I’ve said this all before, but since there’s a new discussion I will say it all again here. In my opinion:
Any widespread system of trade that does not allow a player to convert Powerful Item A into an intermediary maguffin (repeat as necessary) that they can go on to purchase Powerful Item Z from another player with, directly, defeats the primary purpose of trading, and is therefore useless and has no reason to exist. That includes any restrictions on which items may be traded due to their power, rarity, or difficulty to obtain. Any item that can drop should be able to be listed for sale in a way that a player who wants that item can easily find the seller, contact the seller, and make the trade.
Convenient, fully in-game trade being something that will destroy the game or whatever is a nonsense idea that bad game devs (ex: Grinding Gear Games and Digital Extremes) have sold players on, but it’s just a bogeyman. Everybody likes to cite D3’s AH, but without understanding that the reason it didn’t work is because it was dropped into the middle of a game that made zero effort to account for the fact that it existed. The D3 devs tried literally nothing to solve the problems (either real or perceived) that came out of it except giving up and shutting it down.
Players who have hangups about how big other players’ fake numbers are, or how they “bought the big numbers instead of ‘earning’ them” have forgotten that none of this is real and do not have useful opinions to share on game design. They should be ignored.
I have heard every contrary opinion on these things and argued about them well beyond death. I’m posting here only “for the record”. There’s nothing that can be said to change how I view trade.
I have said this all along but this thread has descended into a bully pulpit from the OP. There is no use this person’s mind is made up and no text is going to change it.
This is my concern. In PoE, I play with a small group of 6 guildies. We either 4 or 6 man most content for the start. Once we have our starter builds complete we move on to our own builds and rarely chat at all after that first 7-10 days.
We made a pack to not trade outside of the guild as we do not charge each other. However, once we split up our “loot volume” goes way down and it’s often difficult to maintain the riches once we strike out on our own or find the special item that others have on the Trade site (which is an abysmal system).
This thread is so boring, its been discussed to death with nothing constructive at all being thrown around anymore, just echoes of previous posts
Its almost a given this game will be ruined when trade comes.
Trade ruins all aRPGs because drop rates are balanced accordingly. You can choose to not engage with trade but your drop rate is always gimped because others cant bare to play games alone and need to be carried which artificially makes it seems ‘xx’ drops are more common because these teams are finding simply more shit than anyone else
Game developers also double down on ruining their own game by giving XP buffs and drop rate buffs to people who play in groups. If it wasnt easy enough for 4-6 people to carry each other through a zone with multiple overlapping buffs, they also now need drop rate buffs to ‘compensate’ them even more for some unknown reason
This discussion is very one sided, I don’t know if I am really alone here, or the guys who are agreeing don’t write anything here.
I so, so strongly believe that an ARPG without trade won’t succeed as one which does incorporate full trading, But you guys have spoken.
In my mind this game won’t survive because of that…I really hope that I am wrong, but again, I strongly believe that I am not.
I think that the issue here is that you are reopening a topic that has had a LOT of discussion over the last year so a lot of what is being said here is repeated and has been discussed to death and I dont think anyone has the energy to rehash a lot of this. Especially until the devs actually release some trading to test out.
I also think that your stance is very far to one side of the Trading issue so finding people who believe as “strongly” as you do is going to be hard. Most people favour a middle ground compromise and its difficult to participate in a thread like this with polorising views.
You believe that the game wont survive without trading and lots of people, myself included, believe that a free for all full trade system will have the exact same result - especially if its linked to the real world. I am willing to compromise with some sort of trading even though I dont really want it, but your view seems to be without compromise… making it even harder to have a productive thread…
You’re perfectly right to have an opinion and express it. Even more, you have arguments to back you and make your opinion even stronger.
I personaly think otherwise. I’m almost sure trading can kill an HnS, by changing the core activity from “killing monsters” to “search for stuff for sale”.
