until you try to get certain items while having a job ;D

you let them do as they pleased for years. TFT is the poof of that.

so i kinda was hoping with poe 2 you implement a system that detects and bans those bots??? you do know you loose A LOT of revenue thanks to them right?

no of course there is no such system.
when i sell something the only buyers are bots and modded chinese names.
and i know for a fact they only buy those items to relist them much much much much more expensive.
if i list them higher no one buys them. since at this point of the game only a few people would have the currency to buy expensive items. but those PLAYERS have better items already.

often the people who then buy those items once i list them cheap enough are lvl 1 characters that do not even have a hideout and you have to tp to the starting area! so clearly people who do not play the game but just mess with the economy!!!!!

why do you let them do as they please? make it harder for them.

did you ever check prices for stuff like HH in week one? 600 ex to 900 ex in one day. week one????

at this point i had 50 ex and 2 div and played quite a lot.

so they buy those things and price them higher than 99% of people can afford.
trying to force people to no life or RMT
for items that without them would be WAY cheaper.
and they do not care its EA they already do their thing.

GGG are you really ok to let those people run amok in YOUR game again? and to make more profit THAN YOU?
because think about it. People who work have less time to play the game but they decide to invest 30 dollar.
do they buy a MTX or a MIRROR? or just some divines to get the overpriced items they need for the build?

people always spin the narrative stuff is so expensive on meta build cause everyone plays them.
that is only true to some extent. because then it would still be in a price range all those people who play those builds could afford.
unless...they buy currency and drive the prices above the lvl one can farm if you have a job ;D

and by buying all good items with bots and pricing them above what a normal person has time to farm...
you loose a lot of money for MTX

cause people rather spend it on RMT
which with normal demand and supply would not be necessary.
HH would always be expensive of course its one of the better items for that slot if not the best. same for meta build items
but it would be FARMABLE and a REASONABLE price without bots.
that people who play a lot could actually afford. because if you price items higher than people can pay you would just not sell them and then make them cheaper!!!!
unless your the guy with all the bots that makes them to expensive for a reason. to extort casuals to buy currency!

so please crack down on those people soon enough this time.

i know the game just launched and you have other problems like keystone
sustain...
random deaths from rares that stealth off screen and 1 shot me despite 80% evasion out of stealth.
or those bird guys with the leap slam attack. if they leap into an obstacle the leap slam does not happen where they are but where they would have landed without obstacles....so also goes through walls ;D
but all this stuff is fine.
its EA after all.

what i don't like is that already know prices get fixed to unreasonable high amounts in the hopes to make profit of players that just think o man i am so bad at this game the only way to ever have a HH is if i buy currency
not realizing it makes those items even more expensive to ensure influx of real money.

I will say this. In POE1 we could not even attempt to discuss the issue you are discussing this openly. Does this indicate a culture shift?

It's probably too early to tell.

I know this, back then I had to talk about these things in the most tangential way possible:

The Mirror of Kalandra and user retention
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3489839

Why not throw the ring into the sea?
(https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3488268)

I think that alone speaks volumes... but again, it's probably too early to tell.

I think the Mirror of Kalandra is there to cheapen the loafty goal of crafting the best of the best during a league. That's it's only goal. It's no longer a cool and unique item you (and your buddies) made to push the game even further. No, it's just a thing you made (with RMT) to sell to kids that are most likely RMT'ing to afford it. It's ridiculous.

I'm happy that EA broke a lot of tools. Even the public and milder versions of these tools. It evens out the playing field.

RMT will never go away, because developers refuse to take steps against it.

I even made a topic a while back... we could literally have a system on top of what we already have that would allow us to have a better market. Allowing us to track items / trades which is the first step on fighting RMT. It's not normal for a trash rare to be sold for multiple divines or a couple of mirrors.