Trade Manifesto

10 years pass by

Can you please just add a the ability to add a merchant to our hideout. It would work something like this:

1. Place merchant in hideout. Merchant can have, say, 1 merchant tab by default. You can purchase up to 4 more for a maximum of 5. More profit - you're welcome.

2. I interact with Merchant and add items to tabs. You'd basically use the same UI we use in our stash to do it, except on the merchant.

After the Merchant is added people can come to my hideout and purchase items from it just like they do any other NPC vendor in the game.

For the vast majority of transactions this system would work great. It would only be tricky around the edge cases, for example with very valuable and underpriced items. In this case the hideout could quickly get swarmed by bots.

To combat this let's create a "reservation" system for newly listed items. If I see an item on the trade site I want to buy, I click "Reserve". This would reserve the item for 1 minute. If I'm the first person to reserve it, I get a notification in game to enter their hideout. I then join their hideout as usual and purchase the item and any other unreserved item(s) I'm interested in.

Let's say 2 people reserve an item. The first gets a hideout invitation that lasts 1 minute, and the other gets a notification that they're in queue position 1. If the first person doesn't buy it, the second person gets notified they're up to buy the item.

The key here is that only one player is allowed to purchase the item. Even if a friend joins their hideout they can't purchase that reserved item.

We would punish players who frequently reserve items and don't purchase them. This would stop people from smashing reserve to "think about it" and then letting it expire. This is behavior that absolutely needs to be punished. If it happens too frequently - give them an escalating timeout duration from interacting with the market.

For items that are over 30 minutes old with the same price we abolish the reservation system. This indicates the item is either niche or overpriced. Players can freely come and purchase these items at any time.

Anyway, I fiend for an improvement of the current system. As it stands now the frustration generated from the current trading scheme actually fatigues me to the point where I don't play POE1 very often anymore.