The Trade Rabbit Hole

Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to go down a bit of an odd tangent and talk about trading in Path of Exile. The last league was the first time I bought anything from other players. Once that barrier was broken, I interacted with Trade many times during this league and have been occasionally selling things. Yesterday I dove further down that rabbit hole and set up a structure for selling goods and the above is the view many strangers have seen… as I invited them to a party and then they popped over to my hideout to make a purchase. Most of the trades are peanuts, and even more, I have passed up because it was not convenient to pop to my hideout because I was in the middle of something and it wasn’t worth 1 Chaos to stop doing whatever it was. For those unfamiliar with trading in POE, I figure I should probably give a high-level rundown.

Essentially every thing that is not associated with a quest… aka colored green, can be traded with other players. Since POE does not use a gold equivalency and instead you receive usable items bartered back to the player from vendors, the trade economy runs also on these currencies of equivalent value. You can check sites like POE.Ninja to see what the rough value of each item is but effectively there is a spectrum of value. If we consider Chaos Orbs to be equivalent to a dollar, then Exalted Orbs would be roughly 10 dollars, and Divine Orbs the next major currency would be roughly 240 dollars. This scales upwards based on rarity with Mirrors of Kalandra being the king of all currencies at roughly 56,900 Chaos Orbs for one. For most purposes, small trades are priced in Chaos, and large trades are priced in Divines.

Grinding Gear Games manages the flow of goods through its website which serves as a central clearing house of all listings. Unlike the ill-fated Diablo auction house scheme of old, GGG takes no cut of the trades and only profits through the sale of Stash Tabs. In order to list things publicly you have to have something called a “premium” stash tab which costs roughly $4 at a non-discounted price. A premium tab can be flagged as public, which means that items contained within it will be cataloged for sale on the website. You can then right-click on an item to set a price or if you choose you can denote that everything within a single tab is a fixed price. When you search the Trade site, all of the items listed are sitting somewhere in a player’s stash tab and the “Direct Whisper” button sends a specifically formatted message in that player’s language denoting that you want to make a purchase.

From there a fairly scripted sequence plays out like clockwork. I am not sure HOW the order of operations became enshrined but it is most definitely a thing. Here is my quick rundown of what commerce looks like in Path of Exile.

• The person wanting to make a purchase clicks the Direct Whisper button on the website while logged into the game. This will send a specifically formatted message and make a loud ping noise to the seller.
• If the seller is able to meet up with the player and conduct a trade, the seller will invite that player to a party indicating that they want to make the sale.
  • Of note, there are lots of times when it is just not convenient to try and sell something, especially if it is for only a few Chaos Orbs. This is also part of the culture and if you don’t get a response you just move on to the next listing.
• The buyer and the seller both return to the seller’s hideout.
• The encoded message that was sent with the Direct Whisper button will have indicated what trade tab the item the person wants to buy is located in, and when the seller goes into that tab the item in question will be highlighted with a purple outline.
• The buyer waits, usually on the waypoint pad for the seller to open a trade window.
• The seller retrieves the item and opens a trade, and places the item in the window.
• The buyer places the amount of currency from the listing in the trade window and hits accept.
• The seller mouses over all of the currency in order to verify the item and hits accept.
• There may or may not be any communication that takes place, if there is any it is usually a short “thx” or “ty” or something along those lines.
• Either the seller or the buyer disbands the party and the buyer leaves the hideout to go about their way with their new item.
  

Where things break down slightly is when someone uses the formatted message but wants to haggle. I’ve had a few of these take place. If the item is a single Chaos I am more than likely willing to take lesser currency in its place. However, I had one person yesterday say they wanted to buy a jewel that was going for 120 chaos… and then when we get to my hideout tell me that they only have 29 Chaos and wanted to “make a deal”. You are just too far off from the price at that point and I have no interest in 9000 Scrolls of Wisdom. The thing is… this has happened exactly three times so far, two with dollar store items that I had up for sale and once with the high ticket item. Most trades just function like an automated machine.

