A Trade flow to eliminate needing to portal to hideouts for either party

I've avoided selling items via the POE1 trade mechanics because it looked like a pain to deal with as a seller. I would have to interrupt whatever I'm doing in game, portal to my hideout, party invite the buyer, wait for them to arrive, do the trade, then go back to the enjoyable part, playing the game.

And when I decided to try selling a few items in this Phrecia league, it was as bad as I thought. The current system ACTIVELY DISCOURAGES casual trading in my opinion.

But rather than just saying "Fix this!", I thought I'd made some suggestions that I think would be improvements without moving too far away from the current system.

First, my main goal is to remove the requirement for either party to leave game play and travel to hideouts.

Second, to limit bot abuse GGG can limit the number of trades using this mechanism that can be done per day (or week, or month) by account. And even sell microtransactions that increase the amount for 30-day window up to reasonable max limit for those users who do a lot of trading. My goal with this is to increase the number of casual traders.

My suggested trade process would follow this flow:

Item is placed in public stash tab for a specific price (either item level or tab level).
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Purchaser finds item in trade site and clicks 'purchase' button (preferable) or uses current Direct Whisper button to initiate purchase
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The prospective purchaser's stash is checked to verify if the appropriate currency amount is available.
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If not, the purchase 'offer' is NOT sent. This prevents users from spamming sellers with invalid offers to cause aggravation.
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If the prospective purchasers stash includes the appropriate amount of currency, that amount of currency is 'locked' (maybe move it to a special 'Reserved' tab that is not user-editable) and the purchase offer sent to seller.
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Once the purchase 'offer' is received in the seller's client, the item is 'locked' (maybe moved to the same 'Reserved' tab mentioned above?). If the item cannot be found in the seller inventory, the prospective purchaser is notified the item has already been sold.
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In the sellers client a box is displayed on the side that shows the requested purchase, including the specific item and price. Item is hoverable to display full stats. This box has a reject mechanism (a red 'X') on one side and an approve mechanism (a green check) on the other side. The separation of the controls by the box is to make it harder to click on the wrong action.
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The seller has a limited amount of time (say 3-5 minutes) to either approve or reject the transaction.
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If the seller approves the transaction, the trade happens automatically swapping the reserved items and currencies.
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If the seller rejects the transaction, the purchase 'offer' is closed and the prospective purchaser notified.
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If the 'offer' times out, the prospective purchaser is notified of the time out and the purchase 'offer' expires. Allowing the user to move on.

This process allows both buyer and seller to continue game play largely uninterrupted. While still requiring interaction. It's not 'bot-proof', but nothing is. Which is why I suggest limiting the number of trades that can be done this way.

Thank you for considering this, or at least reading it.

The reason they haven't added something more seamless for trade to my understanding is:

They want players to interact, so that players can show off their MTX;

and they want there to be a certain level of friction to the trading process, so that flipping/speculating doesn't invalid the playing.

There is certainly room for improvement. Could be that in your ideas there is a solution that would satisfy this and be a better experience for people trading.

One thing I would suggest is improving people joining the party. Since settlers town exist there is a third location and people often go to the wrong location with the confusion. It's much better than at the start of the launch but still makes things annoying, when you are standing by the stash but need to communicate where to meet, or jump around bypassing each other, especially with less experienced traders. Same thing when in other areas, like delve, rouge harbor, sanctum. I usually find it quicker to go to the buyer when I'm in those locations, but it can be confusing and time consuming trading while playing those contents.

I read the old Trade Manifesto before posting this. But a few points in reply:

1) I agree, trade is probably on the way to show off your hideout MTX to other players. But I expect a fair number of players are like me and bought the MTX for own enjoyment. I could care less what other people's hideouts look like.

2) My main point though is that by making trade such as a pain, they actually encourage bot use. Because if you are a casual player, being a seller is more of a hindrance than a benefit for the most part. So only dedicated traders are willing to commit the time to sit around and sell, or to set up a bot to do it for them.

I believe if they reduce the friction enough so that folks don't HAVE to shuttle around to different hideouts, you'll get more folks interacting in the trade economy.

Of course, maybe they really like the fact that so much of selling happens through bots as I would assume it artificially inflates prices and encourages more play from buyers to build up the currency to make purchases.

Not exactly sure. I know there is certainly still a lot of problems with the system, largely that it becomes efficient to use 3rd party applications rather than what they have provided.

I know though from playing D3 when they had the auction house, that it became all about flipping items rather than playing the game. It can be fun in it's own way, but is not great for the game. What they have implemented with the currency exchange was done quite well, but even with that, on my first settlers playthrough, I found it more profitable than looting items in the game. On subsequent playthroughs like necro/settlers, I had to self limit doing this to make it become about not profiting of the market and actually playing the game.

Not against them improving it, I think you points are valid. I just don't think it is a simple solution. I think the currency exchange has been well received and is something they can build upon.