There is a difference between worthless and making prices according to the type of economy.
It’s just not compareable with other types of trading.
I am not even talking about uniques, but good rares and exalted items.
We still don’t know what types of items and rarities are tradeable.
Which in turn would make the devs nerf drop rates, and thus kill the game. My point isn’t about what Dev codes or doesn’t code. Its about the effects. Open Trade (which obviously had to be coded) allows RMT and nerfs drop rates making Trade ‘mandatory’, and thus kills the game. You can’t just add open trade without creating RMT and nerfed drop rates.
I’m not sure I agree with this logic.
If item A has a .000000000001 chance to drop, AND it’s a god-tier item, meaning everyone wants to USE it, then it’s going to be hard to find someone wanting to trade it, and if they DO want to trade it, they’re going to want something equally rare/god-tier in exchange.
Now, if item B has the same drop rate, but it’s really only usable for 1 mastery, then this item becomes less valuable (even though it has the same rarity) because more players are willing to trade it, and they are willing to trade it for less because they can’t personally use it.
Being able to trade the item doesn’t automatically make it common.
Now, once you add RMT into the equation, things obviously get a bit more complicated, and this is the part I wish we could avoid.
@Zaodon @Llama8 @Maelstromicus
I understand the point of view, I just hope that there is some reasonable compromise.
Some of my favourite gaming community moments came from the social interactions in early Runescape before the introduction of the Grand Exchange (an auction house system). Making friends to farm resources for created a unique and intricate system that ensured your items could always be sold. It was fun to meet weekly quotas for certain crafting guilds. That entire sense of community was ruined when the Grand Exchange was added - in fact, you could go as far to say that the majority of communication ceased once the auction house was added; despite being an MMO, it had also become a single-player game.
Long story short - I get it. Auction house and free trade more often than not leads to undesirable circumstances. However, I will continue to argue that the polar opposite of it is no better. We don’t know what EHG has planned, but it is important to voice feedback and concern to help them understand the community perspectives.
I think a perfectly acceptable solution would be to introduce a Guild system, similar to what Path of Exile has, which would enable items to be stored inside the stash. Members of the guild (presumably friends) could exchange items this way. I am sure a positive compromise could be made in some way… I just do not want to see a restrictive trade system choke the potential out of Last Epoch.
Except it is worthless if no-one can find it. There is no reason to engage in a system for obtaining loot that actively fights against you finding what you are looking for, especially when loot filter, dungeon exalt farm and monolith exists. Unless it is for the items everyone sells(which you would already have), you are not going to find a rare high value item there, and that is IF you have the gold. The value of an item becomes meaningless if no-one can find it.
Not to mention the ease of destroying such a system by having bot accounts mass sell one item, thus flooding everyone’s bazaar and nobody can find any item EXCEPT the one you flooded it with.
Or the issue that you may NEVER find even a halfway decent tem due to RNG.
Again, there ARE good ideas when it comes to trade systems, but trade systems that actively fight against you using them, that even in theory are inferior to just grinding, that can be broken by bad actors with ease and rely entirely on RNG to even work in the first place - are not the answer here.
What WOULD be an answer would be things like 1-to-1 item trades, with some restrictions, so that you can only get the item you want if you specifically have one the seller wants. You may be mad because “but then people would use it to shorten the grind”, but that is the entire point of trading systems, the best you can do is make people have to trade a rare item for a similarly rare item.
Wow, I’m very disappointed to hear that the Bazaar is being dropped from the game. In that case I would prefer no trading with drop rates adjusted accordingly. Player-to-player trading is just awful and I’ve never been a fan of selling every good item I find in order to buy every item I use.
I do agree with you that a limited, controlled form of “Friend” trading should exist.
So far, EHG has not rescinded their plans for Trade within an active Party inside of an instance (mono). So, there is at least that, at a minimum.
As far as asynchronous trading (i.e. not online at the same time as each other), it has to be well thought out to be protected from exploitation, because if there’s a way, RMT companies will find it.
For example, a HUGE RMT Guild which everyone joins (just an example of exploiting your idea). Or an RMT character with a HUGE friends list. etc.
If you focus specifically on how RMT works, you can defeat it (I posed an idea earlier in this thread on how an AH could work and be immune to RMT).
“Noone can find it” is something that is very likely a exaggeration, but we don’t know the details of what would have been the case.