In my bank, I have six tabs that I have flagged as public and have goods for sale. Essentially I have 3 “bulk” tabs that have items priced at 1 Chaos, 5 Chaos, and 10 Chaos accordingly. I made these breakpoints because they sorta represent several common breaks that I have seen for items. If an item is worth 12 Chaos… I am going to just dump it in the 10 Chaos bin. If an item is worth 8 Chaos… the 5 Chaos Bin et cetera. The other three tabs are for items of higher value or items that I really want to custom price for whatever reason. Since setting this up, I have made a large volume of trades and while most of them are nickels and dimes… if I am sitting in my hideout it takes almost next to no effort to turn an item I would have previously vendored into a chaos orb.

The problem of course comes with pricing items. Exilence Next is a great tool that will let you price out everything in one or more stash tabs and is somewhat useful for letting you know that you might be sitting on some hidden value there. Example… I sold a few cards this season that was worth a few divine each and would have had no clue I was sitting on that without this wide sweep. The problem is it takes a significant amount of time to run a scan because the API only allows it to send 30 requests every 5 minutes… which means if you are cataloging MANY stash tabs it can take half an hour for a run to complete. This is not a great option for price-checking something on the fly.

That is where Awakened POE Trade comes in, and I have been talking about it for a while now. Once configured you can mouse over an item in your inventory or stash tabs, hit control+d, and it will bring up a guesstimate of if an item has value. The best thing that it is useful for is indicating the tiers of the rolls on a specific item. The challenge is that the number that it brings back is in the category of a “wild-assed guess”. However, you can turn off and on specific attributes that add value to an item and it will search on those parameters and try and bring back a more refined estimate. Generally speaking, I think it overvalues the items that I find based on my own experience, so I apply some “gut math” to tone that down. For example the 120 Chaos Jewel I was talking about earlier, indicated that I should be able to get as much as 200 Chaos for it. That seemed outrageous so I dropped down to the price tag that I was using… and then ultimately just gave it to my friend who is playing Poison SRS because it seemed significant for that build.

I am not necessarily going hardcore into trade, because it is a means to an end for me. I care about currency in a league only insofar as it solves problems with my builds. I’ve invested likely four divines worth of currency in my Righteous Fire build and it is so much nicer to run than it was previously. I thought it would be interesting to look at the general state of my currency tab from 12/13 on the left to 1/4 on the right. So if you only look at liquid assets, and consider that I have spent 4 divines… on the 13th I had roughly 39 Chaos, and counting what I have spent so far I’ve had roughly 2600 Chaos this league. The biggest difference between this league and other leagues is that I have been dabbling in trade and turning things I was not using into resources that I can then spend on items that I will use. I am not specifically doing things for the purpose of making currency but it is nice to be able to afford upgrades over time.

I am very much doing this as a side thing, and I certainly hope I never turn into an Auction House Baron. However, it is one more step on the descent into madness that is Path of Exile. I am not necessarily changing HOW I play the game. I’ve focused a bit more on Delve and I am making a good profit from it… but I also really enjoy playing Delve. I think when it is no longer as compelling I will move on to doing something else. I think the next step on the path to hell however will be dabbling in bulk selling. There is a discord out there where folks can post an export from Exilence and have others bid on bulk items. I figured somewhere out there was someone playing an arbitrage role of buying items cheaply and bundling them with other like items then selling for a profit. I’ve found that place but also I have yet the desire to wade into those waters.

This morning’s post if nothing else is an attempt to demystify what seemed at first to be a terribly cumbersome system. While I would likely prefer an anonymous trade system that did not require anything of me, something more akin to the trade boards from Everquest II or Retainers from FFXIV, this is also not awful. It reminds me quite a bit of the Nexus in Everquest, which required players to effectively be a vendor. However, it is not even something you can bot like you could that because it requires effort from the players involved which also lends a weird human touch to the process. Sure most trades go by without comment, but occasionally conversation does happen. Especially on those single chaos items I am way more willing to offer deep discounts and take assorted “bubblegum” currency if it helps someone get a random item they needed.