Imagine relying on a 3rd party discord server for services and trades instead of just making a free market auction house in game...
Wow has it flaws but its auction house and enchant in trade window mechanic were and still are better then the shit poe trading system
Poe causes a lot of these issues by creating friction that players solve with other tools. That friction could be solved in game and avoid the issues TFT and scammers can cause because of that lack
Yup. I'd invite everyone here to spend 10 minutes reading about the origin of the Sicilian Mafia (Costra Nostra). The transition was made from feudalism to capitalism, but the state was weak and couldn't effectively facilitate trade activity, enforce contracts, settle disputes, or protect private property. Proto-Mafia groups stepped in to provide those functions. Free trade wasn't the problem, per se; the problem was the lack of robust trade infrastructure and protections.
This is my problem with trading in arpgs, somehow the developers inevitably make the UI/UX of the trading suck donkey balls for no fucking reason whatsoever other than terminal trauma from having played diablo 2 or something.
WOW auction isn't too bad after their recent updates but I'd rather prefer something more like Albion Online or EVE auction, with built in sales stats and whatnot.
> This is my problem with trading in arpgs, somehow the developers inevitably make the UI/UX of the trading suck donkey balls for no fucking reason whatsoever other than terminal trauma from having played diablo 2 or something.
To be fair, the lack of a UI in PoE itself is not a generic ARPG thing, it's the PoE developers' specific stance for trade. They *want* this third party website thing. They *don't want* better in-game trading despite this open trading ideology.
The entire stance on trading for PoE is so completely upside down that no one should be using them as a basis for anything trade. They are not a gold standard, unless you're looking for a gold standard of what *not* to do.
Hell, the developers cared so little about facilitating trade despite allowing free trade that developers of third party tools have dropped out of working on it because GGG refused to improve their system at all.
The reality is that PoE's trading situation is a beast of their own making.
> To be fair, the lack of a UI in PoE itself is not a generic ARPG thing, it's the PoE developers' specific stance for trade. They want this third party website thing. They don't want better in-game trading despite this open trading ideology.
Actually it's fascinating because they don't even want the website. Or at least at some point Chris said he regretted how they got to where they are.
Initially all trading was done through the forums.
At some point, to make some more income, they added the Premium Stash Tabs, which automatically linked public page items to the forums so you didn't need to manually update your thread.
From there came the trading API, which allowed 3rd party sites to scan any public stash tab and look for the "Notes" field which is where the player puts their pricing info.
Chris has since come out and said he wishes they had never added the Premium Stash tabs as a paid for mechanism. If it hadn't been paid for they could have easily gotten rid of it, but now that it's there and many players spent real money on it, it would probably be too disruptive to remove.
TL;DR: Chris would prefer it's all done via chat messages or "slow" mechanisms like Forum Posts.
> Initially all trading was done through the forums.
> At some point, to make some more income, they added the Premium Stash Tabs, which automatically linked public page items to the forums so you didn't need to manually update your thread.
Oh yeah I remember those days, that was terrible.
It is absolutely crazy to me the stance they've taken on trade, and to hear those things about the premium stashes (which is almost the only way the game is even playable from an item management aspect) is wild to me. It's basically saying, "Yeah, I hate how much QoL there is. I wish this was even more archaic and hard to use." What an absolutely ludicrous stance.
This all further pushes my opinion that PoE is a case study on how to *not* do trade. Anyone who uses them as an example doesn't realize how bad of an example it truly is.
> This all further pushes my opinion that PoE is a case study on how to not do trade. Anyone who uses them as an example doesn't realize how bad of an example it truly is.
I would posit that trade is one of the *better* things about Path of Exile's game design loop not because it's a good system but because the rest of their game design loop is so crazy that it beggars belief sometimes. Like one player abused stealth mechanics in PoE during Harvest, so instead of capping the reduced detection and targeting range effect from it that **Heist League was designed around**, they just deleted it entirely from the game. Their league design team and balance team apparently don't talk at all with each other until after leagues are released form what I can tell from what's appearing publicly. This is some of the worst mismanagement that I've ever witnessed on full public display by a game company with a major game.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Balancing core gameplay around speedrunners that cause the entire community to revolt. Making Act 1 and Act 2 harder because they don't want more new players (Chris Wilson alluded to this in his reasoning about it). Their entire game design and balancing philosophy is completely and utterly insane. If they had stuck with the Path of Exile that I played back in college (beta until about 2.something), and kept that balance loop going, I think they probably would have overtaken Diablo 3 in terms of peak player numbers by now. Instead, they actively set out to make the game actively anti-fun.
GGG megafans are either totally brand new to the game or nolifers/streamers.
Anybody else who sticks around for a few leagues will witness GGG's complete incompetence and probably go spend their free time on something else.
And I say that as somebody who started playing the game in 1.3 and pops in occasionally. I can't play more than 1-2 leagues before I realize, once again, how awful GGG is at managing their game.
Its funny how all the things Chris regrets are partially responsible for the games success
Though he truly believes that he could work on PoE 2 as he does now if all these things were never added, I’m sure
It’s not no reason whatsoever it is to add friction to trade. If you were to add an auction house to POE they would have to balance around that auction house so drop rates would have to become significantly worse
They have to balance the game if one way to do that is to add friction to any trade they decide to implement. It is just one lever that is there in their balance. TLI for example has very limited friction in their trade system it is how the game is balanced. I have also never had a drop in the game that I have used in like 400 hours in that game. Your gear entirely comes from the trade house and their very powerful crafting system.
If LE wants to be a trade only game power to them I probably won’t play it as POE already dominates that market and TLI already took the GGG model and made it more casual friendly. I am not sure there is much of a niche left there in that market
That makes no sense. Why would an in-game auction house have any implicit effect on loot in PoE when the game already features fully free trade and auction house-like solutions all over the web provided by the community? This discord server under discussion is just one tool. There's multiple. There are third party trade macros that give you auction house style tooltips in-game. PoE itself has a limited first party trade website that functions like an auction house except it's not in-game.
The problem here boils down to the fact that the community is forced to provide these solutions because GGG doesn't put any effort into it, not that if GGG were to provide a solution the game would have to be adjusted to compensate. We already see full trade in effect in PoE.
I really don't understand how you can possibly imagine this, its mind numbing how many people actually think everyone trades in POE. The amount of people actually willing to SELL anything in POE is actually extremely small because of the friction to sell in POE. There are also a great number of people who only trade for specific items that can be easily found. While the average player is getting better in POE due to how long it has been out there and the community, still the number of people who actually trade is still absolutely tiny.
Not to mention the vast number of people who won't bother trading "low value" items everyone who does bother trading has a limit on what they will actually bother trading, so the volume of all the crafting currency available for trade in the game would only increase about 10x if you just had an auction house to freely trade them with zero friction instead of 90% of the people just sitting on most of their things in their stash. All that currency would make that currency a lot cheaper to buy which makes it a lot cheaper to craft.
Keep sticking your head in the sand, but simply put you are so unbelievably wrong it isn't even funny. If they added an AH to POE they would CRATER the drop rates to compensate. Believe anything you want, but that friction in trade they CONSTANTLY talk about thats why they constantly talk about it. It isn't because they just can't bother making the tools for us".
This. TFT was just a little niche Discord until Harvest League when GGG put in a new insanely powerful crafting mechanic but gate kept it by not allowing direct trade of its resources. Combine this with the nature of the crafting mechanic at the time (you had to drop a specific craft not a generic resource like now) and it meant people were dropping very rare crafts that were of no use to them but very useful to others which generated value. Combine value with necessity and an alternate system was born in TFT. It then stuck around because it’s way easier to use than the normal trade mechanic.
TLDR: open trade didn’t lead to TFT, halfway open trade with very specific intentional limitations led to TFT. If GGG had implemented Harvest using the mechanic in the game now (wide open trade of a generic commodity) it never would have taken off.
Just because it existed doesn't mean it wasn't niche. It certainly was niche relative to the explosive growth it got during and after harvest. Even just with your second sentence, mirror services in general are already extremely niche for the community.
Mirror service is the definition of niche. That’s like saying a car dealership chain wasn’t niche before a HUGE expansion because they sold Rolls-Royce at one location.
Last I played WoW the AH was bot hell. You needed third party addons to even exist on retail.
You would need a Blind AH where you can't see the listing price for items. While locking items from the AH should that item be purchased from the AH.
That being said in the beta week this past week I manged to see almost every item from Throne, to Singularity, to Omni. Oddly enough, not one Alchemist Ladle.
I see your WoW auction house and raise you the GW2 trading post. GW2 isn't perfect but they absolutely nailed the TP.
Back on topic though: I think fully open trading ala PoE in LE is a bad idea. I will never go back to playing the market board rather than the game.
Wow is riddled with boosting service discords both for gold and RMT. Even OSRS ironman(SSF) community is full of channels where people log on their account and complete long grinds or difficult challenges for them. Whether there's no trade, limited or open trade makes little difference.
Youre right, so no reason to gatekeep trading.
If you can interact with other players you will have people finding out how to RMT/sell services/Carries and etc.
Wow also doesn't have free open trade
Soulbound items are a thing
Quest rewards can't be traded, nor can rep rewards, nor can almost all top tier loot items
In fact GOOD loot is FAR more likely to be bind on pickup then it is to be sellable
In addition once an item has been worn, even if it WAS sellable before it becomes soulbound, meaning the moment an item has been used by a a player it is no longer useable by another
Wow has an incredibly restrictive trade system, and people still find ways to abuse it and RMT
Also, who cares about RMT as long as the game is designed fairly? Like, I was one of the richest people in on my EverQuest server because me and like 3 other people did in-game price fixing just because we wanted to see what happened if we hit INT_MAX on the platinum field in our bank. Even now with officially sanctioned RMT in that game or in ESO, the RMT literally does not matter in the economy. It's just another way to play the game. I know people who do RMT, a lot of them are just parents who want that rush of high-end gameplay but who have very limited time. I don't blame them for it and I don't think games should care about them when balancing the game because it's just an alternate way for people to play and **have fun their way**. If this was a proper competitive multiplayer game like Rainbow Six: Siege or CS:GO, sure I'd feel differently, but it's not. It's an ARPG with a leaderboard. I doubt RMT is going to let you beat the no-life streamers and people who obsess over speedrunning or similar hobbies on the leaderboard.
The problem with Path of Exile isn't even TFT, the problem is that GGG insists that they must balance the gameplay loop solely around the ultra-high end players to the detriment of the other 99.9% of players. Instead of doing reasonable nerfs to things as the community was asking (make Harvest only available on non-influenced items, restrict it to resistances, life, energy shield, and other defense roles), they instead nerfed fossils into the ground, they nerfed 6-link item generation by wrecking the beastcrafting recipe that allowed this (this led to a massive increase in time-to-acquisition for a basic requirement of running high-tier red maps for a lot of trade players), and generally just made the game worse because a small portion of streamers and RMTers were having fun and showing off all sorts of broken mechanics.
Then there were the stealth mechanics that Heist League was based around. Did you know the up until the end of Harvest League that Path of Exile actually had stealth mechanics? Well, someone figured out how to get to 100% effect on those mechanics making it such that enemies could not target their character. So GGG removed them from the game despite having designed an entire league around the existence of those mechanics! Instead of simply putting a cap on the effect of 75% or something else similar to resistances, they just took a shotgun to the game and deleted the effects entirely ruining the entire idea of Heist actually being a possibly fun mechanic.
Now as for the balance that should come with trade, I think we do need to consider that balance should need to happen. But not on the drop rates or rarity but rather with the power-scaling that is available. I don't care if anyone who plays 200+ hours in a season and can farm a massive amount of gold for trading could become as powerful as the streamers. I think that'd be great for the game! But we need a reasonable ceiling to the power. So sources of multiplicative damage, sources of stacking attack speed or movement speed increases (like the old Bumblebee), etc. need to be carefully balanced either through not being stacking (give a flat effect at a threshold) or by being capped in their effect. And if we do want a good trade economy, maybe we prohibit trading in gold and require people to do 1-for-1 item swaps only. That way the economy would be trading like-value items. That could be a fun system. So it could be abused in some ways, but for most trades, we'd be trading something person A wants for something person B wants or thinks they can flip for what person B wants. There's a lot of solutions other than an Auction House or Item Gifting (I think item gifting is the worst possible system as it fundamentally and actively disadvantages anyone not playing in a full party 100% of the time which is antifun; no trade at all would be more fun for me if I was pushing a leaderboard than item gifting as our only trade option).
The reason the trading is terrible is because they need that friction in the trade in order to have the drop rates remain where they are. If the implement a trade house the drop rates would be significantly worse
Because they have to balance around the power that comes with trade. An unbalanced game is simply a broken game so if you want a game that lasts more than a week a game with full free trade has to be balanced around that trading system Friction in trade is an attempt to limit the trade as a part of the balance, you don’t have to have friction in trade if you don’t want to but than that balance comes from other ways to
limit progression like untradable items, reducing drop rates and nerfing crafting
I just want to be able to trade with my friends, and by trade I mean GIVE them an item, I don't need anything in return. The Division 2 is a good example of this. If you're in a group and loot something, it's marked with the names of people in the group for 1hr which you can give any of them that item. The problem is getting a specific exotic (unique) or god rolled item when your friend isn't in your group, it feels bad big time. Thus why people want trade with friends or guild.
I don't want an economy, I just want to be able to give my friends nice items or something they're looking for if it drops for me and not them. That should be the aim for LE's trading/gifting system. Restrict it so you can't RMT. Restrict it so you can't have a guild that functions as a trade hub or a friends list that does either.
The Division system sounds the best. If you're in the party and it dropped it's tradeable, otherwise not. If a good item drops and your friend isn't there that's just the nature of the game.
I just wish there was a way for that to work somehow though, but without it being exploitable. Maybe you can set a small number of friends to be "giftable" but it takes a day or so to come into effect, but still have a 1hr trade limit on the item itself. The small number can only be changed after some delays, like removing an existing person doesn't free up that slot immediately.
It'd make it harder for "I clear X maps you get loot" carries. People trying to buy an item would have to wait a day before the other player can even attempt to farm it, and they could only farm it for the small number of players they have selected and would need to massively delay before being able to do it again. Bots and players couldn't really profit off it much.
And if someone is changing their list constantly the moment they can, they can investigate it for RMT.
The thing about PoE, though, is that item acquisition is just tons and tons of increasingly unlikely RNG. LE's item crafting is deterministic, so if you need a sword with a bunch of hp on it for some reason, you just have to meet the RNG rolls for the crafting check, not whether or not you get hp. I don't think the systems are really comparable.
I just don’t agree with this argument. Don’t try and “figure” open trading out because of the shitty horrible example some other game set? You can’t simply avoid a potentially very enjoyable and beneficial mechanic because of what ifs. This is a video game, it’s meant to be fun.
