you sum up exactly what I wanted to say!
Well, the overall experience I am having playing this game is and has been a positive one thus far. Ye there are some bugs and optimisations that need to be done to polish things up more, and I look forward to those for sure, as some areas within the game tend to trigger at least temporary fps drops while fighting towards that next monolith objective completion. Once I am back in the MoF hub after exiting the portal, the fps goes back to the normal rate for me (60fps) 9/10 times. Otherwise I just exit the game, and reload to basically reset my RAM since this game likes to use a bunch of it during the course of my play sessions which tend to last more than an hour at a time. I am really looking forward to new content and updates on skills/classes/arena for sure!
This is where I must disagree. Trade breeds socialization.
When I am playing as a character, filling my distinct and defined role, and I come across an item that is not good for my build I think nothing of it. However, if this item would make a difference for someone else - this heightens the excitement regarding this item; this item once again has value to me because I know I can then potentially trade it to someone else for something that they do not care about but I do.
If Last Epoch does not implement appropriate trade, a very large pool of items become worthless. Furthermore, if a large pool of items become worthless, the time invested farming them becomes worthless. Not allowing trade does inherently affect the drop rates since unwanted items could be seen as pollution.
You talk about how trade short-cuts gameplay but that is the intrinsic purpose of having a community. Economies are formed on the basis that it becomes easier (and often more profitable) to work together - even briefly.
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This is where alts come in to play, as well as trade-between-party-members-when-the-item-dropped which Zaodon mentioned in his last sentence.
This is patently false.
The following is not āsocializationā:
- Buyer: ā/tell Seller Hi, Iād like to buy (item name) for (cost)ā
- Seller: ā/reply OKā
- Mechanics: Trade window opens, item and gold placed inside, both players click Accept
- Buyer: ā/reply Thanksā
- Seller: ā/reply Enjoy!ā
Again, that is NOT socialization.
What it is, is Trade Economy, which has no place in a video game (economies in general). If you want Unique X or Exalted Item Y, play the game and get it. It isnāt hard, because drop rates are good, and crafting is good. If you get Unique Z which you donāt need or want, sell it for gold.
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I doubt that I will be making many alternate characters. I could see myself possibly having three - tops.
Unfortunately I just will not have the time.
What happens when I am playing without my party of friends and come across an item that would benefit them? Restricting the playtime to only when I can get everyone together would likely lead to me not playing much at all.
Again, this comes down to time investment. The drop rates only correlate with the time invested. Having trade would increase the security of my time investment. Without it there will be less incentive.
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So, you admit you want the items that you want with less time invested. i.e. you want to shortcut the loot hunt, which is what an ARPG is - a loot hunt game.
No thanks.
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and this is where I, too, would also disagree. Iāve played in tons of online games with trading, and Iāve only ever seen ONE where trading bred socialisation, and that was where trading was only possible in a virtual Market (Bazaar). This was a 2 faction game called Shaiya, and the Market was the only place in the game where combat was disabled between the 2 factions and cross faction Shops were allowed. In that game, both factions used to meet in there and āchatā to each other about skirmishes, etc that had taken place.
In EVERY OTHER game I have ever played where trading was involved, it resulted in zero socialisation, absolutely zero. Unless of course the dialogue exampled by Zaodon above is what you term being social? Social to me means chatting to people, not merely uttering a fiscal buy/sell dialogue.
Now, trading āin partyā or in guild to others who you are currently playing with would be nice, but youāre already socialising with those players anyway it could be argued. I do see the benefits of being able to share loot in a group dungeon run for instance.
Open world trading, free trading, or API trading though does nothing to promote you āgetting to knowā people, unless each trade was not allowed until you were forced to chat to someone about non trading topics for 15 minutes before a trade was allowed (this is a facetious suggestion). The only way of creating a social atmosphere in trading is as listed above, either an in-game Marketplace with shops, group only trading as a result of instance running, or guild only trading encouraging people to join guilds.
As has been debated over many times before though, the one thing āfree tradingā does do is promote the incursion into a game of bots/RMT.
Socialisation = no, bots/rmt = yes with free trading. So, it always makes me wonder & become highly sceptical why there are always people in Beta games who push for it so hard.
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Which is entirely your prerogative, I, however, have ~70 & Iām pretty sure @boardman21 has in the hundreds.
We donāt know as the devs just decided to drop the bombshell of no-bazaar on us without giving us any idea of where there heads are at (cue music, if you wish) vis-a-vis any form of replacement.
I agree, but a lot of people do enjoy finding something & putting it up for trade, either with a profit-motive or just to help someone else (which is a thing, when I played Sacred 1 & 2 the MP starting isle would frequently have large quantities of items dropped on it for random strangers from random strangers).
