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Globalized Trade Chat


Draekyn

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Just now, notmudkip0 said:

The spam still happens even with trade chat, GTL and filters in place though.

That's what Mods are for. People spam /ch because it has the least overhead and can be seen by a fairly wide audience. /tr is a containment zone so Mods can say "Go spam it here, nobody wants to see it in /ch"

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16 minutes ago, Kyu said:

We don't want trade chat. It's a bad solution to trading

How? I mean granted trade chat is often not enjoyable and by no means would I want it to be the ONLY means of trading, I think it's still a very good thing to have exist. Being able to actually have communication between buyers and sellers is a lot better than the way GTL works in a lot of cases. 

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Just now, Rigamorty said:

How? I mean granted trade chat is often not enjoyable and by no means would I want it to be the ONLY means of trading, I think it's still a very good thing to have exist. Being able to actually have communication between buyers and sellers is a lot better than the way GTL works in a lot of cases. 

In an ideal world, the GTL can be refined to a system which supports multiple methods of trading. For bartering, the Mail system is a better infrastructure than whispers to create that type of system, but the GTL would need to expose player names to allow it.

 

Trade chat only continues to exist because the GTL isn't refined enough to support multiple types of trading.

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Just now, Kyu said:

In an ideal world, the GTL can be refined to a system which supports multiple methods of trading. For bartering, the Mail system is a better infrastructure than whispers to create that type of system, but the GTL would need to expose player names to allow it.

 

Trade chat only continues to exist because the GTL isn't refined enough to support multiple types of trading.

Mail is by no means better because it's slower and costs money. Having a trade chat is nice because it's like those things except completely in real time, just people posting things right then and there hoping for a response from another player, not just posting something up, praying it works out, and logging off. Getting rid of trade chat discourages actual player communication which seems like the exact opposite of what the goal should be.

 

Also saying "we did away with global trade chat because hopefully we'll make the GTL good some day" seems pretty silly. Maybe think about nerfing/destroying trade chat after that ideal situation exists, not when the very first incarnation of it comes about and does the job in a very mediocre fashion.

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Just now, Rigamorty said:

Mail is by no means better because it's slower and costs money. Having a trade chat is nice because it's like those things except completely in real time, just people posting things right then and there hoping for a response from another player, not just posting something up, praying it works out, and logging off.

I'm aware. That's why I mentioned overhead in a previous post. Both Mail & GTL need to be tweaked for more fluidity and cost of entry is too high for casual trading.

 

Just now, Rigamorty said:

Getting rid of trade chat discourages actual player communication which seems like the exact opposite of what the goal should be.

The only thing it discourages is real-time trading, which can be changed with an Online/Offline indicator @ GTL, allowing buyers to initiate contact with sellers.

 

Just now, Rigamorty said:

Also saying "we did away with global trade chat because hopefully we'll make the GTL good some day" seems pretty silly. Maybe think about nerfing/destroying trade chat after that ideal situation exists, not when the very first incarnation of it comes about and does the job in a very mediocre fashion.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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3 minutes ago, Kyu said:

The only thing it discourages is real-time trading, which can be changed with an Online/Offline indicator @ GTL, allowing buyers to initiate contact with sellers.

If a deposit remains a thing then an Online/Offline indicator won't solve anything. Listing something at the cost of a deposit first and then trying to negotiate with people later will discourage listing entirely if you aren't confident on the price. You need a way to talk to people before slapping shit onto an auction house. 

 

5 minutes ago, Kyu said:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At least pretend to give a shit about the game. 

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Just now, Rigamorty said:

If a deposit remains a thing then an Online/Offline indicator won't solve anything. Listing something at the cost of a deposit first and then trying to negotiate with people later will discourage listing entirely if you aren't confident on the price. You need a way to talk to people before slapping shit onto an auction house.

35 minutes ago, Kyu said:

People spam /ch because it has the least overhead and can be seen by a fairly wide audience.

8 minutes ago, Kyu said:

I'm aware. That's why I mentioned overhead in a previous post. Both Mail & GTL need to be tweaked for more fluidity and cost of entry is too high for casual trading.

What part of this was ambiguous?

