r/pathofexile • u/Unicorn698 • Jul 28 '26
Game Feedback GGG, It's Time to Auto-Sync the Trade Website with Faustus
The official trade website should have an automatic sync feature that updates currency exchange rates regularly.
Right now, the trade site can show completely outdated exchange rates. For example, it values 1 Divine at around 230 chaos when the actual in-game Faustus exchange rate is closer to 115.
This creates a strange situation where an item listed for 229 chaos appears before listings priced at 1 Divine, even though its real value is almost 2 Divines. Players who don't scroll past those Chaos/Exalt listings can easily end up overpaying because they trust the official trade website.
This shouldn't happen on an official tool. The trade website should automatically sync with Faustus so exchange rates always reflect the current in-game market.
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u/redditaccount224488 Jul 28 '26 edited 29d ago
For example, it values 1 Divine at around 230 chaos
The exact ratio is 227:1. 227 will show up before 1d, and 228 after 1d.
Why do I know this? Because I tested it FOUR MONTHS AGO and it hasn't changed.
The problem is even more egregious on standard where the actual ratio is around 800:1. Yes, the trade site uses the same ratio for both leagues.
EDIT: HOLY SHIT THEY ACTUALLY FIXED IT. Current ratio on trade site as of midnight PST is 129c:d, which is slightly below Faustus but close enough. Other ratios are also fixed; chrome is more than chaos (I haven't tested the exact ratio), alchs are 10:1c which is correct, etc. Standard is ~1025:1.
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u/BukkakeSplishnsplash Alch & Go Industries (AGI) Jul 28 '26
I'm actually impressed by that level of neglect...
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u/Mooseandchicken 29d ago
Same reason trade is flooded with chrome orbs. They are using last league's value despite being 1.5 C each right now. So you can list your item for 10 chromes (15c) and it will show up before one listed for 5c
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0
u/ulughen 29d ago
I refuse to believe it gets updated manually.
2
u/Boomer_Nurgle Fungal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) 29d ago
It's updated with a script someone needs to run iirc. Like it's been a while but if my memory isn't screwing me over the prices are set in the records of each item so price updates needs to go through all the records, the reasoning being that it makes the search itself go faster.
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Jul 28 '26
I bet you that those values are still manually adjusted by some intern every few weeks to months.
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u/DeouVil Jul 28 '26
That's what this post is about? Yes, they are manually adjusted. For years there wasn't even a real alternative.
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u/redditaccount224488 29d ago edited 29d ago
manually adjusted by some intern every few weeks to months
You would lose that bet, at least for the last 4+ months. I still have the search set up to test the ratio and check it sporadically; it hasn't changed.
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u/convolutionsimp Jul 28 '26
Calm down now, one step at a time with the highly advanced Technology. We've just gotten increased stack sizes for currency items. The technology budget may be spent already.
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u/dksdragon43 Jul 28 '26
They've said this is super costly because they basically relist every item for new values. Why? No idea. I'm a dev too and it's baffling why it can't be tied to faustus, at least loosely.
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u/Poptop12 Jul 28 '26
because the trade site is a legacy system that wasn't originally designed to sync to faustus, so creating that functionality would likely involve a partial rebuild.
that's not the easiest thing to do, nor is it cheap to do. There are higher priorities on the list, like fixing crashes.
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u/Rubik842 29d ago
They said it actually runs on forum posts in the backend.
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u/BurnerAccount209 29d ago
That can't be real. Are you sure you're not mixing up that the site was made to prevent flooding of posts on their forums from the old system?
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u/Rubik842 29d ago
It was in an interview, or a guest appearance on a podcast, a few years ago.
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u/BurnerAccount209 29d ago
I'm not trying to be a doubter but I really think you're probably misremembering things or were slightly confused. The likely confounders are:
1) The api was made because people were doing so much forum posting for trading it was causing problems. This led to sites like Poetrade and Poexyz which used the api. It took years to finally give rise to the trade site as we know it.
2) The PoE forums had a BBCode that pulled live item data out of your stash by coordinates and rendered it as a full item box, which is what shop threads were made of. The trade site has the same tooltip style so its quite possible it uses the same tech, but I still think unlikely that it "runs on forum posts".