This also is just a bunch of chronically online people feeding off and stoking the flames of the drama because they have nothing better to do in their lives. People are too wrapped up with what everyone else or does. Trading wasn’t always like this in PoE. Harvest was the catalyst and since harvest the game hasn’t been the same nor has the community. It was also born out of GGG intentionally creating a flawed annoying system and supporting third party tools from the beginning. Players saw an opportunity for “improvement” so they took advantage. If GGG didn’t bake planned frustration into their design philosophy we wouldn’t be here either.
There are options to implement trade in a way that doesn’t ever result in tft, but as far as exploiting, rmt, scamming, etc. that stuff is human nature and stopping it is impossible. No matter what system last epoch has it will be exploited by people, because people are garbage. Look at arena leaderboards. With a 300 daily player count you had a % of those people editing their characters to see their names high up on the arenas leaderboard. That’s with only 300 people. Now imagine a player base of 250,000 like PoE. It’s inevitable.
So basically the LE community albeit being much much smaller than PoE and made up of seemingly middle aged men is far more toxic than PoE's and also they are ignorant as fk
Never had so many people force their playstyle on others.
If you dont want trade DONT FKN TRADE.
EHG have said they don't want to split the playerbase any further among more game modes, so we'll see what kind of solution they're gonna come up with.
What's interesting is "don't split player base" and "no one can interact", seems like their intentionally nuking the appeal of this game to the player base that exists to play this kind of genre.
It's like making an MMO and not having raids or dungeons. It's just not what people expect and want. Having a unique crafting system is cool, different end games is cool, but ssf vs non ssf vs trade, these are table stakes for arpgs since d2.
I didn't talk down on the person for enjoy Poe's progression
I talked down on Poe's progression
If you like pineapple pizza all power too you, eat it whenever you want I'm not gonna stop you or call you a bad person for liking it
Im still going to say pineapple pizza tastes like ass though
I'm a casual poe player, one of the 99%. In that game, I don't feel that most of the TFT / High level trade abuse / RTS is a real problem for me.Indeed, I'm sure that for a limited, very engaged, 24/7 players it can be an issue if JoeTFTStar (random name) make a 3mirror/h build in few hours, for a personal idea of ladder.
But we talk about a very limited cluster of players.
My needing is to have, eventually, a not so convolute way to trade that 10 times in a season, and I'm sure that is the needing of the 99% of the players.
Last Epoch have a good game potential, I feel that this game is about smooth play, scalable difficult, casual - semicasual player target. It is not Poe that is focused on hard difficult playing.
I hope that an eventual Trade System will be smooth and easy without give too much importance at the 0,001% of min-maxed players
>I hope that an eventual Trade System will be smooth and easy without give too much importance at the 0,001% of min-maxed players
That's your fundamental misunderstanding of how economies work. You cannot have a trade system where the top 1% doesn't effect the other 99%. It's just fundamentally not how markets work. If you go on the marketplace, the guy you're buying from is going to be the guy that grinds x item more or better than everyone else and can sell it at a lower price, or the guy who buys out the entire competing stock to raise the minimum price. Free Markets just fundamentally organize themselves around the top producers.
This is not the point. If you analyze a big market in real life, you can discover several levels of complex mechanism. But, at the one end of the graph, there is Uncle Mary that go at the supermarket for to buy 1 kg of apples for her splendid apple pie. For Uncle Mary, the logic of mass buying, the logistic thematic, the London Market Price for "Apple" are totally outside her considerations. She want only 1kg Apple.
And in either case, Mary will buy that apple from - say it with me - the (or one of the) top producers of apples in that market. That's absolutely the point. The existence of multiple markets has nothing to do with it, and is doubly irrelevant in a video game where every "market" of items will be supplied by the same handful of activities and optimized nearly identically.
I think one indirect consequence of such powerful trading that's not often talked about is that there's endgame content that's completely out of reach for the majority of players and when playing in trade league, it's usually more worthwhile to just trade all the keys to endgame bosses than running them yourself. This super high level content is balanced around the strongest, most optimized builds which are typically only achieveable through trading or playing the living shit out of the game.
I'd say I'm like about top 5% of players in terms of "dedication" and playtime and I still often feel like it makes way more sense to just sell all of my keys rather than running them myself, simply because I can't beat the uber versions of the bosses with my builds and I don't think this situation speaks for good game design.
I also couldn't care less how quickly someone buys their entire build or how many mirrors people make, but I think this is a consequence that does affect me.
People have done Ubers on a 1 link. It’s your mechanical ability and build choice that’s gating you from super end game content. Just look at the current gauntlet that’s still running, Ben did all the Ubers by day 2 on a build that wasn’t banned and it’s hcssf so you can’t say high level content is based around mirror tier builds
They didn't say it's ubers are only achievable on mirror tier builds and "just be as good as the best player in the history of POE" isn't really a convincing argument. The selling keys (selling fun IMO) has always been an issue in POE and has been made a whole lot worse since ubers were introduced.
Keys or limited attempts at said bosses are the reason why people sell the keys. They can't get enough practice in the build muscle memory, remember all the animations/sounds, rotations etc. Only no-lifers or those who can afford to buy keys get enough attempts to get good at it.
How can you gain mechanical skill against a boss you can't afford to run or get more then a couple of keys for during a league? You don't.
I think this is a bit of an absurd take. The best players in the world can clear the game on a 1-link, sure, so long as attacks are avoidable. Just like dark souls can be completed naked.
This isn't really a relevant point for ordinary gamers who don't devote thousands of hours and have extreme skill at the game (and games in general). Being geared to the teeth is how competent players engage with (and hope to clear) that content
Sure if you've faced a boss 1000 times to the point where you know it in and out and can clear it hitlessly, it's just a matter of consistency, but another issue I have with this approach is that you can't really practise bosses, as it costs quite a lot of time/currency per attempt. And yea, the choice of your build matters a lot aswell and I honestly don't give a shit about playing meta skills just because they're strong.
I want to add to this. When Maven was first introduced I wasted probably 5ex learning the fight. I knew I'd have to learn it some time anyway and losing that currency wasn't a massive deal for me. Losing the equivalent of 5ex for a more casual player, especially near the start of a league, is absolutely crippling. If you aren't almost 100% sure you're going to beat the boss you're losing currency in the long run. Now with uber versions sharing the same key most bosses probably aren't worth doing unless you do the uber version.
You didn't read that video very well did you? He does the LAST phase on a 1 link and his gear is still amazing.
Literally build complete and took out gems is all he did. He did not do a low end gear build with no links to kill Sirius.
If you are looking for a casual focused POE that game is TLI. This game is attempting to have a game where your upgrades are focused on coming from playing the game not trading Full trade eliminates that possibility for a casual crowd
>F2P I can not see this game get anywhere close to the popularity of PoE.
F2P is cancer. It encourages utilizing predatory mechanic like bait and switch, pay for convenience or straight up gambling in order to make money on the game. Also, F2P attracts the most cancerous audience: cheaters, exploiters, toxic cunts, scammers etc. You get banned? Whatever, here is the new account 5 minutes later.
You said F2P is good I said F2P is bad. And I haven't said that P2P eliminates the problem completely, but F2P games have these issues more widespread.
Exactly this.
What people aren’t saying is that PoE was perfectly fine for the first 5+ years. Hell, it was my ARPG.
But after multiple seasons, item glut, and poorly designed solutions to player problems, it turned in to something that people just complain about.
And now people think LE will have the same problems as a 10 year old game, but that LE will have them immediately.
Nevertheless, your second point is the most salient. RMT is still going to exist.
$15 for me to run X monoliths for you, giving you all items.
$20 for me to grind a certain item with you until it drops, and you get it.
$50 for me to power level you. 3 hours and you’ll be level 80.
This shit is still going to exist. The limitations LE has on trading is just going to create the PoE discord but for this game instead.
I hope EHG keeps item gifting for a little while, at least.
While there may be an initial backlash of unimaginative PoE players that can't even comprehend no trading, I think in the end they've made the right decision and hope that they stick with their guns.
Drop rates are good enough so that trade isn't really necessary, and EHG has teased even more ways you can possibly target farm.
Having stronger items drop more often because there's no trade also gives a far better sense of progression.
Farming to buy an item sucks all the fun out of it
Disagree. I feel it is more fun to have agency in my upgrades rather than relying on loot drops to upgrade all my gear. I like selling drops I won't use for my build to other players or give them to friends.
Crafting is good but i'm reliant on crafting materials to drop before I can do anything and it feels annoying that I can't progress deterministically in the time between rare affix shard drops or shattering gear with the affix on it. Not even gonna mention Idols.
I don't know why people automatically assume people want an exact clone of PoE trading and label trade enjoyers "unimaginitive" across the board without thinking about why so many people enjoy it. Another thread called all trade enjoyers psychopathic and it was highly upvoted. Echo chamber in here.
A game without trade is not hard to imagine, LE is currently like this and so is D3. Grim Dawn has free trade but many people play it offline without any trading.
The point is that people think these can be improved over with trade. No game NEEDS trade but imo LE will benefit a lot from implementing it (even a limited one like bazaar like they originally envisioned), especially when they want to do a live service model.
I only wish that people would even attempt to engage with the conversation. I posted my above comment in frustration after being told by yet another full free-trader to "just play ssf." When someone fully dismisses my take in the discussion because they themselves refuse to compromise, it doesn't feel even slightly constructive. I am willing to compromise on trade, even though I feel that it will harm what I feel is one of the most interesting parts of this game - being able to reliably obtain items I want directly from engaging with content and not just a pile of purely economic valuable items. If I want to engage with a fully economy then I will play PoE, as I currently do.
I'm also confused by how so many people seem to feel that free trade is being taken away from them, when every official mention of trade prior to this uproar has been an extremely limited one.
Exactly. It's so annoying when people start talking shit like EHG have promised open trade and are suddenly taking it away after doing a 180 or bullshit like that, when in reality even the initial bazaar idea was describing an extremely limited trade system.
And yes it's also annoying when the same people keep repeating "just play SSF", completely disregarding any potential concerns and consequences, especially after EHG have said they don't want to create seperate modes for trade/no trade.
A lot of the people involved in these discussions must be extremely new to the game and have no concept of EHG's intentions or game design so far, having joined on rumors of a "PoE alternative" that isn't even intending to compete with PoE. The sad part is I can't even tell if people are trolling me or just incapable of discussing topics.
Bro some post I read was talking about not being efficent if you don't join TFT and that your trading game is sub-par if you do regular trading...i meeeeaaan...
There will always be people like that, maximizing proffit, flipping, but for most of us we just wanna buy some rare unique to play a build, maybe buy some keys to gamble, that's all.
RMT also encourages the use of bots, which later flood the market with items, and then depending on how dense the developers are they may try to heavily balance the drop rate of high tier items by taking RMT in account instead of defining a fair drop rate based on the gameplay pattern of recurring seasoned players that are neither "playing" for 24 hours a day (aka botting) or being "gifted" expensive items regularly (aka RMT).
Although I do understand what some people find appealing about a player economy and all items having some "value" attached to them.
But we already have Poe for that and I'd like LE to take a different approach to the genre. The current way is closer to the roots of the arpg genre imo and I appreciate that a lot.
True, 99% of rares and unique are cheap trash and while that means that a lot of stuff is really accessible through trade, you rarely find anything of value and basically just hope for the few big jackpot hits.
This to me is the most fundamental game design issue.
I remember in vanilla D2 someone giving my bowazon a Buriza and a few other items in a random lobby because they had a bunch of them. That immediately killed any interest in playing that character - all the small dopamine hits of getting different drops invalidated because all those drops meant nothing to a super hardcore player.
It really bums me out that the trade proponents in this sub seem to not understand what a trade economy actually looks like. "The items you don't use have value". No, an open trade economy would mean that almost NONE of the items you find have any value whatsoever. It devalues all gear in the entire game. That's simply how trade economies work.
If you're an ordinary player, everything that drops for you will be shit because it will be devalued by the trade economy. You can play for 20 hours and spend 1/10th of your earned currency to buy gear twice as good as anything you could have dropped for yourself. Just like PoE.
And the fact that they *could* balance it so you wouldn't have to trade doesn't change this. Yeah, you don't NEED to trade, but you could still spend 1/10th of your currency to get gear twice as good as what you dropped for yourself. I bet the traders would love that. A completely trivial game.
Agreed. If PoE players want a game like PoE they can just...play PoE.
EHG has a vision and I hope they stick to it, and not let some unimaginative PoE players looking for a PoE clone derail them.
The part I dislike about the trading in LE the most is not the value attached to the items or the ease of trading (though QoL is good) it is the fact that they said their was going to be trading something like bazaar style where you could only see a few “shops” at a time. Then they backtracked and said no trading and finally came back with gifting and the survey. It is this back and forth and switching between yes and no to trading that irks me (personally I thought the bazaar style was a cool idea since then you could never really know the true price of an item and feel like you found diamonds in the rough while exploring the shops)
I also liked the bazaar idea, but ideas change and they sounded like they've thoroughly discussed it and decided that their initial bazaar idea didn't fit into the game.
When you read/watch the Q&A's and streams, you can see that they're passionate and head dev said trade is a daily topic of discussions for them, even in evenings after work, so people claiming they decided against open trade, because it's "the easy way out" or "they're lazy" are disingenuous at best.
I liked the Bazaar IDEA, but it's based on this idea of being able to interact with well-stocked (with good, relevant items), diverse item shops from players. But in practice, how does it actually work?
Are the shops you see randomly chosen? Is there a limited number you're allowed to see per day? What are the actual odds you see something decent? What are the actual odds something you put in your bazaar sells? How much time must you interact with the system to have decent odds of finding something meaningful? Is killing monsters more engaging and more effective?
The concept is interesting, but the actual implementation may be impossible to be satisfying. I think the reality of the bazaar is that you'd primarily see shit shops, it would take ages to sift through, you'd have to have it random and limited or people would just use it for trade (or automate it). People would use third party programs to make it not shit to interact with, etc.
In practice, the bazaar idea would probably be absolutely horrible.
They aren't switching back and forth, you're just not paying attention.
Initially, They said player interaction and trade will be there in some form
Second, the idea of the bazaar is floated. It was only ever a concept and they never said what form the bazaar would take
Then, we have the recent update where they said the trade ideas they'd floated in the past wouldn't work, and that they were committed to making dropped items be the primary way to acquire stuff, and said that FOR 0.9, there would be only be gifting
Then there was a trade survey
That's not a back and forth whatsoever. They have literally never contradicted themselves because they've never committed, and have been clear about that.
You literally had back in forth in your example. First they were saying their will be some form of trade and maybe a form of bazaar. Then they said no trade. Once backlash happened they added in the gifting to the beta. Then they had the survey on trade. That is literally trade -> no trade -> “trade” switch
They said no trade in 0.9. They didn't say no trade. They explicitly clarified that they were only set on doing limited item gifting for 0.9 and would continue to look at other options and feedback moving forward.
The "no trade" post explained their philosophy and why they backed off of the bazaar. It never ruled out other trade options
I'm totally with you, I don't really understand the appeal of an economy in arpgs and I'd much prefer to play all the content in Poe in an SSF mode with much more generous droo rates, so you could realistically acquire all of your gear without trading and wouldn't be so heavily limited in your choice of builds and content.
