Frankly I think it's impossible to avoid for rare items. People are just going to have to accept their mistakes and attempt to not make them in the future.
FWIW, I don't think games that have traditional auction houses tend to have any protections for this kind of thing. I'm not sure why people expect it here. Maybe because lots of people have gotten used to the lazy (and frowned upon) method of throwing everything in a cheap tab and only price checking an item after they get spammed.
I only bring this up because it was asked in the jessirocks interview and Jonathan said he didn't have any solutions to the problem but was open to suggestions
Yeah, I know, I was just saying, I don't think it's a solvable issue.
I think the approach you specified for bulk trade (and even uniques) is perfectly valid, but for rares specifically, it just seems straight up unavoidable.
This is one of the reasons why I *like* the current trade system of getting whispers for an item.
It's just *not reasonable* to perform price checks for every item. In PoE1, you can throw them into blanket priced dump tab and then reprice the tab if it doesn't get sold, or price-check the item if you get spammed.
In an instant buy-out system, the best that we can expect is putting unreasonably high prices on the dump tabs and lowering them very cautiously.
I don't think bulk trading is too problematic because it's possible to do price-checks there. But items are far too complex (and will continue to be complex in PoE2) for the system to work well.
My issues with having instant buyout *at all* aside, I don't have much of a problem with price checking most things. If I don't and something sells instantly I just take that as a lesson.
Not impossible though, you can have a grace period of some kind where if more than X number of people try to buyout an item it would get flagged as wrongly priced. It has drawbacks though (like allowing people to click buy on something that would tell them already sold) so it's likely easier to allow people to make mistakes. The hard part is that with instant buyout nobody would learn that they made a mistake like they do today by getting spammed.
One thought to try to limit downsides would be a grace period of something 1 minute where the item is still shown in the shop, but if you try to buy it says "already sold" but also allows you to click a separate button to flag as mispriced. If flagged by enough people the sale in cancelled before it goes through.
> Not impossible though, you can have a grace period of some kind where if more than X number of people try to buyout an item it would get flagged as wrongly priced.
If there's a grace period, then it's not instant buyout. Doesn't seem like a huge deal but I'm sure people would bitch a ton if buying an item took 5s or whatever.
Also, what if that's *not* the wrong price? What if it's just an item in high demand? What if people maliciously abuse this system with friends or bots to stop people from being able to sell items that compete with theirs or price fix?
I think they'd know they made a mistake simply by having some sort of notification their item was purchased. If it's purchased essentially instantly, you probably priced it low, or it's just in very high demand.
>but if you try to buy it says "already sold" but also allows you to click a separate button to flag as mispriced. If flagged by enough people the sale in cancelled before it goes through.
I could also see this getting abused in a similar way.
This always need to be a consideration with automated systems. There will always be people contributing in bad faith to take advantage of the system for their own benefit.
Maybe you could just sell it to the first person, but notify someone a few minutes later if there were a lot of failed attempts to buy their item after it was already sold. 50 people clicked the button within 3 mins. Obviously, it's already sold and gone, but it reinforces the "here's a lesson" part for them to learn from.
Ultimately, it is people's responsibility to price their items appropriately, so I don't see a problem with that, but I'm sure some wouldn't like it.
Right, it's an instant buyout where it gets delivered after a grace period. That would be a required drawback though likely seems acceptable.
Wrong price would need to be community driven basically, it should be tuned to only enough flagged reports that it's safely getting ripped off. Abuse of the system could be handled essentially with a trust factor, where if you flag items that aren't flagged by other members with high trust it would get ignored. It still does become complicated to avoid abuse, but it's feasible to handle the abuse.
Essentially people acting in bad faith should have a way to get punished, which can be done through automated algorithms, but likely still adds manual work in evaluations of disputes.
I don't think instant buyout always signifies wrong price though, tons of items in POE currently instantly gets bought while still at the right price. The idea of sending a message that X number of people tried to buy this item could work like you said, that's a good idea.
I understand the hard lesson perspective, and I'm fine with that for myself. I think the idea of guardrails is to help more people enjoy getting into the trade economy when it's already super daunting. Of course if newbies don't know they screwed up, that might even be generally ok. I do think bots hitting instant buyout will be the most lucrative part of the game though if allowed.
> I do think bots hitting instant buyout will be the most lucrative part of the game though if allowed.
Gold fee *should* avoid mass botting of purchasing, hopefully. I do however think gold fee should exist on both selling *and* purchasing to prevent people mass listing junk to sell for zero effort.
