As we all know, the trading system in PoE has received some buffs and re-works in the past. Each re-work has brought us closer and closer to an optimal trading system, and GGG says that they still have much more work that needs to be done on the optimal trading system. The players call out for an auction house, and GGG has stated clearly that they do not want to remove player interaction on trading, so the auction house is unlikely to ever happen. I personally don’t mind the player interaction, but I do feel that there are several different issues with the current trading system that makes it very uncomfortable to use.



Problems

1: It’s uncomfortable!

Imagine this… you’re in the middle of a zana map, or the lab, or a breach, or some other intense situation. A guy messages you wanting to buy that pitiful ring that’s worth 2 chaos. What’s your reaction? Generally your reaction is to continue doing whatever you were doing and ignore the trade offer. Why? Because you have to leave and drop whatever you’re doing. OR, message the guy and explain that he’ll have to wait a few minutes, which could be the death of you in many situations. You have to invite him to your party, which could frankly be a problem if you’re someone who parties a lot. You have to go to your hideout. You have to rummage through your stash to find the item in question. You have to send him a trade. You have to make sure he’s giving you what he promised. You have to confirm the trade. And then after all that you finally get back to doing what you were originally doing. That is not user friendly at all for a 2 chaos ring.



This creates the atmosphere where everyone is “AFK” or manipulating the market, where in truth most likely they’re just too busy to do anything about it at the moment. If you want a perfect example of this, go and try to buy a 1 alch item, good luck.



2: There are AFKers.

Way too many times there are people who have an item that I want, and I message them a dozen times over the course of the next several hours, and continually get the AFK message. This is unnecessary…



3: There are Market Manipulators.

Many people put an item up on the market for a low price, with no intention on selling it, but with every intention on bringing the market value down for that item. This creates some serious annoyance with the people who are trying to buy said item. If you want a good example? Go try to buy a tabula rasa or exchange currency. Probably the first 5 results will ignore you.



4: It’s pay to trade.

Now this one doesn’t bug me so much, but I thought of a solution, and figured why not put it here.



Now… these are all well known problems, and people have complained about these problems for ages and asked for an auction house to fix these problems. I present a different solution. While I profess that my solution may not fix everything, it could very well revolutionize the trade system.





Solutions

Imagine this scenario.



You’re in the middle of a map, someone sends you a TRADE OFFER, which consists of the item they want to purchase, the amount they’re willing to pay, the original amount that you priced the item at. The item could also contain in it the details of the item, very much the same way linking works as ingame. In this Trade Offer, you are presented with three buttons, Accept, Whisper, and Reject.



Accepting the trade offer would cause the trade to happen immediately, getting rid of all the annoyance of #1 above.



Rejecting the trade offer would have a measured impact on the person. For example if the selling price was 4C, and someone offered 3C, no problem. However if the selling price was 4C, and the person offered 4C or more, then rejecting said trade offer would mark that person as a market manipulator, and they would earn these negative reputation marks to the point at which they would receive a cooldown on trading, or some other punative measure, at the very minimum their reputation could be shown on PoE.Trade so that people have a warning as to who they are.



Whisper, would be for bartering purposes, and of course personal contact.



And if the trade offer were ignored for about 15 seconds thereabouts, the person would be marked as AFK trade wise, and their items would be removed from the market until such a time as the person proved to be active again, either by typing a command, or by actually being active.



The AFK system that’s already in place could be extended to include trades to automatically remove someone from the trade market as well.



This suggestion fixes #1 instantly, as there is no more annoyance when it comes to trading.

This suggestion helps solve #2 quickly as well, as people who go AFK would be weeded out before too much occured.

This suggestion helps solve #3 as people would gain or lose reputation based on what their trading habits were.



As for #4, make your personal inventory tradeable. People who haven’t bought premium stash tabs, would be able to trade using their personal inventory. While this could possibly be abused to some extent, it would provide a method for new players to trade without paying for it. It could easily be limited to those who are online only with the new trade button system. And it would serve as both a taste test of what a premium stash tab would offer, as well as a desire to get rid of all this trading stuff out of your inventory.





Thoughts?



Suggestions?



Discuss!

Last bumped on Mar 12, 2017, 4:24:32 AM