 

2 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

At least pretend to give a shit about the game. 

Shitty temp fixes like this are bad practice. That's why I don't want to do them.

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10 minutes ago, Kyu said:

Both Mail & GTL need to be tweaked for more fluidity

well this part is very vague and doesn't actually give a real answer, just "when we find a solution it'll be solved" and yes, people would always rather just spam a chat because its free, and quite frankly that should always be an option. While I'd love to see this fairytale gtl that solves all of our trading problems come into existence, what I've seen in its current iteration doesn't give me that hope at all, and it certainly didn't warrant the crippling of trade chat. 

 

13 minutes ago, Kyu said:

Shitty temp fixes like this are bad practice. That's why I don't want to do them.

  Then what do you call this current GTL? And it's not like it's some new thing to be made to fix what's broken, it already was a thing for years and was then done away with, when there was no logical reason to do away with it yet. 

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Just now, Rigamorty said:

well this part is very vague and doesn't actually give a real answer, just "when we find a solution it'll be solved"

That's because I don't know how to fix it yet. Things are changed by "identifying issues" then "thinking on the problem" then "figuring out solutions" then "working on the implementation". We are currently at step 2.

 

p.s. Congrats! Most ideas don't get that far.

 

3 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

 Then what do you call this current GTL?

Not good enough.

 

4 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

And it's not like it's some new thing to be made to fix what's broken, it already was a thing for years and was then done away with, when there was no logical reason to do away with it yet. 

It's disabled because we don't want people to use it, because eventually it will be taken away, and that makes people sad. We want people to use the GTL and for it to become a habit, so that when we do improve its functionality, it'll be noticed and taken advantage of immediately. The only reason I'd seriously consider moving back to a trade-chat based system would be if the GTL were so ridiculously underimplemented that its core functionality is broken. And from everything I've read in

it's not. Shinies are edge cases. Casual trading is the main issue, but players migrate toward designated "trade channels" anyway, so it seems like it works well enough for right now.

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2 minutes ago, Kyu said:

Casual trading is the main issue, but players migrate toward designated "trade channels" anyway, so it seems like it works well enough for right now.

It really doesn't. At this point in time GTL is a great tool for breeders and items trading. Everything beyond those is a challenge to trade effectively.

I believe you would greatly benefit from actually playing the game. Since the game is time-consuming more so than anything else, you could instead give a say to staff people who do when it comes to the development. That or actually take some of the most sensical suggestions seriously, which I doubt you do because you never quite go the way your playerbase thinks the game should be headed.

We are told you have no time or resources to allocate to trade balancing, to legendaries (which we've needed since launch, we've found out the hard way that a competitive OU metagame without those can never truly be balanced), all that because of the gen 5 region which no one asked for. Why jump into a new project to the detriment of fixing pressing core issues? If you know you don't have the resources to do both of those, why don't you hire additional developers?

 

From my point of view as a player, this new region project is like polishing this table

broken-table.jpg

After the update hype dies down and the casual players leave your game, people are going to notice something's missing. Fix the table first, only then should you get that sweet vanity cash from storyline casuals swarming the game for the new region.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, Draekyn said:

It really doesn't. At this point in time GTL is a great tool for breeders and items trading. Everything beyond those is a challenge to trade effectively.

List them and what you think we should do with them.

 

1 minute ago, Draekyn said:

I believe you would greatly benefit from actually playing the game. Since the game is time-consuming more so than anything else, you could instead give a say to staff people who do when it comes to the development. That or actually take some of the most sensical suggestions seriously, which I doubt you do because you never quite go the way your playerbase thinks the game should be headed.

We don't make any decisions in a vacuum. These are my personal opinions on the matter and I talk with many people in private before making serious goals. This is one of those few situations where I decided to talk to actual players about the issue.

 

1 minute ago, Draekyn said:

We are told you have no time or resources to allocate to trade balancing, to legendaries (which we've needed since launch, we've found out the hard way that a competitive OU metagame without those can never truly be balanced), all that because of the gen 5 region which no one asked for. Why jump into a new project to the detriment of fixing pressing core issues? If you know you don't have the resources to do both of those, why don't you hire additional developers?