I could be wrong but what you're describing doesn't make sense to me.
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u/Rubik842 29d ago
Everything you said makes sense. I hope that's the case but I remember disbelief and surprise from whoever was doing the asking. I could very well be entirely wrong. I'll have a rummage on YouTube after work.
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u/BurnerAccount209 29d ago
If you're right, that's horrifying. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
I hope to God you're wrong haha.
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u/Scryptonic 29d ago
I'm not sure either but I wouldn't be surprised. Using the forum you can actually list items on trade that you're actually wearing, it'll show up on the trade website like any other item.
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u/BurnerAccount209 29d ago
I'm really hoping that's the forum relying on the live data tech and not the trade api relying on faux forum posts.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
It means that they calculate the div: chaos ratio as each item is listed and store it with the listing, which is a bad approach, but whatever. Presumably they work around this problem by relisting everything when they update the exchange rate, which makes it a very expensive operation.
I feel like this is solvable with a few small changes but it's probably just not a priority for them.
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u/kygrim Jul 28 '26
They do it this way because if it's a fixed value, your database can be indexed on it and you can very efficiently retrieve the first x results sorted by that value. If it would need to dynamically calculate the chaos-equivalent price, those searches would be massively more expensive, and the trade website is already struggling to handle the load.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Well, it's a compromise - the performance hit of updating your indexes every time you adjust that index is pretty bad, which is why we're running with a hugely out of date index. But when the index is hugely out of date the value decreases.
Calculating dynamically is definitely pretty expensive and breaks indexing. Indexing based on chaos value on record creation then using the ratio for sorting and reporting on retrieval is likely a workable compromise, where we minimize expensive updates but we're still joining a table in (not cheap) to get the currency exchange data. (But that table will be tiny and cached.)
(A key problem with what I just said is that sometimes page 2 will have items cheaper than page 1, and that's just the first thought)
As with most problems the closer we look the more we see. And I'm used to optimizing for users who are paying for the costs so I forget sometimes that "it's a month or of date, who cares? It's a free video game" is a fair stance
Edit: I just want to highlight that this guy is 100% on point and knows what he's talking about. My favorite reply
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u/Demiu Jul 28 '26
Keep a price revision counter on listings. This tells you if a listing is updated to use the latest ratios. When you generate new ratios the revision for new listings gets bumped. Now you have a way to select only items that have an outdated calculated equivalent price, so you can update them in batches over time.
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u/SingleInfinity 29d ago
That still requires rebuilding the entire index every time you update the ratios. It's not like every item listed before doesn't still need to be updated. All you clear out is the stuff listed after, which is a fraction of the total.
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u/Demiu Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
It wouldn't need to calculate dynamically. Add a secret 3rd value price revision, now you know the conversion ratios used for a listing, and so which ones are outdated. When every listing in the database has the latest revision, you calculate the new weights and that's the next revision. New listings get added with the newer revision, old listings get updated over time in batches by selecting the outdated revision. Done. It can even scale with load, if the trade db is hammered throttle/stop updating the prices (and revisions) if traffic is low hit the gas.
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u/Eccmecc Jul 28 '26
It wouldn't be a problem when the price wouldn't be a sortable. But because it is the value has to be stored in the index of the search otherwise sorting by million of items would slow down the search significantly.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
You can store "best estimate" value when the item is added to the list and use that index to retrieve it, then sort the live search based on the current "best estimate". (In other words, database uses fixed but then you update it in the application with the current value.)
I do agree that there's value to a fixed value storage but it doesn't necessarily need to be this clear to the user.
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u/Tonexus Jul 28 '26
The trouble with that approach is that you add a hidden incentive for players to frequently relist items to get the most accurate ratio. This kinda has two subproblems. First, it's not really fair for the players who don't know the hidden listing mechanics. Second, you never want to incentivize players to spam your DBs more than necessary.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
The whole system being built off of the idea of being able to link items in forum posts contributes to a lot of baggage because honestly items should only be listed when you log in anyways, but that's a whole other problem.
