Many players do not have an intimate knowledge of the cost/value of many build-required unique items. Streamers and build guide writers frequently update PoBs with each league but their (frequently video) guides will often feature outdated approximations of the cost to obtain required items in trade. Players who are unfamiliar with the current PoE market are also players who are likely to lack the resources to fix or back out of a build if they discover they cannot afford to gear it to a minimum level of functionality.
PoB has an opportunity to help these players and increase its utility to build authors by incorporating a feature that allows a user to "price" a builds displayed item profile. Less knowledgeable players would gain quick insight to the overall expense associated with a build and authors would be able to refer interested readers to PoB for current market information rather than having to continually update guides with market information that rapidly becomes out of date.
Certain items will always be difficult to price accurately: we've seen various attempts at machine learning pricing for rares but current iterations meet with limited success. Despite this obstacle, simply providing a user with a list of unique prices along with a best guess for rares (using trade filters that simply look for matching itemization without regard for magnitude, for example) would help prospective build users identify builds that are much too expensive to attempt.
Exploring the various PoE trade and price macros (e.g. Awakened PoE Trade) might be a good place to start to see how other tools approach retrieving/estimating prices responsibly via the trade API and 3rd party websites.
Many players do not have an intimate knowledge of the cost/value of many build-required unique items. Streamers and build guide writers frequently update PoBs with each league but their (frequently video) guides will often feature outdated approximations of the cost to obtain required items in trade. Players who are unfamiliar with the current PoE market are also players who are likely to lack the resources to fix or back out of a build if they discover they cannot afford to gear it to a minimum level of functionality.
PoB has an opportunity to help these players and increase its utility to build authors by incorporating a feature that allows a user to "price" a builds displayed item profile. Less knowledgeable players would gain quick insight to the overall expense associated with a build and authors would be able to refer interested readers to PoB for current market information rather than having to continually update guides with market information that rapidly becomes out of date.
Certain items will always be difficult to price accurately: we've seen various attempts at machine learning pricing for rares but current iterations meet with limited success. Despite this obstacle, simply providing a user with a list of unique prices along with a best guess for rares (using trade filters that simply look for matching itemization without regard for magnitude, for example) would help prospective build users identify builds that are much too expensive to attempt.
Exploring the various PoE trade and price macros (e.g. Awakened PoE Trade) might be a good place to start to see how other tools approach retrieving/estimating prices responsibly via the trade API and 3rd party websites.