You have literally no idea how much time is spent on those sub-projects or the time/monetary cost of "hiring additional developers". The people who work on this project are extremely skilled and efficient at what they do, and it's clear you have no experience in managing any form of real team.

 

1 minute ago, Draekyn said:

From my point of view as a player, this new region project is like polishing this table

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

After the update hype dies down and the casual players leave your game, people are going to notice something's missing. Fix the table first, only then should you get that sweet vanity cash from storyline casuals swarming the game for the new region.

We balance our goals between new features and core functionality fixes because this game doesn't run on pixie dust and unicorn farts, and it wouldn't matter how good the core gameplay is if there's nobody to play Gen 3 forever.

 

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11 minutes ago, Kyu said:

it's clear you have no experience in managing any form of real team.

it's clear you have little, to no experience with PR

 

 

I think this assumption:

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

It's disabled because we don't want people to use it, because eventually it will be taken away, and that makes people sad. We want people to use the GTL and for it to become a habit, so that when we do improve its functionality, it'll be noticed and taken advantage of immediately.

has a poor basis to it.

 

 

The moment GTL was introduced it was obviously going to be heavily used, cause for many things it is easier to sell stuff there (plus 24/7), regardless of a trade chat being there or not. So people not gaining the "habit" of using the GTL is far-fetched to me. Furthermore, I can easily see a scenario where once you did implement "better functionality to the GTL" to pass it off as: "Hey guys, we are shifting the trade chat over to the GTL instead, because it will work better". Because, if it doesn't work better, then why the hell are you doing it in the first place?

 

Just my thoughts on it. Please don't attack me Kyu, like you did Draekyn...

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3 minutes ago, Gilan said:

it's clear you have little, to no experience with PR

I don't know why you'd expect me not to defend my team when people make ignorant and arrogant assumptions about it. We chose to make Gen 5 because if we stagnated at Gen 3, we would have killed PokeMMO. That's the truth, and I'll happily defend that decision because it's how this game will last at least a decade instead of 5 years.

 

3 minutes ago, Gilan said:

I think this assumption has a poor basis to it.

 

The moment GTL was introduced it was obviously going to be heavily used, cause for many things it is easier to sell stuff there (plus 24/7), regardless of a trade chat being there or not. So people not gaining the "habit" of using the GTL is far-fetched to me. Furthermore, I can easily see a scenario where once you did implement "better functionality to the GTL" to pass it off as: "Hey guys, we are shifting the trade chat over to the GTL instead, because it will work better". Because, if it doesn't work better, then why the hell are you doing it in the first place?

Teaching players by encouraging a certain action is something very hard to describe to someone who's not familiar with it. We can't rely on direct communication like messages due to the potential of people not seeing or understanding its meaning, so we have to encourage people to do a certain thing by providing opportunities in different ways.

 

This is my personal design philosophy, but it's an older one. It used to be how games were made. You can see the differences in how Gen 3 & Gen 5's storylines were tutorialized: How Gen 3 just kinda threw you into the world without any form of dialogue aside from "Press Start", and how Gen 5's dialogue is used as a crutch to encourage or explain mechanics. I always try to do the former because it requires the least overhead (custom dialogue -> NPC interaction -> translation pipeline -> release).

 

That is why we prod people to do things in certain ways through action instead of telling them.

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4 minutes ago, Kyu said:

I don't know why you'd expect me not to defend my team when people make ignorant and arrogant assumptions about it. We chose to make Gen 5 because if we stagnated at Gen 3, we would have killed PokeMMO. That's the truth, and I'll happily defend that decision because it's how this game will last at least a decade instead of 5 years.

I do expect you to defend your team, and for the record I completely agree with the decision to do Gen 5. I don't expect you to attack back like you did; I've always found that it is the quickest way to degenerate a conversation into useless slinging of accusations.

 

 

4 minutes ago, Kyu said:

Teaching players by encouraging a certain action is something very hard to describe to someone who's not familiar with it. We can't rely on direct communication like messages due to the potential of people not seeing or understanding its meaning, so we have to encourage people to do a certain thing by providing opportunities in different ways.