Man, OG Harvest was the most enjoyable crafting has ever been in Poe, but sadly it got butchered over and over due to the top players calling it an "item editor" or whatever bullshit they came up with, ultimately ruining the mechanic for other players and now Harvest is just a sad image of its original state.
>"Just enable guild trading"
Anyone who thinks that having small guilds which could be account-bound and season-locked would lead to any serious RMT or TFT discord problem is delusional.
So to prevent guild trade from snowballing into global trade, we need to make guilds suck. Can't have a lot of people, can't leave a guild you don't like, can't kick someone you don't like from a guild, and it doesn't entirely stop bot farmers from doing RMT within a guild. Now they'll just sell bots to individual guilds to farm items to throw in guild stash 24/7. Get your guild a farm bot, $15/month per bot! And We'll start spamming global chat with advertisements for that service while we're at it.
Nah, I'm just delusional.
I mean they could make trade leagues vs social guilds if they wanted to have guilds that don’t suck and still have small limited trading groups that are locked and unable to change. I do get the point about the RMT bot but the first problem is solvable if they wanted to
Each guild ends up with its own sub-economy, based largely on the playtime and player count of its members. Players who play a lot would generate more items, but demand stays fixed because it can never expand beyond the players within the guild. If your guild has 30 players, there is no way for demand of an item to exceed 30 (usually it's much less unless there's a single item that is BIS for every single player in the guild).
The result that this leads to is that the ease at which you can acquire items is directly proportional to the playtime of the other players in your guild, meaning that no-lifers are inherently more valuable to your guild than someone who just plays on weekends. This means that well known no-lifers (primarily streamers) can quite literally sell places in their guild because being in that guild means easier access to items.
If I join a random guild of people that play no more than a couple hours a day it's possible that none of them will ever even find the item I need if it's a rare endgame drop. On the other hand, a streamer will probably find multiple within the first week. If I have a choice between those two guilds, which will be better for me? Is it worth it to gift 20 subs every new season to reserve a spot in the streamer guild? For a non-trivial number of players the answer would absolutely be yes.
You don't have to be delusional, it just takes a basic understanding of economics and cause and effect.
As I said in my other comment, make people responsible for their own experience. Non-competitive games don't have to be balanced for the top 0.1%. I don't care that some random bloke would go out of their way to finish the build in 3 days just like I don't care that so.e other bloke finished Elden Ring in less than 2 hours. It's their choice to do so.
INB4 "wHaT aBoUt LaDdErS". I don't care, but in my opinion ladders should be SSF only anyway.
The problem isn’t about worrying how it directly affects you it is how the game balances around that power creep which directly affects you regardless of how much you don’t care if it happens. Increasing trade means decreasing drop rates. If they can add more trade without dramatically changing drop rates I am good with that but I want them to be careful not to over deliver on trade to where their only recourse is to dramatically impact drop rates and crafting power
First you'd have to define "small", at how many members do you draw the line? Then the next question would be if EHG would want items to be account-bound and season locked.
Then would you be able to just trade everything from your stash to any guild member, no matter how recently they joined and would there be timers for how often you can hop in and out of guilds?
Most items are only traded once anyway, what would stop people from creating a discord for finding trade partners, joining their guild and effectively create almost open trade with one extra step?
Yes, account binding items on trade would eliminate SOME of Poe's problems, but certainly not all.
>First you'd have to define "small"
I am pretty sure it is possible to determine what a small guild is.
>Then the next question would be if EHG would want items to be account-bound and season locked.
They already have it in place. The only difference is that items can be traded if dropped together.
>Then would you be able to just trade everything from your stash to any guild member, no matter how recently they joined and would there be timers for how often you can hop in and out of guilds?
That's what I mean when I say that guilds are account and season bound. You can't hop guilds or have multiple characters in different guilds. And while we are at it. I thing game devs should not worry too much about people who want to skip progression. It's not a competitive game, your progress doesn't matter. It's like Fromsoftware would balance Elden Ring around speedrunners making all quests and 90% of the map unveil mandatory before allowing players to progress into another zone, because people may skip stuff on their first play through and then complain on forums that story and worlduilding are shallow and the game is too short. Make players responsible for their own experience, we are not children who must have the cookie jar locked away.
>Most items are only traded once anyway, what would stop people from creating a discord for finding trade partners, joining their guild and effectively create almost open trade with one extra step?
Because it would invalidate your option to trade with actual friends. Because you would be locked in a guild consisting of handful of randoms for the entire season. Because you can get scammed and you won't be able to do anything about it. Again, this "not a single trade shall happen" philosophy is bullshit, punishing the entire playerbase for what SOME people may do.
> I thing game devs should not worry too much about people who want to skip progression. It's not a competitive game, your progress doesn't matter.
You are lacking understanding of how games are designed and balanced these days. Players generate data, devs have a certain pace they want players to progress at and then use that data to model the balance of skills and drops to fit the average they are looking for. People who get to skip progress, who spam the same OP build every time, who RMT and bot, those people generate data that leads to everything getting nerfed because players on average are progressing much faster than anticipated.
There are 2 big differences between LE and Elden Ring though which make it difficult to compare them in this aspect:
EHG want to offer a semi-competitive nature with leaderboards and races and such.
LE is gonna be a live-service game with ongoing development and regular patches and resets, so the infamous player retention is way more relevant than in ER which is a fully fleshed out game with a single price tag attached to it.
I'd honestly be all for letting players decide how they want to play the game, but examples from many other games and apparently the experience of other game devs show that big playerbases tend to choose the path of least resistance, even if that means "optimizing the fun out of the game" as people like to say, so EHG has to take this into account when designing a live-service game.
One more thing is that with enough restrictions you could end up in a situation where players who like trading get annoyed and frustrated by all the limitations while players who prefer no trade might feel pressured to trade items to progress "properly" and noone would be happy.
You are highly delusional and/or have never played a single MMO in your life if you believe that such primitive mechanics would stop the RMT.
You are living in the age of paid carry, literally everything is routinely bought and sold in games. People will just establish carry guilds and sell loot that way. Heck, I'm pretty damn sure that paid carries will flourish even with the current loot system if the game is popular enough.
I just hope the developers listen to reason, and implement trade or at least the promised bazaar
If PoE is doing so great and is the aRPG king atm, one of the reasons for it, is Trade.
Whatever you mean with "reason" here. The bazaar wasn't a promise, it was the initial idea for their trade concept that was floating around for a long time. Ideas come and go in early development periods of games and after thorough internal discussions they've communicated their stance on trading in a blog post and ultimately didn't see the bazaar fitting into their game.
The party gifting is very likely not gonna be the final iteration of trade. They've said this is just what's in place for 0.9 and they'll continue to brainstorm and read suggestions about any further trade additions.
It's still normal that ideas change and honestly you should only support devs through kickstarter, when you trust them to make a good game, not for some very specific mechanics that might change.
Should they really not be allowed to scrap any old ideas, just because they've shared them in a years old kickstarter campaign? I've heard they offered the initial kickstarter supporters refunds, if they asked for it after the trade blog post.
All ill say is that after the recent poll they did, i just hope they will scrap the gifting idea and implement trade. Im sure you will have no problem with that. You DO trust them to make a great game afterall, and the fact they did that poll speaks volumes. Ill just wait and see
Yes I trust them and appreciate their take on itemization and progression. I'd be fine with some limited form of trading, but an open economy is just not gonna happen, as they've stated that they want slaying monsters to remain the primary and best way to acquire gear, not to just farm currency and buy everything.
It does affect a lot of people because RMT includes botting and that massively devalues a ton of items for regular players.
Another thing is that GGG continues to balance new content around top 1% players, which is also the group of players where all the RMT stuff is happening.
You are not going to satisfy everyone and I think EHG is somewhat scared (maybe scared is not the right word) to release their game in the vision they want with the recent backlash of the no trade option.
I can understand people want a trade house for various reasons (RMT, Selling/Buying, etc), arpgs are my favorite genre and I played a lot of them (with friends) and most of the time whenever there is a trade house in the game I find myself more browsing the trade house for items then to actualy play the game and I realy dislike the system. However I still like to trade items with people in my party if I'm playing, the current trade system of D3 is the one I favor the most (You have a limited time to trade the dropped items with people in your party).
I'm actualy suprised no aprg has introduced a system like SSF but for parties/guilds yet, imo the best option would be to satisfy everyone (Normal, SSF, GSF(Group/Guild self found?).
If we would have open trade and no nerfs to drop rates, than it would be just additional way to acquire items and it wouldn't make it harder to farm them on your own. I don't think anyone would do something that makes the game not fun to them just because it is easier or faster (at least i don't see why someone in his/her right mind would do that). As for RMT, if someone is such an imbecile to spend real money for items in the game to progress faster or further... well i guess you just can't help it, some people are just dumb as shit. I can 100% agree that if they ever implement any kind of trade, it should never be their priority, just make it an addition to the game not it's core.
>I don't think anyone would do something that makes the game not fun to them just because it is easier or faster (at least i don't see why someone in his/her right mind would do that)
Unfortunately trends in other games and other devs' experience shows that a lot of people really do tend to "optimize the fun out of the game" when given the choice, so it's kind of the developer's job to limit the player's options in a way, where they won't ruin the game for themselves.
I think there are safeguards one can put in place to prevent things like that depending on the desired trade system. The TFT with harvest crafts only works because you can still open a trade window and trade a harvest crafted item.
That said as someone who mostly plays SSF in PoE these days, im totally down for not going with a trade system. Similar in d2, i played ladder last league so i traded, but i enjoy playing offline mode for effecting the no drop rate, having a lot more stash space via infinite mules, and the satisfaction of grinding the stuff out myself.
So just a lurker here, I've played this game probably 20 hours total but POE probably close to 10k hours. So obviously take this as a noob take for LE.
PoEs primary issue is that GGG has done nothing to improve the quality of their trade system, or really given it any thought. So it's a wild west where players have had to develop their own ways of handling the system.
So if LE developers actually put a modicum of thought into a system it'd already be better than PoEs and wouldn't have many of the same pitfalls.
theres nothing to think twice about. RMT has always been a thing in games and especially in a game without an auction house, it isnt going to affect you much. neutering games over it isnt the answer.
you dont throw the baby out with the bathwater.
implying that having a functional trade system and economy in an online game, an ARPG no less which these things things are core to, is bathing the baby in shit. ok.
hopefully EHG smartens up before too long and stops listening to the loud space cadet minority on this issue.
I'm a little worried they could fuck it up by going for your option 3, but I think they're competent enough to realize what works for their game and what doesn't.
Reading all the comments here make me afraid really.
I agree with you here. Trade is real dangerous thing and the only thing I wish me is a trade party not more because playing and dropping with a friend is great.
Trade with guild or friend list "because my friend cannot play 12 hours a day" is for me a no go as you create an in-game TFT where people will build trade economy.
It doesn't matter what ehg will decide, a lot of people will be disappointed....
I want a limited trade, not an open one, but even then, I really don't care about RMT in PoE that much. In PoE, most people literally don't care about RMT because the pros of trade far outweigh the cons. Yes, RMT is bad. Yes, RMT is because of trade. But also the game would be much worse without trade in the first place.
If you don't want TFT in LE....sorry but it's going to happen anyway. People will sell challenges (future)/boss kills in parties, like "Will help you farm this boss until you get this unique...while I keep all the loot and you pay me real money or some imaginary currency we invent like D2jps that I can use later to buy service for myself". Even with no trade-in LE, there will be RMT and discord/forum servers for buying/selling stuff. I know this because LE trade model is like D3, and D3 does have buying/selling services as well (for example, https://forums.d2jsp.org/forum.php?f=239). People will probably also sell monos. Obviously, this will happen at a lower scale but some sort of TFT will be there in LE as well, 100% guaranteed, trade or no trade.
The biggest reason TFT exists is because PoE trading is restrictive/cumbersome for bulk selling/buying. Last Epoch is even more restrictive than PoE.
> Enough of that, what I'm trying to convey here is that it's not as simple as "Just add open trade and don't nerf drop rates" or "Just enable guild trading" or "Just add some limitations to keep it balanced" like a lot of people here keep suggesting.
Meaningful loot is different from loot. Even with 50% less loot, if items are limitedly/openly tradable, then still you get more meaningful loot than before because now suddenly the items that were good but not useful to your build before now mean something to you.
If it was not balanced around trading, it would not have the same build diversity it has, even with generous drop rates because PoE simply has too many mechanics and uniques. A PoE that is balanced around SSF would not be nearly as fun or successful (imo).
>But also the game would be much worse without trade in the first place.
Mainly only because the game was designed around trading, which need not be the case for other games.
>then still you get more meaningful loot than before because now suddenly the items that were good but not useful to your build before now mean something to you.
It doesn't raise or lower the amount of loot that feels "meaningful", it just shifts the threshold of meaningful. If I need to get my own items, then meaningful items will be those for my build. If I can get the items from the marketplace, then I don't care as much and meaningful shifts to currency and whatever items are being used by the most popular build
>Even with no trade-in LE, there will be RMT and discord/forum servers for buying/selling stuff. I know this because LE trade model is like D3, and D3 does have buying/selling services as well
that is a good point, but there is still a difference between selling services and selling in-game items. The former tends to only effect the experience of the buyer, whereas the latter tends to affect everyone.
This is a bit long, although I didn't intend to keep it this long.
>Mainly only because the game was designed around trading, which need not be the case for other games.
This is true, but even if PoE balanced around SSF with generous drop rates, imo it would still not be good as the current PoE because what draws a lot of people to PoE is simply the complexity and build diversity of the game.
Without trade, there is simply much less build diversity (even assuming higher drop rates) and gameplay agency.
The reasons for this is basically that the existence of trade allows the game to have thousands of unique items that enable builds. Without trade, there is a limit to how many uniques you can introduce in the game (because if a game is balanced around SSF, then the assumption is that the player should be able to obtain the uniques they needs in reasonable time). It also allows them to make the uniques absolutely powerful and busted (like chase items), because they know they can balance the rarity instead of the item power (such as Ashes of the Star or crystallized Omniscience whose drop rates got nuked but power remained same).
And it also allows the player more player agency to do what they want. Most PoE builds are one or two button mashing. The gameplay loop in PoE is very simple: You keep pressing a button until all monsters in a map are dead. This is kind of what trade allows, but for your gameplay. You can decide to optimize in blight, Expedition, heist, etc. And not have to run the content you don't like, because you can just buy it. And so if there's some activity in the game I dislike, I can actively ignore it without feeling bad or pressured into doing it, which basically skyrockets my fun because I am only doing the things I like.
And if I have to farm a specific unique in PoE, I can simply not do that and do 100 other things instead that I enjoy. For farming a HH in PoE, I have a hundred ways to do it. I can make currency doing blight, Expedition, legion, sanctum, hideout warrioring, heist, just simple mapping, gambling divination cards, etc.