If they add affixes, and they make bases difficult to find, this game will be another shity Poe, where you spend 90% times tradeing and 90% in this tradeing to talk with bots. So noo…Last epoch is one of the last funny games where you spend time looting and killing mobs, instead snipeing for deals, and then gear character for 1% uber content where loot is ok(poe). I dont want changes in crafting, this game have best crafting ever, compared to unfair poe gamble, and i dont want it make harder becuse some assholes want to speedrun trade.
Nope its not, 90% trade in poe are bots, you need 2-3 side programs to do it right. You spend more time in lobby, and w8 than actually playing. PoE is not a game is a job for 5% nolife players.
All we can say right now is that EHG announced their plans (Bazaar = limited, random player shops, “best” items disallowed; Party Trade = item drops while in a party allows you to trade it to party members) and they do not include open trade or an auction house. Further, EHG has said they plan to prohibit the trade of the “best” items in the game, so that players need to smash monsters for loot to get them.
Past that, the rest is just hot air - er, hot text? That doesn’t sound right…
When I said that PoE’s doing ok, I meant that they’re doing ok financially & the game hasn’t collapsed due to the inclusion of trading. I’m not going to argue the merits of how well received the last few leagues have been as that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. But you can’t argue that GGG aren’t doing reasonably well “despite” having trading in PoE. I’m also not fond of GGG’s trading for the reasons you mention, if the “person” you’re PMing for a trade isn’t a bot & you aren’t trying to trade for a moderately high value item, good luck getting a response (even a “mapping/etc” or “sold”).
They are not doing fine, Tencent is being driven into the ground right now. Giving over 86% of his company to a foreign investor with a shaky background was not the smartest business decision.
There us also a third opinion “Trading has no place in the game loop and everything that trading tries to address can be handled by other game mechanics.”
That’s not quite the same thing. It’s not great when the parent company is being given a kicking by the local government but if you look at GGG’s statutory accounts, they still have over $50m cash even after doing a dividend of over $102m. Revenue, costs, etc are all comparable to the prior year (if you gross that up to 12 months).
You know what I am going to retract the Tencent portion of my prior comment. Unless SIXJOY HONG KONG LIMITED is equal to Tencent as an investor, with a different name. 51M is not a lot of cash in this day and with the “pandemics” continued grip on the economy that can disappear in a hurry.
Thats really interesting info, even for a non-accountant like me… Always wonder what it takes for game companies to keep the lights on… Imagine what Activision Blizzards looks like…
As a side note… that NZ website is damn good… finding that kind of info for South African companies (even listed ones - which should be easy to do) is an exercise in patience & futility sometimes and its most definitely not all centralised like this… something to be said about first world countries I suppose…
SIXJOY HONG KONG LIMITED is a subsidiary of Tencent so that’s irrelevant, they’re just being shuffled around holding companies (I’m not going to mention “deckchairs on the Titanic”, but).
$51m is about 1.5 years worth of GGG’s costs, that’s not nothing. They took well over $100m last year, which is also not nothing. They are, currently, a pretty cash-rich company which is an enviable position to be in even in normal times, which these aren’t as you say. $51m wouldn’t be much to a company the size of Tencent or Blizzard, but GGG aren’t.
Depends on the size of the company, I’m sure for EHG it would last them a lot longer.
US stat account formats are nasty.
Yup, the UK’s Companies House is the same (but better, obviously, less fush & chups, more tea ).
Thought so, it is difficult to remember all the interconnected spiderwebs. When I was still working full-time I did know about 90% of the industry after doing full-scale due diligence plans off of paper 10k forms.
Right, I get that here is the thing though that cash store has a dual-edge issue. Revenue decline and expense increase due to regulations or other factors limiting GGG or even EHG’s full operation potential puts every cent of the available liquid cash at risk no matter the size of the company. In the several iterations that Wizards of the Coast went through, they had the same issues with the licensing of products. That licensing issue happened to doom Black Isle and force the studio to wait 20 years to release Dark Alliance.
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