Additional Gifting/Trading system

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Too much noise in the dev blog and it’s probably not a very good place to suggest features anyway. Please this is a suggestion, not a discussion whether global trade should be allowed.

I think a very valid concern was raised by Glub in the developer post about gifting (Item Gifting Development Update from our Principal Game Designer - #179 by Glub). If we can only gift items we gained in a zone we shared with other players there will be a growing disparity in power between the more hardcore and the more casual members of a group.

It’s probably delusional to think that MP groups will only consist of players of roughly the same “dedication level”. Many groups will be friends (IRL or internet friends, it doesn’t make a difference). Some will have more time to play the game than others. That means some players will get better gear and be able to farm higher corruption mono. Without some form of “trade” to equalize the power level that means when grouping up, some of those players will be at higher/lower corruption level compared to what their character can typically handle which is something that will lead to sub-optimal multiplayer experience (either the lower power players will die constantly or the higher power ones will roll over everything with the lower level ones doing cheerleaders behind).

In addition to that, it’s more fulfilling from a player’s point of view to gift a dupe unique to one of their friends rather than sell it for 500 gold. It’s also a nice encouragement for the more casual players to receive a gift from one of their friends rather than be left struggling to keep-up with them due to lower time-investment and can help keep those players interested in the game. Unfortunately those items are just as likely to drop when playing solo rather than as a group.

I feel the gifting system described in the dev blog is valid for homogeneous groups where everyone has the same amount of time to invest in the game and will always play together, but is lacking for heterogenous groups. Here is a suggestion for an additional/alternative gifting/trading system to what was described in the developer blog, one that i hope keeps up the spirit of “play the game, not the economy” while still allowing more freedom to help your friends progress.

When adventuring as a group, you have a chance to randomly drop some sort of “trade token”. Those tokens remember which player you were teamed with (player, not character). At any time, you can use one of those tokens to initiate an exchange between one of your character and one of their character. That exchange allows to transfer one or your items to them (and possibly one of their items to you if you want it to look like a real trade) even if that item dropped while you were playing solo or with another character.

With such a system, you still can only trade/gift with players you actually play with, and you can’t just give them an entire build worth of items at once after running a single echo, but you have much more freedom regarding which items you can transfer alleviating some of the issues with the proposed system. It will however bring some issues of it’s own (because there is no perfect system). Nothing prevents a player from forming a team with someone just to be able to acquire one item, however the inconvenience of such a system for both the “seller” and the “buyer” is such that i can’t imagine it becoming much of an issue as long as there is no super-extra-rare-1-in-a-bajillion-silly-op item to trade for and you can tweak the token’s drop rates to ensure it stays an occasional help rather than a “main way to acquire items”. If you have implemented drop tables rather than pure rng drops it’s even possible to ensure a drop every x-echos ran as a group.

And you can even throw some weird “end-of-time” magical explanation why you need additional magic to be able to transfer an item that was “revived” by your Epoch to another “Traveller” if you really want to :wink:

I know it was long, thanks for reading.

9 Likes
2

Nice idea, this would prevent one of the many problems this system will bring. :+1:

I feel like EHG could have included the community more into their decision about trade.
And before all the hardcore fanboys cry out “ItS ThEiR GaMe ThEy CaN Do WhAt ThEy WaNt!!!” and stuff like that, please… don’t…
While they did of course ask us for our opinion, at least I think I remember something like that, they did not present us more concrete examples and share their ideas during the process to let the community weigh in. At least that’s how I feel, but I’m also not someone who visits the Forum every day since EA started so I might have missed something.

I think ideas like OPs one could have helped to create a dynamic trade experience. For example this idea could have maybe made it into the announcement, if they had told us “Hey, this is our idea for trade, what do you guys think?”. Then OP says “Hey, I got this idea with tokens.” - the idea gets presented to the community and 70% of the community say “Great idea!” and look at that, you got a solution that most of your core audience will be happy with. Maybe some more ideas could have made it into the announcement… something like unrestricted trade of non-unique and set items with a lvl requirement of <60 or something like that, so more experienced players can help out newer or more casual players during the leveling process. Or free trade of 0-LP uniques or something similar. Or an auction house where every account is allowed to trade up to X items per month globally. Or have tokens like the suggestion of OP which are even more rare and allow you to place one item per token into the auction house. Of course there are many more ideas that the community has and some of them would have gotten their approval and some don’t, but yeah… it just feels like there was a big opportunity missed here.

I’m not saying the presented solution is all bad, but it could have been more fleshed out I think. It’s like “Here’s what were gonna do, we know it’s like the 3rd or 4th different approach than what we initially said, but have fun and now it’s final!”.
The good thing is that I have faith in EHG that they change/adapt the system if they feel like the community wants those changes, so maybe their decision is not as final as it sounds (at least to me it sounded pretty final).

1 Like
3

I like the Idea.
Its simple and powerful, though the drop-rate of such a token should be carefully considered.
One could add another condition for the usage of the token, such as playing a certain amount of time with the friend to use it.

Like I drop one, and then I also need to play one hour to fill some bar before I can use it.
(Just an Idea)

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Very good suggestions.

I feel like more people should actually use the upvote functionality of the forum if they support this idea :stuck_out_tongue:

Its right up there, below the thread title :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
5

I had a similar idea of trade groups that do the same as tokens just without inventing tokens :D. The idea is okay but you introduce free trade for hardcore playerrs while casuals will be shafted.

