Feature Suggestion: Temporal Appraisal — Fixing Trade to Be Functional and Fun

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Feature Suggestion: Temporal Appraisal — Fixing Trade to Be Functional and Fun

Right now, trading in Last Epoch isn’t fun. It’s frustrating, slow, and punishes players for trying to engage with the economy. You spend more time guessing prices and adjusting listings than playing the game. Favor loss for canceling, no way to reverse search items, and long-dead listings all contribute to a system that feels more like a penalty than a reward.

We need trading to be more accessible, more reactive, and — most importantly — more fun.

Proposal: Temporal Appraisal

A simple system that lets you appraise the market value of your item with one click, giving players real-time pricing context and easy tools to adjust listings responsibly.

How it works:

Right-click an item, select "Temporal Appraisal"

The system scans current listings for:
- The same base type
- Affixes within ±1 tier
- Optional filters: LP, Forging Potential, sealed affixes

It returns a price overview:

    Lowest listed for 1 tier lower
    Lowest listed for same tier
    Highest listed for same tier

Result:

You get a clear price range and can choose to list at a fast-sale or market-aligned price.
The system auto-fills the listing window with that value.

Price Editing:

  • After 24 hours, allow players to change prices without canceling.
  • Optionally charge a small favor cost for mid-window edits (5–10%).
  • Encourages honest pricing without enabling spam.

Listing Expiration:

  • Auto-expire listings after 14 days.
  • Items return to stash (no favor refund).
  • Prevents stale, long-dead listings from clogging the economy.
  • Could be extended to 30 days as a Merchant’s Guild perk.

Optional Appraisal Filters:

Let players toggle filters like:

  • Exact tier match only
  • Exclude LP or FP items
  • Show only listings created in the last X days
  • Include items with recent sale activity

This helps players understand what’s actually in demand — not just what exists.

Why This Matters:

Trading should feel like part of the power progression.
Right now, it’s more frustrating than rewarding — especially for late starters or players short on time.

Temporal Appraisal would:

  • Make trade intuitive and quick
  • Encourage active listings
  • Fix long-term market bloat
  • Let players play the game, not manage a spreadsheet

This isn’t about making trade “easier” — it’s about making it feel worth doing.
Let trade become part of the fun.

A Note on Taxation

The current tax system makes trading needlessly frustrating. If a tax must exist, it should be taken from the price we set — not added on top of it. Right now, we have no control over how our item appears to buyers. This breaks strategic pricing, clutters listings with awkward values, and creates confusion.

On top of that, gold is already abundant within a few weeks of a cycle. Between favor costs and economic inflation, there’s no meaningful reason to also apply a gold tax. Either remove the tax entirely or, at minimum, let players control their listing prices directly.

Thanks for reading.
Idea by me, format by GTP

2

Yes, a price checker is requested fairly frequently, for good reason.

That abundance in gold is the reason for the tax. As is the inflation. Though it’s also a reason for not using gold as a currency.

It must, because there’s currently no effective way for gold to be removed from the economy, Lightless Arbour should be a way but isn’t. That’s a fair point & I wonder how much of an effect the tax being added afterwards contributes to inflation. If you see an item for sale for 100, that includes tax, but when you set the price for your similar item to 100 tax is then added on top so everyone else sees your item at 115 (or whatever the tax % is) so if the next person uses your item as the price point to list theirs at, buyers see theirs at 132.

Listing expiration, I get it & the need for it but I’m not entirely sure if there are enough people selling enough different items to keep the market functional outside of the first few weeks if items auto-expired.

I wonder if the entire concept of how the MG gains rank needs to be reworked as currently it encourages listing crap to gain rank faster to be able to buy the more desirable items sooner. That said, I don’t know what a better solution would look like.

3

Devs want to do this, but it’s not an easy thing to do. And this is because it has to be very accurate. If a price checker undervalues items then you’re losing money. And if a price checker overvalues items, then you’re not selling (and thus are losing money) while contributing to inflation as well.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I’m both for and against it.
Yes, it would prevent long dead listings but it would also increase the effort required to interact with MG.
Mostly I think this wouldn’t be necessary at all (and thus I’m against it) if we had a decent price checker. PoE doesn’t do this and there’s no issue with dead listings, because when you’re price checking you see how long ago they’ve been sitting there.

This can’t happen though, because you might not have free space in your stash. If this were implemented, it would have to sit on MG (outside the AH) until you reclaim it. Similar to how redeem works when you sell stuff.

A tax must exist, because an ever increasing currency will always lead to an ever increasing inflation.
With a tax you’ll eventually reach an equilibrium point.
The tax should even be higher, because 15% is clearly too little to prevent rampant inflation. Although MG should use gold either, so… :man_shrugging:

I do agree that the tax should be on the seller, not the buyer. Either that or show the items with their correct value + tax, so players are more aware of this.
Because a tax on the buyer does remove more currency than the reverse.

I think MG ranks are backwards. Ranks should work on preventing the bigger issues with the market currently. And that isn’t buying item but selling them.
So MG should just let you buy whatever gear you want whenever you want (items have level restrictions already, no need to add more) but each rank lets you sell more items.
So MG1 lets you sell 1 item at a time, MG2 lets you sell 3, etc. Until eventually you can sell 50 or 100 at MG12.

This way, if you have limited sell slots, you won’t just spam the market with whatever garbage you find. You’ll have to evaluate it properly. Or at the very least you’ll have to keep an eye on it and eventually delist stuff either to lower the price or to sell something else.
This would massively decrease the amount of low value trash available.