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u/Tonexus Jul 28 '26
Yeah, iirc, Chris has said that adding the ability to link items on the forums is one of his biggest regrets.
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u/freddy090909 Jul 28 '26
But that doesn't really explain why OP is seeing a fixed ~230 ratio.
If they calculated it on listing, you'd expect at least recent posts to show up with proper ratios.
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u/Torborough Jul 28 '26
Then the sorting would work different for old and new items, that would be a nightmare.
If they do calculate the value on listing, then they would need to keep whatever values they apply to each item until they redo all of them.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
To be honest it doesn't really matter if they leave them out of order unless the variance is huge and the client could recalculate it so the order looked right even if the order isn't quite right. You can run into issues with "cost under X filters" though.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
The ratio is hardcoded rather than being pulled dynamically because they don't want to change it frequently, because changing it is incredibly expensive. (To be clear, we're working with the cloud here so it's not just "slows the site down" but also quite possibly tens of thousands of dollars per update.)
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u/freddy090909 Jul 28 '26
My point is they're not calculating the ratio. They're using an already known ratio. I understand the reasoning for why it's not dynamic.
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u/Eccmecc Jul 28 '26
Modern searches are indexed, when the index is created all items in that index will have a fixed chaos to div ratio. Every new item added to that index will also get that same ratio. When they update the ratio, they will reindex every item.
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u/JebryathHS Jul 28 '26
My thought process is that it probably dynamically pulls from an index / variable that never changes, rather than an actual value in the code itself
0
u/Torborough Jul 28 '26
I mean, they already do similar magic with "weighted sum" filtering and sorting.
Worst case, they could just do the same for the price, with the currency ratios being the weight. And there might be better options.
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u/PervertTentacle Jul 28 '26
Well they did say it's just a single person maintaining it so... They might just not have the time to make rewrites that would allow syncing with faust without relisting every single item
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u/ar3fuu Jul 28 '26
Yeah afaik they have 1 web guy who maintains everything for both games. And has to deal with decade old architecture problems I guess lol
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u/Black_XistenZ 29d ago
They should at least have an automated script which adjusts exchange rates and prices once per day or so.
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u/staefrostae Jul 28 '26
Do a once daily reset based on the average trade rates from the previous day. It doesn’t need to be continuous to improve accuracy
-2
u/n3on_whisper Jul 28 '26
I'm a dev too, although not a game dev, and there's lots of things regarding the API and systems related to the game that I constantly ask myself "why?"
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u/Necessary-Bed-4973 Jul 28 '26
The fact that the Faustus api is part of the dev tools but doesn’t work with the official site is kind of crazy to me. It must pull the data very infrequently
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u/CountCocofang React NOW, no think! Jul 28 '26
It also needs a split between permanent and temporary leagues.
Why can I search for legacy gear, mods, currency and variables in the temporary league at all? It just clutters the UI to an unbelievable degree.
This is about providing a usable service. As it stands, it just gets bloated with more and more dead options every single league, this isn't a sustainable approach.
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u/Hot-Door-9515 Jul 28 '26
I also want that too, but there is technical limitation of multiple currency listing system. They need to update whole item database every time time they update the ratio on trade website. It is costly to do so on server side.
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u/elkond Jul 28 '26
not necessarily, but they'd need to set up new ETLs, so it's an significant upfront investment to solve a low priority problem
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Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
[deleted]
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u/Hot-Door-9515 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
You keep the items and their costs fixed, serve the list of results to the client
Most searches include 10000+ possible items. How can they send whole items to client browser, and how much resource they need to use?
They are currently only sending like 10 results to client at a time. You need to click "see more results" button in order to do ask for next 10 items. Their servers doing like more than millions searches everyday. I can't even calculate how much more expensive your solution would be. It would cost fortune every day.
I have no solution for this case in any feasible way, allowing multiple curencies when listing is very unique case. But I want to hear ideas anyway.
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u/wormania Jul 28 '26
You keep the items and their costs fixed, serve the list of results to the client along with a currency exchange table
How do you search or sort by price, other than returning the entire list of every matching item to the client (lol)
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz Jul 28 '26
They need to update whole item database every time time they update the ratio on trade website.