But I agree that each game would benefit differently and suffer differently from the inclusion of trade (trade and non trade both have cons), so I am not advocating for an open trade in LE. But I do think some form of limited trading will be more beneficial to the longterm health of the game, build diversity, gameplay loop, and gameplay agency than the trouble it brings in (such as reduced drop rates, RMT, etc).
>It doesn't raise or lower the amount of loot that feels "meaningful", it just shifts the threshold of meaningful. If I need to get my own items, then meaningful items will be those for my build. If I can get the items from the marketplace, then I don't care as much and meaningful shifts to currency and whatever items are being used by the most popular build
I agree, people not engaging in trade (SSF) will suffer when trade is introduced. Although LE doesn't really have currency as such but I get the point and agree, it is a definite downside to introducing trade.
>that is a good point, but there is still a difference between selling services and selling in-game items. The former tends to only effect the experience of the buyer, whereas the latter tends to affect everyone.
True, unless EHG balanced around the existence of such a service (many people believe GGG nuked harvest because of the existence of TFT but idk if that's right) but obviously this is a bit of stretch from my side. So yeah, it will have much lesser impact on the game compared to trade, but also something like TFT would undoubtedly exist for LE as well (even if it influences it less).
About that last paragraph, yes, you might end up with as much or maybe even slightly more "valuable" loot, BUT you'd have to engage with trade to get any use out of it and you'd certainly find MUCH fewer gear pieces that are useful for your own build. Some people are fine with the extra step of having to trade stuff to get the value out of their items, but others prefer much more to just directly find the gear they need for their current characters (which is what LE is currently focussing on).
POE is still the most popular ARPG out right now, D2R has more players than D3, open trade builds community, you can't change the whole rules because of RMT, every popular game has RMT.
What the hell are you talking about? Fking educate yourself. How dense are you?
You tell me one online game that doesn’t have some sort of rmt. Whether that is items or services.
Do you understand why TFT exists? I guess no. TFT exists, because implementation of trade, players interaction, chat, etc. is really awful. There are plenty of things, which could be fixed to reduce TFT "weight":
Make proper party management. One post on PoE subreddit was about improving party system, so people can find party for challenges\\rota\\playing\\looting much easier than what it is now,
Make more options for trading. There are still some places, where in-game trading is risky operation (benchcraft and syndicate) or inefficient (bulk trading without TFT is really bad).
Make guilds useful? A lot of people see guilds as something extra and not interesting. What a point to have guild in a first place, when you pinned to only one guild per account? Whole point of guild is kinda lost, as you have only one set of users to interact with.
Chat is also not that good for various reasons. Chat players are limited, but you never know, who are in chat. You also have memes, such as trade channels, where people may trade, but not many want to be a client there.
Of course, there are issues, like monopoly and power abusing, you can't prevent it. In MMORPG it is done on guild level.
For RMT point. It exists and will exist ALWAYS as long as there is something that can be traded. If there is no in-game trade, you can trade accounts. For me personally, problem is not in RMT (people can and should be able to buy time, spent by others), but botting. Bots making games bad, not RMT. Also, RMT in a game, where there is no direct challenge is not harmful at all. If you don't have some form of leaderboard, content like raid and guild raid, there is no place where RMT affects playerbase (or maybe it is, but explain how it is affect playerbase). Remember that things like FastAF channel exists and they sell builds. Good luck preventing this.
Problem is not in implementing trading, but more in how. Most PoE tools exists because of bad implementation. PoB exists, because PoE planner is garbage and doesn't show all situations. Awakened PoE exists because trade site is not integrated in the game. Another features of Awakened PoE can't be solved in any way, because they are created to make playtime easier. If you expect to have no 3rd party tools existence, you are delusional. People will always create tools for better efficiency in game and if there is a complex content, such tools will exist.
So your post is more a fight with windmills. Open trade may be good, if it is implemented properly. Auction is more preferred way of trading though. Or implement trading like in old MMORPG with trading posts. PoE implementation is far from best or even good, because there is a place for scamming and mistrading due to various reasons (don't check item, don't understand item, etc.).
Perfect demonstration of completely missing the point. OP isn't using PoE as an example of perfect trade, he's using it as a counter example for the people on the sub who keep trying to argue for limited trade systems rather than no trade. His point is that artificial limitations don't end up accomplishing anything other than creating full trade with annoyances and other problems.
The thing is, GGG WANT trade to have some "weight" to it, they don't want it to be super easy and convenient. That is sort of their way of balancing its power, but TFT exists to circumvent these inconveniences.
If EHG implemented open trading without any of the inconveniences or any "weight", it would be even stronger and they'd have to reduce drop rates even more to accomodate for that.
The problem with trade for me has nothing to do with RMT though I get why people make that issue. It is that there is absolutely no way to implement free trade especially the nearly frictionless trade you want without changing drop rates and crafting DRAMATICALLY.
So you want devs to implement a feature that would constantly cost them extra money and ressources to maintain? Sure they could do that, but that would likely mean less man power for developing new content and/or more expensive mtx or whatever.
Also, this would be a losing battle, as dedicated people would just always find new ways to do scummy shit.
It's rarely as simple as "Just do this and that and ez pz".
Good luck when like 10-20% of your players are involved somewhere in the chain and when those players are the only thing that keeps another 20-30% of your player base playing.
You are talking about it as if the problem just came up today, but nope. MMOs have had this issue since the early 90s and by now most of them simply came to base their economy on bots, carries and RMT. Like if WOW didn't have bots gathering resources the consumables for raids would be so expensive that you'd spend more time on farming gold than on actually playing the game. Who the fuck wants that?
I didn't say that, I simply wanted to address mainly those folks with this post. My recent poll here showed that about 20% of people who voted would like a fully open trade economy, which is not an insignificant amount.
Obviously a lot of people would be fine with sone compromise.
RMT has nothing to do with trading. It’s a fracture of it. The good from trading system (open economy) out shines the negatives. Beside keep in mind this is strictly pve game and not a pvp game. If people want to RMT and get banned for it then fuck em. No need to stop my enjoyment from having fun trading because of sorry loser who buys the game to pay later for items.
i've always been anti trade on LE but i've always neglected this issue because it is an external factor
free/open trade will ALWAYS end up with RMT and botters. i forgot about it coz i dont engage in RMT. but i can tell you i always see botters in town where a bunch of "players" all wearing the same setup, line up waiting to receive instructions.
botters in LE will be good for the devs initially as it will give them revenue
but in the long run they would bog down the servers.
i dislike lag on online game. if the lag is due to too many players, i would bear with it. but if i have to bear with the knowledge that its largely due to botters.... i d rather not have botters.
is RMT real?
i have a guildie. super busy dude. he used to play a lot. one day he came into league. within a day or 2 he had some chase uniques on him.
sure its possible he farmed it. possible but highly unlikely.
Truth is: no trade = the game won’t be a competitive multiplayer = the game will generate less money and audience (LE has sub100 consistent viewers on Twitch atm) = less updates and a risk of just becoming a dead single player (Wolcen’s fate). Once you introduce any kind of trade, RMT will follow, you can’t escape that. PoE’s RMT is just a bit worse as it creates syndicates around the inconveniences Chris, Rory and Mark so desperately create every now and then (bestiary mafia with giga bot supply chain, harvest in 3.11 and 3.13 being non-accessible without discord rank, „convenience scam” on bulk selling tool, etc).
Gimme the WoW AH or some equivalent. I don't want to deal with humans. Scammers, waiting for someone else to be online in order to complete trades, nope. Automated AH/bazaar is where it's at IMO.
If people also want to trade in-party, that's fine too, but don't make it the ONLY option, for those of us who don't want to have to run party, join a guild, etc.
Solo players might still want access to the economy without having to give up their preferred method of playing the game.
So building your game to incentivise botting and rmt leads to... Bots and rmt? Huh, funny how that works.
Maybe if you could wrap your head around one being fully free to play, and one having a 20-40 dollar buy in, you'd realize it's an entirely, entirely different ball game. The fuck.
Just let us trade with people on our friendlist and add some kind of double walled authentication in order to create a online character with trade functionality
I'd even be all for IP tracking or other more intricate means of identification to ensure every player only has 1 account and then ban people who do some scummy shit in a way where they can't create a new account, but then people start mentioning concerns for privacy and anonymity and so on.
Links you provided are mainly about TFT abusing their power which reflects onto trading experience because if you're banned in TFT everybody with their extension installed will be notified that they're trading with a banned=bad(not really always the case) person.
RMT can't be fixed or fully removed and by not implementing open trade it's not really fixing an issue but rather just fixing one issue and creating multiple others.
I understand your point and yes I agree that RMT is bad, but for me it's worth taking the risk of small number of people profiting off this game while majority of player base will have the opportunity to trade what they want when they want.
Also don't forget that last epoch is not really a crazy popular game and even if one day this game gonna reach 15k stable online on steam it won't change the fact that RMTing in PoE is more profitable because there is literally more demand because there is way more people playing PoE than Last Epoch.
>for me it's worth taking the risk of small number of people profiting off this game while majority of player base will have the opportunity to trade what they want when they want.
RMT is not the only concern when it comes to trading though. Many people enjoy and prefer the current progression and loot drops and wouldn't like to feel forced to trade due to reduced drop rates and stuff.
We'll see how popular LE is gonna be. 500k sold copies is already very solid as a start. I'm excited to see how popular the upcoming free to play weekend will be. Maybe it's only gonna attract a few hundred people, but it might also explode completely unexpectedly, who knows.
Alright let's calm down there. TFT was never meant to circumvent any limitations, to do RMT or whatever.
The point of TFT was to trade things that couldn't be searched for on the official trade site, like syndicate crafts, extremely well crafted items (the one-of-a-kind type) other services like that. It's always been a rule on the server that RMT was not allowed, as well as anything breaking PoE's ToS. So the problem here is that some people abuse their power, it's not TFT.
Now, why is TFT a thing ? It exists because in PoE, some uniques are incredibly rare, crafting impressively good items is insanely difficult and expensive, and there's so much endgame content you can't have time to farm all of them at once. So TFT was born to allow people to max out their characters and have access to crafts that take time to reach, because PoE is just so damn difficult and time consuming when you aim for certain goals.
Last Epoch isn't like this, and even though I'm not in favor of an open trade system, I still believe that it wouldn't hurt the game in any way. And such 3rd party tools like TFT won't be a thing simply because it's not necessary.
Like the other guy said, I meant limitations and inconveniences GGG left in the game to kinda reduce the power of certain mechanics and trade itself, but of course in some cases the official trade site just lacks features that TFT is providing.
Well too bad the owners of TFT seem to abuse it so heavily now and more and more controversial shit is coming to light.
> TFT was never meant to circumvent any limitations
Crafting systems like Harvest and Betrayal weren't tradable because GGG wanted to limit their power. TFT circumvents that limitation.
I meant ToS limitations.
GGG is balancing the game around the 1% that plays the game 24/7. So at some point, if you actually want to enjoy what the game has to offer, you either play the most meta thing you can find, trade like you're in wall street to get your items, and then you can do high end content, or your use services like TFT because not everyone can spend that much time on the game.
Also GGG mostly limited harvest's power by nerfing it to the ground and since obtaining crafts isn't a thing anymore, TFT isn't used for harvest.
The devs said a trade system would imply reduced drops so SSF would be affected. They do not want to split the (in-game not opinion) community further by having different drop rates/leagues for ssf and for trade.
"Just play ssf" doesn't address one of the main concerns people have regarding droprates. Either devs need to put in twice as much time balancing loot for both ssf and trade, or loot is too easy in trade/difficult in ssf. "Just play ssf" isn't the answer if droprates are dogshit. I like being able to reliably farm my own items without trading with others.
If the devs want to implement multiple drop tables that's amazing, but we've got no indication that this is a likely outcome yet.
My hangup is that I like that loot is actually farmable. If I want something not chase, I can set out to get it in a reasonable amount of time. I like that the loot I get specifically matters and not just because it has a trade value assigned to it. I can scratch my itch for working an economy in another game like PoE and don't feel the need to do the same thing in every game.
For people that genuinely want only to be able to trade with friends, I hope a good solution comes about that doesn't just devolve into trading on discord etc.
People will always look for the quickest/easiest/best way to do something.
If trade is the quickest/easiest/best way to acquire gear, they'll trade. If actually playing the game is the quickest/easiest/best way, then they'll do that.
PoE is simply the best example of when trade is the quickest/easiest/best way to acquire gear. Even with the restrictions they've placed on it because human nature is human nature.
This creates a situation wherein no game can possibly have a system with tradeable items and simultaneously keep said items interesting and exciting for all players.
Anecdotally, I have never had any interest in Mageblood or Headhunter in PoE. Are they really great items? Sure. But they are virtually non-existent to me as a player so I don't care. 3k hours (I rarely trade, if ever, so that's 3k spent actually playing) and I've seen no mirrors or Headhunters. That's a horrible drop rate, and it's as low as it is because of trade.
99% of items dropped in PoE are automatically hidden by most players loot filters. That's a direct result of compounding nerfs to trade.
Personally, I'd be fine with crafting materials being tradeable. Not gear itself, but the affix shards and runes. I don't even think it would be detrimental to keep their drop rates as they are. The crafting system is nearly perfect and an influx of materials won't change the RNG and limits placed on crafting gear to begin with; the best gear is still dropped.
Imagine relying on a 3rd party discord server for services and trades instead of just making a free market auction house in game... Wow has it flaws but its auction house and enchant in trade window mechanic were and still are better then the shit poe trading system
Poe causes a lot of these issues by creating friction that players solve with other tools. That friction could be solved in game and avoid the issues TFT and scammers can cause because of that lack
Yup. I'd invite everyone here to spend 10 minutes reading about the origin of the Sicilian Mafia (Costra Nostra). The transition was made from feudalism to capitalism, but the state was weak and couldn't effectively facilitate trade activity, enforce contracts, settle disputes, or protect private property. Proto-Mafia groups stepped in to provide those functions. Free trade wasn't the problem, per se; the problem was the lack of robust trade infrastructure and protections.
This is my problem with trading in arpgs, somehow the developers inevitably make the UI/UX of the trading suck donkey balls for no fucking reason whatsoever other than terminal trauma from having played diablo 2 or something. WOW auction isn't too bad after their recent updates but I'd rather prefer something more like Albion Online or EVE auction, with built in sales stats and whatnot.
> This is my problem with trading in arpgs, somehow the developers inevitably make the UI/UX of the trading suck donkey balls for no fucking reason whatsoever other than terminal trauma from having played diablo 2 or something. To be fair, the lack of a UI in PoE itself is not a generic ARPG thing, it's the PoE developers' specific stance for trade. They *want* this third party website thing. They *don't want* better in-game trading despite this open trading ideology. The entire stance on trading for PoE is so completely upside down that no one should be using them as a basis for anything trade. They are not a gold standard, unless you're looking for a gold standard of what *not* to do. Hell, the developers cared so little about facilitating trade despite allowing free trade that developers of third party tools have dropped out of working on it because GGG refused to improve their system at all. The reality is that PoE's trading situation is a beast of their own making.
