Keep one thing in mind: A side aspect for you might be a big aspect for other people. I say it for years now… keep average game enjoyer Joe in mind because at the end of the day he (and all the other Joes) pays your game.
I just want to trade freely with my friends and that’s it and on the other hand I’m still in the “farming xyz currency or item to buy/trade item abc is fair game.”. Sure farming currency might be more efficent at a given time but that’s not the economies or trades fault but a game design weakness.
I think there are only 3 ways to approach trade.
No trade at all
Free trade but not for engame items aka exalts and uniques with LP
Free trade because who cares
Everything else might be a unrealistic chunk to code but sadly EHG didn’t answer back to that question as well so we might never know or at least not this year :D.
At the end of the day it’s a players choice how a game is approached. Everyone who is 24/7 nolifeing should stfu about “buh game has no content!” when done in 2 days. Same goes for people who trade or go for easy mode or OP builds that simply destroy everything LE is throwing at us.
Seperate modes aren’t that well recived by the community because it splits the playerbase and somehow that’s a bad thing… elitists say :D.
The only way trade (butt)hurts some people is the good old trade economy and RMT trading blabla everyone understands and got the point of it. I never cared if other people trade or if they had better stuff then I do and I never been jealous of BigEpeenWilly’s stuff he get from his trusted Willies when he’s livestreaming.
Just make trade free and keep the droprates in a way ssf people can get stuff and be done with it. If you want to buy everything and have the needed stuff to buy/trade it so be it but don’t come back crying when the game get’s boring after 5h. I think that’s the best approach…
At the end of the day I would be happy to trade with people on my friendlist without restrictions. That’s all I want like in almost every other hack and slay besides a very few.
btw @Mintfoxx this isn’t all aimed to you and I don’t want want to piss you off or something. Just another bunch of random stuff that came up ^^.
I am fine, i will always respect other people opinions, there is no singular truth in this world, it’s all a matter of perspective, i am just adding my chips to the pot.
I want also add to the discussion that pretty much every single problem of a “free market” is solved in hardcore, which i believe is the gamemode that fits modern ARPGs gameplay loop the most.
The simple fact that dying erases items from the market, creates a really healthful trade enviroment (halts item inflation). Furthermore hardcore makes botting a lot harder (it still happens), and makes RMT a lot less advantageous (also will still happen).
Furthermore it’s interesting to point out that hardcore in LE is actually really fair and fun(at least without connection issues), for example i’ve pushed multiple characters of all the classes (except shaman) up to empowered monos, even my 900 hp dodge rogue was able to get to empowered monos (before being stun-locked by the meteor dudes in an arena node xD). So i think more people should at least try hardcore and think how trade would interact in that enviroment.
The only two things i wanted LE to avoid are:
1- balancing drop-ratios/player vs monster power around trading.
2- creating obscure systems that promote the creation of an exacerbated number of third party sites/programs (like what happened to PoE, where they wanted to halt trade so much that they ended with an AH that is more powerful than any other game while also being the most obnoxious to use).
And i will just make clear again that i don’t really care about trade, as long it doesn’t disrupt the core game, i see trade as a side mechanic that you can interact if you want to. When i play ARPGS i play for the action and role-playing portion, and i never roleplay as a greedy capitalist lol)
Not going to raise a stink or anything but if they wanted the game to be successful it would have a trading system and thats all there really is to it. I had a group of friends hyped to play multiplayer that spend 60-90 dollars every single PoE league that aren’t even going to give this game a chance anymore and surely I am not alone in that.
I also don’t really understand wanting seasons in a completely SSF game but that is me I guess.
We don’t really know what EHG will do with cycles and how similar it will be to PoE leagues/D3 Seasons.
But may I return this question to you.
Why would you want seasons in a trade game? What makes the difference of having trade or not having trade specifically regarding seasons? (I don’t want to know why you want or prefer trade, only why this is linked to seasons/cycles)
Depending on how the cycles will be its a fresh start and I don’t see a bit difference here in trade or no trade. If the cycle brings enough new things to discover and also comes with possibly balance changes, new skills, new content etc. The cycle experience doesn’t really change with or without trade.
Also the game wouldn’t really be “completely ssf”. But even if you play solo mode without friends the cycle still brings something to the table.
At least if you enjoy cycles in general, but if you don’t enjoy cycles in general trade or no trade again wouldn’t make a big difference.
Even if you look a a cycle in a ssf game, you could look at it similar to a Roguelike game, where the cycle simply resets your progress and you start over. This can even be enjoyable in a singleplayer game.
There is a clip on twitch where Mike said 0.9. is delivered with gifting and there will be no changes. He didn’t say if there will be changes after 0.9. or if they even want to change anything.
Yeah, my assumption is that they’ll continue to noodle around trade in the background and if they can figure out something more robust they’ll do that in the future.