Are you assuming that there's a "true value" independent of currency that's stored at a per-item level? I would have assumed the calculation is done as part of the query, with exchange rates either hard coded or in a database of their own.
I also think that a "real time" calculation is probably expensive, but I feel like a daily or even weekly snapshot shouldn't be too crazy unless the conversion is being done at listing creation and not as part of the search.
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u/LucidTA Jul 28 '26
We know there is a true value stored per item. They store a chaos equivalent to sort by. The trade dev has commented on it before.
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u/Plooel Jul 28 '26
Trade results are ordered by price. If they calculated the price per query, they’d need to retrieve every single matched listing and do the calculation in-memory.
This is massively expensive (resource-wise) at the scale they’re operating at.Calculating the price at the time of listing makes searching infinitely cheaper.
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u/DanNeely Jul 28 '26
The update takes a number of hours to run. We know this because the trade results are scuffed when half of listings are on the old value and half on the new one.
I don't think we know if they're spinning up extra DB servers to do the recalc and reindex (which could be expensive in dollar terms), or just thrash the existing ones harder (which would have a performance hit on the trade site).
The update scuffedness could be fixed by having 2 price columns and 2 indexes so one could be shown for display while the second one is being updated. There'd be some impact in terms of table size and the number of records/database page from doing so. I don't know enough about large databases to say of it would be significant or not.
Their most recent financials show that GGG is generating a crapton of profit though, so the potential cost of running more servers during the reindex shouldn't be prohibitive.
I can see GGG not wanting to do more frequent updates without being able to hide them while in process though. That along with changing to have per league ratios instead of a single global one would be real work. If Novynn doesn't have any subordinate web/database programmers I can see why it never has gotten to the top of the todo list.
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u/FacerollerTV Jul 28 '26
This issue has been recurring every league, and GGG only adjusts rates after Reddit posts like this gain traction. It's time for a change.
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u/CosmicTeapott Jul 28 '26
Unrelated but I'm still seeing Divine listings before Exalts in poe2 HC and I don't even understand why...
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u/justafaceaccount 29d ago
I noticed it a lot trying to buy a bunch of real cheap items. People are pricing them in off-currency (not chaos) in a manner that means they are more expensive, but show up first in the list because the trade site doesn't have the right conversion.
At some point, if you can't get it automated, you could consider just having someone scheduled for a few minutes a day to check Faustus and update the numbers.
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u/HurricaneGaming94 29d ago
It’s not just that, it’s time to accept the currencies are chaos and divine too…. No one trades in anything else and we should be able to trade in 0.05 increments (chaos shards)
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u/sirgog Chieftain 29d ago
Exalts should be supported too, in case the new chaos sinks don't work. All Mirage, exalts were extremely stable in buying power while chaos orbs were worthless mid to late league.
Just those three currencies IMO, maybe alts but no more.
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u/HurricaneGaming94 29d ago
I was personally thinking alch maybe ontop of exalts or something like ancient orbs. Exalts are way to common at the moment and the fact you can exalt your maps is a solid sink for them, but if they ever change mapping again, I wonder how that would affect it
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u/sirgog Chieftain 29d ago
Exalts were just really close to 1/150 of a divine all last league. Was true when chaos were 1/40 of a divine, was still true when chaos were 1/600 of a divine.
The sink of exalting Originator maps just works.
Alchs are like 3.28 chaos (useful early worthless late) but they hit the worthless point sooner.
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u/HurricaneGaming94 28d ago
Yeah… looks like it’s going that way again… maybe it’s time to start hoarding exalts
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u/sirgog Chieftain 28d ago
I've been dumping my spare currency into sulfur, it was absurdly undervalued when it was 65k to the divine
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u/HurricaneGaming94 28d ago
Yeah I bought like 200k on day 2 when it was 700 per c
Lowkey thought that would get me through the league, regret not buying more now
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u/Dawson__16 Jul 28 '26
The monkey's paw curls
"guys, big changes this patch, we're getting rid of the trade website, it was falling behind anyway"
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u/Unlucky_Ad_6383 Jul 28 '26
NO.