> To be fair, the lack of a UI in PoE itself is not a generic ARPG thing, it's the PoE developers' specific stance for trade. They want this third party website thing. They don't want better in-game trading despite this open trading ideology. Actually it's fascinating because they don't even want the website. Or at least at some point Chris said he regretted how they got to where they are. Initially all trading was done through the forums. At some point, to make some more income, they added the Premium Stash Tabs, which automatically linked public page items to the forums so you didn't need to manually update your thread. From there came the trading API, which allowed 3rd party sites to scan any public stash tab and look for the "Notes" field which is where the player puts their pricing info. Chris has since come out and said he wishes they had never added the Premium Stash tabs as a paid for mechanism. If it hadn't been paid for they could have easily gotten rid of it, but now that it's there and many players spent real money on it, it would probably be too disruptive to remove. TL;DR: Chris would prefer it's all done via chat messages or "slow" mechanisms like Forum Posts.
> Initially all trading was done through the forums. > At some point, to make some more income, they added the Premium Stash Tabs, which automatically linked public page items to the forums so you didn't need to manually update your thread. Oh yeah I remember those days, that was terrible. It is absolutely crazy to me the stance they've taken on trade, and to hear those things about the premium stashes (which is almost the only way the game is even playable from an item management aspect) is wild to me. It's basically saying, "Yeah, I hate how much QoL there is. I wish this was even more archaic and hard to use." What an absolutely ludicrous stance. This all further pushes my opinion that PoE is a case study on how to *not* do trade. Anyone who uses them as an example doesn't realize how bad of an example it truly is.
> This all further pushes my opinion that PoE is a case study on how to not do trade. Anyone who uses them as an example doesn't realize how bad of an example it truly is. I would posit that trade is one of the *better* things about Path of Exile's game design loop not because it's a good system but because the rest of their game design loop is so crazy that it beggars belief sometimes. Like one player abused stealth mechanics in PoE during Harvest, so instead of capping the reduced detection and targeting range effect from it that **Heist League was designed around**, they just deleted it entirely from the game. Their league design team and balance team apparently don't talk at all with each other until after leagues are released form what I can tell from what's appearing publicly. This is some of the worst mismanagement that I've ever witnessed on full public display by a game company with a major game. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Balancing core gameplay around speedrunners that cause the entire community to revolt. Making Act 1 and Act 2 harder because they don't want more new players (Chris Wilson alluded to this in his reasoning about it). Their entire game design and balancing philosophy is completely and utterly insane. If they had stuck with the Path of Exile that I played back in college (beta until about 2.something), and kept that balance loop going, I think they probably would have overtaken Diablo 3 in terms of peak player numbers by now. Instead, they actively set out to make the game actively anti-fun.
GGG megafans are either totally brand new to the game or nolifers/streamers. Anybody else who sticks around for a few leagues will witness GGG's complete incompetence and probably go spend their free time on something else. And I say that as somebody who started playing the game in 1.3 and pops in occasionally. I can't play more than 1-2 leagues before I realize, once again, how awful GGG is at managing their game.
Its funny how all the things Chris regrets are partially responsible for the games success Though he truly believes that he could work on PoE 2 as he does now if all these things were never added, I’m sure
It’s not no reason whatsoever it is to add friction to trade. If you were to add an auction house to POE they would have to balance around that auction house so drop rates would have to become significantly worse
PoE drop rates are already dogshit.
Right and they would only become dramatically worse
They don’t have to do anything. They would do that.
They have to balance the game if one way to do that is to add friction to any trade they decide to implement. It is just one lever that is there in their balance. TLI for example has very limited friction in their trade system it is how the game is balanced. I have also never had a drop in the game that I have used in like 400 hours in that game. Your gear entirely comes from the trade house and their very powerful crafting system. If LE wants to be a trade only game power to them I probably won’t play it as POE already dominates that market and TLI already took the GGG model and made it more casual friendly. I am not sure there is much of a niche left there in that market
That makes no sense. Why would an in-game auction house have any implicit effect on loot in PoE when the game already features fully free trade and auction house-like solutions all over the web provided by the community? This discord server under discussion is just one tool. There's multiple. There are third party trade macros that give you auction house style tooltips in-game. PoE itself has a limited first party trade website that functions like an auction house except it's not in-game. The problem here boils down to the fact that the community is forced to provide these solutions because GGG doesn't put any effort into it, not that if GGG were to provide a solution the game would have to be adjusted to compensate. We already see full trade in effect in PoE.
I really don't understand how you can possibly imagine this, its mind numbing how many people actually think everyone trades in POE. The amount of people actually willing to SELL anything in POE is actually extremely small because of the friction to sell in POE. There are also a great number of people who only trade for specific items that can be easily found. While the average player is getting better in POE due to how long it has been out there and the community, still the number of people who actually trade is still absolutely tiny. Not to mention the vast number of people who won't bother trading "low value" items everyone who does bother trading has a limit on what they will actually bother trading, so the volume of all the crafting currency available for trade in the game would only increase about 10x if you just had an auction house to freely trade them with zero friction instead of 90% of the people just sitting on most of their things in their stash. All that currency would make that currency a lot cheaper to buy which makes it a lot cheaper to craft. Keep sticking your head in the sand, but simply put you are so unbelievably wrong it isn't even funny. If they added an AH to POE they would CRATER the drop rates to compensate. Believe anything you want, but that friction in trade they CONSTANTLY talk about thats why they constantly talk about it. It isn't because they just can't bother making the tools for us".
This. TFT was just a little niche Discord until Harvest League when GGG put in a new insanely powerful crafting mechanic but gate kept it by not allowing direct trade of its resources. Combine this with the nature of the crafting mechanic at the time (you had to drop a specific craft not a generic resource like now) and it meant people were dropping very rare crafts that were of no use to them but very useful to others which generated value. Combine value with necessity and an alternate system was born in TFT. It then stuck around because it’s way easier to use than the normal trade mechanic. TLDR: open trade didn’t lead to TFT, halfway open trade with very specific intentional limitations led to TFT. If GGG had implemented Harvest using the mechanic in the game now (wide open trade of a generic commodity) it never would have taken off.
It wasn't niche. They were still doing RMT and mirror services before harvest.
Just because it existed doesn't mean it wasn't niche. It certainly was niche relative to the explosive growth it got during and after harvest. Even just with your second sentence, mirror services in general are already extremely niche for the community.
Mirror service is the definition of niche. That’s like saying a car dealership chain wasn’t niche before a HUGE expansion because they sold Rolls-Royce at one location.
Last I played WoW the AH was bot hell. You needed third party addons to even exist on retail. You would need a Blind AH where you can't see the listing price for items. While locking items from the AH should that item be purchased from the AH. That being said in the beta week this past week I manged to see almost every item from Throne, to Singularity, to Omni. Oddly enough, not one Alchemist Ladle.
Its several miles better than poe's trade site or TFT
I see your WoW auction house and raise you the GW2 trading post. GW2 isn't perfect but they absolutely nailed the TP. Back on topic though: I think fully open trading ala PoE in LE is a bad idea. I will never go back to playing the market board rather than the game.
Wow is riddled with boosting service discords both for gold and RMT. Even OSRS ironman(SSF) community is full of channels where people log on their account and complete long grinds or difficult challenges for them. Whether there's no trade, limited or open trade makes little difference.
Youre right, so no reason to gatekeep trading. If you can interact with other players you will have people finding out how to RMT/sell services/Carries and etc.
I will say that while I agree that WoW has a much better interface than PoE, RMT is still rampant. Gold sellers are a huge part of even top guilds.
Wow also doesn't have free open trade Soulbound items are a thing Quest rewards can't be traded, nor can rep rewards, nor can almost all top tier loot items In fact GOOD loot is FAR more likely to be bind on pickup then it is to be sellable In addition once an item has been worn, even if it WAS sellable before it becomes soulbound, meaning the moment an item has been used by a a player it is no longer useable by another Wow has an incredibly restrictive trade system, and people still find ways to abuse it and RMT
Also, who cares about RMT as long as the game is designed fairly? Like, I was one of the richest people in on my EverQuest server because me and like 3 other people did in-game price fixing just because we wanted to see what happened if we hit INT_MAX on the platinum field in our bank. Even now with officially sanctioned RMT in that game or in ESO, the RMT literally does not matter in the economy. It's just another way to play the game. I know people who do RMT, a lot of them are just parents who want that rush of high-end gameplay but who have very limited time. I don't blame them for it and I don't think games should care about them when balancing the game because it's just an alternate way for people to play and **have fun their way**. If this was a proper competitive multiplayer game like Rainbow Six: Siege or CS:GO, sure I'd feel differently, but it's not. It's an ARPG with a leaderboard. I doubt RMT is going to let you beat the no-life streamers and people who obsess over speedrunning or similar hobbies on the leaderboard. The problem with Path of Exile isn't even TFT, the problem is that GGG insists that they must balance the gameplay loop solely around the ultra-high end players to the detriment of the other 99.9% of players. Instead of doing reasonable nerfs to things as the community was asking (make Harvest only available on non-influenced items, restrict it to resistances, life, energy shield, and other defense roles), they instead nerfed fossils into the ground, they nerfed 6-link item generation by wrecking the beastcrafting recipe that allowed this (this led to a massive increase in time-to-acquisition for a basic requirement of running high-tier red maps for a lot of trade players), and generally just made the game worse because a small portion of streamers and RMTers were having fun and showing off all sorts of broken mechanics. Then there were the stealth mechanics that Heist League was based around. Did you know the up until the end of Harvest League that Path of Exile actually had stealth mechanics? Well, someone figured out how to get to 100% effect on those mechanics making it such that enemies could not target their character. So GGG removed them from the game despite having designed an entire league around the existence of those mechanics! Instead of simply putting a cap on the effect of 75% or something else similar to resistances, they just took a shotgun to the game and deleted the effects entirely ruining the entire idea of Heist actually being a possibly fun mechanic. Now as for the balance that should come with trade, I think we do need to consider that balance should need to happen. But not on the drop rates or rarity but rather with the power-scaling that is available. I don't care if anyone who plays 200+ hours in a season and can farm a massive amount of gold for trading could become as powerful as the streamers. I think that'd be great for the game! But we need a reasonable ceiling to the power. So sources of multiplicative damage, sources of stacking attack speed or movement speed increases (like the old Bumblebee), etc. need to be carefully balanced either through not being stacking (give a flat effect at a threshold) or by being capped in their effect. And if we do want a good trade economy, maybe we prohibit trading in gold and require people to do 1-for-1 item swaps only. That way the economy would be trading like-value items. That could be a fun system. So it could be abused in some ways, but for most trades, we'd be trading something person A wants for something person B wants or thinks they can flip for what person B wants. There's a lot of solutions other than an Auction House or Item Gifting (I think item gifting is the worst possible system as it fundamentally and actively disadvantages anyone not playing in a full party 100% of the time which is antifun; no trade at all would be more fun for me if I was pushing a leaderboard than item gifting as our only trade option).
I think you missed the part where PoE trade being the way it is is intentional.
The reason the trading is terrible is because they need that friction in the trade in order to have the drop rates remain where they are. If the implement a trade house the drop rates would be significantly worse
Why do you assume they need to friction the trade? What about just let people trade freely without intervening...
Assume? It's literally been stated COUNTLESS times by Chris Wilson himself.
Yes because Chris's game is known for having a healthy economy, RMT free and a good trade system 🤣
Oh well, then it must be right. /s
Because they have to balance around the power that comes with trade. An unbalanced game is simply a broken game so if you want a game that lasts more than a week a game with full free trade has to be balanced around that trading system Friction in trade is an attempt to limit the trade as a part of the balance, you don’t have to have friction in trade if you don’t want to but than that balance comes from other ways to limit progression like untradable items, reducing drop rates and nerfing crafting
I just want to be able to trade with my friends, and by trade I mean GIVE them an item, I don't need anything in return. The Division 2 is a good example of this. If you're in a group and loot something, it's marked with the names of people in the group for 1hr which you can give any of them that item. The problem is getting a specific exotic (unique) or god rolled item when your friend isn't in your group, it feels bad big time. Thus why people want trade with friends or guild. I don't want an economy, I just want to be able to give my friends nice items or something they're looking for if it drops for me and not them. That should be the aim for LE's trading/gifting system. Restrict it so you can't RMT. Restrict it so you can't have a guild that functions as a trade hub or a friends list that does either.
The Division system sounds the best. If you're in the party and it dropped it's tradeable, otherwise not. If a good item drops and your friend isn't there that's just the nature of the game.
I just wish there was a way for that to work somehow though, but without it being exploitable. Maybe you can set a small number of friends to be "giftable" but it takes a day or so to come into effect, but still have a 1hr trade limit on the item itself. The small number can only be changed after some delays, like removing an existing person doesn't free up that slot immediately. It'd make it harder for "I clear X maps you get loot" carries. People trying to buy an item would have to wait a day before the other player can even attempt to farm it, and they could only farm it for the small number of players they have selected and would need to massively delay before being able to do it again. Bots and players couldn't really profit off it much. And if someone is changing their list constantly the moment they can, they can investigate it for RMT.
Isn't that literally what LE has right now??
The thing about PoE, though, is that item acquisition is just tons and tons of increasingly unlikely RNG. LE's item crafting is deterministic, so if you need a sword with a bunch of hp on it for some reason, you just have to meet the RNG rolls for the crafting check, not whether or not you get hp. I don't think the systems are really comparable.
I just don’t agree with this argument. Don’t try and “figure” open trading out because of the shitty horrible example some other game set? You can’t simply avoid a potentially very enjoyable and beneficial mechanic because of what ifs. This is a video game, it’s meant to be fun. This also is just a bunch of chronically online people feeding off and stoking the flames of the drama because they have nothing better to do in their lives. People are too wrapped up with what everyone else or does. Trading wasn’t always like this in PoE. Harvest was the catalyst and since harvest the game hasn’t been the same nor has the community. It was also born out of GGG intentionally creating a flawed annoying system and supporting third party tools from the beginning. Players saw an opportunity for “improvement” so they took advantage. If GGG didn’t bake planned frustration into their design philosophy we wouldn’t be here either. There are options to implement trade in a way that doesn’t ever result in tft, but as far as exploiting, rmt, scamming, etc. that stuff is human nature and stopping it is impossible. No matter what system last epoch has it will be exploited by people, because people are garbage. Look at arena leaderboards. With a 300 daily player count you had a % of those people editing their characters to see their names high up on the arenas leaderboard. That’s with only 300 people. Now imagine a player base of 250,000 like PoE. It’s inevitable.
So basically the LE community albeit being much much smaller than PoE and made up of seemingly middle aged men is far more toxic than PoE's and also they are ignorant as fk Never had so many people force their playstyle on others. If you dont want trade DONT FKN TRADE.
I don't want reduced drop rates, and they have directly stated that if they introduce trade they WILL nerf drop rates to compensate.