 

This is my personal design philosophy, but it's an older one. It used to be how games were made. You can see the differences in how Gen 3 & Gen 5's storylines were tutorialized: How Gen 3 just kinda threw you into the world without any form of dialogue aside from "Press Start", and how Gen 5's dialogue is used as a crutch to encourage or explain mechanics. I always try to do the former because it requires the least overhead (custom dialogue -> NPC interaction -> translation pipeline -> release).

 

That is why we prod people to do things in certain ways through action instead of telling them.

See, I don't see this as actually being a problem. I think you could have left trade chat as it was, and we would be at the same point of "understanding" of the GTL as there is today. When you port the functionality of Trade Chat over to the GTL only a fraction of the population has to actually "understand" it. They will then teach others in the game about it, and it expands until 90% of players get it. And the rest are just spamming trade in channel chat anyways. It's exactly what happened with Breeding. You guys overhauled the system. A portion of the community understood it fully. Those people taught everyone else, in-game, through guides, etc.. And now breeding isn't really an issue (even less so when I finish my video tomorrow).

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2 minutes ago, Kyu said:

List them and what you think we should do with them.

You mentionned that you read or skimmed through the trading thread in the general discussion subforum, you should be able to get some ideas in there.

 

2 minutes ago, Kyu said:

These are my personal opinions on the matter and I talk with many people in private before making serious goals.

 

You have literally no idea how much time is spent on those sub-projects or the time/monetary cost of "hiring additional developers".

 

We balance our goals between new features and core functionality fixes because this game doesn't run on pixie dust and unicorn farts

 

We're not asking for magical solutions. That's why I disagree with your earlier comment dismissing temporary fixes as bad practice, they might take some of the time allotted to your end goals, but things like reverting to global trade chat would go a long way towards making the game enjoyable in its current form.

 

2 minutes ago, Kyu said:

You have literally no idea how much time is spent on those sub-projects or the time/monetary cost of "hiring additional developers". The people who work on this project are extremely skilled and efficient at what they do, and it's clear you have no experience in managing any form of real team.

I don't, thankfully I'm not trying to run a game. What bothers me is that while we are made aware of the progress on the new content (dev blog), we are left guessing when it comes to the progress on older projects (An update on the issues with legendary dungeons would be something a lot of competitive players would like to see within that dev blog post). You believe moving forward is the way to have the game live longer, and that's likely to be true because of the influx of new players. But it would be reassuring to know older projects are still being worked on without having to ask or to look for the information given by staff members on a 2 months old suggestion thread.

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2 minutes ago, Gilan said:

I do expect you to defend your team, and for the record I completely agree with the decision to do Gen 5. I don't expect you to attack back like you did; I've always found that it is the quickest way to degenerate a conversation into useless slinging of accusations.

To me, when people start accusing you of incompetence at a core level based on incorrect assumptions, I don't really agree. Sometimes people really do need to be snapped back at when they say something dumb.

 

Thankfully the Internet is a very forgiving medium of communication for arguments because of the latency of it, and sometimes it's enough time that a person can prepare to voice their frustrations in a different way.

 

2 minutes ago, Gilan said:

See, I don't see this as actually being a problem. I think you could have left trade chat as it was, and we would be at the same point of "understanding" of the GTL as there is today. When you port the functionality of Trade Chat over to the GTL only a fraction of the population has to actually "understand" it. They will then teach others in the game about it, and it expands until 90% of players get it. And the rest are just spamming trade in channel chat anyways. It's exactly what happened with Breeding. You guys overhauled the system. A portion of the community understood it fully. Those people taught everyone else, in-game, through guides, etc.. And now breeding isn't really an issue (even less so when I finish my video tomorrow).

I think that if we have to rely on external sources to teach players game mechanics, we've failed in the mechanic's intuitiveness. Relying on the guides section of the forum is, again, restricted by concepts like language and a distraction in attention. The same goes for players teaching each other. The ideal game's design is taught entirely through play instead of direct communication, but complicated systems like Breeding are difficult to do.

