Dissection of a Trade

Good Morning! I hope your week is going well and at a bare minimum tolerable. Yesterday I talked a bit about engaging with the trade economy in Path of Exile. This morning I am going to pick up where I left off a bit and include some of the things that I didn’t really talk about. Firstly the community has a sort of rhythm that trades follow and it is insane how smooth everything goes. First off say you are wanting to buy an item, then you will of course go out to the official Path of Exile Trade website and more specifically select the league you are currently playing in. I am in the Crucible Softcore League so for me I just select “Crucible” from the drop down. This will allow me to search for items that are currently available for sale by players who are online and playing in the same league I am in. The online part is important because all trades are made face-to-face, but the website smooths out this interaction quite a bit.

So say we are looking for a Tabula Rasa, the ultimate in twink leveling convenience as it gives you access to a six link for any socket color combination at level 1… with the trade-off being you have no defensive stats on the item. When you search for “Tabula Rasa” on the trade site you will see everyone selling the item and the price they have it listed for. When you find an item you want to attempt to buy if you are logged into your account you can click the “Direct Whisper” box that I have highlighted in green and blown up on the above screenshot. What this will do is cause your in-game character to send a specifically formatted private message to that player.

@CascadeDeezNuts Hi, I would like to buy your Tabula Rasa Simple Robe listed for 8 chaos in Crucible (stash tab “$$$”; position: left 4, top 4)

For example, the above item generates the following message. What this mechanically does in-game is tell the player that you are wanting to buy the item, what tab it is stored in, and what column and row it is located in. However, it actually goes one step further and will highlight in purple the item in that inventory slot once you have invited the player to your party. This makes it pretty easy to find what the intended target of the trade was and retrieve it to trade to the player. After a trade message has been sent a sequence of events plays out almost automatically as though everyone were reading from the same script.

• The Buyer Sends a Message via the Trade Site
• The Seller Invites the Buyer to a Party
• The Buyer and Seller meet up in the Seller’s Hideout. This is always the case unless otherwise agreed upon, no clue who made this rule but it is absolutely a thing.
• The Buyer brings the agreed-upon currency to the hideout and mostly just waits on the Waypoint pad.
• The Seller retrieves the item and opens a Trade Window with the Buyer.
• Both parties insert their items into the Trade Window.
• Both parties mouse over to verify the items. This is required to complete the trade and the accept dialog will not show up until you have moused over every item. If you are trading a lot of items or currency this can be a bit tedious.
• Both parties hit accept and the trade completes.
• The Seller generally either kicks the Buyer out of the party, or my personal style is to leave the party… effectively dissolving it.
• You have the option of exchanging pleasantries but it is absolutely not a requirement. Depending on how I am feeling I usually message the other party “Thx”.
• Both parties go about their business with either a brand-new item or a stack of new currency as a result.

Yesterday I recorded another one of my dumb videos to attempt to illustrate the point of just how fast I can liquidate a stash of resonators. It takes a bit for the trade site to realize I am selling the goods, but once it starts I get a rapid-fire succession of folks wanting to buy my goods. I figure if nothing else the video illustrates just how fast a trade goes, in this case, it is me as the seller but I’ve also been the buyer so many times and the same pattern plays out. The community just seems to follow this pattern without anyone actually specifically telling you to follow it. One other piece of wisdom is if you do not respond to a trade request within a few seconds… buyers are usually going to move on to the next person selling the item. There are a lot of times as a seller when it just is not convenient for me to accept a trade because I am in the middle of combat. This is just accepted as part of the whole situation and no one really takes offense if you don’t respond. Occasionally I follow up when it is convenient for me, but almost always I get thanked for doing so but the person has gotten the item from another vendor.

As far as the trade site goes, the search engine is pretty robust and allows you to get extremely granular in what you are looking for. For example, I have been periodically looking for a new helm for my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I started out with a slightly cheaper option that has worked well for me, but I eventually want one with Socketed Gem Support for level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect while also including Buring Damage, Area Damage, and Regeneration on the item… with an empty prefix so I can craft on +1 to AOE Gems bench craft. I also am only interested if the item has an Armor base and am not interested in it if it has any Evasion on it… as my specific build gives me no benefit from Evasion in any form. The fastest way to do this that I have found is to set a Minimum Armor stat of 1 and a Maximum Evasion stat of 1. This is an extremely specific search that I am running and will likely give only a handful of results.

Sure enough, when I completed the search it narrowed down the results to three items. The first two I had seen before and was not interested in them due to the very low amount of life regeneration on each. The last item though, I decided was well worth 2 Divine Orbs to me personally and as a result, I snatched it up. I did not really care too much about the sockets because getting a 4 link in the right colors is easy enough to do with bench crafting. Additionally, it has two open prefixes which allowed me to craft +1 to Level of Socketed AOE Gems and 10% increased Area of Effect. Then with the other empty prefix, I tried a “yolo slam” aka applying an Exalted Orb that I had laying around to add an additional stat to the item. I hit +8% to the Local Armor of the Item and +6% to Increased Stun and Block Recovery.

Socketed, Linked, and Recolored… that gives me the above final item. Now this helm right now is a minor damage upgrade but at some point in the future it will be pivotal when I “invert” my build. There comes a point in the damage progression of Righteous Fire where you recolor your chest piece and helm and swap abilities. Fire Trap goes into your Body Armor and moves into an Empower setup, and Righteous Fire moves to your Helmet because it is no longer your primary source of damage generation. I am not quite there yet as there are a number of other swaps that I want to make in my gear before I do the inversion, but I am slowly gathering the core components. Yesterday I also spent a ton of money on Awakened Gems which now have pushed my damage well over 3 Million according to Path of Building. That should honestly be enough damage to tackle the rest of the end-game bosses and maybe unlock my last two void stones.

There is legitimately no way I would be sitting at the point I am now with this character were it not for the existence of trade. I could have likely gotten to the point of having a functional build, but it would not be anywhere near as comfortable as it is now. Trade and my engagement with it… have been the key differentiator between what I considered to be rough and awkward leagues and the last two leagues that I have greatly enjoyed. I am so glad that I got over my hang-up regarding making trades, because really… it doesn’t involve that much interaction with other players. I am also glad that I made the leap to actually selling items and getting comfortable with doing so. It gives me the funds to do the dumb things like acquire all of the alternate quality gems I needed to move my build to the next level.

While I technically understand how to get all of the items I purchased, it would have legitimately taken me multiple hundreds of hours of farming it to do on my own. I don’t mow my own lawn because my time and the negative impact on my allergies are well worth the weekly amount that I pay the neighborhood kid. I can more efficiently turn currency into the items I want than I can reasonably farm them myself. In the end that really is what engagement with the trade economy comes down to, a more enjoyable use of my time in the game.