Where is “requires” mentioned? You suggest re-reading? You obviously didn’t read the link at all.
“massively multiplayer online game: any online video game in which a player interacts with a large number of other players.” No REQUIRES in that sentence at all.
Take your own advice, and read what people write and links they quote. You obviously do not bother reading things as demonstrated by the way you keep shooting your own feet; and I have better things to do than argue with you just because you’re bored & seem to enjoy arguing (your posting history seems to back that assumption up). I’ll stick to replying to the other people in this thread who want to engage properly and can be bothered to read. At least I’ve had some intelligent discussion with them.
Edit: To avoid getting dragged into nonsense I will utilise the “ignore” facility in profiles. Easier to not get baited by silence
Yes, I agree with you. It is a little irrelevant in conceptual terms. I think we got sidetracked from the original question and to be honest I think we covered most of that earlier in the thread with other discussions of AH’s.
Its assumed by “in which a player interacts”. It doesn’t say “in which a player CAN interact”. Thus the implication that the interaction with other players is part of the game. aRPGs are single player games that can sometimes be played with friends.
It does matter because both genres have different end goals. Being able to buy BiS gear in LE would be akin to being able to buy a raid boss kill token in a MMO. It isn’t good for a game to offer the carrot at the end of the stick so easily.
LE could make it work, but it would be a very watered down AH and I can imagine the crazy amount of complaining about how weak the AH is.
My vote would be for not introducing a marketplace at all. They could just as easily add some sort of inevitability mechanic to crafting and it would serve the same purpose and be a better driving force than an AH.
I’m curious why you think MMORPG AH’s (which don’t allow the sales of Raid Gear, the BiS gear of MMORPGs) are fine, but an ARPG AH which does the same (disallows selling of the BiS gear) is somehow “watered down” and “weak”?
That’s a good question that may not be getting much thought in this discussion.
It’s because in LE, rares are BiS the majority of the time (including Exalted items). Uniques are not hard to get in the game anyway.
There have been a couple good ideas in the thread. The idea that the item is bound once you craft on it could fix a lot of that potential damage. That would at least still force people to craft onto the good bases they buy, if people sell them.
it is current state for rares but there will be also legendaries. You can drop uniques relatively easily now but there will be many more uniques in future (some of them in next patch) so it will lower your chance to drop unique which you need.
Well i am not against even a full-blow AH as long the game is not balanced around it. Let players choose if they want to trade or not. This way you can cater to a lot more type of players, with different play styles and time available.
But my personal suggestion for an AH in the Arpg genre would be following a little what poe tried (aka, not having gold). Basically the system i would propose would be going back to the stone age and only allowing trades of “equal value”. The “rules” would be something like this:
1- You can only trade gear for gear, keys for keys, fragments for fragments, etc…
2- You can setup what you want for your item (this is the whole core of the idea). For example, let’s say i have an axe with t7 physical damage and t5 crit multiplier but what i want is a staff.
2a> I put my axe for sale in the ah.
2b> a window appears that allow me to configure what are the minimum specs for an offer to be valid. For example i can setup that i will only accept offers of: Oracle staffs and t7 cold damage and t5 crit multiplier. Or i can configure it in a more diverse way: Any two-handed staff and >= t6 cold damage or >= t6 spell damage or t>= t6 crit multiplier.
2c> After that by accessing the ah menu i would be able to see all the offers people made for my item and choose one.
2d> When the offer is accept each item is automatically transferred to each other.
The whole idea is to keep the value of items, but remove them from a “this item is worth x gold” perspective. You would trade items for their value for your character, not for their “economic” value. And the biggest challenge would be making a menu UI that is easy to understand and easy to configure.
I don’t think the problem is Auction Houses, the problem is trading. That the PoE/aRPG community managed to see the failure of launch D3 and learn the exactly wrong lesson is staggeringly stupid and frustrating.