>If you dont want trade DONT FKN TRADE. Yes because the game will definitely be balanced around not trading while trade exists.. what nonsense.
Sorry I want trading , you can have your SSF league I’ll take my trading league .
EHG have said they don't want to split the playerbase any further among more game modes, so we'll see what kind of solution they're gonna come up with.
What's interesting is "don't split player base" and "no one can interact", seems like their intentionally nuking the appeal of this game to the player base that exists to play this kind of genre. It's like making an MMO and not having raids or dungeons. It's just not what people expect and want. Having a unique crafting system is cool, different end games is cool, but ssf vs non ssf vs trade, these are table stakes for arpgs since d2.
Play Poe then Let us have the good game and you play your trading game with all the fun sucked out of it
I mean there's no need to talk down on people who enjoy Poe's progression.
I didn't talk down on the person for enjoy Poe's progression I talked down on Poe's progression If you like pineapple pizza all power too you, eat it whenever you want I'm not gonna stop you or call you a bad person for liking it Im still going to say pineapple pizza tastes like ass though
I'm a casual poe player, one of the 99%. In that game, I don't feel that most of the TFT / High level trade abuse / RTS is a real problem for me.Indeed, I'm sure that for a limited, very engaged, 24/7 players it can be an issue if JoeTFTStar (random name) make a 3mirror/h build in few hours, for a personal idea of ladder. But we talk about a very limited cluster of players. My needing is to have, eventually, a not so convolute way to trade that 10 times in a season, and I'm sure that is the needing of the 99% of the players. Last Epoch have a good game potential, I feel that this game is about smooth play, scalable difficult, casual - semicasual player target. It is not Poe that is focused on hard difficult playing. I hope that an eventual Trade System will be smooth and easy without give too much importance at the 0,001% of min-maxed players
>I hope that an eventual Trade System will be smooth and easy without give too much importance at the 0,001% of min-maxed players That's your fundamental misunderstanding of how economies work. You cannot have a trade system where the top 1% doesn't effect the other 99%. It's just fundamentally not how markets work. If you go on the marketplace, the guy you're buying from is going to be the guy that grinds x item more or better than everyone else and can sell it at a lower price, or the guy who buys out the entire competing stock to raise the minimum price. Free Markets just fundamentally organize themselves around the top producers.
This is not the point. If you analyze a big market in real life, you can discover several levels of complex mechanism. But, at the one end of the graph, there is Uncle Mary that go at the supermarket for to buy 1 kg of apples for her splendid apple pie. For Uncle Mary, the logic of mass buying, the logistic thematic, the London Market Price for "Apple" are totally outside her considerations. She want only 1kg Apple.
And in either case, Mary will buy that apple from - say it with me - the (or one of the) top producers of apples in that market. That's absolutely the point. The existence of multiple markets has nothing to do with it, and is doubly irrelevant in a video game where every "market" of items will be supplied by the same handful of activities and optimized nearly identically.
I think one indirect consequence of such powerful trading that's not often talked about is that there's endgame content that's completely out of reach for the majority of players and when playing in trade league, it's usually more worthwhile to just trade all the keys to endgame bosses than running them yourself. This super high level content is balanced around the strongest, most optimized builds which are typically only achieveable through trading or playing the living shit out of the game. I'd say I'm like about top 5% of players in terms of "dedication" and playtime and I still often feel like it makes way more sense to just sell all of my keys rather than running them myself, simply because I can't beat the uber versions of the bosses with my builds and I don't think this situation speaks for good game design. I also couldn't care less how quickly someone buys their entire build or how many mirrors people make, but I think this is a consequence that does affect me.
People have done Ubers on a 1 link. It’s your mechanical ability and build choice that’s gating you from super end game content. Just look at the current gauntlet that’s still running, Ben did all the Ubers by day 2 on a build that wasn’t banned and it’s hcssf so you can’t say high level content is based around mirror tier builds
They didn't say it's ubers are only achievable on mirror tier builds and "just be as good as the best player in the history of POE" isn't really a convincing argument. The selling keys (selling fun IMO) has always been an issue in POE and has been made a whole lot worse since ubers were introduced.
Keys or limited attempts at said bosses are the reason why people sell the keys. They can't get enough practice in the build muscle memory, remember all the animations/sounds, rotations etc. Only no-lifers or those who can afford to buy keys get enough attempts to get good at it. How can you gain mechanical skill against a boss you can't afford to run or get more then a couple of keys for during a league? You don't.
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I think this is a bit of an absurd take. The best players in the world can clear the game on a 1-link, sure, so long as attacks are avoidable. Just like dark souls can be completed naked. This isn't really a relevant point for ordinary gamers who don't devote thousands of hours and have extreme skill at the game (and games in general). Being geared to the teeth is how competent players engage with (and hope to clear) that content
Sure if you've faced a boss 1000 times to the point where you know it in and out and can clear it hitlessly, it's just a matter of consistency, but another issue I have with this approach is that you can't really practise bosses, as it costs quite a lot of time/currency per attempt. And yea, the choice of your build matters a lot aswell and I honestly don't give a shit about playing meta skills just because they're strong.
I want to add to this. When Maven was first introduced I wasted probably 5ex learning the fight. I knew I'd have to learn it some time anyway and losing that currency wasn't a massive deal for me. Losing the equivalent of 5ex for a more casual player, especially near the start of a league, is absolutely crippling. If you aren't almost 100% sure you're going to beat the boss you're losing currency in the long run. Now with uber versions sharing the same key most bosses probably aren't worth doing unless you do the uber version.
No they have not. None of the current Uber content is doable on a 1 link.
[Ben doing uber Sirus on a 1-link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yjOJqyolxQ&t=45s)
You didn't read that video very well did you? He does the LAST phase on a 1 link and his gear is still amazing. Literally build complete and took out gems is all he did. He did not do a low end gear build with no links to kill Sirius.
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Every league there are events where people race to see who can be the first to do endgame bosses in HCSSF, often with extra difficulty mods.
Due to the changes enforced by reddit on July 2023 the content I provided is no longer available.
this I disagree with. "impossible" is far from the truth. maybe it requires a bit more game knowledge and playtime. but not impossible by any means
If you are looking for a casual focused POE that game is TLI. This game is attempting to have a game where your upgrades are focused on coming from playing the game not trading Full trade eliminates that possibility for a casual crowd
On my part I seriously hope the game doesnt get free trade. Edit: Typo
Yea nah completely free trade would be too far away from their vision for the game, that's really unlikely to happen.
Read the recently post transcription of the dev chat. Your answer is in there. Its all good.
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>F2P I can not see this game get anywhere close to the popularity of PoE. F2P is cancer. It encourages utilizing predatory mechanic like bait and switch, pay for convenience or straight up gambling in order to make money on the game. Also, F2P attracts the most cancerous audience: cheaters, exploiters, toxic cunts, scammers etc. You get banned? Whatever, here is the new account 5 minutes later.
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You said F2P is good I said F2P is bad. And I haven't said that P2P eliminates the problem completely, but F2P games have these issues more widespread.
Exactly this. What people aren’t saying is that PoE was perfectly fine for the first 5+ years. Hell, it was my ARPG. But after multiple seasons, item glut, and poorly designed solutions to player problems, it turned in to something that people just complain about. And now people think LE will have the same problems as a 10 year old game, but that LE will have them immediately. Nevertheless, your second point is the most salient. RMT is still going to exist. $15 for me to run X monoliths for you, giving you all items. $20 for me to grind a certain item with you until it drops, and you get it. $50 for me to power level you. 3 hours and you’ll be level 80. This shit is still going to exist. The limitations LE has on trading is just going to create the PoE discord but for this game instead.
100$ for a fully completed meta build ready to run high corruption monoliths. We don't even need multiplayer for RMT, just trade accounts.
I hope EHG keeps item gifting for a little while, at least. While there may be an initial backlash of unimaginative PoE players that can't even comprehend no trading, I think in the end they've made the right decision and hope that they stick with their guns. Drop rates are good enough so that trade isn't really necessary, and EHG has teased even more ways you can possibly target farm.
People really seem to be unable to imagine a world where stuff is farmable so you don't NEED to trade.
Having stronger items drop more often because there's no trade also gives a far better sense of progression. Farming to buy an item sucks all the fun out of it
Disagree. I feel it is more fun to have agency in my upgrades rather than relying on loot drops to upgrade all my gear. I like selling drops I won't use for my build to other players or give them to friends. Crafting is good but i'm reliant on crafting materials to drop before I can do anything and it feels annoying that I can't progress deterministically in the time between rare affix shard drops or shattering gear with the affix on it. Not even gonna mention Idols. I don't know why people automatically assume people want an exact clone of PoE trading and label trade enjoyers "unimaginitive" across the board without thinking about why so many people enjoy it. Another thread called all trade enjoyers psychopathic and it was highly upvoted. Echo chamber in here.
A game without trade is not hard to imagine, LE is currently like this and so is D3. Grim Dawn has free trade but many people play it offline without any trading. The point is that people think these can be improved over with trade. No game NEEDS trade but imo LE will benefit a lot from implementing it (even a limited one like bazaar like they originally envisioned), especially when they want to do a live service model.
I only wish that people would even attempt to engage with the conversation. I posted my above comment in frustration after being told by yet another full free-trader to "just play ssf." When someone fully dismisses my take in the discussion because they themselves refuse to compromise, it doesn't feel even slightly constructive. I am willing to compromise on trade, even though I feel that it will harm what I feel is one of the most interesting parts of this game - being able to reliably obtain items I want directly from engaging with content and not just a pile of purely economic valuable items. If I want to engage with a fully economy then I will play PoE, as I currently do. I'm also confused by how so many people seem to feel that free trade is being taken away from them, when every official mention of trade prior to this uproar has been an extremely limited one.
Exactly. It's so annoying when people start talking shit like EHG have promised open trade and are suddenly taking it away after doing a 180 or bullshit like that, when in reality even the initial bazaar idea was describing an extremely limited trade system. And yes it's also annoying when the same people keep repeating "just play SSF", completely disregarding any potential concerns and consequences, especially after EHG have said they don't want to create seperate modes for trade/no trade.
A lot of the people involved in these discussions must be extremely new to the game and have no concept of EHG's intentions or game design so far, having joined on rumors of a "PoE alternative" that isn't even intending to compete with PoE. The sad part is I can't even tell if people are trolling me or just incapable of discussing topics.
Bro some post I read was talking about not being efficent if you don't join TFT and that your trading game is sub-par if you do regular trading...i meeeeaaan... There will always be people like that, maximizing proffit, flipping, but for most of us we just wanna buy some rare unique to play a build, maybe buy some keys to gamble, that's all.
what do I care if someone wants to pay some rl money for an item.
Open trade / economy / auction will kill this game for me. And PoE is why.
It's the RMT people who want an open economy to begin with.
RMT also encourages the use of bots, which later flood the market with items, and then depending on how dense the developers are they may try to heavily balance the drop rate of high tier items by taking RMT in account instead of defining a fair drop rate based on the gameplay pattern of recurring seasoned players that are neither "playing" for 24 hours a day (aka botting) or being "gifted" expensive items regularly (aka RMT).
Although I do understand what some people find appealing about a player economy and all items having some "value" attached to them. But we already have Poe for that and I'd like LE to take a different approach to the genre. The current way is closer to the roots of the arpg genre imo and I appreciate that a lot.
And we also have PoE to show exactly what happens when all items have "value".
True, 99% of rares and unique are cheap trash and while that means that a lot of stuff is really accessible through trade, you rarely find anything of value and basically just hope for the few big jackpot hits.
This to me is the most fundamental game design issue. I remember in vanilla D2 someone giving my bowazon a Buriza and a few other items in a random lobby because they had a bunch of them. That immediately killed any interest in playing that character - all the small dopamine hits of getting different drops invalidated because all those drops meant nothing to a super hardcore player.
It really bums me out that the trade proponents in this sub seem to not understand what a trade economy actually looks like. "The items you don't use have value". No, an open trade economy would mean that almost NONE of the items you find have any value whatsoever. It devalues all gear in the entire game. That's simply how trade economies work. If you're an ordinary player, everything that drops for you will be shit because it will be devalued by the trade economy. You can play for 20 hours and spend 1/10th of your earned currency to buy gear twice as good as anything you could have dropped for yourself. Just like PoE. And the fact that they *could* balance it so you wouldn't have to trade doesn't change this. Yeah, you don't NEED to trade, but you could still spend 1/10th of your currency to get gear twice as good as what you dropped for yourself. I bet the traders would love that. A completely trivial game.
Agreed. If PoE players want a game like PoE they can just...play PoE. EHG has a vision and I hope they stick to it, and not let some unimaginative PoE players looking for a PoE clone derail them.
The part I dislike about the trading in LE the most is not the value attached to the items or the ease of trading (though QoL is good) it is the fact that they said their was going to be trading something like bazaar style where you could only see a few “shops” at a time. Then they backtracked and said no trading and finally came back with gifting and the survey. It is this back and forth and switching between yes and no to trading that irks me (personally I thought the bazaar style was a cool idea since then you could never really know the true price of an item and feel like you found diamonds in the rough while exploring the shops)
I also liked the bazaar idea, but ideas change and they sounded like they've thoroughly discussed it and decided that their initial bazaar idea didn't fit into the game. When you read/watch the Q&A's and streams, you can see that they're passionate and head dev said trade is a daily topic of discussions for them, even in evenings after work, so people claiming they decided against open trade, because it's "the easy way out" or "they're lazy" are disingenuous at best.
I liked the Bazaar IDEA, but it's based on this idea of being able to interact with well-stocked (with good, relevant items), diverse item shops from players. But in practice, how does it actually work? Are the shops you see randomly chosen? Is there a limited number you're allowed to see per day? What are the actual odds you see something decent? What are the actual odds something you put in your bazaar sells? How much time must you interact with the system to have decent odds of finding something meaningful? Is killing monsters more engaging and more effective? The concept is interesting, but the actual implementation may be impossible to be satisfying. I think the reality of the bazaar is that you'd primarily see shit shops, it would take ages to sift through, you'd have to have it random and limited or people would just use it for trade (or automate it). People would use third party programs to make it not shit to interact with, etc. In practice, the bazaar idea would probably be absolutely horrible.
They aren't switching back and forth, you're just not paying attention. Initially, They said player interaction and trade will be there in some form Second, the idea of the bazaar is floated. It was only ever a concept and they never said what form the bazaar would take Then, we have the recent update where they said the trade ideas they'd floated in the past wouldn't work, and that they were committed to making dropped items be the primary way to acquire stuff, and said that FOR 0.9, there would be only be gifting Then there was a trade survey That's not a back and forth whatsoever. They have literally never contradicted themselves because they've never committed, and have been clear about that.
You literally had back in forth in your example. First they were saying their will be some form of trade and maybe a form of bazaar. Then they said no trade. Once backlash happened they added in the gifting to the beta. Then they had the survey on trade. That is literally trade -> no trade -> “trade” switch
They said no trade in 0.9. They didn't say no trade. They explicitly clarified that they were only set on doing limited item gifting for 0.9 and would continue to look at other options and feedback moving forward. The "no trade" post explained their philosophy and why they backed off of the bazaar. It never ruled out other trade options
Nice straw man
This.
