Trading! or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bazaar!

Oh man, I’m mad I didn’t find this game earlier, just so I could have taken part in this conversation earlier.

GGG massively failed at developing a trade system that was reasonable. It would be okay in a LAN of 4 people together (since that’s how they designed it, to be a game that would fit in in 2001, but not 2019), but it massively fails in every way imaginable at scale. The Trade Manifesto Chris wrote is more of a mockery and a misunderstanding of his players than it is a well-researched explanation of how game markets work.

Please don’t copy their dumpster fire of a system in any way.

Even games from the early 2000s have decent and enjoyable trade systems. I personally enjoy how it’s done in Ragnarok Online (even though it relies on a 3rd party indexer to find items, and even then it can’t handle selling items of over 1 billion zenny–it’s a miracle the game is still alive after so long, much less the economy is still running). I think a fair bit of innovation has to come into play.

On the topic of Legendaries, I think there’s 3 other options: Smart Drops, so only legendaries for your class will drop for you (so you don’t find a Void Knight-focused sword if you’re a Lich); Another is making Legendaries only tradable for other Legendaries, so you can’t RMT to enter the upper echelons of the game instantly; The final I thought about was making Legendaries shatterable to create high-end tradable crafting components. I like upgrading or modifying Legendaries as an idea, we see PoE doing that now with Veiled Mods (except it’s still boring grind-forever RNG gating there).

Cygnus, I think you have the best idea overall. I haven’t seen that done before, or even attempted. It would take a bit of time, and a decent size training data set so your AI could give mods a base value, but I think you could make one hell of a trading AI, especially if you trained it to always win–the bank always wins. It could even act as a 3rd-party in the trade experience, and keep track of how much money it has, and if it gets low, its offers start to dip in response, so it can learn from the negative traits that led it to lose money, and regulate the number of less-desirable items on the market.

Whatever is implemented, just please don’t make it like PoE. I’ve noticed most of the people who posted here that mentioned PoE are SSF, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence (SSF Vegan Crossfitter BTW)

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I am sure you know what makes a successful ARPG trade system than the founder and CEO of the de facto king of the hills currently.

Im certainly not going to take sides, but i personally dislike the trade system in POE, and I also think that it could be something that either makes LE stand out, or makes it a POE clone.

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I think it is important for people who dislike the POE trade system to explain why they dislike it. Because if the reason is that it’s a pain in the ass to trade (and believe me, I’m in this group) then Chris has achieved EXACTLY what he was shooting for. Trade is not meant to be easy and smooth in POE.

Hahaha, fair enough!

Your hit the nail on the head. Trade is difficult to organise, requires currency which itself has fluctuating value (100 chaos at the start of the league vs the end) and drops randomly (getting exalt from act 1 lol).
It almost encourages RMT and, as far as i can tell, GGG simply gave everyone a trade button and said “lets just let it do its thing”. It did do its thing, and markets do tend to be self regulating (until they arent), but it feels like an after-thought to a game that never intended to have trading.

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And I suppose this is where we have to agree to disagree.

Instead of an afterthought, I think GGG has put very deep and serious thoughts into this which is why they have not buckled all these years.

My issue with folks who complains about the GGG trade system (no offence) is that my reading of their complaint is exactly what I thought. But they do not realise why it is so important for trade in POE to be inconvenient and I’m still not convinced that suggestions brought up would make for a superior trade experience that also promotes a healthy player economy, that balances both playing the game and trading.

Just because PoE is big, doesn’t mean it does everything perfectly. If it did, no one would be here.
I don’t think you were around during the desync days, because if you were, you’d remember the desync manifesto he wrote, where he explained that rubberbanding was good. The game was, nevermind the memes, literally unplayable. /oos was the most popular macro in the game, and HC numbers dwindled to nothing. It wasn’t until he relented on his decision and listened to his playerbase, and they added lockstep, that they found boatloads of massive bugs in their predictive code and improved it. The game got better for listening to his players.
Reasons why I hate PoE trade:

