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

Developer Blog
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Hello guys,

Wonderful game you have here and I just became a supporter. I do have a warning for some ideas mentioned, however:

In the old days Diablo II created a good item & trading system considering it was the best of its kind. Several people tried to copy it and changed the wrong things, but one group did a better sequel than Blizzard themselves. The game in question was Path of Exile, and although imperfect they certainly came closest than anyone else.

If I can offer one critique it would be this - don’t just look at systems “you” like and pick and choose, a narrow myopic view can lead to a very bad decision. Understand why other games did things and what their goals were. In the case of Diablo 3 - blizzard made the horrible trading system because they wanted to maximise their profit. They made a shallow stats, skills and item system, because they wanted to minimise cost of design & balance.
On the other hand GGG wanted to make a free to play game - and although amazing - that gave them a lot more economic problems, which the devs here are understandably concerned about. However, as someone previously said a lot of the issues were from the fact that it was FREE. A gold/currency farmer would only have to lose one account, or even perhaps one mule. A little time lost but no money. When he loses an account that’s a much bigger problem for him, especially since they tend to live in poorer countries. The reward for 11th Hour is that they improved the economy and were paid to do it (from the botter who bought their game). If you ever need new blood you can always have free weekends or a demo with a level cap, but we’re here to discuss the market… I mean bazaar.

BoE/BoPickup are terrible archaic systems which are not fit for ARPGs, and although some people defend them, they are also saying they prefer playing SSF (self-found aka 99% solo play). I don’t see the issue with a mechanic they’ll avoid/not plan on using.
For example I plan on playing only Hardcore mode - because to me without the risk of losing it all, there’s no challenge in respawning - but I would never advocate that you make a Hardcore-only game :slight_smile:

PoE did get something very wrong however - I draw wisdom again from a previous poster - drop rates. Intuitively we think all uniques have the same drop rate, sometimes only certain bosses can drop certain things and that’s cool, but uniques having different drop rates - outside of iLvl/mLvl/cLvl requirements - is counter-intuitive. They should have just added more rarities. Example: unique tier items make something unique - change how skills behave, etc. epic tier items are just very powerful, hard to find items.

The bazaar limit isn’t a bad idea but what about the bazaar looks like an auction house, but doesn’t function like one. Instead of automated trades you have people whispering you (by clicking Buy it automates a message/item link) and they whisper you?
As a player I would think twice before I list every junk item in the hope of getting some gold, because people will be whispering me constantly. Also it requires you to be online and therefore there’s no instant access. Maybe that gives you some helpful ideas :slight_smile: But please no BoP/BoE/BoA before understanding why those systems were made, I think your goals, 11th Hour Games, are vastly different.

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Hi Mastery, welcome to the community and thank you for your support. You raise some very good points and I have to say that I agree with your concerns. We don’t expect to get it right on the first try. I’m sure that the plans we have for the Bazaar will evolve as we experiment with it at scale. It’s actually one of the systems that we want to get up and running fairly soon so that we can start testing it out. Currently, we are planning on having certain situations in crafting where it binds the item to your account but makes the crafting guaranteed to work. We are planning on having most (if not all) items that you find out in the wild be tradable on the Bazaar or giftable to your friends.

We really like the GGG trading system a lot and want that same sort of market to happen. You’re right though, we are trying to avoid gold sellers being a thing. We are also trying to avoid players needing to go to another website or program (e.g. poe.trade) to set up a trade.

Most of the devs (myself included) are more much responsive on our discord.gg/lastepoch/ if you are interested in diving deeper into it.

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This POE trade manifesto was brought up recently in POE reddit. I actually think it is instructive design philosophy for a successful arpg, and thought to share the link here:

I am not sure the idea of a bazaar is compatible with the ideas within. But will give EHG’s vision of a bazaar the benefit of doubt and experience it before I feedback further about trade ideas in this game.

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  1. I agree having a bazaar, or open game trading without the need to rely on third party sites is a great idea. In the case of path of exile having to use a 3rd party site was both annoying and also encouraged and made it far easier to manipulate the market. D2 had an even bigger problem where everything was relied on d2jsp where scamming was rampant since FG was an entirely different system from d2 itself… which brings me to

  2. Having gold as the main currency just isn’t a good idea from my experience. The inflation that grows when gold is the main currency in games pretty much always ends up destroying large parts of the economy Being a new player years after the game was released means that all the gold you get ingame is of close to no value. Items tend to retain value far better which is also why an itembased trading system needs no sinks. Even though tons of goldsinks can be added, usually the most effective goldsink is taxation of trading. This pretty much is just a way to discourage trading, which i dont think is a good idea in itself. Then you have other problems with your propose of how to implement the taxation and trading system. For starters it hurts a player who geniuenly wants an item and is willing to offer more than the first offer but is discouraged by the increased taxation because he was late in finding the offer, that goes against the idea of the bazaar (open market). Secondly there is times when you need considerable time in order to find a person who actually needs such a specific item, for example it took me 8 months until i found a buyer for my 68stat cold sorc amulet, the system you are suggesting, what time would it limit the trade to? It would possibly pretty much destroys the market of nieche items and turn it into RNG(an item valued at 100x could be sold for 1x because its such a niche item which leads to flipping fest)

  3. Even though I understand the desire to dismantle RMT, the way to go about doing so isn’t destroying trading, that would just mean that you have given up, ill get back to this point.

The 5 item option is also counterproductive, you will simply have people with many alts. One way to make “mid” level items retain value is by them actually being “useful” in the long run (in the case of diablo 2 tons of early game items retained value because they were great items even in end game, example runes, soj, shaco, titans, the list is huge) or gatekeeping the highend items to a much larger degree (very hard drop rates), or alternatively making them fit niche roles, where there isn’t alternatives depending on build even if you level higher. As for items maintaining value later on is a completely different story.