I guess that depends on how hard it is for bots to acquire gold. Might make botting a higher barrier to entry, but dedicated people should still be able to spin multiple bots that get themselves enough gold I assume. Maybe the gold limit means they only snipe extremely lucrative items, but with enough bots that bar could lower.
> but dedicated people should still be able to spin multiple bots that get themselves enough gold I assume.
Gold isn't tradable so they'd need to farm it on each bot.
It's *going* to be a problem though, in some capacity. It's one of the issues I have with them implementing instant trade at all.
>Maybe the gold limit means they only snipe extremely lucrative items, but with enough bots that bar could lower.
I don't think gold will prevent sniping of super underpriced, high value stuff, it might just prevent it from happening to *everything*.
Yeah I think that's the hope, that gold would limit bots to snagging broken prices but still allow actual players to find good values. I think I just doubt that it ends up working out that way unless they are real good at detecting bots when they try to farm gold.
They haven't mentioned enabling buy requests have they? The idea of being able to setup a buy request filter, essentially saying you would buy the first item added to the market which meets your criteria could also help solve this. It would mean that people raise their buy requests higher than other existing buy requests, setting a price floor for items. And if you tried to sell an item for lower than it's worth, but it hits someone else's buy request you would still get full value at the price floor. Probably in a game like PoE it's just extremely complex to be able to setup those buy request filters with so many options to configure.
> They haven't mentioned enabling buy requests have they?
Jonathan mentioned currency exchange would have buy and sell orders, but I don't think that's the case for items.
How about a 10sec delay before an item is listed that refreshes when you change the price?
That way you can quickly correct mistakes.
If you fail to notice your error within that time, that's just ~~a skill issue~~ the way it is; you can make mistakes just like in normal trade interactions.
Another thing that would be cool is a narrative around instant buyout beyond the game mechanic, like a specific NPC you pay with gold that goes and instantly collects/manifests the item for you. No mechanical impact, but it could add some immersion.
I think that's about as much as you can do, really. Maybe also/instead of that you could put a confirmation box that forces you to think twice about what you've written, and then that's it.
Add 30 min auction time for items fresh on the trade. The item is sold to the highest bidder, and the flippers have to make more reasonable price predictions.
Yeah I would love it actually, but I don't think that's the direction they seem to be going. Community seems to be too adverse auctions, maybe just from D3 tainting the idea of an auction house.
If you have instant buy out that solves the fake market item on its own, the problem we have with fake market items now is that there is no instant buy out so people can load tons of items out there way below market value with no intent of selling them. If they have an instant buy out then that issue goes away.
I am curious how much of the market will use instant buy out depending on the cost of the tax that will go into the instant buy out.
Display a confirmation dialog that requires you to re-enter the price for your sale item. If the prices match, list the item. If they don't match, notify the player to either re-enter the correct price or go back and fix it.
I just want to note that the current trade system will go nowhere. So it will just depend on the comunity adjusting on both systems use case. I can totaly see the default behaviour being to use the AH to buy/sell currency and low variance items (such as uniques or crafiting bases), while rares still using the old system, because of the pricing complexity. Not having to spend gold to use the current trade system should mean that it will still be used a lot (depending on the gold tax of the AH, of course). In the end I think I will prefer to sell any <1div item in the AH for eficiency and if I ever get or craft anything better, use current trade method to try a better price. So I don't see much benefit from spending time developing a solution for such hard problem. The only kind of misprice they should worry in my opinion is mistyping, and that should be easy enogh to do with a grace period and/or a confirmation dialog before listing the item.
I don't think this is a real problem. For the rare items I don't think that anything is possible except using the trade market and bargaining unless GGG decides to implement an in game UI for in game trade market/auction house. For the unique items though this is not a hard problem to solve. I have no idea about technical coding part but in theory it is very very easy. You don't need a predictive algorithm or % price of market value. There are already 2 good implementations in other games with auction houses.
**1. Option (showing the min. and max. prices in the market):**
Just show the buyer (and also maybe seller) maximum and minimum price for that specific item in the auction house. A simple example:
Item A Auction House listings:
1. 10 currency
2. 10 currency
3. 11 currency
4. 11 currency
5. 14 currency
So the seller or buyer can decide the price for buying and selling. If I want a fast sell as a seller I can put my item in Auction House for 9 or 8 currency. If I have patience to wait I can put it for 15 currency. As a buyer also same. They can make some buttons to make errors less like: a) minimum price b) max. price c) average price etc. or manual entry. Since this is not a "stash sale", it should be okay. Min. and Max. price can be limited also like: max./Min. price a seller can use could be +/-% of the max./min. prices in the market.