  1. It’s massively outdated, and took no thought at all to design. Originally, there was no trade, and honestly Chris didn’t want to implement it. Go look at the old forums and you’ll see how we used to trade–you had to post your items on the forums, find a set time, and meet up to trade. It was a nightmare, and games from the 90s did it better. The only reason it got better (if you call poexyz/poetrade/etc better) is because of the one time Chris relented and listened to his players… go make a few forum trades, then go use Acquisition, then go use poetrade, and see how things get better when player’s voices are heard.
  2. It’s inefficient. It’s kind of a trope that “Trade must be hard,” but it really doesn’t. Whether trade is slow or fast will has little to no effect on the top players–they will be putting more time into the game overall and will benefit the most. Casual 20-hour a week players will be massively impacted however, as they might spend half their time trading, and that much less time actually playing the game. There’s been no good argument that explains why trade must be bad or difficult. Complexity disincentivizes trading.
  3. It’s subject to massive manipulation. There is no impetus for a seller to actually sell an item. You can list an item for a ridiculous price (low or high) and no one can stop you. I can list a Headhunter for 10ex lower than its current price and cause its value to tank overnight. You can buy a few of an item and raise their base price to raise its value. People who spend all their time trading benefit the most from trade in this system, since they will only make more and more money. Trading should be a supplementary system to the game, it should not be THE game.
    In most games, I enjoy building up my mercantile skills, and doing my best to dominate a market. I spent an entire year building up the best Weaponsmith I could create in SWG, and I made custom high-end weapons. If I had to spend all my time physically interacting with people to sell my items, I would have gone bankrupt in a week–it allowed me to focus my time on crafting the highest quality items in the game, and doing what I loved.
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  1. POE isn’t perfect. But I think fostering community/public multiplayer is a bigger problem than trade.

  2. I have been on POE longer than most :slight_smile:

  3. You clearly misunderstood Chris in the manifesto. He meant more frequent micro corrections of desync (more small rubber banding) is better than the state back then when corrections were less frequent but extreme when the correction took place (less but large rubber banding).

  4. Trade can plausibly be improved. But the suggestions offered by most are imo more likely to make things worse - not necessarily that the trading experience is worse. But you end up with a stronger trading metagame.

  5. Which brings to the point about trade efficiency. Most are asking for greater trade efficiency thinking that would allow players to focus on the game instead of the trade. But they don’t realise that what’s more likely to happen is that people end up trading more than playing the game when trading becomes a better experience and an easier avenue to upgrade rather than playing the game.

  6. An efficient trade system than requires less human intervention is going to be subjected to MORE trade manipulation because scripts and bots are better suited to scalp such markets.

I know where you are coming from when you say you want to focus on what you love (playing the game) instead of trading. But I’m suggesting you might want to be careful about what you’re wishing for.

I am very careful for what I wish for. Many of the arguments in the “trade has to suck” camp are fundamentally rooted on the idea that trade is a constant, that you will always be trading… but it’s really not. Unless you find enjoyment in trading (which isn’t a bad thing), odds are you will only participate in buying items as long as you need something… but even in ARPGs, there’s a ceiling, you will hit the optimal state for your build, and unless something new comes out, you’ll be done.

More efficiency isn’t a bad thing, a bad thing would be recklessly implementing a system with vulnerabilities that you know are there and doing nothing about it :slight_smile: As it is, a vast majority of the currency market is run by bots… and players are okay with it because the bots are more efficient than interacting with players, who may or may not respond, may try and rip you off, may yell at you for literally no reason, etc. They know they are there and do nothing about it, which kind of shows you the unofficial viewpoint on bots.
I, unlike many other ARPG players, have actually played more than one or two games, and I’ve seen it done well. I don’t spend all my time trading endlessly, I spend my time having fun–it feels almost like it’s a stopgap introduced into the game to fill out the holes for when people realize that there really isn’t much content to the game.
The suggestions may make things worse, or they may make them better. You don’t know that.
I didn’t misunderstand Chris at all, he was still wrong.
How much longer than most? Do you want to measure and see who wins? :wink:
Does an ARPG even need a community? Trade isn’t the way to foster community, since it is a fundamentally adversarial system–it’s a competition, and building friendships with people you are fighting against isn’t normally how that works. Community should be built through forums, reddit, guilds, parties, discord, etc… like it is everywhere else.

I like the design they are aiming for here, it makes every trade impactful.

I think Cygnus’ idea has the most potential… it could easily be a scholarly article in the future.

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Final replies here because I sense we are reaching a point where we basically have to agree to disagree.

  1. We describe as if trade was a constant because the belief is that many players would choose to do the things that get them the most returns even if it’s not fun. That’s the worry about an efficient trade system, that someone may feel complied to play the auction house than the game. From your reply I know ure not that type of player. But I posit that players like you are the exception rather than the norm.

  2. I agree for many things we won’t know until we try it. If you check my post history here you would know that I’m not a fan of auction houses/bazaar but I’ve also made it clear I’m willing to see the team implement their vision and try it before commenting further.

  3. Simply insisting Chris is wrong doesn’t lend the impression that you’re open to other’s idea. Why is he wrong? (But never mind. No need for us to delve further into this).

  4. My point wasn’t to compare. But if like you can check me out on Poe forums. Same handler. Just saying that I’ve experienced everything you described in your original reply to me (because you thought I must have started more recently).

