This feedback is important. This is just the first cycle and it's a totally new system that has to be tested and retested to balance it properly. I am sure that EHG will address all of these issues and update the system until it is really good.

I post everything for 0 gold for 2 reasons, 1 i dont need the item and 2 i dont need the gold. So why not share my unwanted loot with others who might want or need it

Clearly there are many places where the UI could be improved, and some balancing of the ranks. I would be amazed if EHG weren't already working on a bunch of those types of improvements. But I really hope they don't cave too far and encourage the market-mogul style of gameplay where there's an incentive to sit in market all day min-maxing your price checks and reselling items instead of killing mobs. The MG is already the easiest way to get specific gear to fully enable any build you want; it doesn't need to get even easier. A few tweaks and balance passes are all the MG needs. Signed, happy CoF player.

This is exactly the impression I had of the MG without ever playing it. It seemed clear just from the faction "bonuses" plus the restrictions that trade would be terminally hampered. I saw someone else somewhere say something to the effect of the factions should be constructed based on "fun" not some ironclad "balance" between them. CoF was clearly developed with fun in mind and then MG was developed to reign in it's "power". Just looking at the rank rewards made me not want to play it.

I try Merchant Faction until rank 7,and yes exactly like you say it just painful to navigate,especially as a new player it's hard to understand value of an item,I used to just ctrl+D on POE and I can learn and check the item I just got is trash or good in the end I made new char and play offline mode coz well there's no reason to play online if I was gonna choose Circle Fortune.

GGG: "Oh good, now we don't have to improve trade like we thought we had to" :P

Thank you for the heads up. I now know what to expect when i was going to join it on my second character.

They definitely need to make improvements, but for half the problems there's a workaround. You can have your inventory open when you talk to the NPC. And you can click the more button to search while your inv is open. You can also switch the view of the items to be List, instead of Grid if you prefer it that way. So you'll have all the items on the left and you hover your mouse over them, having the stat you want to check ("movement speed" in your case) pretty much in the same visual space so it's easier for your eyes than going left-right. It also fits more items. Hope this helps players.

I'm so glad someone made this video!

I made a suggestion involving adding a new system/number into the mix that we can call "influence" that can replace the Rank Requirement for buying completely. Favor and Reputation will still be there in parallel, but now we have this new 3rd thing. Influence would work like a thermometer and would have a max cap that will be going up as you get reputation and increase in Rank. Let's say you start with 200 influence cap at Rank 1. A rare item will require (and spend) exactly 200 influence, meaning that you can only buy 1 before you have to go out and earn more influence again. Uniques will cost 1000 influence and therefore, you can't even buy them at rank 1, because your cap isn't high enough (it doesn't fit in that thermometer). When you get at the appropriate Rank, let's say you have 1000 influence. Well now you can buy Just One Unique, or 5 Rares (given my example). Then you have to farm more. I'm assuming the same way you farm favor, but maybe even through some quests that they could add to an NPC, similar to how the CoF Prophecies feel like quests you can pick because you were planing to do that content anyway. How is this different than gating uniques behind a Rank if you will be gated behind a max influence cap? Well because you make it so that the equivalent of Rank 8 will fall around Rank 6 in this new system (when it comes to time invested to get there), with the only caveat being that you can't buy 5 items in one go to fully gear your character. And by the time you farm more influence and buy more items one by one you will be getting closer to that Rank 8 in the old system. What do you think? Obviously these were just random numbers as examples. Riguros testing needed, but I think it solves a lot of problems while giving MG players a more organic feeling of growth and like mom telling you you can have a toy, but just one for now. You have to make choices if that unique is worth more for you now than 2 Rares.

I have been playing CoF offline due to the server issues mostly. Now that servers have stabled I have started levelling a few new chars and was planning to try MG for online play. Maybe I will do CoF there as well until MG is refined.

Merchants guild has been great for me, but I typically am just looking for entry lvl gear to get the build I'm looking to play up and running (required idols, no LP version of any required uniques).

