The problem with Path of Exile is that POE trading can be tricky, even in the official trade website. So to make this painstaking but necessary part of the game more convenient, Grinding Gear Games has decided to make a few changes to the site in question.
Begin with the Format
Aside from developing solid games despite being an indie house, Grinding Gear Games is also good at listening to their player base. Thus, after many complaints, they’ve finally made it less confusing. How? By giving it two formatting options: Compact Mode and Compact Two-Columned. The former does what its name suggests, which is reducing the screen space used by the site in order for it to display only the relevant information. The latter, on the other hand, uses the same formatting as Compact Mode but displays the results in two columns, making the displayed info even more compact.
Another new piece of information that is now displayed in the marketplace is the time the items for sale have been posted. With this, players can filter according to preference which offers were posted more recently, and which ones have been in the trade website for quite some time now.
Mods and Beyond
In addition, players can now see if a mod in an item is a prefix, suffix, or hybrid mod. This allows players to determine what mods can be attached to a piece of gear for sale. On a related note, players can now also search for items that have open prefixes and/or suffixes – a feature that will be a big help in finding items that would be awesome deals.
As for players who want to buy items en masse, players who make use of the Bulk Item Exchange can now set a minimum stock that other players must list before the search result is returned. This way, players won’t have to sift through offers of bulk items that don’t fit their search.
The last but definitely one of the most important improvements to the trade site is the web notification for live searches. Players will receive a browser notification once someone posts a deal for the particular item that they’ve been searching for in the trade market. By simply clicking on the notification, players will be directed to the trade in question.
This, of course, is not the last updates the trade site will be receiving. In fact, Grinding Gear Games already has in slate one particular update: the ability to use freeform text to look for items by name. For example, by searching for Chemist’s Divine Life Flask of Staunching”, you’ll be receiving search results based on that name.
Getting the Feedback
And with the Path of Exile’s trade site’s improvements being player base-driven, it’s safe to say that looking at players’ comments in forums is not only a good indicator of whether the updates were good or not, but also what the next updates would be.
While a lot of players are sufficiently pleased with the improvements, there are also a lot of players are saying that poe.trade, the unofficial trading site for Path of Exile, is still their preferred trading site. Hopefully there’d be more of the latter, and that will only happen
For suggested future improvements, there are a lot. The most popular among them, however, is putting the trade site in- game. It’s a small move, but it’s hugely convenient, not to mention that it should’ve been done ever since the game was launched, as other games also have their trading houses in-game.
Trading is a huge part of every MMO, including Path of Exile. Thus, it’s important that the game’s trade site gets improved. So, did the updates improve the trade site? Without a doubt.