**2. Option (A real Auction House):**
A real Auction House instead of a Trade Boot. Put the item for X price (min. price) for Y time (with or without instant buyout). Then buyers will increase the bid themselves. Since it was marked or sent to Action House there won't be any option to refuse bids if there are any. If the item doesn't get any bids then seller gets the item back. Otherwise buyer gets the item, seller gets the payment. No market manipulation, no price fixing. Since there is already a trade website for stash sales I think this is a much better option. I think, this is also very good for rare items when a player has no idea about the price of a rare item. In my personal opinion this solves a lot of problems about trade. Of course there should be some limitation like 5 or 10 items at most in Action House at a time. Otherwise it will turn into a price check stash tab. Maybe bulk sales and other items can have different limits though. In any case this will prevent any accidental pricing, any price fixing or any trade shenanigans and also helps new/inexperienced players to sell their items for as close as their real market value.
A small reminder: These shouldn't be replacing current stash sales but as addition. If a player wants to operate a stash shop s/he should be able to.
Least invasive solution is to have items not list for 30 seconds after being put up.
You put the item up and then you'll have 30 seconds to be like "oh wait that was the wrong price" and take it back down. I assume after adding it you'd have a summary screen of what you listed and what price you just listed it for.
This solution means no annoying popup between every transaction. No need for extensive development on a complicated algorithm.
Anyone who still slips through the cracks then was probably going to just click the warning popup anyway.
I don't believe an auction house should be fully automated, just the fact that we don't have to go to each other's hideouts for each trade is a great change.
Just let me say "yes or no" to a trade when prompt (with a timer). Assuming it's not an offer, If I press "no" the item is delisted.
Also, allow me to not have items for sale when I'm offline. The market always changes, an item I could've listed for 1 divine can be 2 divines the next day. I don't want my items to sell for less because it was automatically traded.
Frankly I think it's impossible to avoid for rare items. People are just going to have to accept their mistakes and attempt to not make them in the future. FWIW, I don't think games that have traditional auction houses tend to have any protections for this kind of thing. I'm not sure why people expect it here. Maybe because lots of people have gotten used to the lazy (and frowned upon) method of throwing everything in a cheap tab and only price checking an item after they get spammed.
I only bring this up because it was asked in the jessirocks interview and Jonathan said he didn't have any solutions to the problem but was open to suggestions
Yeah, I know, I was just saying, I don't think it's a solvable issue. I think the approach you specified for bulk trade (and even uniques) is perfectly valid, but for rares specifically, it just seems straight up unavoidable.
This is one of the reasons why I *like* the current trade system of getting whispers for an item. It's just *not reasonable* to perform price checks for every item. In PoE1, you can throw them into blanket priced dump tab and then reprice the tab if it doesn't get sold, or price-check the item if you get spammed. In an instant buy-out system, the best that we can expect is putting unreasonably high prices on the dump tabs and lowering them very cautiously. I don't think bulk trading is too problematic because it's possible to do price-checks there. But items are far too complex (and will continue to be complex in PoE2) for the system to work well.
My issues with having instant buyout *at all* aside, I don't have much of a problem with price checking most things. If I don't and something sells instantly I just take that as a lesson.
Not impossible though, you can have a grace period of some kind where if more than X number of people try to buyout an item it would get flagged as wrongly priced. It has drawbacks though (like allowing people to click buy on something that would tell them already sold) so it's likely easier to allow people to make mistakes. The hard part is that with instant buyout nobody would learn that they made a mistake like they do today by getting spammed. One thought to try to limit downsides would be a grace period of something 1 minute where the item is still shown in the shop, but if you try to buy it says "already sold" but also allows you to click a separate button to flag as mispriced. If flagged by enough people the sale in cancelled before it goes through.
