Path of Exile Auction House: Do We Need One?

By: Bazkur - 7/12/2016

Does Path of Exile (POE) need an in-game Auction House (AH)? This seems to be the hot topic of the month and comes up every few weeks by somebody on Reddit and is usually met with great hostility from a few but the overall majority seem to be in favor of an AH or other similar feature. So where do I stand on this? Well, I'll agree that we need something to help the trade experience along and an AH certainly has some good and bad points.

First off, what is an AH? I think this is where things seem to get lost in translation for many people when I read their comments on the various social media outlets. Most would consider an AH to be akin to what you Have in World of Warcraft or had in Diablo 3. In those settings you have a player who wants to sell an item, a player that wants to buy an item, and they follow these basic steps:

• Player list item on the AH with a starting bid
• Player has the option of having a "Buy It Now" or "Buyout" price
• Player list the item for X amount of time
• Buyers search the AH for the stats they are looking for
• Buy places a bid on the item (assuming they don't want to buy it outright or can't)
• Others bid on the item as well until the time runs out
• The item is won by a player and the system automatically sends the item to the buyer and the currency to the seller (minus a processing fee)

So is that what we need in POE? Good question. I have experience with those systems. The AH in World of Warcraft (WoW) works exceptionally well and is an intergral part of WoW. In Diablo 3, not so much. There were so many complaints that Blizzard removed the system entirely. But was it the AH that was bad for the game or something else? I personally think that the AH was not the problem in Diablo 3, the problem was itemization and general content. I think if they had brought in the AH in Diablo 3 when the Reaper of Souls expansion was released everyone would have a different opinion of the system but they have such as bad taste in their mouth now that to even discuss it is just setting yourself up for failure. So why do I even mention it? Because it seems to be the prime arguement from players of PoE to not have an AH. If you remove those comments from people who played Diablo 3 with an AH you will find very little opposition to an AH in POE. Players who didn't play Diablo 3's AH don't seem to think the AH is a bad idea.

So where do I stand on this topic having played Diablo 3 with an AH and now spending the bulk of my gaming time in POE? I think that the argument is mute. POE is not Diablo 3 so stop making that comparison. I don't think that the argument "if we have an AH then we are going to lose value of the higher tier items" is a valid one which is what people thinks happend in Diablo 3. In POE, that isn't likely to happen because the itemization in POE is done pretty well and is tweaked all the time by GGG in the background without ever telling the players when it is occuring (Chris Wilson discuss this in one of the State of Exile podcast, sorry I don't recall which one) whereas Diablo 3 has to roll out patches to control their itemization as I understand it. If we had an AH and GGG saw there was an extreme influx in Shavs on market, they would simply tune the drop rate to bring it inline with what they believe the rarity should lay. I don't think you are going to see this influx though. Anyone who finds a higher tier item today is either using it or selling it. Why would that change? Okay, maybe there are a handful of players out there right now that are not selling things at all and will start to sell them if the system becomes less gated behind 3rd party tools or premium stash tabs.

Special note... In my opinin, we already have an AH. POE.Trade is basically an AH already. We list our items in game for a set price (or no price) and people buy them for what we ask or they make an offer which is essencially a bid.

So I've avoided the question, do we need an AH? It might surprise you after reading up to this point that my answer is "no" but I should clarify that answer. I have already pointed out what an AH is in my opinion, and I don't think we need that. What I propose we need are Stores. We don't need to make bids over days while we wait on an auction to come to completion. We need a few major things:

• Auto Buyout Option
• Haggling Ability
• In-Game Searching of Items For Sale
• Trade without Instancing

So let me start with the first item Auto Buyout Option. We need this hands down no questions asked. Anyone who disagrees isn't currently using any trade features in the game or has been exceptionally lucky in terms of finding people online. Anyone who is using the current system has undoubtably run into the issue of contacting 10+ people before you finally find somebody online or willing to trade because they are in a map or Lab run. A Buyout Option would eliminate this for probably 90% or more of the trades that occur in game. Most players simply pay whatever the buyout is listed at, most don't haggle at all (basing this on my trading experience as well as what I see occur on streams). If I could simply say "This guy has a Shavs listed for 5ex" I could simply press "Buy It Now" and the item would be delivered and the currency delivered to the seller immediatly. How this would occur would be a topic for another discussion but I'd say something like a mailbox or broker system would be the way to go.

Haggling Ability. While I don't haggle or get haggled very often, I can certainly see the appeal and the occasional need to do so. So long as the player's IGN is exposed still, you'd be able to contact them and haggle normally. But I propose a system where I can send them a message, we haggle, and then when we agree on a price we simply click an "Approve" button (both parties) then the item and agreed upon currency is auto-exchanged. Ideally the item would be linked in this process so the seller can see it without leaving their instanced area.

In-Game Searching of Items For Sale. I think I'd get little arguement on this. I have great respect for the 3rd party sites out there such as POE.Trade but when those sites are down or if they ever decide that they can't afford to keep running, what will we do? These are the only real way to find items in the game to trade. So we need some sort of GGG system to manage the searching of listed items. I'd be surprised if GGG isn't already working on this honestly. While I say "In-Game" I suppose a GGG run site would work well too but ideally it would interact with your in-game account as you clicked on whispers/buyout options on the site. Again, the details are topic discussions in and of themselves. But we need to be less dependant on 3rd party tools.

Trade without Instancing. I've basically discussed this already in the haggling comment, but one of the biggest issues for sellers is they get messaged at the most inopportune times and either have to ignore the request, leave their instance, or try to remember to reply back to the buyer after the map/lab run has completed. We shouldn't be in this position. We should be able to trade without leaving an instance. Aside from the obvious issue of leaving your instance there is another added benefit to this. Often when I trade with players in different parts of the world I get such extreme lag that I nearly disconnect. If we didn't have to physically meet up with somebody in their hideout or town, we'd eliminate this latency issue.

TL;DR? That's cool. To sum up my thoughts:

• We don't need an Auction House where we Bid on items over a long time frame.
• We need a "Buy It Now" feature to automate the purchase without any meet-ups.
• We still need the ability to haggle but the sell should still be automated once a price is agreed upon.
• The AH destroyed Diablo 3 is not a valid argument and I'm tired of hearing it.
• We need the ability to search in-game or via a GGG controled website.
• Making items easier to sell is not going to greatly impact the number of GG items for sale (thus driving down their price).
• We need less reliance on 3rd Party tools, no matter how much we respect those tools and thier authors.
• We more or less already have an AH, we just need to spice it up a bit.