SERIOUSLY - LE needs to do something about the Merchants Guild

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I’ve been playing LE since it’s launch, got excited about the Merchants Guild and the opportunity to buy/sell your best items BUT now it’s getting out of control:

:exclamation: Many items listed more than 15 days ago.
:exclamation: Overrated prices.
:exclamation: Cannot see the seller’s name / id to avoid coin sellers (people who are selling coins in websites)

So, the points is: We need market limitations like (based in previous games I dealt with and their player’s market was decent):

:white_check_mark: X number of items you can sell per day (idk, 10 maybe)
:white_check_mark: X number of days the item can be in the market (no more than 1 week)
:white_check_mark: who is selling? is a fair user or website coin seller?
:white_check_mark: Information avoid the average price of the item you’re trying to sell
:white_check_mark: Website to see all the items listed just to see the price references

Hope they can bring back Merchant’s Guild popularity back again since many players are moving from Bazaar to Observatory and honestly, I loved free market featured in games since Maple Story but I think the developers just abandoned this guild :confused:

2

This is what happens in any game that has trade. I don’t think it should be changed either. LE just needs a good price checker and then you can ignore those.

That’s just a result of inflation and no good gold sinks. Will keep happening until LE finds a gold sink that is appealing to MG players.

This is not an issue. Gold sellers don’t make gold by selling items, they make them by farming gold with dozens of bots.
Not to mention that EHG is more likely to identify gold sellers than you are.

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3

Does it matter if the price is reasonable?

4

The only real reason for limited listing time is to filter out the stale listings (other than listing performance, but that is a dev decision, not a player one). But with a good price checker, if you see outlier prices (either too cheap or too expensive) and can see that it’s been for sale for months or years, then you can ignore it.

5

Nah funny enough games with an AH style ones usually have listing limits. either space, or time, or both. I think we need both, but space can be more forgiving. but your item should 100% not sit on the market for weeks at a time. it means your item is not worth what its listed for.

in real life economies there is supply and demand, but those mechanics break down a bit with goods that dont cost anything. So a house that sits empty is someone paying property tax for 0 gain, at some point they do lower the prices, shoes take up space, if they are not sold, no new product can be put in. So shoes go on clearance to get people to buy them. etc.

This flops in online spaces because the tax is on the buyers end iirc, there is no penalty for listing an item for max gold for no reason, and there is 0 kick back of any of the items. and as far as I am aware you can list as many items as you want. So the stat some people employ is to just list as many items as they can for high prices until the economy eventually makes someone buy it.

PoE suffers from the same problem, people will simply set up “1div” tabs where they dont price anything, drop items into it and wait for someone to bite, and never accept any haggling. So the buyers are the ones who have to do every single bit of work. And you will see items listed months ago, that the player just refuses to sell to you even 10% lower then what its listed. Why? because there is 0 loss of money if they dont. So because they likely dont even need the money at that point, might as well keep waiting since they waited this long.

Items desperately need a timer, when the timer runes out you will have “take back item” options, or “relist” options. And there needs to be some kinda tax for simply listing an item. That way the strat isnt to just put 100 items up for sale for to high of price, then just repeatably relist them.

Ive actually desired this in PoE too, as its a mechanic price fixers use, they list items for low amounts with 0 intent to sell and snipe the cheap ones people price match with. this works because they are able to list items with 0 intent to sell them. there needs to be mechanics to prevent phony listing.

6

But in LE there is no way to do this strategy (because people would just immediately buy the item). And even if there was, there would be no benefit because you can’t resell.

I personally don’t see any issue with old listings as long as your search tool is good. In PoE standard there are thousands of items that are years old. But since the search tool is very good, you can simply ignore those.

And if you impose limits on listings, then you definitely need to improve the UI a lot, because re-listing, de-listing and even searching among your listed items is quite an effort.

Ultimately, I think that if you create time limits for listing it will simply increase the amount of time you’re not playing and you’re instead managing your listings. It stops being an ARPG and starts being a store simulator.
This is not a hill I would die on, though, since I prefer CoF anyway. But it does seem to be a flawed concept, to me, purely because of all the extra management it imposes on players, especially new ones.

7

Your partly correct but this is still happening. now its just on the buyers end.

So what ends up happening is that selling is just “throw shit at the wall until something sells” and buying is OP going “how the heck do I get what i need” improving the search tool does nothing if the sellers end is still “throw shit at a wall and see what sticks”

Cause its going to be made worse with a perfect search tool, okay I am able to search anything very easily like say a poetrade. Well I drop an idol, there is 3 up with my mods all for 200m so i just follow suit, and everyone new who drops one? also does this, until eventually someone some where decides “oh its not selling let me try something else”

it works on the high end and the low end, so while price fixers cant really abuse it as easily, it creates a terrible market space where everyone just has to slowly lower because the guy at the top just never changes his item. by forcing that item unlisted at some point, eventually the guy on the top gets tired of relisting it, or straight up forgets and it gets delisted letting the market start fresh.

All I know is they need to bring selling and buying closer, selling seems to be pretty easy and worth while to do, while buying large amounts of items seems extremely annoying.

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8

I disagree with this. Because with a good search tool you can simply filter out older listings. So in the end it’s no extra effort for the buyer either.
And you can refine the ranges on affixes, so you can filter out exactly what you want.

As I said before, older listings has never been a real issue in PoE. This is even less of an issue when you have an AH and don’t even need to interact with the seller directly.

Actually, the tendency is always to underprice. You see 3 for 200M, so you’re selling for 195M. And the next person is selling for 190M, etc. Until it starts selling.
We see this all the time in PoE as well.

Besides, as pointed above, with a good search tool you simply filter out the older listings. It’s what I did in PoE when price checking. If some of the outlier listings (either cheaper or expensive) are older, I just ignore them.

I agree. But this is achieved with a good search tool, not limiting listings.
A buyer should just be able to check the price easily and put however many items he wants for however long he wants.
And a seller should be able to easily find the best item he’s looking for for the best price available.

The issue is that currently you have 10 pages of the item you’re looking for and you have to manually go through all of them. You don’t have options like in PoE where you can limit ranges on all affixes, do weighted sums, counts, etc, both on implicit and explicit affixes (even unique ones). And you can filter price ranges. And how old listings are. And many other very specific things that you won’t use often but you can use every now and then to make finding your item much easier.

When you search for an item in PoE, you don’t spend a lot of time on it because if you have 10k results you can always refine it to a point where you only have half a dozen and know that those items are the best for what you’re looking for.

PoE market has many issues, but having a great tool for price checking isn’t one of them.

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9

Was about to type what DJ just mentioned - going through 40 pages of the same item with +1 or +2 skill points on it but you can’t filter that or the base crit percentage, basically needs a more detailed search function. As if, kinda bad as you’ll sort by price expecting best prices at one end for best items but nope, just listed by crazy folks lol

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