Yes the features in the Merchant's guild need a lot of work for ease of use. With that said I still love the idea of it because I look at trading as End Game. I think this format to trade is really unique so I enjoy it. I've sold a few really nice items for 1 mil gold each that had high tier skills and have cleaned out my inventory several times and been selling everything even Idols. You definitely have to be in the mood for it and usually when I'm finished playing for the day I'll spend time selling and buying. I really like buying Exalts and testing my luck crafting and have gotten some serious upgrades.

Thanks, I actually asked about the MG on Reddit, didn't get many responses, so this is good info for me.

For me its the opposite i did COF until lvl 9 and didnt get the stuff i actually needed i switched to MG took me 4 days to get to 8 and now i just buy 2LP consistently and if i get high LP drops i can sell them instead rotting them in my stash if my alt doesnt use it.

I don't play a large variety of games with trade, but has there been any other games that implement a trade search with the degree of filter customization as the Path of Exile trade website? I'm genuinely curious as, while I'm not saying Last Epochs is an amazing implementation of trade, it just doesn't seem that different from other games that implement a built in auction house. I could be wrong though, its been ages since I've played a proper MMO, just curious what else is out there?

Great video and explanation. Covered everything that's been frustrating me about Merchant's Guild and made me swap to Circle of Fortune as using the Merchant's Guild is just a horrible experience and I'm half way to rank 8 and I'm just not able to buy anything because it's so hard to find anything, anything I do find is ridiculously priced.

I tried MG for about 2 hours, went CoF and didn't look back.

Great Video, same experiences. After getting your first few build defining legendaries. It's mostly stale all the way untill way after level 100 due to extreme scarcity. Search function is horrible as exactly mentioned. Price checking is that tedious that i will just sell for 1000 gold just to clear inventory or just throw away that it makes me confused why i'm not doing COF most of the times.

Exactly my experience. I think that MG is still the most reasonable way to min/max character though. I could swallow the lack of search options, but price check of uniques and at least 1 exalted affix should be a thing, because it's ridiculous to force people to learn about every build's gearing.

ty for your review

Yeah, it's a struggle to sell items and gold accumulates fairly slow without being able to actually sell the items.

Also EHG should impliment an in game feature similar to Awakened PoE trade. The QoL of Awakened PoE Trade is night and day

crazy that you can filter by LP on the AH, but you cant use the loot filter to sort out 0 or 1LP uniques. Even when considering that the uniques arent even the chase items, its the exalteds with mods you want to put onto the uniques. With the exception being a few rare uniques ofc or encounter specific ones.

I felt the same , i switched from it halfway though it , very disappointing but luckily my progress with the guild isn't lost if they patch and fix it . , i can always go back from circle of fortune later

how do people make so much gold?? just farming corruption mono's?

Great video i only enjoy trade leagues but im not even at rank 7 yet and im allready losing my mind with this system 😫 i hope they improve it fast cause i really wanna keep playing.

It's a bit clunky yeah but gives access to more power, gold has meaning now and most importantly, I spent 3 days farming Lagon for a boss drop relic and didn't get it, switched to Merchants and bought it in 3min (very nicely rolled too) Additionally, good exalted items that are not for my build are interesting now as I can sell good gear I don't like gambling my time with RNG, to each their own I guess I'll be pushing 1k corruption with my Paladin and I think Merchants will get me there MUCH faster than CoF

I hope the devs catch this video. Thanks for helping me dodge a bullet here. Was thinking about making an alt with Merchant's.

One moment I get a huge drop and get rich next I realize I can't buy any upgrades till Rank7 and 8 . On the other hand the prices follow no pattern or make any sense now, this is just the first cycle so yes it will be improved upon too in time.....but the most agonizing part is finding an item that you're looking for....it may exist but you don't know on which tab.