Itās almost like there are differences of opinions on how people play games & what they want/get from them! Go figure! Has your flabber been sufficiently gasted?
Yes mate. My flabber seems in a constant state of being ghasted in the current world 
I agree that there are always differing opinions in most things. The one thing I would hazard to suggest that we pretty much all have in common though is a wish not to see bots or RMT appear in LE. Iām happy with any sort of trading setup they come up with, as long as it doesnāt mean externally programmed sources creeping in and ruining the game for legitimate players.
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DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online, which admittedly is an MMORPG, not ARPG) has a Vendor system where there is (I think) a special vendor you can sell your items to. The vendor then KEEPS those items and has them for Sale for a limited time (24 hrs or so). So, when I played, Iād log on, check that vendor for cool stuff (rare, but possible), then go play, and vendor my ājunkā there and check for stuff again, then log out.
Since it was in a special spot you had to travel to, most people would not bother to go there to sell every backpack full of junk, theyād use the normal, local vendor. People usually saved their good items/rare items to sell there. It really was a community effort to keep it relatively clean. Of course, one personās junk is anotherās treasure, and vice versa.
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Iām honestly a bit disappointed by this update.
- Item trading - you didnāt provide much info here, but if itās moving away from the bazaar system to something that makes trading a primary way to get items it will honestly ruin the game for me. Itās a big part of why I have no interest in PoE. Finding loot to use is exciting. Finding loot that has value only to trade it for what you really want just becomes a grind.
- Removal of two endgame systems - I get that things change, but the original pitch was a varied endgame with a number of different activities to pursue. Adding more dungeons doesnāt really make up for removing two entire systems.
I really hope you donāt leave the primarily solo players out in the cold with the trading system. I know Iām just one player and there are some vocal players on the other side, but I donāt want this game to become yet another economy simulator.
This was one of the things that I was both slightly annoyed by, and yet mildly intrigued by in PoE. After a while, instead of farming for specific items, I started to feel like I was simply farming currency to BUY the items I wanted from other players. I felt the same way when D3 originally launched with their gold Auction House. Thereās nothing specifically WRONG about this kind of setup, but it doesnāt feel as rewarding as when I can actively target farm items.
That said, once I accepted that the currency had actual value in helping my character grow in power, it was nice to see that after say, an hour of playing, even if I didnāt find any outstanding items, I could actually see that I had gathered X amount of currency, which assured me that the time would at least benefit my characters in SOME way, which is good. Compare that to if the currency option wasnāt there, I would simply feel worse because I played for an hour and didnāt get anything useful.
All that said, the tradeoff for allowing completely open trade is inevitably letting the RMTs and bots in, and Iām not sure if itās worth it in the long run.
This is a good example of what I am talking about.
- Someone played X hours
- They DID NOT get the item they wanted in that timeframe (it was rarer than that)
- They then used currency to shortcut time and just buy the item
I keep trying to explain to people that rather than suffer through that experience, instead, EHG has decided to just make drop rates BETTER and crafting REALLY GOOD, so that your actual game play is rewarding. No need for currency, an economy or Trade.
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From what they said, one of the systems they removed sounded very similar to Bounties in Diablo 3, which everyone HATES doing. The other system was simply a way to generate random quests and a reward for both of those. This could easily be covered by the āFavorā system they mentioned, which Iām assuming is either some sort of reputation system or something similar to randomized quests & rewards.
Well, as developer myself, I cannot wrap my head around leaving performance on the side.
A performance loss is a bad programming decision, or an oversight, either way, is something you would want to fix ASAP as is something that can quickly escalate into more and bigger issues.
Anyways, everyone has his priorities, certainly the devs usually have damn good computers so maybe the raw power mitigates even nullify these performance issues.
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I definitely agree that itās a shortcut, and that PoEās particular loot/drop system made this feel like a band-aid, but the ability to see progress on my character even if it wasnāt the progress I wanted was a good thing.
Progression will flatten as you get higher into the end game/max level. It is easy to find an upgrade to gear at level 50. It is harder at 70. It is really rare at 90. It is extremely rare at 100.
Yet, Trade negates all of that, because Person A gets some super rare unique they donāt want, and so does Person B, and then BOOM, they trade and instead of āextremely rareā upgrade at 100, its uniform (spend X time to gain currency, buy item). It literally breaks the design of loot.
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You use [ quote ] to start and [ /quote ] to end it
Minus the spaces in between, obviously
Iām kind of playing devilās advocate here, but itās important to note that when progression flattens out, players have a tendency to get bored or burnt out quicker. one good thing about a currency based system is that progression can actually INCREASE as your character gets more powerful, as you can get more drops/currency in harder content. LE has this in a way with corruption, so it might not be a huge issue, but that was the ONE thing I liked about POEās currency system. I just didnāt like how rampant RMT is there.