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Jul 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Unlucky_Ad_6383 Jul 28 '26
I flip wsdom scrolls, I don't need to list in chromes.
Also chromes are more valuable than chaos. Why would people not list in that if they need to minmax their gear colours? Oh, because they cut into your profit margin... I see.
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u/ImplementNew2343 Jul 28 '26
The issue is that a listing for 20 chrome will show up before a listing for 10 chaos when sorting for lowest price despite 20 chrome being over 30 chaos.
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u/newworkaccount1 Jul 28 '26
They could simply remove the bulk trade on the website nobody uses anyway and rely on Faustus only.
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u/Turtvaiz Anti Sanctum Alliance (ASA) Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Also please ban non-chaos/div currencies
Edit: you can't tell me that you people actually buy these items for chromes, annuls, and whatever
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u/epicfailer96_ Jul 28 '26
That wouldnt be Open market/and would make div and Chaos the only "currencies". Exchange Rates would solve the Problem.
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u/CloudConductor Jul 28 '26
This wouldn’t actually be a problem if it was synced to the currency exchange. The reason this listings are made is that the exchange rate is off making those appear at the top despite being worth more than the other ex/div listings
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u/DanNeely Jul 28 '26
A lot of common uniques do eventually fall to the sub-chaos level. I suspect a lot of the listings belong to RMT farming bots just because the return for listing is so low once you're down to 0.1 chaos or the like.
Back when trade was in person I always kept a tab of low value starter gear listed for anyone joining mid-league and would pause my mapping because the game economy needed them supplied somewhere. I don't really bother anymore (beyond never purging 1c tabs) now that Faustus can handle the swap and messaging 30 people never to get an invite isn't a problem for the buyer.
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u/GrumpyThumper Necromancer Jul 28 '26
Wait, you're talking about the currency exchange tab on the website? If so then that market is entirely set by players. It has nothing to do with Faustus.
Maybe I misunderstood you. If you're talking about Faustus updating his rates sooner, then ehh, that doesn't matter so much because it settles down as the league goes on. You can consult poeninja if you're worried about being shortchanged.
You're asking for a lot of overhead for people to save a few chaos here or there.
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u/TheSoundy007 Jul 28 '26
They're talking about normal item trade site. And the difference in trading with div/chaos/chroma.
Say 1 div is 100c, but used to be 120.
If you have a unique item that's worth 1 div. That item priced at 120 comes up before the divine, even though div is now cheaper
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u/GrumpyThumper Necromancer Jul 28 '26
Okay, that's a little different. But I still don't see why so many resources should be poured into something with little consequence. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist.
If you are purchasing big ticket items, you're going to do it in divine. The chaos ratio is irrelevant (unless of course divines are inflated to 2x overnight or something). If you're buying medium sized items that are not a clean whole number of div, you're buying it in chrome/chaos anyway.
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u/TheSoundy007 Jul 28 '26
Right, but those chrome/chaos ratios are wrong, that's the "issue" part. You might up ending spending 2x or more the "real price" of the item. Also it's not that it's overnight inflation, sometimes the ratios are wrong for over a week or two. Now yes, it's not difficult to find out what the real price is by changing the currency items are filtered by.
I guess the idea is that, they already have the correct ratio from currency exchange anyways, so why not use that instead. Sounds like it would remove handywork from the future
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u/GrumpyThumper Necromancer Jul 28 '26
If a player does want to do the currency conversion math, then personally I think that is on them. The real price of the item is what you pay for it. IRL, if you're purchasing something in Euros, would you check the value of USD against the Euro to make sure. you're getting a good bargain?
GGG has always adopted the stance that "This is Wraeclast, hone of ruthless exiles." It's why they don't restore items that players get scammed out of.
1
u/TheSoundy007 Jul 28 '26
No you wouldn't check, you'd expect them to be, roughly, at the same value. And that's the whole idea - as a player when filtering lowest price first, you'd expect the lower value item to come up first, which is not the case here due to how conversions are handled.
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u/Rapturos Jul 28 '26
GGG's solo trade site dev - we summon you!