I started merchants and it felt bad it was hard to get reputation fast and it felt like a chore. Unless you priced all your items for no gold you really didn’t sell much unless it was gg but also no one had good early and if others not rank 8 to buy items then you couldn’t sell or buy. Merchant guild should be allowed to trade everything to everyone and to give gear to people. They need a poe style item checker api thing people use. Then went cof and been happy with it and already level 7 after a few days

bro can you help me understand why we are suppose to use Heart of Uhkeiros relic? running very similar setup as you, low life. so it doesnt give you any ward, i dont understand.

Glad I had the foresight to go CoF!

Mike has already said that they were working on MG improvements, including searching the items yesterday on twitch stream

Very well said. I fell refreshed

The biggest and most important change they could make quickly as a bandaid fix is to allow you to adjust price after placing for free. Also it would be nice if they minimum price was the vendor sell price instead of 0. Personally i would live if the system auto sold items to a vendor if the price ever got that low and automatically lowered prices the longer a item sat on market until it sold. That way the market could slowly adjust itself.

i switched from cof to mg pretty early and got rank 8 this morning, with my character ending up lvl 98 in the end. mg is for sure pretty scuffed and a bit frustrating to interface with, no doubt. when i made the switch, all of the lp gear was so cheap, it was what tempted me to make the swap and hopefully beat the curve of gamers catching up. i dont think i hit it, as the good uniques with 3 lp are quite expensive now. i dont regret it tho, as my original plan when making the switch, was to get leveling gear, which is still cheap due to how common it is, and swap my characters to cof after leveling up a bit. i think ill stick to that plan but we will see how that plays out. i didnt really spend too much on gear for mg, mostly just for my first character, so i have tons of self found stuff that i should be able to make swap to cof without it feeling too bad to drop the twink gear

not reading comments.. so some1 might have put out there the idea.. but~ I feel they probably should have a system that calculate for you the price of the item. you as a player don't really place the gold cost, rather the system takes into consideration all the modifiers and gives you a number that should be its base price, and you can't go under that. with time, the system would learn that modifiers are those that players gravitate to, and that would update the system (id say every 1 week there would be an AH prized update). at the start of a season all modifiers would start at a base 100% prize (whatever that cost would be).. and then the % can go higher or lower based on what are players looking for on that equipment. this system would also take into consideration the rolls on an item (high and low rolls on a T7 as an example) this would remove the need to price check every time, it would force players to never sell at 0 gold.. as it is not useful to the system and probably some more pros and cons i think that the system should probably insert random items into the AH. if there is a low number of a specific item (no1 is selling) then inserting it into the system might possibly alleviate the drought feeling. these items would always come with lowest rolls in all modifiers. as a last idea, items bought from the AH should be able to "evolve". for example, a unique item should have the potential to gain a number of legendary potential when placed into the AH. the players themselves would not neceserally see it or if they do, if they removed it from the AH it would revert to the previous state. This idea would make the AH more alluring in the sense that selling items you find are always the best option, but your personal upgrades will always come from the AH. with items having the potential to be LP2-4 more easily on there people would hopefully place more items in there, to gain gold, and then look for there own items they need at a higher LP then what they can find out there in the wild. high LP items make sense to be rare (or even impossible) for the AH to find in the wild, but making them grow in power after entering the AH makes for an interesting relationship between players.

im so spoiled from how ff14 does it. D: you have the sales window open, where you enter the quantity and price, and in the same window there are two small icons. With one you look at the market board to check the current price, and with the other you look at the sales of the last few hours. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, but I think it would be great if they took inspiration from something like that.

They could have an algorithm calculating a recommended or minimum price for every gear on the market, so people know what to ask for. Then the sought after stuff will gain a big margin. If they can make the system like Forza horizon 5, but with a reputation system I would be happy to give it a shot

On my rank 10 COF I farmed last steps from 100-900c and only dropped 2 boots with 1 LP, Which on trade I can just grab ‘em for free. You think you would have better drops and gear on COF but you really don’t which is sad 😞

I like merch guild. My only problem is it takes FOREVER to level up after like lvl6 and there's no price checking.