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6

I appreciate your well thought out suggestion here and the assessment of the realistic scenarios that need to be accounted for @Lord_Yanaek. If an expansion of trade were to be introduced to Last Epoch I do believe that it would require a clever solution like proposed here. I’ll link this internally and ask our game design team to read through.

Also, I invite others to brainstorm in this manner. As mentioned in Trasochi’s dev blog we are not firmly against trade, but rather the negative consequences that it brings when entirely open or exploitable.

Thanks, Yanaek.

4 Likes
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I think it’s safe to say that the community is also very largely with you that an entirely open trade is not ideal and brings a lot of problems that EHG has the opportunity to avoid. Many of us just don’t want to see an entirely closed option without even a limited economy either and so far this is what we’re seeing. Something in the middle where SSF is still balanced for but players who want to trade can find something to enjoy is preferable and will bring in a lot more players, even if that system isn’t entirely perfect and open to some exploitation (Which every system is. This gifting system is also exploitable and I’ve seen multiple suggestions of how it can already from clever players).

I’d also like to point out that the dev blog didn’t give me the impression that EHG isn’t against trade. The statement:

makes it seem like the door is basically closed on any meaningful trade that might include some form of an economy. I really do hope that based on your statement here Judd that this is just a misunderstanding between the community and EHG.

6 Likes
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Gifting is completely exploitable. Didn’t need 2 seconds to think of ways to exploit it or use it for RMT. IF this is true and your only reason to hesitate to bring a trade system is the quotet part then remove gifting for now and go back to the drawing board.

1 Like
9

I have no interest in trade, but the system we have is exclusive, that on its own is not great. Gating trade, a feature many people want probably because they come from PoE, is a bad idea. Why do I have to play with some dude with 50 minions in order for A CHANCE to maybe get an item he/she doesnt need but I do? If I cared about trade, that would be a hard pass.

13

And to complicated! Open this window, put item there, hope my friend finds the gift inventory and so on and so forth. On top of that we can never tell if somone realy needs the item we have because we can’t simply drop it and our friend can say yes or no because he sees the item through his lootfilter.

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I like the idea of a gift token. It does help solve the gear difference for casual friends. Maybe make it where they only drop after so many hours of playing together or time played otherwise they could be abused for trade with people you just met. There should be a limit on gearing a friend’s new alt with a token though. Or you could just cash in your tokens with that player to instantly gear their fresh alt.

A quick thought I had for the situation when I first saw the dev post was to have a dedicated 10 core friends list where you can trade anything you want even if they weren’t in the group at the time it dropped. Only allow adding the initial 10, and then after that, you’d have to play with them for 5+ hours to be able to replace a core friend with someone else. And only allow one gift to each friend per week. That would slow down people from just gearing someone’s brand new alt and skipping the content/whole reason to play the game. I feel it stays in line with people able to help friends while still completing content and playing together rather than skipping right to the end game.

These are just incomplete thoughts. Maybe it could help to a system that stays in line with the Dev’s vision of the game, but allows friends to keep up with each other.

15

Out of curiosity, if I wanted to RMT a Ravenous Void or other rare unique, how you as the “filthy RMTer” exploit/do that? I could envisage a way to do it (kinda) for boss drops but not for random world drops.

It’s really not much different to PoE in that regard. Both require to click a few things (less in LE’s case tbh), place an item in a UI, etc.

16

Boss RMT is straight up just run the boss and trade the item away best part is the person buying can just afk in the reward room

Random unique rmt is extremely simple and here me out.
Runes of Ascendance turns items into uniques that can be traded.

Both works but are subject to change.

There are also other ways where gifting can be exploited to do RMT that have been confirmed to work.

2 Likes
17

Yeah, that’s what I assumed.

I had forgotten about that, though there’s still an element of RNG to it.

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Not currently, unless this has changed since Friday when Mike posted this:

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From the same day a bit later on stream Twitch

The plan is to get rid of it but he most certainly confirms it to work

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I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the testing environment in some respect there. So you can’t really extrapolate that to the actual release.

1 Like
21

Someone I had the displeassure to know spent 5k+ on obtaining random loot in another game. If some is stupid and rich enough They throw money out of the window.

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22

Yes, all the info we get is based on the current version they have right now.
Everything is subject to change until 0.9 goes live.

Just because their tentative plan is to change how it works does not mean that it’s going to make it.

The same way being AFK in the reward room allows you to leech tradeable items is subject to change

Even if both were changed for 0.9 launch there will still be ways to do anything i mentioned above because those two are not the only ways of doing it, but they are simple ways of doing it.

At the end of the day, we produced quite a few ways to “exploit” the system and we haven’t even played around with the system yet!
all the ways of doing it have been confirmed to work one way or another as of right now. (Subject to change)

So realistically no matter how many exploits they take out before 0.9, the system is going to be exploited whether its small or big one’s heck the system could be bugged one way or another for all we know.

24

I’m not sure I like that idea given you’ve already “paid” for the item (by using the rare drop token) but you’d have to fight a thing that could potentially kill the item for you? If it were optional, so you could either playitsafe and take the item as is or risk it for a buff (max the rolls, increase some affix tiers, etc), then I’d be fine with potentially loosing the item.