 

I don't think Trading is a complicated enough concept to warrant relying on external tutorialization. Metagaming the market is, but the concept of capitalism is ingrained in everyone's lives by society, and everyone knows how it works at a basic level. We just need to point them in the correct direction for how to do it here.

 

19 minutes ago, Draekyn said:

You mentionned that you read or skimmed through the trading thread in the general discussion subforum, you should be able to get some ideas in there.

I only skimmed through the topic. I really would appreciate a list of the types of objects you're trying to trade and a summary of why it's difficult, aside from shinies and casual trading. It would save me a few hours.

 

19 minutes ago, Draekyn said:

We're not asking for magical solutions. That's why I disagree with your earlier comment dismissing temporary fixes as bad practice, they might take some of the time allotted to your end goals, but things like reverting to global trade chat would go a long way towards making the game enjoyable in its current form.

This is the same argument Desu & I had, but I don't want to because I know my team very well. We have bad habits when it comes to these temp fixes. It's very easy to do something like this and then forget about the problem for another 2 years. That's why I want to do it right, instead of this, if we can achieve it within a reasonable timespan. If it's not reasonable to do, that's when we fall back on these small changes.

 

19 minutes ago, Draekyn said:

I don't, thankfully I'm not trying to run a game. What bothers me is that while we are made aware of the progress on the new content (dev blog), we are left guessing when it comes to the progress on older projects (An update on the issues with legendary dungeons would be something a lot of competitive players would like to see within that dev blog post). You believe moving forward is the way to have the game live longer, and that's likely to be true because of the influx of new players. But it would be reassuring to know older projects are still being worked on without having to ask or to look for the information given by staff members on a 2 months old suggestion thread.

I'll keep in mind. I tried to note improvements to older things in this latest one, like hordes, pickup, and addressing the storyline's difficulty curve. But there really hasn't been a lot done on PvP balance that the TC doesn't already know about.

 

We don't talk about everything because it can have a chilling effect on the Live Server. When we discuss things related to balancing, for people who pay attention, it can change how they play the game or make them want to stop until it's released. I know it's a bit frustrating, but we have to be very careful as to what we say because an MMO is a game with persistent character states. For something like a MOBA, the game itself has no persistent progress aside from an abstracted profile, and they can be very lenient in what they talk about.

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27 minutes ago, Kyu said:

To me, when people start accusing you of incompetence at a core level based on incorrect assumptions, I don't really agree. Sometimes people really do need to be snapped back at when they say something dumb.

 

Thankfully the Internet is a very forgiving medium of communication for arguments because of the latency of it, and sometimes it's enough time that a person can prepare to voice their frustrations in a different way.

Well, I'll just continue to disagree with you on this then, I don't want to derail.

 

 

27 minutes ago, Kyu said:

I think that if we have to rely on external sources to teach players game mechanics, we've failed in the mechanic's intuitiveness. Relying on the guides section of the forum is, again, restricted by concepts like language and a distraction in attention. The same goes for players teaching each other. The ideal game's design is taught entirely through play instead of direct communication, but complicated systems like Breeding are difficult to do.

 

I don't think Trading is a complicated enough concept to warrant relying on external tutorialization. Metagaming the market is, but the concept of capitalism is ingrained in everyone's lives by society, and everyone knows how it works at a basic level. We just need to point them in the correct direction for how to do it here.

Yeah, I don't think Trading is complicated either, and it for sure wouldn't need an external tutorial. The point that I'm trying to get at is that I don't share in the belief that taking away Trade Chat and getting everyone to move over to the "refined" GTL would be that big of an issue. Thus, I don't see any con in the reapplication of Trade Chat until GTL is improved (other than taking dev time away from Unova/Sinnoh content).

 

27 minutes ago, Kyu said:

I only skimmed through the topic. I really would appreciate a list of the types of objects you're trying to trade and a summary of why it's difficult, aside from shinies and casual trading. It would save me a few hours.

