I, personally, couldn’t imagine enjoying Grinding Gear Games’ action-RPG Path of Exile as much as I do, without being able to easily purchase the items I need from other players. To do so, previously you had to use third-party websites, but now you can use GGG’s own trade site. And if you’ve grown accustomed to those third-party sites – those aren’t going away, in fact, the updated Online API will add some functionality to them as well. Here’s how this will work:
Today we have launched a beta version of pathofexile.com/trade, a trade site that has similar functionality to popular community sites. We have also augmented our Online API to take into account AFK players and those in DND mode. This functionality is available for all trade sites that consume this API and should help make trade results more accurate for everyone. Read the rest of this news post for information on pathofexile.com/trade, or click here to read our Trade Manifesto if you’d like to hear more about our philosophy behind trade in Path of Exile.
A small subteam have been working on pathofexile.com/trade for a year now, with the goal of creating a slick, fast experience that supports many of the features of other community trade sites:
- Search through item listings from the Public Stash API as well as linked items in trade threads from the forum.
- An extensive set of filters to find that perfect item.
- Automatic support for new mods and unique items as they are found in leagues.
- Live-searches that notify you of matching items as they are listed by other players.
- A trade-specific blacklist to hide item listings from abusive players.
- Available in all the languages Path of Exile supports (English, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, German, French and Spanish).
The goal of this site isn’t to change how trading works, but to provide more options for our players. It doesn’t really matter which site you use, but it does matter that there’s always one available and in your language. We also hope that additional features we add over time help reduce certain frustrations related to trade. API changes like the AFK/DND information will of course be available for external trade sites to use.
And if you’re up for some reading, you can check out GGG’s Trade Manifesto that outlines their stance on the game’s user-driven economy. An excerpt:
Items Matter. Trade is Important.
When we started developing Path of Exile in 2006, we identified several key design pillars. These are fundamental philosophies chosen to guide our design decisions throughout development. One of these was that “items matter”. Items are a player’s reward for playing Path of Exile. They’re the primary way of measuring progress in a league. A person with vastly more in-game wealth has often played longer than someone with a higher level character. They also matter because if a player had better items, then they’d be able to build more powerful characters, play harder content, and be viewed as richer and more successful within the game. The acquisition of items is why people play Action RPGs. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you understand why it’s important that items matter because your Path of Exile items mean a lot to you as well.
For items to matter, it’s important that they can be traded to other players. It’s important that you could give the item to the other player, if they were able to convince you into it. For this reason, almost nothing in Path of Exile is bound to your account. Even in Solo Self-Found mode, which doesn’t allow trading, items can be moved at will into the regular trading leagues so that you can benefit from their value if desired.
The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile – if you’re lucky, you can find amazing stuff that you can trade for all the items needed to create an entire new character build.
Consequences of Easy Trade
So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile’s formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not. While easy trade sounds great on paper, there are some important considerations!
Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.
People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!
Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can’t be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can’t use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in. Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you’re reading this, then you’re one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.
The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We’re tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.
Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players.