> Not impossible though, you can have a grace period of some kind where if more than X number of people try to buyout an item it would get flagged as wrongly priced. If there's a grace period, then it's not instant buyout. Doesn't seem like a huge deal but I'm sure people would bitch a ton if buying an item took 5s or whatever. Also, what if that's *not* the wrong price? What if it's just an item in high demand? What if people maliciously abuse this system with friends or bots to stop people from being able to sell items that compete with theirs or price fix? I think they'd know they made a mistake simply by having some sort of notification their item was purchased. If it's purchased essentially instantly, you probably priced it low, or it's just in very high demand. >but if you try to buy it says "already sold" but also allows you to click a separate button to flag as mispriced. If flagged by enough people the sale in cancelled before it goes through. I could also see this getting abused in a similar way. This always need to be a consideration with automated systems. There will always be people contributing in bad faith to take advantage of the system for their own benefit. Maybe you could just sell it to the first person, but notify someone a few minutes later if there were a lot of failed attempts to buy their item after it was already sold. 50 people clicked the button within 3 mins. Obviously, it's already sold and gone, but it reinforces the "here's a lesson" part for them to learn from. Ultimately, it is people's responsibility to price their items appropriately, so I don't see a problem with that, but I'm sure some wouldn't like it.
Right, it's an instant buyout where it gets delivered after a grace period. That would be a required drawback though likely seems acceptable. Wrong price would need to be community driven basically, it should be tuned to only enough flagged reports that it's safely getting ripped off. Abuse of the system could be handled essentially with a trust factor, where if you flag items that aren't flagged by other members with high trust it would get ignored. It still does become complicated to avoid abuse, but it's feasible to handle the abuse. Essentially people acting in bad faith should have a way to get punished, which can be done through automated algorithms, but likely still adds manual work in evaluations of disputes. I don't think instant buyout always signifies wrong price though, tons of items in POE currently instantly gets bought while still at the right price. The idea of sending a message that X number of people tried to buy this item could work like you said, that's a good idea. I understand the hard lesson perspective, and I'm fine with that for myself. I think the idea of guardrails is to help more people enjoy getting into the trade economy when it's already super daunting. Of course if newbies don't know they screwed up, that might even be generally ok. I do think bots hitting instant buyout will be the most lucrative part of the game though if allowed.
> I do think bots hitting instant buyout will be the most lucrative part of the game though if allowed. Gold fee *should* avoid mass botting of purchasing, hopefully. I do however think gold fee should exist on both selling *and* purchasing to prevent people mass listing junk to sell for zero effort.
I guess that depends on how hard it is for bots to acquire gold. Might make botting a higher barrier to entry, but dedicated people should still be able to spin multiple bots that get themselves enough gold I assume. Maybe the gold limit means they only snipe extremely lucrative items, but with enough bots that bar could lower.
> but dedicated people should still be able to spin multiple bots that get themselves enough gold I assume. Gold isn't tradable so they'd need to farm it on each bot. It's *going* to be a problem though, in some capacity. It's one of the issues I have with them implementing instant trade at all. >Maybe the gold limit means they only snipe extremely lucrative items, but with enough bots that bar could lower. I don't think gold will prevent sniping of super underpriced, high value stuff, it might just prevent it from happening to *everything*.
Yeah I think that's the hope, that gold would limit bots to snagging broken prices but still allow actual players to find good values. I think I just doubt that it ends up working out that way unless they are real good at detecting bots when they try to farm gold. They haven't mentioned enabling buy requests have they? The idea of being able to setup a buy request filter, essentially saying you would buy the first item added to the market which meets your criteria could also help solve this. It would mean that people raise their buy requests higher than other existing buy requests, setting a price floor for items. And if you tried to sell an item for lower than it's worth, but it hits someone else's buy request you would still get full value at the price floor. Probably in a game like PoE it's just extremely complex to be able to setup those buy request filters with so many options to configure.
> They haven't mentioned enabling buy requests have they? Jonathan mentioned currency exchange would have buy and sell orders, but I don't think that's the case for items.
How about a 10sec delay before an item is listed that refreshes when you change the price? That way you can quickly correct mistakes. If you fail to notice your error within that time, that's just ~~a skill issue~~ the way it is; you can make mistakes just like in normal trade interactions. Another thing that would be cool is a narrative around instant buyout beyond the game mechanic, like a specific NPC you pay with gold that goes and instantly collects/manifests the item for you. No mechanical impact, but it could add some immersion.
I think that's about as much as you can do, really. Maybe also/instead of that you could put a confirmation box that forces you to think twice about what you've written, and then that's it.
I see the other side, all these price fixers will have their price fixed suddenly sell while they try to play the markets, thats a win
The other side is bot flippers instantly buying everything mispriced though. Pros and cons to both sides.
If anything in the last years taught me, the bot flippers at least do reply and sell shit
Add 30 min auction time for items fresh on the trade. The item is sold to the highest bidder, and the flippers have to make more reasonable price predictions.