  5. When I said community/public multiplayer I literally meant that POE is more of a solo game than anything based on its league/challenges design. I didn’t mean to conflate it with trade. I agree the player interactions is better experienced through parties and/or guilds. I’m not an advocate for player interactions through trade.

  6. @Cygnus bazaar idea is novel and interesting. But I’m not optismtic that the team could come up with an implementation that would execute well. But like I said, whatever the team wish to try, I’ll experience it, and feedback again.

I think you’re right in terms of my idea. I think it would be kinda groundbreaking for an online game, but it would take ALOT of work and testing and tweaking to get it to work, and these lovely folk already have a busy schedule.

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It is safe to say in the context of all the economy/trade handling ideas, Cygnus’s idea significantly stands out to be fresh, unique yet to be handled with care to the max to get the best of it imho. It indeed requires very tight tweaking and to be well-thought and fleshed out to get the benefits right on the startup and rooted. However, if EHG can ever pull this idea off among many others, undoubtedly the outcome shall be big enough to pay off way-way worthy of having it that the title may live up to its name alone for that matter, for years to come.

I hope devs wouldn’t steer away from this nonconventional approach by comprehending that as a risk and instead as an innovative move to turn the potential into opportunity in this competitive field.

This is going to be such an interesting experiment!

One small suggestion I have is to extend the Bazaar listing time if someone places a bid in the last 5 minutes to prevent Bots from sniping the item. So a bid during the last 5 minutes extends the Listing by another 5 minutes.

a fixed ending time will result in the servers getting hit hard in the seconds/milliseconds at the very end of the Listing and it will hit a point where players with the best latencies will best be able to time the ending of the sale. Conceivably the Listed Item Best Price could change hands dozens of times in the last second and the only happy party will be the person who won the item.

RMT companies will attempt to do their business by turning a very low priced item ie. “A Rock” into a commodity being bought and sold for very large amounts of $$$ Gold. So the system has to be aware of a rough price or a price range for an item to see if it is being exploited.

Can wait!

If I can’t trade end game BiS items what’s the purpose of trading at all?

That is not the intention @trollpeis

A very small proportion of items will not be tradable. With the exception of white items with no affixes, an item being a higher rarity doesn’t mean that it will be more powerful. In this regard Last Epoch will be more similar to Path of Exile than Diablo III.

This thread is quite old now and may not have been phrased as well as it could have been in a small number of places - leading to it giving a more restrictive impression than our current intentions. We’ve been discussing either giving it an update or posting a new thread on the subject, but our upcoming beta release has kept us busy.

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Having no Special Input at that time (Maybe a bit later), I just want to throw into that - while fluid in development- the idea`s seem appropriate at that time. They surely Need to be balanced between Intention/Goal, and actual causality and Impact on Players and economy, balance the pros/cons of that and being willing to make changes and Adjustments.

As for the 5 Item Limit and the Fee on Bidding. No one knows how this would work out, really, in matters of how pragmatic it is (beside the Intention to “Keep the flow and balance within the market” vs. “what is the Player experience and how does this Limit to ensure the market is functioning Limit the Player experience”. I can see how this makes sense, I can see how this can lead to Frustration too.

Let`s say you want to get rid of your Sorcerers gear, and your Druids gear, and get into making a powerful Lich. With a 5 item Limit, you are heavily restricted time-wise. Not knowing how it may turn out in real-game, as a Player experience. I mean, you can create Problems by simply trying to avoid “that and this” Problem - e.g. botters, spammers, inflantation, etc. and therefor making a System inherently unfun or ineffective to use, or ineffective to use for certain things.

I mean, this is probably where in-game trading may be a possibility, or another function where you can “send out” that you sell full Sorcerer and Druid Equipments (probably 20-30 items in total), and People can whisper you or something. 5 Limit restriction, with its potential or theoretical inherent Pros, can have theoretical or practical Con`s, that could be or could not be dealt with at some Point, through additions or alternative Solutions.

Another idea, within the 5 Item Limit, could be: 5 Trades can be set on, that People can bid for. E.g. I offer 3 items, and I offer 2x2 sets. That is 7 Items total, but only 5 trades People can bid. So I can put online 3 items, and I can put online (on the Bazaar) the Equipment of my Sorcerer and my Druid, for a valid high Price to bid for. It will Count as 1 item, because it is 1 trade, but it includes each for example 10 items. You cant bid for one, but only for the totality.

Or you can enable that you either have a Limit of 5 Items, or you have 2 “listings” instead. Items will be directly on the Bazaar, meaning that Players can search for it by searching for specifics (e.g. “helm - strengh - vitality - minion resistance”. These will Show in the market and Count to your items. You can have 5 items max.