And here is where we hard disagree, for me this kind of trading system is how trading should be.
Supplementary to your regular item acquisition, not the main source of items.
It’s not “actively fighting against you”, it’s just another avenue of potentially good items that you might want to use, just like regular loot.
I am not sure what you mean with “selling the same item”, but EHG would have great control and monitoring capabilities about suspicous behaviour in individual bazaars.
And depending on how the distribution works, with what bazaars you see, there also could be a algorithmic solution to only see bazaars with varying content.
As mentioned above, this is how it should be, just like with regular loot. Supplementary
So what kind of trading system do you want to see?
When there are so many out there that work so well.
The bazaar, that EHG initially wanted to add had some of the best Anti-Bot/RMT opportunities by far, compared to any other trading system I know.
I just wanted to quote this again, because it’s amusing.
This is how it should be and how EHG wants it to be, pretty sure.
On several occasions EHG stated, they want to go out and kill monsters be the best way of acquiring loot.
So unless that didn’t change, I guess every trading system they will come up with, that holds true to this, will be inferior to trading and thus you probably dislike it.
Yeah, they are actively improving performance, patch after patch, or that’s what they say. I have no reason to mistrust them anyways.
A bit optimistic there. Is more a cat & mouse game. The thing is: dev resources are limited, you are willing to spend too many resources to avoid this to happen, or more likely, spot when it happens and react to it?, or you will just limit trade so badly this can’t happen?
IMO, this is a though one.
I work in IT and security is absolutely a huge part of what I do for a living.
I am convinced that security can work. In this case, anti-RMT is falling into the “security” bucket.
Here is how RMT works:
So, to attack RMT, you need to be sure that you can never pass an item specifically from one character to another freely (with no limits).
I see two scenarios for Trade which people desire:
Global Trade Idea
(posted above, but I will repost here)
An Auction House that will prevent RMT.
Friend Trade Idea
Q: What can you do with a real friend that can’t be mimicked by an RMT user?
A: Play the game together.
RMT companies do not have the time or resources to have employees constantly grouping and playing with every player on the server in the hopes that one of them might want to RMT in the future. Not feasible.
Therefore:
Agreed. These are reasonable threats to assume.
This is a reasonable solution - maybe not as long as 100 hours… but, if they decide it is necessary, I suppose it cannot be helped.
I think the email verification could work too. It would help to track suspicious activity.
Going back to one of my earlier posts in this thread, I wouldn’t mind if they needed to make Guild/Friend trade a premium service (one-time payment to establish a guild, then pay/member).
Just, please, let me play and trade with my friends - asynchronously and synchronously.
I like some of these ideas. Specifically the anonymous selling and the required group playtime, but I’m not sure if the playerbase as a whole wants to manually group and verify everyone they want to trade with. Some people that are not RMT would still try to abuse the system.
Although, if EHG had an internal log of these emails, they would have an easier time of policing both RMT websites and the people who buy from them.
Also, I think ONLY bid systems and no buyouts would be more likely to discourage RMTs. Players might not like the delay, and we would have to deal with how to be killing monsters while also bidding on legitimate upgrades, which might be difficult to balance.
Your idea of staggering the visibility of items would only make RMT’s change their website to say “available within 2 hours” instead of “available immediately”. It wouldn’t actually change any of their operations. It seems more punishing on the person buying items than on RMT, although this might not be a bad thing 
I almost wonder if it would be easier to orchestrate a way to keep RMT from even wanting to be in the game than it would be to specifically limit their ability to trade, but I suppose I haven’t given it that much thought recently. Allowing social trading while limiting the potential for exploitation and RMT is an interesting exercise in problem solving, to say the least.
The buyout only thing isn’t only for RMT, its also to prevent market manipulation. I can go into detail if you don’t know how Bid systems allow players to do that, but its Google’able. (<-- is that a word? It is now.) But, it does have an effect on RMT (See below).
The visibility staggering has a HUGE impact on RMT. The RMT company posts the item for 1 gold (because, you don’t want the player to pay gold in addition to the $5, right?) Then, that SUPER RARE item becomes visible to RANDOM people for up to 90 minutes before the Buyer can even search for it. SOMEONE is going to SNATCH that baby before the buyer can, thus invalidating the RMT. It literally shuts RMT down.