My observation of types of things traded (ignoring shinies):

  • Perfect Competitive Pokemon - End product pokemon, can't be improved
  • Imperfect Competitive Pokemon - Pokemon that are good-enough for competitive play (i.e. can actually be used to win tournaments)
  • Borderline Competitive Pokemon - Pokemon that leave plenty to be desired, but can fill a slot on a competitive team when necessary; if a team is filled with these, one would be extremely hard-pressed to win a tournament
  • PvE Pokemon - Pokemon that are bred for the purpose of taking on Trainer Tower / Battle Frontier / Holiday events / etc.
  • Breeding Pokemon - Pokemon that do not fit into any of the above categories, but have at least 1 desirable attribute and can be used to create an above pokemon
  • Casual Pokemon - Pokemon that do not fit into any of the above categories

Keep in mind that for all competitive pokemon, they are split between the different tiers of competitive play (Uber, OU, BL1, UU, BL2, NU, LC). In GTL you can't search by tier. You may think that that's unimportant, cause "you should know what you want to buy for you UU team". I disagree. I think a lot of the transactions that happen are "impulse buys". On the forums and in Trade Chat, you can quickly sift through tons of pokemon and their stats at a simple glance. As opposed to the GTL where you have to input a species, filter, order by cost, individually click on each one to thoroughly inspect its nature, ivs, evs, moves, and ability.

 

I often times have no clue what I should be looking for. When I go on the forums or trade chat, I look at what is there and then I think "Hey, that pokemon looks interesting, I think it would pair up well with these other 5 pokemon I already have, I'll test it out".

 

I think item trading on the GTL is great, and not difficult at all.

Edited by Gilan
item trading
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23 minutes ago, Kyu said:

I only skimmed through the topic. I really would appreciate a list of the types of objects you're trying to trade and a summary of why it's difficult, aside from shinies and casual trading. It would save me a few hours.

well first thing that comes to mind is competitive pokemon. Value gets iffy and a lot of the times you'll list something just making a shot in the dark at value because its VERY hard to determine a price on things like comps which can vary wildly by a single stat point. Not everyone will understand why their 30 speed pokemon is worth 1/10th of what a 31 speed pokemon with the same things everywhere else is worth immediately, they'll list and get shafted. 

 

another thing is services that aren't directly marketable. a lot of the time i'm looking to have something bred personally, because like 90% of the time the thing i actually want doesn't exist on the GTL, so it needs to be specifically bred. You can't list your breeding service on gtl. 

 

Shinies really shouldn't be disregarded because they're an enormous part of the trading and economy in this game, so really I suggest you rethink shrugging them off as outlying examples that don't matter.

 

Rare vanity items can fluctuate and do the same things shinies do, and should also not be ignored.

 

Really the only thing the gtl is actually good about is breeders and small items like berries.

 

 

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if we are talking shinies. then yes, GTL is terrible for it. The removal of Trade Chat seriously hindered shiny trading. Can confirm cause I was a member of only shiny trading teams for as long as I can remember now, and they really died off when VD, and Trade Chat were removed and GTL was implemented.

 

You can't trade a pokemon for a pokemon on the GTL. It's purely Yen. That just doesn't work for shiny trading (and in some cases competitive pokemon trading).

Edited by Gilan
going to sleep now
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7 minutes ago, Gilan said:

My observation of types of things traded (ignoring shinies):

  • Perfect Competitive Pokemon - End product pokemon, can't be improved
  • Imperfect Competitive Pokemon - Pokemon that are good-enough for competitive play (i.e. can actually be used to win tournaments)
  • Borderline Competitive Pokemon - Pokemon that leave plenty to be desired, but can fill a slot on a competitive team when necessary; if a team is filled with these, one would be extremely hard-pressed to win a tournament
  • PvE Pokemon - Pokemon that are bred for the purpose of taking on Trainer Tower / Battle Frontier / Holiday events / etc.
  • Breeding Pokemon - Pokemon that do not fit into any of the above categories, but have at least 1 desirable attribute and can be used to create an above pokemon
  • Casual Pokemon - Pokemon that do not fit into any of the above categories

Keep in mind that for all competitive pokemon, they are split between the different tiers of competitive play (Uber, OU, BL1, UU, BL2, NU, LC). In GTL you can't search by tier. You may think that that's unimportant, cause "you should know what you want to buy for you UU team". I disagree. I think a lot of the transactions that happen are "impulse buys". On the forums and in Trade Chat, you can quickly sift through tons of pokemon and their stats at a simple glance. As opposed to the GTL where you have to input a species, filter, order by cost, individually click on each one to thoroughly inspect its nature, ivs, evs, moves, and ability.