Actually I highly doubt their will be ‘cycles’ or season anymore or at least nowhere near the frequency of PoE (3 months) and definitely not the content either that PoE and now other game companies like whoever makes Torchlight Infinite
Torchlight Infinite came out in open beta Season 1 in October and is about to finish/make a new season on January 12th. New season has this Pirate theme, adding in 3 new Hero types and controller support, 5 new skills, lots of balance changes - much of this content ie the changes are based on feedback, because skills are not tied directly to the character they can develop new heroes at a faster rate and the skills can be balanced
GGG made a whole Rogue-like dungeon, made their best possibly league ever, if you play PoE you can expect content every 3 months more consistent than your countries weather patterns
Because people want to play for a few weeks and move on. I did 2 level 100s and 40/40 in Sanctum, I wouldnt be able to do that in that timeframe without trade. I would still be working on it now probably,
Also my second level 100 I did was only because I found a extremely strong league item which is going to be removed next league so I made another to play around with it - if that isnt the perfect reason to make someone play their game longer…not only that my account was full so I had to pay $5 to them each time I want 2 new characters - so now they make money 100% of the time keeping me around
As I explained above Torchlight Season starts Jan 12th, I have completed all my PoE goals for the league, I had 2 weeks off during xmas to play and im burned out, time to play Torchlight for a while until I burnout of that and play some other filler until March when; unless the world ends a new PoE league yet again
Seasons are very important in trade games because they reset the economy.
All game economies suffer from hyperinflation due to the fact that players are printing more money/currency/whatever all the time by sheer virtue of playing.
Additionally, players tend to accumulate at the level-cap as time goes on.
Both of these effects are mostly inevitable.
This makes the trade experience very bad for new players.
With the rampant inflation, and the lack of demand for low-tier items (since most players are past the point where low-tier items would be useful) they are basically left out of the trade economy until they have sunk a very significant amount of time in the game. So, they can end up feeling left out of the game proper and turn away.
Resetting the economy is a measure that allows new players to enter the game.
Actually, I don’t understand the point of seasons when there is no trade.
If the economy is not reset, “experiencing new content” is not a very good excuse for the game to force me to play the campaign again.
I didn’t really think about other people jumping in and replying on my question that I asked Fiftyfifty
But its kinda funny you explained in 7/8 of your post why having resets is good for a game with trade/economy, while completely leaving out the thing that I actually mainly asked for
That’s why a sensible game/developer will add in as many sinks as possible (as PoE’s currencies are all used for crafting so they get sucked out of the economy).
Was this not the question? “how seasons are linked to trade” and “What makes the difference of having trade or not having trade specifically regarding seasons?”.
From my point of view, seasons are a fix to an inherent problem with game economies, if there is no economy there is no need for a season.
If that was not the question, I have misread the post.
Well, yea, ideally there are enough sinks that the market stabilizes to something sensible. However, even with the best, most well developed and engineered sinks, both inflation and (for lack of a better term) aging of the playerbase still happens.
It is just part of the nature of ARPGs, the playerbase levels up, the production of loot and currency increases as players become more efficient in farming.
This induces some form of inflation in the economy.
My question was specifically towards Fiftyfifty asking why he thinks that having a reset (aka seasons/cycles) in SSF has no sense.
From a players perspective if a game has trade or no trade, that really doesn’t make any difference to me regarding having cycles or not.
I do understand that some people don’t like the reset/cycle loop in general, but that doesn’t have anything to do with trade.
Yeah but it is to late if you need those and even more of those and just one more of those. Mostly all players with a lot of time on their hands and half a brain will always have more currency then the devs expected.
Imagine a game balanced arround Kevin who plays 22h a day and is an uberchad elitist pro who plays Elden Ring with his left foot without problems. People would go mad but maybe the economy would be the least problem.
What about the possibility of exchanging one unique into another. So if you found lets say a T0 unique then you will be presented a choice of e.g. three other T0 uniques to choose from. Cant imagine the excitement to check the alternative choices from vendor if you have found a T0 what you don’t need.
Or you mix all together like; you can have like x gold, or x runes, or this T7 item or this unique. This would be awesome! You would know for sure to get value from a valuable drop. And maybe you present different offers from different vendors. Every vendor ids appreciating different uniques more over others and is offering different things…so you would have multiple excitements" per unique (if you don’t need it)
What kind of uniques? The ones that randomly drop everywhere or the ones you targetfarm? When you talk about the ones that drop randomly the whole system would be useless because most of these drops are to common and the good stuff needs to be target farmed. On the other hand it would be totaly bonkers if you’re able to trade a Slab in for a target farmable unique.
There is always one problem when it comes to traders… they offer you little currency to sell items for much more. “Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler” might be good with paying a lot but then again he’s kind of special.
When the setup of the trader is changed and he offers worthwhile options you still cater to the 1% because they’ll win the most with a “usefull currency” trader and average Joe might not even care because when did a NPC trader ever offered something intresting?
The idea is very intresting thou but I can’t come up with something reasonable as an exchange for a unique or T20+ items. On top of this there is still the elephant in the room of “player want to trade item A with another player.” that isn’t covered by a NPC trader ^^.
I think this is super flexible and adjustable to a proper balance easily.
Loot tables, what uniques (tiers) to offer for exchange, how many, how much - you could even think about side quest to unlock this (or additional features), maybe different outcomes of quests to have an individual touch for every single one of us aligned to our likeings/needs.
I´m here only talking about the general idea of “exchange” - I realy like it!!
what is your expactation here? Ofc people who play much gain much… this is not to get a T0 unique for exchange from a T100 unique found in act1… and I think the most important point from OP is missed…this is ABOUT making NPC offers interessting and sort of replace/compensate the missing trade functionallity…
details/ideas/pros and cons - all happy to hear - lets discuss
but maybe the economy would be the least problem.