You’re making an assumption (a reasonable one to be fair) that the presence of the bazaar will require the devs to alter the drop rates when they not, as far as I’m aware made any comments in that vein.
IMO, the bazaar is going to be far enough from a frictionless trade system that they won’t need to adjust the drops. Unfortunately, because it’s going to be so far from a frictionless trade system it’ll be pointless.
No, my friend. I’m not against the Bazaar because it makes trading under control and limited. I’m against AH or PoE like systems. That kind of trading would certainly require changing affixes, drop rates and many other factors of LE itemization.
Changes that aren’t necessarily bad for both trading and not trading.
As I stated in the original post, after getting a list of changes that needs to be done there will need to be a review of these changes, and a decision if they are bad or not.
If they are bad enough to deter from trading then yes, don’t do them.
Late to the discussion - which has been had ad infinitum a few times in the last year or so… In my usual contrary approach I was wondering a few things…
Traditional aRPG is roughly based on the general concept of creating a character, engaging in action killing mobs and gaining experience/skill points & finding new loot to be able to do the same more efficiently, using more powerful skills & gear over and over again to ultimately achieve end-game status and kill the grand daddy of whatever boss exists or ding a max char level or get to the highest possible end-game level. Whatever each player considers their goal. Just my basic summary of the genre
Traditionally trading between players isnt needed or part of the game genre concept. Trading with NPCs is usually just a gold exchange of loot or getting something that might help a lower level character gear wise. The gold generated is traditionally kept in check by “gold sinks” - buying backpack space or crafting materials etc.
What is the purpose of trading? To get the “new loot”. (Getting rid of useless loot is already handled by the NPC trading).
Why do you want to trade for “new loot”? Because its too hard to get “new loot” by playing the action part of the game (drops) or whatever crafting mechanic exists.
If tradings sole purpose is to bypass a deficient game mechanic - in this instance - its too hard to craft or takes too long to get “new loot” - then why not just fix the problem with the game loot system?
Personally, I loathe trading for the following reasons:
I believe that its fundamentally against the core concept of the genre.
Any link to the Real World WILL be exploited and impact the game negatively. I am sure someone will say “No it wont” but anyone who has played online gaming knows that it will.
Trading morphs the game into something else entirely - people farm for the purpose of trading gear instead of enjoying the game for its intended point. People wanting new loot, no longer farm a specific boss for a specific drop, they farm for whatever gets them enough currency to buy the drop from the trading system…
All of this means that the game developers have to continually counter and balance this externally driven in-game economy instead of working on the game.
The game gets shorter/has less replayability/longevity/gets boring because the entirety of the "chase item " concept is turned on its head.
I am in favour of the following compromised trading:
The bazaar / car boot sale idea - if it acts like an NPC based shop that shows random items put up by other players (anonymously) that you can purchase then I am ok with it. As long as its entirely random and cannot be linked to the real world in any way I do not see that this could cause any in-game issues and it will add a little bit of “Hell Yes, I got lucky finding XYZ in the trading shop” to the game - probably have just as much of a kick as getting a good drop from farming because its all random. (simplified obviously)
Trading between players in a Multiplayer party - I have no problem with any loot items that have dropped during that player session being traded between participants of that same session. HOWEVER: Allowing people to form multiplayer parties and trade items they already have is a link to the real world and WILL mess things up with people exploiting it. This I dont think should be possible.
Just my two cents…
and yes… now during beta is the time to test out things like this, but it should still be done intelligently with the core design and developers vision for the long term game in mind.
I totally agree with all your post! 
That’s a first . 
all your points are solid. Still those players who loves trading (and I do understand them though I’m not among them 
) wish they had something VALUABLE in exchange for a good item (exalted or a rare unique one) they’ve found. ‘Something valuable’ can vary - it might be gold, rare crafting materials … whatever. I think and believe the Bazaar will cover that urge.
With that system you will be able to put an item with good stats you don’t need on sale and get something valuable in exchange (much more valuable than a small pile of gold from the vendor). BUT you will not be able to sell it to real money traders, flippers, won’t feel like you MUST trade.
I also predict that finding something really good for one of your builds at the Bazaar will be nearly as exciting as dropping it because you have only limited access to other players ‘shops’.
Here I’ll just point to PoE.
You didn’t answer my final (and, in reality, most important) question. You said that, at one point you stopped playing because you didn’t need anything more for your character. How does having access to an auction house change that?
If drops are tuned such that you were able to gear your character too quickly while only having access to items that dropped for you, how does gaining access to items that drop for thousands of other people do anything but accelerate reaching that point?