 

I often times have no clue what I should be looking for. When I go on the forums or trade chat, I look at what is there and then I think "Hey, that pokemon looks interesting, I think it would pair up well with these other 5 pokemon I already have, I'll test it out".

 

I think item trading on the GTL is great, and not difficult at all.

Thank you.

 

4 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

well first thing that comes to mind is competitive pokemon. Value gets iffy and a lot of the times you'll list something just making a shot in the dark at value because its VERY hard to determine a price on things like comps which can vary wildly by a single stat point. Not everyone will understand why their 30 speed pokemon is worth 1/10th of what a 31 speed pokemon with the same things everywhere else is worth immediately, they'll list and get shafted. 

I think value is out of scope and falls into market metagaming. It's not something we can teach directly and requires knowledge of core game mechanics.

 

It doesn't seem like Mods are allowing "value discussion" anywhere, but I think that's a mistake and it's a topic which should be addressed by them. I can see in https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/59663-value-discussions-removal/ that the reason given was that it was influencing the market negatively, but I think it's necessary and that policy should be changed regardless of whether market manipulation occurs. I don't think we're being neutral enough on the topic.

 

4 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

another thing is services that aren't directly marketable. a lot of the time i'm looking to have something bred personally, because like 90% of the time the thing i actually want doesn't exist on the GTL, so it needs to be specifically bred. You can't list your breeding service on gtl. 

In-game services are something I hadn't thought of. Thank you.

 

4 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

Shinies really shouldn't be disregarded because they're an enormous part of the trading and economy in this game, so really I suggest you rethink shrugging them off as outlying examples that don't matter.

 

Rare vanity items can fluctuate and do the same things shinies do, and should also not be ignored.

I didn't mean that they should be completely disregarded, just that they're lower priority since there's less volume related to them. I know a lot of people make it their hobby to trade shinies, but if there's a core issue which affects more people, it's objectively more important. It won't be forgotten though.

 

2 minutes ago, Gilan said:

if we are talking shinies. then yes, GTL is terrible for it. The removal of Trade Chat seriously hindered shiny trading. Can confirm cause I was a member of only shiny trading teams for as long as I can remember now, and they really died off when VD, and Trade Chat were removed and GTL was implemented.

 

You can't trade a pokemon for a pokemon on the GTL. It's purely Yen. That just doesn't work for shiny trading (and in some cases competitive pokemon trading).

Bartering is something which I would prefer to address with direct communication between buyers & sellers via the GTL. I discussed this briefly above, and proposed that exposing usernames of sellers & allowing direct communication for free would help this type of trade. What else do you think it needs?

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7 minutes ago, Kyu said:

It doesn't seem like Mods are allowing "value discussion" anywhere, but I think that's a mistake and it's a topic which should be addressed by them. I can see in https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/59663-value-discussions-removal/ that the reason given was that it was influencing the market negatively, but I think it's necessary and that policy should be changed regardless of whether market manipulation occurs. I don't think we're being neutral enough on the topic.

I was actually one of the people pushing for the removal of value discussion when that happened. The way it was done before was extremely exploitable. Basically a lot of new players who were trying to figure out the logistics of a trade they were making with someone in game, would go in, search the value of their pokemon, then search the value of the thing the other person was offering. There was a point where there wouldn't even be anyone asking for a value and a person would just show up unprompted and say something like "Sandshrew 6m" when it wasn't worth more than 3m, but now the most recent thing Mr. Newfriend would see when he used the search bar would be "Sandshrew 6m" 

 

That along with people just always arguing their thing was worth more than others said and the things other people had was worth less because you don't have it blah blah people just being scummy. The actual Value Discussion thread was a disgusting circle-jerk. After it was abolished, people were turning their own Trade Corner shops into a list of personal values, which new players would end up seeing, and that also became bad. That's kinda what lead to "no discussing value on the forums ever" 

 

Really we need a moderated way to discuss values, but it's nearly impossible to do that correctly from an unbiased standpoint, so it's a very tough situation. Ideally trade chat in game would be the go-to "value discussion" because then if someone tries to spout off some bullshit, the entire general public is right there to call him out and set things straight. 

