Love that shade of pink on you 3 <| sep |> Many reasons , first is the amount of people listing . If there is an AH , the amount of people that list items will increase several folds . That ' s not market manipulation . Second reason is that in an AH , it ' s easy to sort out the cost of an item and just undercut , that with point one means that it ' s much easier to manipulate the market . It ' s just as easy to do that on poe . trade . Look up the price of any item and undercut by 1 c . Hell , we even have a AutoHotkey script that looks up items for you now . Third reason is that if you have to do the trades yourself , it takes a lot of time and it ' s time inefficient , if a bot can do over 500 trades a minute , because AH is automated , that is far , FAR better . That ' s a separate issue . Cheaters will always be present but you can ' t limit a massive improvement to the game just because it will be abused by 0 . 01 % of players .