Oh, and
[quote=“Trabeldor”]Sorry? You are not the user I said that too right? why do you speak for him/her?
There was no twist of word here, if I understood correctly we both left for the same reason, which were scammy people and trades.[/quote]
I wasn’t speaking for anyone else. Merely pointing out that it’s a bit of a logical leap to go from someone saying that “unscrupulous player activity factored into their decision to leave a game” to “they left because there was no AH”. Making that leap comes across (or did to me, at least) as self serving. It appears as though the words were twisted in a desperate effort to find support for an idea where such support wasn’t necessarily present.
I want to play with my friends. Play in party, but not (feel obliged to) buy my gear.
Whenever a cool item drop i want to think “Nice i could use this for my character, a reroll, or my friend will kill for it !”.
Pure SSF would not allow me to any of the following. Some kind of mixed SSF (like in certains private leagues in PoE) would help, but i would still feel like my way of acquiring gear by my own is impaired by the sole existence of trading. (Droprates of rares or currencies, odds of getting what you want through crafting, items i will never ever see…)
Btw, the reason i backed the kickstarter campaign of LE was because i wanted another alternative in the genre to exist. I want them to show to the competitors that the ARPG genre is not set in stones.
I’m still skeptical about the Bazaar, but i guess not being able to target your own items, buying or selling one of the few good items people find might feel good, and not have much drawbacks. As long as it’s quite limited.
TLDR : I want to find my own upgrades. I want to share the few crazy / weirds items i have found with a friend or two. I want to be able to progress in group. I don’t want to click on a “BUY NOW” button to get my gear and be done with my character. The actual balance of Last Epoch represents well what i’m looking for. The AH system you’re proposing would drive the game away from this vision.
PS :
Feeling the same about this. I was about to add something, but then read you already did it.
It is pure fantasy to think that adding trade doesn’t alter drop rates - it HAS TO. Otherwise the item drop rates are effectively more frequent due to players trading the item.
True, drop rates will probably need some sort of tweak…
However, I think that the Bazaar remaining entirely random would prevent it requiring a substantial tweak and somehow (hopefully) not dependant on the available items (stock) in the bazaar… that would affect everyone, including those that dont like to trade…
Adding trade to a game like this is really fraught with complication… I really hope EHG figure out how to do it without trashing LE…
Has there been idea on how to make the Bazar better? The quality of item in the Bazar will be determined by the people posting items so there has to be a way to keep the quality high enough.
Um, it doesn’t exist yet, buddy. I’m sure suggestions will come once it exists. 
I know that, but what idea do we have to make it good? Not a full index search but you will find some good items.
I remember one idea was a random drop currency that let you refresh the shop, so if you wanted to trade you had to play the game.
An idea off the top of my head is to scale the items to your highest characters level. You might see hot garbage but at least it not a t5 item w/ frailty on hit.
I have to do this now…
…and trade your T5 “Frailty on Hit” [they deal 6%/12%/18%/24% less Damage] for my T5 “Blind on Hit” [they have 50% less Critical Strike Chance]. 
Yes, or the entire bazaar district changes once, or 4 times, or 24 times etc a day. Or you may change it yourself x times a day. At the end of the day, these are apparently just better (static) merchants, as an additional option to currently existing completely sufficient.
The most important thing is the ability to trade with my friends, whom I will be partying with and spending the majority of time with.
When I come across a unique piece of gear or Affix Shards that suits their builds, I want to be able to freely trade with them directly.
While I see and understand the concerns with auction houses, I don’t want the trading or balancing to be directly linked to that. Either way, I think the biggest thing to consider is the smaller parties.
EHG already announced that you can open trade within a party, so long as the item dropped when each person was in the party (i.e. you can’t just party up after an item drops to trade it).
If that’s the extent of my ability to trade with friends, then I’m sad to saying my friends won’t be purchasing LE.
The Ideal would be that you can trade in a free and unlimited fashion with anyone you’ve been friends with for X amount of time.
With regards to the bazaar thing, it sounds like they’re making the same mistake GGG did: making trade tedious instead of making trade more limited. The end result will be very similar: someone will figure out how to catalog everyone’s shops, and people will alt tab to a third party site to figure out where the shop that has what they want is.
You can’t control what Player Shops appear when you enter the Bazaar and it doesn’t reset often (we don’t know what “often” is, most of us speculate its once/24 hrs). So 3rd party trading sites are off the table.
Also, EHG has said that the “Best” items won’t be eligible for the Bazaar (again, no details here).
Friends List is way too easily manipulated to be used as a factor.
