And a heinous p2w cash grab at that if it were done as you describe (presumably the premium currency would be used for trading).
Or you could sale with a specific currency that drop from content especially boss.
For instance if you kill a boss it drops in addition to loot a ātrade tokenā (which quantity could vary with the level of the boss killed).
Therefore you could only trade with in game currency without having to resort to real money.
In addition to that, maybe a interesting system to limit pricing abuse could be either bracketing items based on the added number of their affix tier or directly pricing the item based on the sum of the affix tier.
For the first system it could go :
1- 4 : A token
5-9 : B token
Etcā¦
A and B and the rest could follow any mathematical progression that could be seen fit (linear, parabolic, exponential) to reflect the rarity of the item on the price.
While the intention of this system is good.
That is not very practical.
There are 4x T5 items that are probably not worth much, but still good for soem chars in the early mid game because of a few stats on them.
The pure ātierā from all affixes combined is an indicator of how strong the item possibly can be, but if the affixes are somewhat synergystic is the thing that makes a item worth nothing up to god tier.
Stuff like pricing etc should evolve over time and should be community driven with only restrictions in place that soley serve to prevent abuse.
If you have community driven market then Iām afraid you will inevitably have all the abuse related to such a system :
- Price fixing
- Scam
- Bot
etcā¦
Maybe if the player base number is manageable it will be possible to maintain it to a very low level but if the game has a good commercial success Iām afraid such abuses canāt be efficiently kept under control.
Edit : Now that Iām reading again, itās a stupid system for pricing. One for the reason you mentioned, second because some of the most valuable items to trade could be those with 2 specific affixes that could be crafted in a god tier item.
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You will never be able to completely negate any kind of abuse.
But there are ways to minimize it.
Price Fixing
Not exactly sure what you mean with that.
Scam
That is probably the easiest one to totally negate, when all the trading system are kept ingame. If player use external sites that is their fault then. it all depends on how player to player trading restriction will be.
Bot
LE is a B2P title, which already at least reduces the accessability.
There are several ways to minimize chat bots and trad bots etc. Way too muich to cover here.
For price fixing it is something common in PoE. Maybe if the trade ecosystem is different that is something that could be avoided. Donāt know though.
For scam again Iām refering to PoE you are scammed in game during the transaction. Sometimes the seller swaps the item you want with another of try to give you one very similar that worth nothing instead of the one you want. Donāt need a third party site to be scammed in a trade system.
For the bots WOW was a B2P with subscription. That never prevented the game to have tons of bots.
Trading being bidding via an AH would help to mitigate the first, trading via an AH would prevent the second and bans would help to mitigate the third (since itās not a f2p game so botters are less likely to set up a new account if they have to pay full retail price for it).
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Ture, but still it lowers the amount of all those kind of stuff compared to pure F2P titles. Some F2P titles these days get literally SIEGED by all kind of bots/sellers.
But there are so many ways to reduce that, enableing chat/trade after reaching certain milestones etc. That is a topic for a whole other discussion.
Question is what kind of system the devs want to implement. When their vision from the outdated Economy Thread is remotely the same today, they probably go for a indirect trading route(like bazaar/auction house) and just player to player trade with soem restrictions.
Iām not familiar with D3 but wasnāt the AH in the game a disaster for some reason ?
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Haha, the good old D3 auction house disaster 
Blizzard somehow thought that approved real money trading would be a good idea. In that iteration of an action house you literally could pay or recieve real life money. I think it was going into BNet Credits if i remember correctly.
My understanding of the way price fixing works in PoE, itās that one or more sellers put an item up for trade at a cheap cost but then they just donāt sell it when people ask. Others see the lower price when they are looking to put their own item up for trade and they price competitively with the lower-priced items. The price fixers buy out these lower-priced listings and repost them at a higher price since they donāt plan to sell their own lower-price listings to begin with, which will force anyone wanting to buy that item to buy from a higher-priced seller due to all the lower-priced competition being bought out.
An auction house, as far as I can tell, would eliminate this version of price fixing, since the seller has no control over whether or not they sell their item once it has been bidded on. They wouldnāt be able to list items on an AH interface at an artificially low price to try tricking others because people would be able to buy those listings.
However, an AH could have the opposite version of price fixing where one or more sellers buy out all of an item below their preferred threshold and then resell everything above that threshold, essentially cornering the market. A guy in one of my WoW guilds did this for a common raid consumable for nearly an entire expansion (~2 years) and inflated the cost of the item. Anyone who couldnāt craft it themselves or who didnāt have a friend/guildmate who could craft it for them had to pay higher prices than they otherwise would have.
It is possible for a gaming community to kill off this form of price fixer by flooding the market with lower-priced goods and hoping the price fixers either run out of gold trying to buy out all the listings or give up when they realize there are too many people working against them for their scheme to continue to be profitable, but this comes down to how deep the price fixersās pockets are and whether or not the community is willing to unite to unseat them.
In the case of my WoW guildmate, he had so much gold and so much time that the market cornering only stopped when he decided to stop. A few of the larger guilds on our server tried to force him out and couldnāt. He ultimately got bored, realized heād never spend all the gold he had, and quit the game.
I think it had less to do with this and more to do with wanting an ongoing revenue stream. They knew people would RMT anyway so they put in a āsafeā way to do it while taking a cut of the profits. Players could either leave their profits in Bnet Balance or use Paypal (I think?) to cash it out. However, due to the spending limit, players with higher-value items traded them outside the system anyways.
another pretty simple implementation to avoid fake gold selling accounts is restrict direct player trading to lvls below 50, that way you still gotta do the whole story content first and also require a two-factor authentication.
Generally speaking, there are a ton of ways you can restrict unwanted trading and many of them do not induce player frustration!
Level 50 doesnāt take that long to achieve, and 2FA doesnāt stop gold selling. Maybe Iām missing something here but I donāt see either of these as things that would stop gold sellers/RMT.
I agree, and a strong way to restrict unwanted trading is to make it truly optional by balancing loot acquisition around a solo/single-player experience.
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Yes, their stated reason for doing this was to stop people from being scammed, but as Katalaeia said, they took a cut from the RMT. They also balanced the drop rates around people using the AH so you pretty much had to use the AH to gear up.
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