Let’s recap: Diablo 3 at launch balanced the game’s difficulty and loot progression such that you effectively couldn’t progress past a certain point without trading other players for it because the drop system was so bad you were likely to NEVER see what you needed to do well. But if you go trade at the AH (rubs fingers together and maybe pony up some real money), then you can easily get whatever gear you want. Thus a situation was created where playing the game didn’t feel rewarding and loot wasn’t really earned, you’d just gather enough currency and then go buy a set of what you need. This is rightly met with plenty of outrage and eventually Blizzard reworks essentially the entire game to create a good self found experience. You can argue that they went too far with the simplification and rate at which you can get endgame gear like sets, but hey, at least now you are getting those by playing the game.
Along comes GGG and in their boneheaded wisdom they take a look at the failures of D3 at launch and decide THE ONLY PROBLEM was that you went to a nice streamlined in game UI to trade for gear. Thus they professed two entirely contradictory design goals: That you should earn loot by playing the game and that upgrading things all at once by trading for it ruins the pace of progression… and that trading is somehow fundamentally important to aRPGs as a genre… These are not compatible design goals. Markets (trading) create efficiency (So much asterisk to that statement but not relevant for this discussion). They increase the supply of goods and in turn lower prices. That’s not something from aRPGs that’s just how economics works. It’s math. Allowing players to trade with one another inevitably leads to faster loot progression than what would be possible by a player merely collecting loot on their own.
So what is GGG’s solution to try to reconcile these contradiction? They go out of their way to make trading as frustrating of an experience as possible as a way of increasing the transaction cost in hopes that people will trade less and play more… but then they go and balance the rewards for playing the game to be so poor and random that you effectively can’t make reasonable progress in SSF. (Yes people play it, but it takes absurdly longer and you are effectively locked out of certain kinds of builds because of the low droprates.) So it makes it feel like you are forced to trade to even be able to reasonably play the game, thus shoving people into a system they purposefully designed to be a bad UX, creating frustration, leading people to do exactly what they said they didn’t want people to do, (mass upgrading their gear because it’s easier to do it all at once rather than interrupt your gameplay) and opening the door for scammers and bots to reign supreme. I’m actually happier to trade with the bots because at least they always answer their trade whispers. So much for not wanting automated trading.
This is pretty much the single biggest reason I don’t play PoE anymore. It’s just not that fun to play the game SSF and trying to whisper a bazillion people to trade items makes me want to die.
Last Epoch’s SSF as it currently is feels pretty good. If and when they add trading I want it to stay the hell away from me. Please please please don’t re-balance droprates for the sake of trying to keep prices up for trading. Make it a separate league if you have to, just don’t mess with the SSF balance. If they do add trading in some capacity, for the sake of the people who do choose to interact with it, I’d hope they wouldn’t be stubborn enough to forgo an AH and make things artificially frustrating like GGG did. Don’t be that stubborn.
ANY means of trading items inherently increases player power. It may sound nice to have the ability to give your friend this sick unique bow you found, but that comes at the expense of said cool bow diminishing in value due to the fact that your friend could probably get it from someone else.
Even if only uniques could be traded for other uniques, it still creates the scenario where build defining gear can be obtained easily via trades and the loot experience is harmed.
I actually think PoE solved one of the biggest aRPG auction house problems, and that is the gold system. They removed gold and let their currency have a use outside of being currency. This happened naturally in D2 when Runes and SoJs became currency. Gold is too ubiquitous in games like this and there comes a time where there is practically an infinite supply.
Maybe sometime down the line LE could do something similar and just have item affixes be the trade currency.
Ehm. This is from my experience with previous league with friends. Exalted orbs are used only for trading. Chaos orbs are sometime used for rare map reroll. Gold was only switched to something else. If you don´t play current league then there is same issue with infinite supply.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Despised the AH in D3 and won’t play PoE because of the forced trading.
As long as the single player experience remains unchanged I don’t care how the multiplayer is handled, but for the love of god don’t go and mess with the droprates just to keep the “market” under check.
It has a SSF mode with droprates based on the trading mode.
Playing it is exactly like playing without trading: it’s not a different mode, it’s just a flag on your character.
The problem is not engaging in trading, if it were just that people would simply not do it.
The problem is the way trading affects the game: the droprates, the acquisition of gear, the power curve…
Yeah. I still don’t understand the obsession with trading, but if people want to do it, then quarantining the trading so any balance changes made aimed at it don’t affect the people who don’t want to deal with it is the only acceptable solution.