In any case, I think its mostly irrelevant. Last Epoch doesn’t need trading because the item system (finding, loot filters, & crafting) are very good and players can get their own gear without the need for trading.
I agree with Zaodon that friends lists are too easy to manipulate. While this game is not the number 1 mega popular game right now, if it takes off like the Devs are (I’m sure) hoping it will, then it will gain a lot players. Some players are either in a large guild or are streamers that have a massive following. It has been done on POE and other games (notably ARPGs) where someone gets funneled all of the best items from their friends, then that one person goes on to rapidly advance and crush the higher level content in an insanely short span of time. This lets that person, in turn, become highly ranked in the season because it is not realistically possible to keep up with them and they can use their strong character to farm powerful endgame gear ahead of everybody else and feed it back to their friends.
I know that it’s cool to trade with your friends, but limits need to exist because this will be a multiplayer seasonal game with competitive aspects. If you just wanted to have fun and play with your friends with 0 restrictions then perhaps the “offline” mode should be given free and open trade. That would have minimal impact on the game since it would not affect the “online” portion whatsoever.
On a slightly different note, if I am being honest, the whole system for a bazaar is just asking for trouble in my humble opinion. You have to go through so many restrictions it just gets silly. How many times does it refresh? Does it refresh per character or per account? What happens if you have multiple accounts and just keep looking? What if you delete your character and make a new one - does it refresh the bazaar? There are so many ways to abuse it. Why go through all the hassle? I get the general appeal, but I don’t know why some people are so hellbent on having the ability to trade items with random players. What has been suggested here for the bazaar system could easily be implemented with an NPC that just has a low chance to sell you something good every so often. You could even have it randomly purchase one of your items for a high price periodically. Call the NPC “Trade Bazaar” and it’s functionally the same thing.
Or, loot can be balanced.
I get that loot acquisition is not perfect, but trading just adds a whole new dimension that does not need to be there. It also detracts from development time that could be better spend creating active gameplay content (like dungeons, uniques, classes, etc.). Trading is a tool that addresses the problem of not having specific loot, but is not the only tool to fix it, nor is it the best tool. It’s like people who have used a hammer so much that they get comfortable with it and start looking for nails. We don’t need to revamp the game so that it has nails sticking out just because some people like using a hammer. Significantly nerfing drop rates, designing trade, implementing trade, revamping trade to deal with scammers, dealing with 3rd party websites, and dealing with bots are all things that have to happen for open trade (or Auction Houses for that matter) to be successful. It is MUCH easier to just balance loot and make a system for duplicates and outliers that keeps things even.
I have tried to explain this from a high-level viewpoint, but that seemed to miss the mark for certain people. No worries. I’m not naming names or pointing fingers. It was MY failure to communicate at the correct level, so I’ll try to the direct approach from a different angle. If you want to trade your way to success instead of killing things, games like POE have you covered. I generally hate the “go play X then if you don’t like it” argument, but if you’re trading all the time (which you WILL BE at endgame if it’s enabled) then you aren’t actually PLAYING the game. You are playing the trade system. It goes from being an ARPG to a an economic simulator. Combat becomes irrelevant because you are chasing loot as the endgame activity and trade is almost always superior to RNG so long as you invest the time into it. That renders combat (the only legal alternative method of obtaining endgame loot) pointless as it become an inferior method since drop rates have to be lowered enough to keep trade alive. You can sugarcoat it all you like, but trade doesn’t work when everybody already has all the items they need. Items HAVE to be exceedingly rare and/or unobtainable by a single person for trade to succeed on a fundamental level. That means drop rates plummet, self-gearing becomes tedious/inefficient/unfeasible, and those that are not lucky suffer the consequences heavily. This game does not have the trappings of the AH or Bazaar or open trade and does not need them.
We all have the privilege of discussing it here, but I have yet to see any argument which appropriately addresses the question of why we NEED trade. I, along with others, have thoroughly depicted the negative aspects of trade. If the cons outweigh the pros, why bother? I have kept up with this thread, but the arguments in favor of trade are breaking down because they are becoming inconsistent, emotional, and circuitous. I therefore see no benefit in pursuing this further.
At the end of the day, not everybody will be happy. Any choice on trade will lose players, both current and potential. Personally, I would rather have each individual be fully capable of gearing their own characters instead of forcing them into trading. I have put forth my best relevant analysis on trade in this thread for those interested. If anyone has any questions, feel free to message me. Otherwise, I am checking out of this thread. I wish everyone a delightful week both in-game and in your personal lives. Cheers.