A listing would constitute of lets say 3 items, and it has a Topic. E.g. “Melee Sorcerer Item”. People can then go to “Listings” instead of “Search for Item”, and the Listing constitutes of “General”, and then one for each Class. So 6 sectors, General - Mage - Rogue - etc. You can choose whether a Listing will have 1 Price, or if it can be bid on each item. But for Purpose, having a listing have 1 Price would be better, because you can list more, but that should be the downside Maybe. Sell the pack or you dont sell the pack. Otherwise, sell the item. As a buyer, you also have the choice: buy an item or buy a pack. Packs could come with the downside that you dont Need all of the items. But then again, it makes more sense to put items in a pack that align with what People generally Need together (e.g. Melee sorc items), and the rest sell as items.

Ideally you could make the max. items on the Bazaar 6. One pack could hold up to 6 items. You can choose to sell 6 items or 2 packs total. One pack equals 3 items on the Bazaar. So you could e.g. list 3 items and 1 pack, or 2 packs, or 6 items. Pros: items can be searched for directly and bid for individually. Cons: Costs time and is limited highly, but more efficient in selling for particular Prices, and in a certain pace. Pros of packs: can sell more items at once. Cons: can not be searched for directly, can not set Price for items individually hence takes Maybe more time to sell

Since other matters have already been discussed full and frank, such as BoA etc. - one has to see how the middle-way turns out. That everything is tradeable to Long-on-the-F-list-People, could make it. I like both! But Im both a Trader and a “find it yourself-er”. So, from both standpoints, I wouldnt want be too restricted in both ways. To an extent. Just, finding an Ultra rare item you wouldnt use because you would never Play a melee sorc feels bad. Getting a super cool helm for your summoner that you couldnt find in months as a trade-off feels awesome though! The Question then would Maybe be how one can balance the trade-Offs of both sides, instead of causing bad Symptoms because you try to “avoid something” with a Concept design - but entirely creating a new Frustration therewith.

You could also add a function to BoA. E.g. destroying an item that is inherently BoA ( versus e.g. items that are BoA through Crafting) could give X amount of Gold, or this or that of high value. So that finding a very-rare-hard-to-find BoA item is NEVER a “no-win-situation”. And thats the Point. Or being able to re-craft a BoA item. E.g. find a BoA Helm for druid. I dont Play druid. You can reroll the helm to turn into another BoA helm. Maybe you are lucky! But some mechanic could be added to not makeultra-rare BoA`s into a Frustration-funnel.WHen you finally find that item that you dont Need at all. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hyped for the beat and to try it out!

Cheers1

I am just looking for a game closer to Diablo 2, I have played a lot of D3 and POE. I like POE way more than D3 due to item trading being available with some kind of economy. I like the direction Last Epoch is taking in regards to having a bazaar but limiting the amount of items for sale should be based on character level. For example, you can list only 1 item when level 10 or below and list only 5 items between levels 11 - 25 and able to list 10 items between levels 26-50. List 20 items (or higher or unrestricted #) above level 50. Something along these lines would be better imo. Also having bind on account items, I kind of disagree on that methodology as you might find really good epic gear but it isn’t for your class so you should be able to sell it and get something as epic but for your class. I am also seeking that nostalgia of finding a unique item that is awesome for most builds (For example in Diablo 2 “Unique Shako”).

This is fantastic, this is the best ARPG trading design that I’ve seen yet. There will be some tangible value to mid-tier items, but finding your best stuff won’t involve sniping items off an auction house at the last fraction of a second. Well done.

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My 5 cents of criticism - Forced only one currency, which can be obtained in interaction with any NPC trader in the city can mean only one - the trade will be dead or prices will be above reach usual casual player, which can farm gold 12 h every day in week…
In PoE is one advantage of every currency - usability to modify items and objects in environment (Strongboxes all kind). Gold should give such ability with spending it. Any tax trade „to drain gold market” will be not such reasonable and fun as many possible usabilites when spent it in game.

Let’s face the fact; you made Last Epoch a clone of Path of Exile and I see several aspects that can make this better, but this system will surely make people go back to Path of Exile way sooner than you might think.
You basically want to limit the maximum real life value of your best items to what? few bucks? The main reason why people get involved in meta-crafting, mirror services, endless grinding etc. in Path of Exile is because there is sometimes outrageously high real life value behind those items. Even if they do not plan to RMT, this gives them a good damn reason to do it eitherway. If you basically skip that part it just doesn’t make sense from the “grinder’s” perspective.
5 auctions, which can’t be closed until they expire/end is plain stupid too. Basically you want to kill trading completely.
Just let people do whatever they want, trade freely etc. but as suggested in another thread, have a separate currency for purchasing items on the Bazaar. This would make people actually play the game for the “tokens” instead of just power leveling a character to lvl.60 and rmting all the beast gear few hours after creating their account