Couldn't agree more. I planned on leaving merchant guild when i was 7½ because the experience was so horrible.. only to find out i couldn't use ANY of the gear that I had bought if I wanted to continue playing.. So right now I want o play on circle of fortune, but I cba to farm completely new set of gear with basically no gear, so I haven't played all day.. :/

Thank you...I was getting so frustrated with trade and your video made me see the larger picture. I'm switching to CoF.

This actually blows my mind. I've literally given away 2LP Exsanguinous as CoF to friends since they're not a big deal to find. Really bummed to hear that MG has been such a negative experience for so many.

It was so unfun that i threw all my gear away and rerolled cof with a mostly naked warlock.

Yea, I figured this out on my 1st character day 1. Messed around with it for 10 minutes than went to CoF.

I don't know man. I mean, I agree with some of your points (especially the search being still a bit clunky and not beingle able to search for specific affixes on unique gear). But overall, I'm having a great time with the merchants guild, and it's so satisfying to find good items and sell them for a lot of money, and then with that money t buy items that I couldn't find myself in a million years. I'm lvl 100, max level on the merchant guild, and every day I'm buying and selling stuff, and I really enjoy it, basically 99% of my gear comes from trading (and actually I'm playing with friends who are in the cof, and I constantly hear them complaining about not being able to find what they need for the build they do, and I'm kind of like: "uh, there's one of those for free in the market, too bad you can't buy it..."😊

I just wish they had a normal AH instead of it being locked behind a faction. It would be funner to have multiple factions we can grind rep for and get special stuff with.

This triggers my Maplerstory Freemarket PTSD of endless hours comparing item stats and prices.

Damn. I started softcore cof ssf, and was looking forward to trade hardcore.

PoE me demanda mucho tiempo de juego con comerciar, por eso decidi ignorar la faccion de merchant. La verdad es que es la mejor decision que tome por que no paro de jugar y el loot es increible, hay algo mejor que acumular profecias y llenar la pantalla de items al matar un boss?

It is frustrating to be in discord with friends that all went CoF and hearing them all get constant upgrades while I'm sitting here farming for rep. Seems like they get constant 2lp drops.

Agree with that analysis, Merchant is an illusion, it feels good at the beginning, you effectively start earning a few milions of gold, good items you still have from drop because youre not yet at the end game, and you are able to easily boost eq by finding the exact items you may use for a fair price......until the end game, when you hit the barrier that is lower that for COF players. You cant buy a lot of good gear that easily as COF can drop and modify it. Prices of end game gear are really expensive so the grind here is different than in COF. You know you dont have any drop boosts(prophecies), you just have hope to drop anything that you can sell for a milion or so, to collect money for the item you want. At least with COF they get that psychological treat of getting constant drops and dopamine spikes with multiple LP items. In merchants at end game, gameplay is getting quite poor like there is no reason to farm monoliths

I got my CoF to rank 7 and was so frustrated because all of the prophecies on my target farm uniques didnt work (Apathy's Maw axe and Wings of Argentus) i kept triggering them only for other chests or axes to drop so i said fuck it and im lvling merchant now which is at rank 5. I will reach rank 7 and stop, and make it my go to for any new builds. Switching back and forth doesnt seem to have alot of cost to it, except maybe you cant use the items you get from CoF once you leave. I think early game merchants are really good.

If you want power quickly just use the trade guild and you can get your starter gear pretty fast, along with any build defining uniques. What I have done after getting all these items, is hunt for those uniques and exalteds that i can swap over to , and once I get everything that way, I will swap to tthe SSF guild. Currently with chance orbs, I chanced all the uniques i need, and Im only missing a good exalted staff to be able to swap to SSF. Good luck guys

I absolutely enjoy the MG so far. Beeing able to trade requires you to play. They more you play the more and especially the better items you can buy. The prices are extremely fair if I compare this with Diablo. The game isn’t filled with Asia gold sellers however there are some but not even half as bad as in Diablo 4. You can sell the gear you don’t need and help other players getting what they want. All in all I really enjoy the MG

If you don't like having all the uniques for your build before you even start on your build I guess.

what happens if you change from one to the other? You keep the rank if you comback?