If you don’t allow buyouts, then they can’t sell it for 1g. If you remove the ability to de-list an item, they can’t ensure it goes to who they’re trying to sell it to. The staggering is an interesting idea, but I think it just makes it inconvenient for RMT rather than shutting them down.
I tried googling AH manipulation and couldn’t get anything solid to describe what you apparently think is easy to understand. If the bids are anonymous, is the RMT going to bid on every item that competes with what they’re selling? Are they going to de-list if the price goes over what is agreed upon? I honestly don’t see how to ensure that a sold item gets to a specific person if the AH is anonymous and doesn’t allow buyouts. SOMEONE is going to get that item, but they have no way of guaranteeing that it’s their customer, and so they can’t really sell it.
OK, so manipulation does require Cancellation. But here is how it goes:
The problem with bidding and anti-RMT is that eventually that item will become visible to the buyer. Now, I do understand that the buyer would then get into a bidding war with whoever else wants the item, and then the item will inflate to the same market price that it normally goes for. If that’s the case, then there would be no need to RMT because you still have to cough up the in-game gold to get the item that you wanted to RMT in the first place, so now that isn’t possible.
So, I would say that:
I think either combination would prevent RMT from actually working (i.e. getting specific item X to specific player Y).
I will say, however, that people vastly prefer buyouts to bidding, and the delay timer should serve to shut down RMT.
Your example of manipulation still doesn’t ensure an item gets to one specific person. It would help RMT buy up expensive gear cheaply if it works (which isn’t a guarantee, as someone could just as easily buy the one underpriced item instantly and then the RMT gets nothing), but doesn’t work for selling items.
I think the most sensible option is to make selling anonymous and don’t allow buyouts. If they go that route, they will need to work on making sure that the bidding process isn’t super annoying. I don’t want to be sitting at the auction house bidding on items so often that I can’t go play the game.
As far as group trading goes, I think something similar to your email registration could work, but I want to keep it completely in-game.
Maybe something like, you group with someone, and opt-in to loot sharing. Loot drops go up slightly, but BOTH of you can see ALL the loot. The idea would be each person’s loot filter would highlight things differently, and some things would require discussion. If they do something like this, they will have to do something with runes/glyphs/shards, as those can’t be filtered (at least not that i’ve seen so far) and when you click on one of them, you automatically pick up all the nearby ones. Maybe it auto-distributes them? This could still require discussion and teamwork for oddly numbered drops.
Just brainstorming.
Yeah, again, security can work, but at a cost. This is an indie company, after all.
For any problem, there’s N solutions, the thing is this works both ways. Sometimes the “solution” goes though channels we never thought about.
Anyways, beware of an auction house. In D3 the main point in order to remove it was people spent more time checking the AH than playing the game. Such a commodity can very well kill the game.
There are many workarounds to it: For example: you are exposed a limited quantity of items and only refreshes daily.
Such a painful discussion, so many things to consider. I’m sure the devs already had lengthy internal discussions about it.
Sorry for not being more clear.
Manipulation is a totally different negative thing in Item Trading, it has nothing to do with RMT at all. It is something scummy players do to corner the market on certain rare items to drive up the prices.
As far as no buyouts, as I said, players vastly prefer buyouts to bidding. But either should work so long as its anonymous.
As far as grouping, EHG already announced you will be totally free to trade items to party members (no limits) as long as the item drops while you are partied, inside the Monolith, Dungeon, etc. together.
The Friend Trading idea is for when you are NOT playing together. And again, the only thing an RMT company cannot possibly replicate is spending TIME together playing with every player. So that “Played Time Together” component of my idea is absolutely required. The part about then verifying your identity via email is just an extra layer of security.
To be honest, i’d be perfectly fine with only being able to trade with people I’m grouped with. That’s how D3 does it now, and I found myself actually grouping with my friends/clan members MUCH more often than I did in PoE, which allows unlimited free trade.
One thing I thought was really cool was the “allow corpse loot” in d2. It was a way of saying “I trust this person. If I die, (in hardcore) I want them to be able to recover my equipped gear so they can (hopefully) give it back to me”
I wish there was a way to replicate that feeling of trust & comradery in game. I think something like a loot share option would be fun, but it might be too “outside the box”.
I’m pretty sure they’ll just run bots for this.