Besides gatekeeping the best solution to help maintain item values, is to disable a full on public list trading system (namely the bazaar you are talking about) and make trading a bit more of a social-interaction, similar to something like ragnarok online where you had to go around opening peoples trade windows manually but instead of prices perhaps you have to actually manually talk and trade with them. This makes it more difficult to find cookie cutter items, and unlike PoE the API should not be made public. The idea isn’t to limit trading but to make it require more of an effort and not turn it into a worldwide open list.

Most of the things are more or less debatable and difficult to create a perfect system. Plenty of games have managed to make even a pure gold system work without even a taxation system (runescape etc). But the absolute worst idea is to make items untradeable, the concept is wrong on so many different levels. Regardless of how you do it you will pretty much destroy the logevity of the grind either by simplifying it or making it discouraging in these 2 ways:
In my opinion a game needs alot of gatekeeping on itemization and making it simple to get the stuff you want is a bad idea, if you don’t do that then you fail to create logevity and the desire to fulfill the journey of putting together a character/build. I would go as far as to say even some build-enabling mechanic items should be gatekeeped pretty hard (to create desire). When i was a kid trying to scrape everything together until that day i finally was able to get an enigma for my barb was an incredible journey. If you hold the same opinion then having stuff be untradable is will be a desire killer since it would be extremely discouraging to find an item other than the specific you are searching for since you can’t trade up for it, I would’ve never been able to get together an enigma in D2 if it wasn’t because i scraped together everything i found and traded towards that goal. The game simply becomes too RNG and even great item drops won’t give any satisfaction since they are useless to you if lets say you have 2 of them already (or if you don’t play that build/character).

That leads to option 2, which is the only other option make the game simple where every item you could desire can be found grinding fairly easily. If you have good stuff be untradable then this becomes the only option otherwise the grind will be hell and unrewarding. There is no need to argue about this one, it pretty much destroys all human psychological desire to work towards a goal/build, its free handed candy. It isn’t a bad idea but you won’t have a long player retainability.

Then there is another aspect to the whole retainability equation, and that is how do you monetize the game. This is where diablo 2 failed really, it had too much player retainability due to the perfect balance of itemization / trading BUT it was a 1 time purchase game meaning in an economic perspective it was a money sink due to server upkeep and endless free entertainment after purchase. The main goal of a game with longevity should always be tons of microtransactions(cosmetic) or expansions to go hand in hand.

Trading is almost as important part of the game as itemization, it should not be taken lightly. Even if it is taken lightly, i hope you never in any shape or form agree to untradables, its such a flawed concept. In a similar fasion binding on account is also pretty flawed.

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I disagree completely. However I am not going to write out a long post. To keep things simple what me and many of my friends hate, what games like this come to be, is having to take forever to get a build defining item. I think making those items untradable while having the drops similar to d3 is a wonderful idea. I loved everything about the latest version of d3 except the fact that there is zero build diversity. If this game can give me early game trading and build diversity while keeping other people from playing monopoly with high end items I will be a full supporter. I will say that the drop rates don’t have to be quite as common as d3.

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So many awesome ideas floating around!!

I’ve got my own to add to the mix. (and i’ve never seen it done on ANY game)

What if the bazaar acted like an AI middleman that bought items for a price from players based on rarity, level and modifiers and then set the price itself to sell it based on those same factors (+10%) and sold everything anonymously.

For example - Player A has 3 items he wants to sell. A low level 2 mod item, a high level 4 mod item and a unique.

When he sells the 2 mod item, the Bazaar checks its current stores. It sees that this particular low level item have a base value of 100 gold, but there are lots of items in stock with those same modifiers, and two mods are pretty common. So it offers 75 gold.

The 4 mod item is checked against stores, and the bazaar sees that it has a “rare” (that is rare in the bazaars stocks) modifier on it.
The base price for that level item is 500 gold, but that rare modifier in addition to it having 3 other mods makes a big difference so it offers 900 gold.

Finally the unique. Its the only one on the market! This particular unique has a base value of 2000, but because its the only one in the bazaar, and it also has an amazing roll, the bazaar offers 4000.

Player B rocks up and buys all three, at 83 gold, 990 gold and 4400 gold respectively, and upon sale, player A receives his money.

Market saturation drives common items down, which deters sellers, resulting in either a natural plateau or natural fluctuation.
Market scarcity drives prices up, attracting sellers.
At the same time, buyer demand can mean that, maybe you do have a relatively rare modifier on a 4 mod item, but if its something no-one wants, it’ll just gather dust at the bazaar until you give up and vendor it.

Clearly thats a VERY indepth, math heavy retroactive system that also relies on developers setting appropriate base values (which i guess would reflect chance to drop) and modifier values (e.g. number of mods, rarity of those mods, rarity of that item type, rarity of those mods being together, rarity of THAT item having THOSE mods etc etc.)

But FULLY achieves all three main concerns.

Gold will always have value, and new players are actually at an advantage when buying in a busy market, but rare drops for anyone of any level can still be traded for a good price.
The absolute low point of an item would be set by the vendor sell price.

Also completely screws RMTs. They have no-way of selling directly to a player, and if they tried to co-ordinate sales with a player, the rarity of the item would mean they cant even set the ingame price or who actually buys it.

The only issue i see is gold creep.
Maybe my idea in this thread of breaking down items to get components could be the big gold sink. Maybe shattering for components costs more as you level up, so end game you’re having to sink alot of gold in to get the huge amount of components you need.

I guess also rich players could also drive up certain mod prices on a rare item by buying out all the cheap items with that mod. But i doubt it would be worth it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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