I was CoF all the way until I burned out on doing dungeons. Levelled from 94 to 95 inside soulfire bastion and realised that if i wanted the items for the build i was derping with I had to either pause pushing corruption until i got atleast decent lp hits, so i figured i would swap to merchants guild instead - and boy oh boy the ui is perhaps the worst i've ever seen. My initial reaction was that the bazaar layout and ui was how trading would look in d4, uneccessary movement between npcs, Check; unecessary fullscreen windows, Check; unecessary convoluted menus, Check - the same issue as always, whenever ui's are designed to work cross platform we get this fullscreen menace. I decided to instead take a break, and make sure that next time im playing that i play huge attention to whether my build wants alot of dungeon specific uniques and go Merchants guild, because until there is bonuses to drops in dungeons beyond lp chance and some difficulty scaling akin to corruption I'm not doing dungeons spamming again, its so boring compared to monos.

Yeah, agree it is clunky to use at the moment.

One of the biggest issues with MG is that people can't sell their old gear after they got upgrades. So people start getting rank 8, they are buying whole market to get few attempts for making 3lp+ items. But since uniques/exalted items were already traded, they can't sell them back if they didn't hit good combo on exalted or if legendary got wrong mod. So the only people who got anything from MG are those, who first got rank 8 and were able to buy all gear for almost nothing. After that whole market became a mess.

You can always equip item which you want to sell for easy compare/see exact stats @bazzar

If you spend favor in cof you get reputation, i think its the same in merchant guild. If you buy items you get reputation for favor.

Put the item on and you can see the item in the action house

To me trading should have the mental effect of every valuable drop adds to your builds strength regardless of whether or not it's for your build. Because you can always sell it to get closer to buying your upgrades. Right now‚ most things are worthless because of all the free stuff.

CoF here, it aint much better here if your playing an obscure build. If your playing one of the 4 rail roaded builds its fine. Both are completely scuffed since neither solves target farming problem

Ive hated trade so far. I'm so glad I'm not alone.

ye i agree on most of these, i do the same as you in terms of listing, i generally do 10-35k for ltos of things, but if they have + skills i do 50-100k then if its they purp and t7 etc i do check if they have good basic stats I think your missing a valuable point in all this, ALTS - the market is primarily designed with alts in mind, consider myself, i am now on my 5th toon, having the market open means i can bascially kit them out without farming that lp3 or 4 item having to find specific items that dont drop - ie im playing mage atm and needed the chance to apply spark on IDOL - needless to say as never having played mage on any other toon i had 0 in my bank, but pop over to AH and i bought 5 for combined about 10k immediately changes my alts build and no need to farm. Im not hard player , yes i play a lot but not like some and im rank 8 its not hard to get to that, for instance your best to gamble with your favour as your earn more rank (or did ) but still its not hard to get rank, yes it gets a slog from 8 onwards, but thats to be expected. Now, could the items and ranks they sit in be better 100% yes... the search is crap, the UI in general is crap, but we are talking 1.0 wihout this EVER been in game before.

I don't check after few try. Just put as 5k, 8k, and 10k.

whole heartedly agree however ohwell for this cycle for me :3

just looking over the faction level passives made me insta choose Cof.

I shoud grind some gear for next character.

Sadge, I actually enjoy getting the exact items I want where the only factor in getting it is time spent gaining gold/favor. UI had had a handful of improvements and probably will get more. I can now open and close my inventory and even stash while browsing. I will never go with the rng fest that is circle of self found.

this was 120% the video i needed.. i just hit monoliths and tried finding something in merchants and inthought i was just idiit while searching things but it seems.i wasnt and system just sucks.. time to swap

played both and fully agree with what you are saying

I complaint about trade problems and iam glad iam playing CoF. Iam having a blast ❤

I don't know the solution but I had the same experience as you, got annoyed the first time I saw a unique being given away for free when I went to price check it and immediately switched to CoF. Very Frustrating

I just finished the campaign and will def switch to COF while I don't have much rank to lose.

