Flea Market Design Issues

[CypherNil]

Problems

The current flea markets design encourages bots/macros and punishs players who dont make use of them, the delay on purchasing orders seems a quick and dirty solution to displaying market activity. It simply seems like a rushed feature and directly leads to fast fluctuations in prices rather then a slower more stable economy. Having played many games with player driven markets this one seems very lacking and though the solution I'm proposing requires a lot of work it is the only tried and true method of blocking bots without consistant effort from the developers I have seen to date.

This system is open to abuse from real world money transations but bar removing trading from the game entirly there is no known method to stop these that I've seen in any game.

Solution

Slow things down with session based trading, this is used in path of exile and warframe, all trade buy and sell offers would be exchanged through a chat system (a region or global trade chat you'd apply a word filter too to see offers for a specific item), this system typically leads to third party websites like warframe.market being created to smooth out the system, the actual trades would take place in the hideout.

Requirements/Limitations

A trade table in your hideout, this creates another resource sink, upgrading it allows more trades each day. OR you could tie trading to your PMC level, 5 + PMC level trading per day. Trading skills could be integrated into the system later, increasing trades per day, reducing tax.

But what about the existing flea market screen?

Leave it in place to allow us to search items, have it show a live feed of the games economy, whenever a 1:1 trade is completed between 2 players it can be added to a graph displaying the shifting price of an item on the market.

Process

You invite a player to your hideout (loadtimes should be tiny), they spawn in only as an avatar with no gear, you interact at the trade table (none of this can be automated by a bot) and get an interface similar to the traders screens, both players can openly see what is going to be given, recieved. A small trade tax applies to both players. Once both players are happy with the trade they click ok and are shown a confirmation screen with all trading items displayed, after a 3 second delay they confirm again and have a final "handshake", the items are transfered into each others accounts. Only after the final confirmation does it count as a single trade for the limit per day.

Results

1. No more bots or scripts which free's the devs up from having to focus on these issues.
2. Slower more deliberate trading, with time as a factor and a limit on trades per day pricing will stabilise and bartering of multiple hoarded goods will occur between players.
3. Real life bartering, players will be able to activly discuss what they both need and exchange.

 

Thoughts, idea's?

Edited December 31, 2019 by CypherNil

[echocage]

As someone who has a couple thousand hours in POE, the community absolutely despises the trade system, and is currently being phased out in other regions. It takes a ton of time to sell items, and the interactions aren't meaningful in the slightest. Not only that, POE has a ton of trade bots, that most players prefer to trade with as it's done very quickly.

Personally I think a market system like BDO uses would be better. You click buy, and the item enters into a purchasing mode for the next 30 seconds, where anyone who also clicks buy is entered into a little lottery, this means uncontested items are traded with ease, and with contested items, everyone has a fair chance of getting the item.