Yeah I would love it actually, but I don't think that's the direction they seem to be going. Community seems to be too adverse auctions, maybe just from D3 tainting the idea of an auction house.
Learn from mistakes made and don't repeat it.
If you have instant buy out that solves the fake market item on its own, the problem we have with fake market items now is that there is no instant buy out so people can load tons of items out there way below market value with no intent of selling them. If they have an instant buy out then that issue goes away. I am curious how much of the market will use instant buy out depending on the cost of the tax that will go into the instant buy out.
Display a confirmation dialog that requires you to re-enter the price for your sale item. If the prices match, list the item. If they don't match, notify the player to either re-enter the correct price or go back and fix it.
Can we make the player perfom a few captcha test instead? People love those...
People make mistakes now, they will always make them.
I just want to note that the current trade system will go nowhere. So it will just depend on the comunity adjusting on both systems use case. I can totaly see the default behaviour being to use the AH to buy/sell currency and low variance items (such as uniques or crafiting bases), while rares still using the old system, because of the pricing complexity. Not having to spend gold to use the current trade system should mean that it will still be used a lot (depending on the gold tax of the AH, of course). In the end I think I will prefer to sell any <1div item in the AH for eficiency and if I ever get or craft anything better, use current trade method to try a better price. So I don't see much benefit from spending time developing a solution for such hard problem. The only kind of misprice they should worry in my opinion is mistyping, and that should be easy enogh to do with a grace period and/or a confirmation dialog before listing the item.
I don't think this is a real problem. For the rare items I don't think that anything is possible except using the trade market and bargaining unless GGG decides to implement an in game UI for in game trade market/auction house. For the unique items though this is not a hard problem to solve. I have no idea about technical coding part but in theory it is very very easy. You don't need a predictive algorithm or % price of market value. There are already 2 good implementations in other games with auction houses. **1. Option (showing the min. and max. prices in the market):** Just show the buyer (and also maybe seller) maximum and minimum price for that specific item in the auction house. A simple example: Item A Auction House listings: 1. 10 currency 2. 10 currency 3. 11 currency 4. 11 currency 5. 14 currency So the seller or buyer can decide the price for buying and selling. If I want a fast sell as a seller I can put my item in Auction House for 9 or 8 currency. If I have patience to wait I can put it for 15 currency. As a buyer also same. They can make some buttons to make errors less like: a) minimum price b) max. price c) average price etc. or manual entry. Since this is not a "stash sale", it should be okay. Min. and Max. price can be limited also like: max./Min. price a seller can use could be +/-% of the max./min. prices in the market. **2. Option (A real Auction House):** A real Auction House instead of a Trade Boot. Put the item for X price (min. price) for Y time (with or without instant buyout). Then buyers will increase the bid themselves. Since it was marked or sent to Action House there won't be any option to refuse bids if there are any. If the item doesn't get any bids then seller gets the item back. Otherwise buyer gets the item, seller gets the payment. No market manipulation, no price fixing. Since there is already a trade website for stash sales I think this is a much better option. I think, this is also very good for rare items when a player has no idea about the price of a rare item. In my personal opinion this solves a lot of problems about trade. Of course there should be some limitation like 5 or 10 items at most in Action House at a time. Otherwise it will turn into a price check stash tab. Maybe bulk sales and other items can have different limits though. In any case this will prevent any accidental pricing, any price fixing or any trade shenanigans and also helps new/inexperienced players to sell their items for as close as their real market value. A small reminder: These shouldn't be replacing current stash sales but as addition. If a player wants to operate a stash shop s/he should be able to.
Meh, this isn't a problem to be solved. If people accidently list things for the 'wrong' price, then so be it.
Least invasive solution is to have items not list for 30 seconds after being put up. You put the item up and then you'll have 30 seconds to be like "oh wait that was the wrong price" and take it back down. I assume after adding it you'd have a summary screen of what you listed and what price you just listed it for. This solution means no annoying popup between every transaction. No need for extensive development on a complicated algorithm. Anyone who still slips through the cracks then was probably going to just click the warning popup anyway.
I don't believe an auction house should be fully automated, just the fact that we don't have to go to each other's hideouts for each trade is a great change. Just let me say "yes or no" to a trade when prompt (with a timer). Assuming it's not an offer, If I press "no" the item is delisted. Also, allow me to not have items for sale when I'm offline. The market always changes, an item I could've listed for 1 divine can be 2 divines the next day. I don't want my items to sell for less because it was automatically traded.