Cof is so bonkers and fun. With rank 10 i regular see around 20ish uniques popping from one prophecy. Have all the crafting mats such as rune of creation and can get easely more if i need. Am i still hunting the perfect 3lp items sure and it sucks that boss specific dops can not be target bu its so much better thna the trade. I mean buying your gear in a game that is all about gamble crafting seems to be silly to begin with.

I switched to cof after rank5 mg because it felt horrible

Mg needs better passive rewards and a system that interacts with the player too Like a reward could be since we our traders Better chance for affixes when upgraded to crit upgrade or upgrading costs less forgoing potential overall The upgrades should involve the crafting system we should be wanting to make gear to sell to other players

it feels about as bad as bulk selling my entire essence tab in one trade. all things mentioned need to be improved for it to feel good. Hope they do it soon enough.

dropped 2 3lp items from you build while watching it

The amount of loot CoF drops, I see zero reason to ever play MG.

EHG should definitely take notes form this video. I am sure, if they come across this, they will definitely fix some of the glaring UX issues you bring up.

I originally joined MG, went to use it, then immediately went to the Observatory and joined the CoF.

I get that you feel like your power gets locked behind merch guild but then how did all those player reach like 500 corruption level before the game even came out when it had no merch guild and no circle fortune guild?

Thanks for this, I'll stick to Circle of Fortune. Until they get it working properly.

They really need to cut the merchant guild ranks by half because it just does not make sense how they are structured. Think about it , you need rank 3 to buy a unique rank item but to buy one you got to wait until rank 7 , then if you want to skip the rng and buy the legendary with the stats you want you got to what until rank 10. And don't forget that each rank cost like the entire exp for its previous one times 3 to 4.5. So if it took you 2 weeks to reach rank 8, it will take you now 4 months to reach rank 10. And the whole friend gifting mechanic its out right a pain, I just got as a necromancer a "Fundamental Criterion" mage chest piece with LP3 that my friend was farming for since we started playing. Now I got to tie him up to me for like 2 to 3 non stop days until we can hopefully get a obsidian resonance to drop (one that we got only almost a week of playing daily) just to give him the item. The game really needs help, at least add a P2P trade system so we can trade between oversells what we get and not have to constantly play with one another when one might enjoy the empower monoliths and the other enjoys doing the dungeons in the game.

You have very accurate points, but once you muster the ranks it's not all that bad, give it more time to see if pricing will settle

not to mention how long it takes to level it up. 2 lvl 35 characters and a lvl 90 character and im not even 6 guild yet

BTW I think the idea is that you're supposed to do Dungeons (lightless and soulfire) to get the items to sell instead of Monoliths.

I’m running merchant guild on my main toon (nerfed to hell disco mage) and cof on my warlock! I have to say I’ve made over 3mil+ gold passively in a few days from the merchants guild while getting “all” of the loot I need for any builds while cof literally drop nothing but a bunch of trash loot even with prophecies! Merchants guild FTW all day!

Yeah, ... there are a few very frustrating things about this game that are starting to trigger me. I really need that big patch.

My thoughts exactly.. switched to COF rite way

Well shit. Was thinking about switching to MG tonight. With my dive bomb falconer build. Wont be doing that now till price checking is fixed. As well as a far far more stable economy. Its all over the place and thats not good

it seems to be better to use the gamba lady to gain levels as she gives double the rep for the favor cost. No need to price check anything or even pick up gear that isn't being shattered, just run monos and go gamba when you get enough favor or after a grind session. I have been getting 7500 favor and getting the cdr ring which gives 15000 rep

There is a tiny button under the search button that changes how you see all the items, you get a big list instead of the normal full item description. Its not much but it helps with price / mod checking a large number of items

I feel the same but lets not forget the fact that the game is new and we need to give them time to sort things out, thats why we here?