It was a quiet morning. Quiet, that is, until one Path of Exile player posted a lengthy criticism of the game’s trading system to Reddit. Then it was quiet no longer, as the post sparked a fierce debate among the community over what should (if at all) be done with the MMOARPG’s trades. With over 5,500 upvotes and 2,000 comments, this post obviously struck a nerve.
The crux of the argument is that trading is a wildly messy process that relies on third-party apps and forums posts to make deals between players (there is no central auction house to bind this scattered economy).
The original poster said that GGG needs to get on this, right now: “Trading needs a fix. Consider a decentralised marketplace with a single point of discovery and seamless transactions which don’t put users at risk of scams or cons. Don’t push 4.0 out until you have reworked trading, because it IS and has for a long time been such an integral part of the game, and pretty much a meta game in itself.”
Not everyone sees eye to eye with this conclusion, as some defended the “vision” of the studio. One poster retorted that “trading is currently as difficult (and the developers wanted it much more difficult) as it is on purpose. Item acquisition and content completion was never intended to be as quick as it is today. This has been said in developer talks. Stop asking for this to be faster.”