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4 minutes ago, Rigamorty said:

I was actually one of the people pushing for the removal of value discussion when that happened. The way it was done before was extremely exploitable. Basically a lot of new players who were trying to figure out the logistics of a trade they were making with someone in game, would go in, search the value of their pokemon, then search the value of the thing the other person was offering. There was a point where there wouldn't even be anyone asking for a value and a person would just show up unprompted and say something like "Sandshrew 6m" when it wasn't worth more than 3m, but now the most recent thing Mr. Newfriend would see when he used the search bar would be "Sandshrew 6m" 

 

That along with people just always arguing their thing was worth more than others said and the things other people had was worth less because you don't have it blah blah people just being scummy. The actual Value Discussion thread was a disgusting circle-jerk. After it was abolished, people were turning their own Trade Corner shops into a list of personal values, which new players would end up seeing, and that also became bad. That's kinda what lead to "no discussing value on the forums ever" 

 

Really we need a moderated way to discuss values, but it's nearly impossible to do that correctly from an unbiased standpoint, so it's a very tough situation. Ideally trade chat in game would be the go-to "value discussion" because then if someone tries to spout off some bullshit, the entire general public is right there to call him out and set things straight. 

I honestly think that market manipulation is the fun part. It's a cutthroat experience and is immensely satisfying for the people who are good at it. When I still played MMOs, my guild would destroy consumable markets with the work of 3-4 people and pulled in gorillions from it. That work was the most fun I've ever had in a game.

 

The most important thing to remember though, is that all of those flaws related to price you just listed are choices. Players choose to pay that price. They aren't adversely affected by this like botting where it devalues everyone's experience, it's something you can try and fail at by opting in. That's why I think we need to be neutral on it.

 

I do agree that the jerking needs to be removed though.

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This is the list of things we plan on doing to change it short-term. Any huge sweeping changes are out of scope for this update, but feedback would be appreciated to see if I missed anything.

 

Do note, the balancing changes are unrelated to the current topic and were decided on for different reasons.

 

General

  •  Move Trade Chat to Global-type
  •  T1588: Price min/max filter for GTL
  •  Add Sort by tiering

Balancing

  •  Limit the total amount of listings a player can have // The current limitation of a buy-in fee and timebomb is not enough to prevent GTL spam. This creates a rift in difficulty where players can purchase very good pokemon very cheaply, and devalues work on the storyline. While this is still vulnerable to muling, it reduces the behavior in total and should be a net gain. Alternatively, we can increase fees as the total amount of listings increases, but this is also vulnerable to muling and undermines the fee ceiling.
  •  Create a hard delist time of 1-2 weeks. // With the reduction in fees, relisting increases the money sink of using the GTL and prevents high availability of garbage pokemon. Having too many pokemon available makes sifting through the GTL a difficult task due to information overload.
  •  Decide a fee ceiling to reduce overhead of trading especially valuable objects. // Currently, high-value things like Shinies don't have good liquidity because of the prohibitive fees when listing them. This prevents price adjustments and causes a stagnant market, so this ceiling should be low.

Enabling bartering

  • Encourage online communication between buyers and sellers
    •  Create a username field for the GTL's table which shows the seller's name
    •  Add an indicator as to whether the user is online with headshots
    •  [OPTIONAL] Make an option for a listing to be anonymous
    •  Players should be able to click the headshot of a seller to create a mail (if not Anonymous).
  • Improve offline communication between buyers and sellers
    •  Decouple Mail from the PC. Players should be able to send and receive mail at any location and immediately on login.
      •  Only send & receive items when interacting from a PC.
    •  Increase Mailbox size to 250.
    •  Reduce fees for Mail to $200 if no item or pokemon is attached. $1000 if so.
    •  Prevent players from sending too many messages to a single player. // Two methods to do this would be to either create a timer as to how many messages a player can send to a target, or to prevent new messages if >5 are unread
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