4

IMO the tax should increase based on the value of the item, low value items have a low % tax, high value items have a much higher % tax & that needs to ve communicated at the time of listing so the player is aware. Though if the tax was taken of the price the player listed it for you’d then have threads complaining about not receiving the proper amount.

Shouldn’t.

That’s one option but then you’d have a much lower quantity of items available for sale early on. Plus people would just list/cancel/relist the same item in order to spend their favour to maximise rep gain, just like people list crap now. Players are degenerates that will always find the quickest path, whether it’s actually enjoyable or intended or not.

5

Not only can you already do that now, but at least this way the amount of crap items like these would be massively reduced.
Rather than a hundred crap items per player, you now have half a dozen.

I find this funny. Because all that matters is that you spend favour. So I believe it would be faster and more productive to simply gamble at the MG vendor.

6

Sounds a bit like the system Eve Online is using, which btw i find extremely well made. There you invest experience, which you gather over time, in merchant skills. For example: number of items listed at the same time, how long you can list an item, visibility of your item (local system, neighboring systems, whole sector, etc.). The MG perks as you suggest might be the right way to do it.

1 Like
7

I would take it a step further… every 24 hours once.
Ensures flood strategies are even harder to do besides the re-selling option not existing in the first place.
Also allows to actually adjust to the changing market over time.

I’m heavily against listing expirations.
I’ve talked about my preferred system already before, which is a limited sale-slot, the reasonings as well.

The major reasoning I’ll repeat again for that though: With limited listing slots you have to choose what you’re selling, and with more play-time this generally leans towards high-value items. And since space is not endless to list this reduces the market flooding on the lower end, keeping values higher for low- to mid-tier items and hence allows players which start off later to have the ability to actually list items which still have value then.

Stale listings aren’t a problem if for example every cycle all items in Legacy are moved towards a separate storage on the marketplace, invisible for people. Easy re-listing for no cost or removal being possible then. New listing being blocked until this storage is emptied.

This ensures that only active accounts get to have active listings, keeping the bazaar less cluttered and hence more responsive while at the same time not punishing players in any form for not being behind the market-game directly.

This should be done in conjunction with a removal of favor cost for listing, because that’s just utter nonsense to have. The favor cost should be solely related to buyers.
Progression through favor usage for listing also causes the market to become abused mechanically and leads to a bad environment by design. Progression for MG needs to be reworked from the ground up in many places. This is just one of em, but a very important aspect.
And as a Disclaimer: Changes to MG needs to be looked at in conjunction with others, not individually, because I know some people here specifically which would cherry-pick singular aspects which only work in grouping to others for a reason.

Value curves, visualized for base + affix with exalteds would be very good. That’s a thing EHG definitely needs to implement. Every well-working market has visualized aids to help making proper decisions, and LE’s market has enough variance to make it basically mandatory for a good working order.

Agreed, and baffling why EHG hasn’t done that. Their approach is phased out since roughly 30 years in markets for a reason.

Actually the contrary.
The tax is basically mandatory to partially reduce the inflation. It’s by far not enough though. EHG lacks proper implementations for gold sinks long-term, and it’s a massive detriment to their economy.
Market-wise what should actually happen is minimum pricing based on favor cost, not a fixed price-rate. Ensures that any legendary items has a higher minimum value then currently by far. Also favor costs should rise according to pricing itself, forcing the burden of progression onto play-time rather then pure luck of acquisition. The market is supposed to become useful through effort, not lucky sudden hits like CoF does, that’s what discerns it majorly from it after all.

Yes, it needs to be reworked completely.

As for the changes there… it’s actually rather straight-forward and together with the mentioned points above something which really isn’t that hard to design, the difficulty mostly lays in balancing and effort of initial execution.

First off… progression is solely based on XP, hence reputation acquisition, not favor usage. Favor usage providing progress is detrimental for the market as it influences buying decisions… and not in a positive way. People flood the place to advance and ruining options for profit hence. People buy random items they don’t need and taking away opportunities for others hence. Either way is really bad.

As for the progression system itself… power scaling, more advanced then ‘have those few ranks which can’t remotely define a proper baseline’.
Items need to get a power-ranking which is based upon several factors:

Affix composition, namely total tier amount, individual tiers and rarity of those specific tiers.
Base type.
‘Special’ items like sets and uniques need to have a inherent price and a multiplier for further changes. Each Unique being given a individual value based on expected acquisition point during progression as a 0 LP item. Also with higher values respective to boss-drop only items, or specific content locked ones like Brewmasters. By crafting them into Legendaries then the cost gets respectively improved by a multiplier towards the affixes based on LP-chance of the respective unique as well. A unique having a 1 in 8 chance for 1 LP needs to have a lower multiplier then a unique having a 1 in 20.
The combinations of the respective values and following multipliers given then leads to the power scaling and hence minimum favor cost for a buyer, ensuring that respective play-time is invested to get items rather then purely Gold acquisition through luck. Favor cost can rise with gold-price though… but should never be below the minimum threshold based on power level.

Not only does power level provide a easier instant method of price-checking as you know how hard it is to drop comparatively to other items… but it also reduces RMT because Gold is not the thriving factor anymore as a chokepoint for progression… instead time/effort becomes that. Also it finally fixes the atrocious acquisition positioning of items, buying Uberroth items at Rank 3 is kinda… odd.