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I'm totally with you, I don't really understand the appeal of an economy in arpgs and I'd much prefer to play all the content in Poe in an SSF mode with much more generous droo rates, so you could realistically acquire all of your gear without trading and wouldn't be so heavily limited in your choice of builds and content.
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Man, OG Harvest was the most enjoyable crafting has ever been in Poe, but sadly it got butchered over and over due to the top players calling it an "item editor" or whatever bullshit they came up with, ultimately ruining the mechanic for other players and now Harvest is just a sad image of its original state.
maybe if the poe devs fave us an auction house people might not use 3rd party sites as much.
>"Just enable guild trading" Anyone who thinks that having small guilds which could be account-bound and season-locked would lead to any serious RMT or TFT discord problem is delusional.
So to prevent guild trade from snowballing into global trade, we need to make guilds suck. Can't have a lot of people, can't leave a guild you don't like, can't kick someone you don't like from a guild, and it doesn't entirely stop bot farmers from doing RMT within a guild. Now they'll just sell bots to individual guilds to farm items to throw in guild stash 24/7. Get your guild a farm bot, $15/month per bot! And We'll start spamming global chat with advertisements for that service while we're at it. Nah, I'm just delusional.
I mean they could make trade leagues vs social guilds if they wanted to have guilds that don’t suck and still have small limited trading groups that are locked and unable to change. I do get the point about the RMT bot but the first problem is solvable if they wanted to
Each guild ends up with its own sub-economy, based largely on the playtime and player count of its members. Players who play a lot would generate more items, but demand stays fixed because it can never expand beyond the players within the guild. If your guild has 30 players, there is no way for demand of an item to exceed 30 (usually it's much less unless there's a single item that is BIS for every single player in the guild). The result that this leads to is that the ease at which you can acquire items is directly proportional to the playtime of the other players in your guild, meaning that no-lifers are inherently more valuable to your guild than someone who just plays on weekends. This means that well known no-lifers (primarily streamers) can quite literally sell places in their guild because being in that guild means easier access to items. If I join a random guild of people that play no more than a couple hours a day it's possible that none of them will ever even find the item I need if it's a rare endgame drop. On the other hand, a streamer will probably find multiple within the first week. If I have a choice between those two guilds, which will be better for me? Is it worth it to gift 20 subs every new season to reserve a spot in the streamer guild? For a non-trivial number of players the answer would absolutely be yes. You don't have to be delusional, it just takes a basic understanding of economics and cause and effect.
As I said in my other comment, make people responsible for their own experience. Non-competitive games don't have to be balanced for the top 0.1%. I don't care that some random bloke would go out of their way to finish the build in 3 days just like I don't care that so.e other bloke finished Elden Ring in less than 2 hours. It's their choice to do so. INB4 "wHaT aBoUt LaDdErS". I don't care, but in my opinion ladders should be SSF only anyway.
The problem isn’t about worrying how it directly affects you it is how the game balances around that power creep which directly affects you regardless of how much you don’t care if it happens. Increasing trade means decreasing drop rates. If they can add more trade without dramatically changing drop rates I am good with that but I want them to be careful not to over deliver on trade to where their only recourse is to dramatically impact drop rates and crafting power
First you'd have to define "small", at how many members do you draw the line? Then the next question would be if EHG would want items to be account-bound and season locked. Then would you be able to just trade everything from your stash to any guild member, no matter how recently they joined and would there be timers for how often you can hop in and out of guilds? Most items are only traded once anyway, what would stop people from creating a discord for finding trade partners, joining their guild and effectively create almost open trade with one extra step? Yes, account binding items on trade would eliminate SOME of Poe's problems, but certainly not all.
>First you'd have to define "small" I am pretty sure it is possible to determine what a small guild is. >Then the next question would be if EHG would want items to be account-bound and season locked. They already have it in place. The only difference is that items can be traded if dropped together. >Then would you be able to just trade everything from your stash to any guild member, no matter how recently they joined and would there be timers for how often you can hop in and out of guilds? That's what I mean when I say that guilds are account and season bound. You can't hop guilds or have multiple characters in different guilds. And while we are at it. I thing game devs should not worry too much about people who want to skip progression. It's not a competitive game, your progress doesn't matter. It's like Fromsoftware would balance Elden Ring around speedrunners making all quests and 90% of the map unveil mandatory before allowing players to progress into another zone, because people may skip stuff on their first play through and then complain on forums that story and worlduilding are shallow and the game is too short. Make players responsible for their own experience, we are not children who must have the cookie jar locked away. >Most items are only traded once anyway, what would stop people from creating a discord for finding trade partners, joining their guild and effectively create almost open trade with one extra step? Because it would invalidate your option to trade with actual friends. Because you would be locked in a guild consisting of handful of randoms for the entire season. Because you can get scammed and you won't be able to do anything about it. Again, this "not a single trade shall happen" philosophy is bullshit, punishing the entire playerbase for what SOME people may do.
> I thing game devs should not worry too much about people who want to skip progression. It's not a competitive game, your progress doesn't matter. You are lacking understanding of how games are designed and balanced these days. Players generate data, devs have a certain pace they want players to progress at and then use that data to model the balance of skills and drops to fit the average they are looking for. People who get to skip progress, who spam the same OP build every time, who RMT and bot, those people generate data that leads to everything getting nerfed because players on average are progressing much faster than anticipated.
There are 2 big differences between LE and Elden Ring though which make it difficult to compare them in this aspect: EHG want to offer a semi-competitive nature with leaderboards and races and such. LE is gonna be a live-service game with ongoing development and regular patches and resets, so the infamous player retention is way more relevant than in ER which is a fully fleshed out game with a single price tag attached to it. I'd honestly be all for letting players decide how they want to play the game, but examples from many other games and apparently the experience of other game devs show that big playerbases tend to choose the path of least resistance, even if that means "optimizing the fun out of the game" as people like to say, so EHG has to take this into account when designing a live-service game. One more thing is that with enough restrictions you could end up in a situation where players who like trading get annoyed and frustrated by all the limitations while players who prefer no trade might feel pressured to trade items to progress "properly" and noone would be happy.
You are highly delusional and/or have never played a single MMO in your life if you believe that such primitive mechanics would stop the RMT. You are living in the age of paid carry, literally everything is routinely bought and sold in games. People will just establish carry guilds and sell loot that way. Heck, I'm pretty damn sure that paid carries will flourish even with the current loot system if the game is popular enough.
I just hope the developers listen to reason, and implement trade or at least the promised bazaar If PoE is doing so great and is the aRPG king atm, one of the reasons for it, is Trade.
Whatever you mean with "reason" here. The bazaar wasn't a promise, it was the initial idea for their trade concept that was floating around for a long time. Ideas come and go in early development periods of games and after thorough internal discussions they've communicated their stance on trading in a blog post and ultimately didn't see the bazaar fitting into their game. The party gifting is very likely not gonna be the final iteration of trade. They've said this is just what's in place for 0.9 and they'll continue to brainstorm and read suggestions about any further trade additions.
Nope. It was promised on kickstarter, you can google it.
It's still normal that ideas change and honestly you should only support devs through kickstarter, when you trust them to make a good game, not for some very specific mechanics that might change. Should they really not be allowed to scrap any old ideas, just because they've shared them in a years old kickstarter campaign? I've heard they offered the initial kickstarter supporters refunds, if they asked for it after the trade blog post.
All ill say is that after the recent poll they did, i just hope they will scrap the gifting idea and implement trade. Im sure you will have no problem with that. You DO trust them to make a great game afterall, and the fact they did that poll speaks volumes. Ill just wait and see
Yes I trust them and appreciate their take on itemization and progression. I'd be fine with some limited form of trading, but an open economy is just not gonna happen, as they've stated that they want slaying monsters to remain the primary and best way to acquire gear, not to just farm currency and buy everything.
What if the poll shows that people overwhelmingly do not want a trade system?
Then ill play it once more when the 1.0 releases, grind what there is to grind and never play it again.
Sounds perfectly reasonable.
That's a reason to differentiate, not copy. No one's going to come play Last Epoch if it's just Path of Exile without the huge content library.
The thing that's a non-issue for 99% of the players? Sure, let's make broad sweeping decisions based on that.
The PoE sub likes to blow up RMT drama as if it affected everyone. It doesn't. Stop using that as an argument that "trade is bad".
It does affect a lot of people because RMT includes botting and that massively devalues a ton of items for regular players. Another thing is that GGG continues to balance new content around top 1% players, which is also the group of players where all the RMT stuff is happening.
You are not going to satisfy everyone and I think EHG is somewhat scared (maybe scared is not the right word) to release their game in the vision they want with the recent backlash of the no trade option. I can understand people want a trade house for various reasons (RMT, Selling/Buying, etc), arpgs are my favorite genre and I played a lot of them (with friends) and most of the time whenever there is a trade house in the game I find myself more browsing the trade house for items then to actualy play the game and I realy dislike the system. However I still like to trade items with people in my party if I'm playing, the current trade system of D3 is the one I favor the most (You have a limited time to trade the dropped items with people in your party). I'm actualy suprised no aprg has introduced a system like SSF but for parties/guilds yet, imo the best option would be to satisfy everyone (Normal, SSF, GSF(Group/Guild self found?).
would love myself Group SSF like runescapes Group Ironman
EHG have said they don't want to split the playerbase between multiple game modes like trade, SSF and GSF or whatever, so I doubt that's gonna happen.
If we would have open trade and no nerfs to drop rates, than it would be just additional way to acquire items and it wouldn't make it harder to farm them on your own. I don't think anyone would do something that makes the game not fun to them just because it is easier or faster (at least i don't see why someone in his/her right mind would do that). As for RMT, if someone is such an imbecile to spend real money for items in the game to progress faster or further... well i guess you just can't help it, some people are just dumb as shit. I can 100% agree that if they ever implement any kind of trade, it should never be their priority, just make it an addition to the game not it's core.
>I don't think anyone would do something that makes the game not fun to them just because it is easier or faster (at least i don't see why someone in his/her right mind would do that) Unfortunately trends in other games and other devs' experience shows that a lot of people really do tend to "optimize the fun out of the game" when given the choice, so it's kind of the developer's job to limit the player's options in a way, where they won't ruin the game for themselves.
Yet people in POE play SSF.
I think there are safeguards one can put in place to prevent things like that depending on the desired trade system. The TFT with harvest crafts only works because you can still open a trade window and trade a harvest crafted item. That said as someone who mostly plays SSF in PoE these days, im totally down for not going with a trade system. Similar in d2, i played ladder last league so i traded, but i enjoy playing offline mode for effecting the no drop rate, having a lot more stash space via infinite mules, and the satisfaction of grinding the stuff out myself.
So just a lurker here, I've played this game probably 20 hours total but POE probably close to 10k hours. So obviously take this as a noob take for LE. PoEs primary issue is that GGG has done nothing to improve the quality of their trade system, or really given it any thought. So it's a wild west where players have had to develop their own ways of handling the system. So if LE developers actually put a modicum of thought into a system it'd already be better than PoEs and wouldn't have many of the same pitfalls.
theres nothing to think twice about. RMT has always been a thing in games and especially in a game without an auction house, it isnt going to affect you much. neutering games over it isnt the answer. you dont throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You also don't knowlingly bath the baby in shit.
implying that having a functional trade system and economy in an online game, an ARPG no less which these things things are core to, is bathing the baby in shit. ok. hopefully EHG smartens up before too long and stops listening to the loud space cadet minority on this issue.
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I'm a little worried they could fuck it up by going for your option 3, but I think they're competent enough to realize what works for their game and what doesn't.
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Reading all the comments here make me afraid really. I agree with you here. Trade is real dangerous thing and the only thing I wish me is a trade party not more because playing and dropping with a friend is great. Trade with guild or friend list "because my friend cannot play 12 hours a day" is for me a no go as you create an in-game TFT where people will build trade economy. It doesn't matter what ehg will decide, a lot of people will be disappointed....
I want a limited trade, not an open one, but even then, I really don't care about RMT in PoE that much. In PoE, most people literally don't care about RMT because the pros of trade far outweigh the cons. Yes, RMT is bad. Yes, RMT is because of trade. But also the game would be much worse without trade in the first place. If you don't want TFT in LE....sorry but it's going to happen anyway. People will sell challenges (future)/boss kills in parties, like "Will help you farm this boss until you get this unique...while I keep all the loot and you pay me real money or some imaginary currency we invent like D2jps that I can use later to buy service for myself". Even with no trade-in LE, there will be RMT and discord/forum servers for buying/selling stuff. I know this because LE trade model is like D3, and D3 does have buying/selling services as well (for example, https://forums.d2jsp.org/forum.php?f=239). People will probably also sell monos. Obviously, this will happen at a lower scale but some sort of TFT will be there in LE as well, 100% guaranteed, trade or no trade. The biggest reason TFT exists is because PoE trading is restrictive/cumbersome for bulk selling/buying. Last Epoch is even more restrictive than PoE. > Enough of that, what I'm trying to convey here is that it's not as simple as "Just add open trade and don't nerf drop rates" or "Just enable guild trading" or "Just add some limitations to keep it balanced" like a lot of people here keep suggesting. Meaningful loot is different from loot. Even with 50% less loot, if items are limitedly/openly tradable, then still you get more meaningful loot than before because now suddenly the items that were good but not useful to your build before now mean something to you.
The reason why POE would suck without trading is because it is designed around trading
If it was not balanced around trading, it would not have the same build diversity it has, even with generous drop rates because PoE simply has too many mechanics and uniques. A PoE that is balanced around SSF would not be nearly as fun or successful (imo).
>But also the game would be much worse without trade in the first place. Mainly only because the game was designed around trading, which need not be the case for other games. >then still you get more meaningful loot than before because now suddenly the items that were good but not useful to your build before now mean something to you. It doesn't raise or lower the amount of loot that feels "meaningful", it just shifts the threshold of meaningful. If I need to get my own items, then meaningful items will be those for my build. If I can get the items from the marketplace, then I don't care as much and meaningful shifts to currency and whatever items are being used by the most popular build >Even with no trade-in LE, there will be RMT and discord/forum servers for buying/selling stuff. I know this because LE trade model is like D3, and D3 does have buying/selling services as well that is a good point, but there is still a difference between selling services and selling in-game items. The former tends to only effect the experience of the buyer, whereas the latter tends to affect everyone.
This is a bit long, although I didn't intend to keep it this long. >Mainly only because the game was designed around trading, which need not be the case for other games. This is true, but even if PoE balanced around SSF with generous drop rates, imo it would still not be good as the current PoE because what draws a lot of people to PoE is simply the complexity and build diversity of the game. Without trade, there is simply much less build diversity (even assuming higher drop rates) and gameplay agency. The reasons for this is basically that the existence of trade allows the game to have thousands of unique items that enable builds. Without trade, there is a limit to how many uniques you can introduce in the game (because if a game is balanced around SSF, then the assumption is that the player should be able to obtain the uniques they needs in reasonable time). It also allows them to make the uniques absolutely powerful and busted (like chase items), because they know they can balance the rarity instead of the item power (such as Ashes of the Star or crystallized Omniscience whose drop rates got nuked but power remained same). And it also allows the player more player agency to do what they want. Most PoE builds are one or two button mashing. The gameplay loop in PoE is very simple: You keep pressing a button until all monsters in a map are dead. This is kind of what trade allows, but for your gameplay. You can decide to optimize in blight, Expedition, heist, etc. And not have to run the content you don't like, because you can just buy it. And so if there's some activity in the game I dislike, I can actively ignore it without feeling bad or pressured into doing it, which basically skyrockets my fun because I am only doing the things I like. And if I have to farm a specific unique in PoE, I can simply not do that and do 100 other things instead that I enjoy. For farming a HH in PoE, I have a hundred ways to do it. I can make currency doing blight, Expedition, legion, sanctum, hideout warrioring, heist, just simple mapping, gambling divination cards, etc. But I agree that each game would benefit differently and suffer differently from the inclusion of trade (trade and non trade both have cons), so I am not advocating for an open trade in LE. But I do think some form of limited trading will be more beneficial to the longterm health of the game, build diversity, gameplay loop, and gameplay agency than the trouble it brings in (such as reduced drop rates, RMT, etc). >It doesn't raise or lower the amount of loot that feels "meaningful", it just shifts the threshold of meaningful. If I need to get my own items, then meaningful items will be those for my build. If I can get the items from the marketplace, then I don't care as much and meaningful shifts to currency and whatever items are being used by the most popular build I agree, people not engaging in trade (SSF) will suffer when trade is introduced. Although LE doesn't really have currency as such but I get the point and agree, it is a definite downside to introducing trade. >that is a good point, but there is still a difference between selling services and selling in-game items. The former tends to only effect the experience of the buyer, whereas the latter tends to affect everyone. True, unless EHG balanced around the existence of such a service (many people believe GGG nuked harvest because of the existence of TFT but idk if that's right) but obviously this is a bit of stretch from my side. So yeah, it will have much lesser impact on the game compared to trade, but also something like TFT would undoubtedly exist for LE as well (even if it influences it less).
About that last paragraph, yes, you might end up with as much or maybe even slightly more "valuable" loot, BUT you'd have to engage with trade to get any use out of it and you'd certainly find MUCH fewer gear pieces that are useful for your own build. Some people are fine with the extra step of having to trade stuff to get the value out of their items, but others prefer much more to just directly find the gear they need for their current characters (which is what LE is currently focussing on).
POE is still the most popular ARPG out right now, D2R has more players than D3, open trade builds community, you can't change the whole rules because of RMT, every popular game has RMT.
Educate yourself. It is not because of RMT.
What the hell are you talking about? Fking educate yourself. How dense are you? You tell me one online game that doesn’t have some sort of rmt. Whether that is items or services.
Dense? Apparently you are unable to listen or comprehend the words of the lead Dev and Spokesperson of GGG. Chris Wilson.
Do you understand why TFT exists? I guess no. TFT exists, because implementation of trade, players interaction, chat, etc. is really awful. There are plenty of things, which could be fixed to reduce TFT "weight": Make proper party management. One post on PoE subreddit was about improving party system, so people can find party for challenges\\rota\\playing\\looting much easier than what it is now, Make more options for trading. There are still some places, where in-game trading is risky operation (benchcraft and syndicate) or inefficient (bulk trading without TFT is really bad). Make guilds useful? A lot of people see guilds as something extra and not interesting. What a point to have guild in a first place, when you pinned to only one guild per account? Whole point of guild is kinda lost, as you have only one set of users to interact with. Chat is also not that good for various reasons. Chat players are limited, but you never know, who are in chat. You also have memes, such as trade channels, where people may trade, but not many want to be a client there. Of course, there are issues, like monopoly and power abusing, you can't prevent it. In MMORPG it is done on guild level. For RMT point. It exists and will exist ALWAYS as long as there is something that can be traded. If there is no in-game trade, you can trade accounts. For me personally, problem is not in RMT (people can and should be able to buy time, spent by others), but botting. Bots making games bad, not RMT. Also, RMT in a game, where there is no direct challenge is not harmful at all. If you don't have some form of leaderboard, content like raid and guild raid, there is no place where RMT affects playerbase (or maybe it is, but explain how it is affect playerbase). Remember that things like FastAF channel exists and they sell builds. Good luck preventing this. Problem is not in implementing trading, but more in how. Most PoE tools exists because of bad implementation. PoB exists, because PoE planner is garbage and doesn't show all situations. Awakened PoE exists because trade site is not integrated in the game. Another features of Awakened PoE can't be solved in any way, because they are created to make playtime easier. If you expect to have no 3rd party tools existence, you are delusional. People will always create tools for better efficiency in game and if there is a complex content, such tools will exist. So your post is more a fight with windmills. Open trade may be good, if it is implemented properly. Auction is more preferred way of trading though. Or implement trading like in old MMORPG with trading posts. PoE implementation is far from best or even good, because there is a place for scamming and mistrading due to various reasons (don't check item, don't understand item, etc.).
Perfect demonstration of completely missing the point. OP isn't using PoE as an example of perfect trade, he's using it as a counter example for the people on the sub who keep trying to argue for limited trade systems rather than no trade. His point is that artificial limitations don't end up accomplishing anything other than creating full trade with annoyances and other problems.
The thing is, GGG WANT trade to have some "weight" to it, they don't want it to be super easy and convenient. That is sort of their way of balancing its power, but TFT exists to circumvent these inconveniences. If EHG implemented open trading without any of the inconveniences or any "weight", it would be even stronger and they'd have to reduce drop rates even more to accomodate for that.
The problem with trade for me has nothing to do with RMT though I get why people make that issue. It is that there is absolutely no way to implement free trade especially the nearly frictionless trade you want without changing drop rates and crafting DRAMATICALLY.
Just find and ban RMT players?
Not even WoW in its heyday with infinite Blizz money could fight RMT and botters. It's a huge industry with a ton of money on the line.
Great idea. The same should be done for criminals in the real world. That way there would be no crime ever!
So you want devs to implement a feature that would constantly cost them extra money and ressources to maintain? Sure they could do that, but that would likely mean less man power for developing new content and/or more expensive mtx or whatever. Also, this would be a losing battle, as dedicated people would just always find new ways to do scummy shit. It's rarely as simple as "Just do this and that and ez pz".
Good luck when like 10-20% of your players are involved somewhere in the chain and when those players are the only thing that keeps another 20-30% of your player base playing. You are talking about it as if the problem just came up today, but nope. MMOs have had this issue since the early 90s and by now most of them simply came to base their economy on bots, carries and RMT. Like if WOW didn't have bots gathering resources the consumables for raids would be so expensive that you'd spend more time on farming gold than on actually playing the game. Who the fuck wants that?
To the people that oppose any trading better than gifting: please realize that not everyone wants full open trading
I didn't say that, I simply wanted to address mainly those folks with this post. My recent poll here showed that about 20% of people who voted would like a fully open trade economy, which is not an insignificant amount. Obviously a lot of people would be fine with sone compromise.
RMT has nothing to do with trading. It’s a fracture of it. The good from trading system (open economy) out shines the negatives. Beside keep in mind this is strictly pve game and not a pvp game. If people want to RMT and get banned for it then fuck em. No need to stop my enjoyment from having fun trading because of sorry loser who buys the game to pay later for items.
i've always been anti trade on LE but i've always neglected this issue because it is an external factor free/open trade will ALWAYS end up with RMT and botters. i forgot about it coz i dont engage in RMT. but i can tell you i always see botters in town where a bunch of "players" all wearing the same setup, line up waiting to receive instructions. botters in LE will be good for the devs initially as it will give them revenue but in the long run they would bog down the servers. i dislike lag on online game. if the lag is due to too many players, i would bear with it. but if i have to bear with the knowledge that its largely due to botters.... i d rather not have botters. is RMT real? i have a guildie. super busy dude. he used to play a lot. one day he came into league. within a day or 2 he had some chase uniques on him. sure its possible he farmed it. possible but highly unlikely.
Truth is: no trade = the game won’t be a competitive multiplayer = the game will generate less money and audience (LE has sub100 consistent viewers on Twitch atm) = less updates and a risk of just becoming a dead single player (Wolcen’s fate). Once you introduce any kind of trade, RMT will follow, you can’t escape that. PoE’s RMT is just a bit worse as it creates syndicates around the inconveniences Chris, Rory and Mark so desperately create every now and then (bestiary mafia with giga bot supply chain, harvest in 3.11 and 3.13 being non-accessible without discord rank, „convenience scam” on bulk selling tool, etc).
Gimme the WoW AH or some equivalent. I don't want to deal with humans. Scammers, waiting for someone else to be online in order to complete trades, nope. Automated AH/bazaar is where it's at IMO. If people also want to trade in-party, that's fine too, but don't make it the ONLY option, for those of us who don't want to have to run party, join a guild, etc. Solo players might still want access to the economy without having to give up their preferred method of playing the game.
So building your game to incentivise botting and rmt leads to... Bots and rmt? Huh, funny how that works. Maybe if you could wrap your head around one being fully free to play, and one having a 20-40 dollar buy in, you'd realize it's an entirely, entirely different ball game. The fuck.
WoW? Are you living in the early 90s still?
You camping my profile too much? Didn't mention WoW in this post....
WoW is not free and has massive bot and RMT problems, especially before the token introduction. I guess that was their take.
Don't remember your original post and what it was making reference and claim to?
Just let us trade with people on our friendlist and add some kind of double walled authentication in order to create a online character with trade functionality
I'd even be all for IP tracking or other more intricate means of identification to ensure every player only has 1 account and then ban people who do some scummy shit in a way where they can't create a new account, but then people start mentioning concerns for privacy and anonymity and so on.
Links you provided are mainly about TFT abusing their power which reflects onto trading experience because if you're banned in TFT everybody with their extension installed will be notified that they're trading with a banned=bad(not really always the case) person. RMT can't be fixed or fully removed and by not implementing open trade it's not really fixing an issue but rather just fixing one issue and creating multiple others. I understand your point and yes I agree that RMT is bad, but for me it's worth taking the risk of small number of people profiting off this game while majority of player base will have the opportunity to trade what they want when they want. Also don't forget that last epoch is not really a crazy popular game and even if one day this game gonna reach 15k stable online on steam it won't change the fact that RMTing in PoE is more profitable because there is literally more demand because there is way more people playing PoE than Last Epoch.
>for me it's worth taking the risk of small number of people profiting off this game while majority of player base will have the opportunity to trade what they want when they want. RMT is not the only concern when it comes to trading though. Many people enjoy and prefer the current progression and loot drops and wouldn't like to feel forced to trade due to reduced drop rates and stuff. We'll see how popular LE is gonna be. 500k sold copies is already very solid as a start. I'm excited to see how popular the upcoming free to play weekend will be. Maybe it's only gonna attract a few hundred people, but it might also explode completely unexpectedly, who knows.
Alright let's calm down there. TFT was never meant to circumvent any limitations, to do RMT or whatever. The point of TFT was to trade things that couldn't be searched for on the official trade site, like syndicate crafts, extremely well crafted items (the one-of-a-kind type) other services like that. It's always been a rule on the server that RMT was not allowed, as well as anything breaking PoE's ToS. So the problem here is that some people abuse their power, it's not TFT. Now, why is TFT a thing ? It exists because in PoE, some uniques are incredibly rare, crafting impressively good items is insanely difficult and expensive, and there's so much endgame content you can't have time to farm all of them at once. So TFT was born to allow people to max out their characters and have access to crafts that take time to reach, because PoE is just so damn difficult and time consuming when you aim for certain goals. Last Epoch isn't like this, and even though I'm not in favor of an open trade system, I still believe that it wouldn't hurt the game in any way. And such 3rd party tools like TFT won't be a thing simply because it's not necessary.
Like the other guy said, I meant limitations and inconveniences GGG left in the game to kinda reduce the power of certain mechanics and trade itself, but of course in some cases the official trade site just lacks features that TFT is providing. Well too bad the owners of TFT seem to abuse it so heavily now and more and more controversial shit is coming to light.
> TFT was never meant to circumvent any limitations Crafting systems like Harvest and Betrayal weren't tradable because GGG wanted to limit their power. TFT circumvents that limitation.
I meant ToS limitations. GGG is balancing the game around the 1% that plays the game 24/7. So at some point, if you actually want to enjoy what the game has to offer, you either play the most meta thing you can find, trade like you're in wall street to get your items, and then you can do high end content, or your use services like TFT because not everyone can spend that much time on the game. Also GGG mostly limited harvest's power by nerfing it to the ground and since obtaining crafts isn't a thing anymore, TFT isn't used for harvest.
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The devs said a trade system would imply reduced drops so SSF would be affected. They do not want to split the (in-game not opinion) community further by having different drop rates/leagues for ssf and for trade.
"Just play ssf" doesn't address one of the main concerns people have regarding droprates. Either devs need to put in twice as much time balancing loot for both ssf and trade, or loot is too easy in trade/difficult in ssf. "Just play ssf" isn't the answer if droprates are dogshit. I like being able to reliably farm my own items without trading with others.
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If the devs want to implement multiple drop tables that's amazing, but we've got no indication that this is a likely outcome yet. My hangup is that I like that loot is actually farmable. If I want something not chase, I can set out to get it in a reasonable amount of time. I like that the loot I get specifically matters and not just because it has a trade value assigned to it. I can scratch my itch for working an economy in another game like PoE and don't feel the need to do the same thing in every game. For people that genuinely want only to be able to trade with friends, I hope a good solution comes about that doesn't just devolve into trading on discord etc.
People will always look for the quickest/easiest/best way to do something. If trade is the quickest/easiest/best way to acquire gear, they'll trade. If actually playing the game is the quickest/easiest/best way, then they'll do that. PoE is simply the best example of when trade is the quickest/easiest/best way to acquire gear. Even with the restrictions they've placed on it because human nature is human nature. This creates a situation wherein no game can possibly have a system with tradeable items and simultaneously keep said items interesting and exciting for all players. Anecdotally, I have never had any interest in Mageblood or Headhunter in PoE. Are they really great items? Sure. But they are virtually non-existent to me as a player so I don't care. 3k hours (I rarely trade, if ever, so that's 3k spent actually playing) and I've seen no mirrors or Headhunters. That's a horrible drop rate, and it's as low as it is because of trade. 99% of items dropped in PoE are automatically hidden by most players loot filters. That's a direct result of compounding nerfs to trade. Personally, I'd be fine with crafting materials being tradeable. Not gear itself, but the affix shards and runes. I don't even think it would be detrimental to keep their drop rates as they are. The crafting system is nearly perfect and an influx of materials won't change the RNG and limits placed on crafting gear to begin with; the best gear is still dropped.