If you farm enough gold to buy an item isn’t it the same thing as farming enough to drop it? I think it’s pretty legit to get an item one way or another if you played enough.
I’d like to give that post 6/7th of a heart 'cause I think uniques should be tradeable.
I’m the same with minion builds.
That’s because people can act like dicks & like the feeling of power over others.
I agree, the D3 devs had good intentions about implementing an AH, to prevent players from being scammed by RMT sites & loosing real money. They they took the logical next step & reduced drops because the AH makes it a lot easier to get items.
Therein lies a separate problem, your version of too fast is likely to be different to my version of too fast, which is likely to be different to a streamer’s version of too fast. Better to have it somewhere closer to where a casual player can gear up reasonably than piss off everyone who can’t play 8-16 hours a day because they have jobs & stuff.
It is one of the best parts of PoE, crafting acts as a currency sink that sucks currency out of the economy, most games don’t have enough meaningful gold sinks. A gold cost on respecing won’t be enough since the player is unlikely to feel that they’ve got something meaningful from that transaction. If they added a gold cost (ideally % of current gold so it’s still meaningful late-game) to crafting that would suck gold out of the economy & make it more meaningful (or less meaningless).
I vote No Auction house. No form of offline trading what-so-ever.
I’d like to be able to gift/trade gear either through a secure trade window or just by plopping it on the ground. That is the extent I would want trade to exist.
Well thats just straight up asking for RMT
That looks so odd given he’s edited his post (to a more reasonable suggestion). Though that kind of trading is still open to RMT.
That said, my main issue with PoE’s trade is that you can’t trade if someone’s busy (or doesn’t want to sell some low-currency stuff that they put up for trade), that’s my main reason for wanting an AH.
Right, and my main gripe about this is that it assumes everyone will use the AH, and by restricting drops in this way the system’s very existence indirectly forces people to do so - even if they don’t want to - because of how much worse their experience will be otherwise.
There were other issues with the AH, though. At the time, a lot of people thought that just because WoW had an AH, that D3 could do the same, but there were more factors at play.
A game like WoW has many servers with limited population sizes. At one point, if a realm had too many accounts on it, it would lock down character creation so that only people who already have a character there could create another character. This means that unless things were changed, there is a maximum number of players that the in-game economy is designed to be able to serve.
In D3, the “realms” were actually “regions”. The entire NA region fed into a single AH, which meant there were potentially millions of players feeding into the same economy. Even an item with a 1:1000 drop rate would seem common with a pool that large. It’s possible if the regions were divided into smaller, population-limited segments, the system could have worked better plus allowed drop rates to stay reasonable for players who didn’t want to use the AH, but we have no way of knowing.
I agree with you. This is one of those areas where, should development resources allow, I wouldn’t mind the existence of servers/character creation options to allow for further restricted drop rates, so that people who get to play games all day, or who are extremely efficient with their time, can feel more of a challenge. Call it “loot desert mode” or “scrooge mode” or something.
PoE has the opposite problem of gold-based economies. The average PoE player is better off trading his or her crafting materials for gear upgrades instead of trying to craft their own gear. This essentially turns crafting materials into gold without calling them gold because all they are is currency used to buy gear. This is why I’ve gone the route of playing SSF-viable builds and largely staying out of the economy. I actually use my orbs!
Right, but this would still need to be balanced somehow so the average player has a little freedom on what they do with their gold, which inevitably means the “grinders” or the ultra-efficient will still wind up with a surplus, because they create gold at an above-average rate.
I would love to see some kind of solution that keeps gold valuable longer for more players, but I think regardless of the outcome, the folks who have an above-average amount of time to earn gold (or an above-average efficiency in doing so) will still wind up with piles of gold they have no use for. To me, that’s an expected part of the game once you hit a certain progression point. Call it another form of “winning the game” in the sense of not having to worry about money as a resource, if you will.
1 Like
I have an old friend (and by old, I mean collecting social security) whom I enjoy playing and I frequently help gear him up in games we both play. Why? Because he has a wife and I don’t.
We go back to 2006 where we both started playing WoW. Since we’ve played PoE, EvE, ESO, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, all of which allow trading in some capacity.
If someone wants to trivialize their experience by paying real money for an in game item I don’t care.
The only reason I’m against an auction house, is that makes trading more impersonal.
Loot in multiplayer is going to be FFA, so unless they prohibit dropping items once picked up this is unavoidable right?
Which is fair enough, but developers tend to, especially if that involves (their) paying customers getting ****ed over by scammers & loosing real money. D3’s attempt to solve this was the RMAH (as I mentioned above) so that any RMT went through Blizz’s secure system (with the side effect of Blizz taking a cut).
Trading in PoE is usually anything but “nice & personal”. In my experience it usually involves spending the first 5-30 mins going down a list of items (usually maps) that people listed with the intent to sell but now don’t want to because they have other better things to do (like playing the game, which is fair enough), or they’ve AFK (again, fair enough). Then eventually you get to someone who’s willing & able to trade & it happens.
IMO PoE needs an AH for consumables (maps, currency, crafting mats, etc) & not for gear (due to the oft-repeated “AH’s make it too easy to get gear & GGG want to slow trading down”).
I thought they’d said it was going to be instanced, but I have work to do (obviously!)…
The problems with trading will always be unlimited influx of gold and items causing inflation, and at some point it will be easier to just buy your items then to find them.
There should be money and/or item sinks that at are more appealing to spend your time in then trading. Maybe gambling could be it.
I like gamble options that takes x uniques to gamble for a new one. Huge item sink. But in the end, infinitive influx divided by x is still infinitive influx.
Another option: item decay. This creates constant need for gold to repair and highest level items could be logarithmically increasing. Or even Unrepairable in some cases.
The title of the thread is “Economy: How would you like it”.
I didn’t critique anyone’s choices, my original response is me simply listing mine. Now I’m defending my choices.
No AH, No offline. Only person to person either through secure trade window or by dropping on the ground.
That is how I like it, for reasons already stated.
1 Like
Which is fair enough, I was “just” stating some potential problems with that kind of trading. If you want to stick by your trading preferences I’ll respect that (though I’ll disagree with it).
to me the most important factor in this. Can and will they stop hackers, botters, save modders and other cheaters?
If they wont the economy will be ruined in almost any case.
1 Like
My limited exposure has been “ty”, “t4t”, etc. Kind of like the D2 days when “personal” trading consisted of “wug/wuw” followed by “no ty” or “t4t”.
Some folks talk about trading as if it involves two people bartering leisurely at the local market while talking about the weather. I’ve yet to run into a trade where that happened. I could understand some negotiating happening for bigger-ticket items, but most things are the equivalent of the local grab-n-go. You dash in, grab one, pay, and leave so you can get back to whatever else you were already doing.
I’d wager a lot of people don’t care, but that doesn’t mean the presence of RMT shouldn’t be considered by the devs when they determine how to implement the in-game economy and what restrictions, if any, to place on it.
The game WILL have RMT. It’s up to the devs how much it will impact/affect “honest” players.
Yeah, you know things are bad when the trading is better with bots than real people…
I think that does happen at the high end of trading (ie, in the exalt-range), but most of it works better with bots.
No, if trading will be limited or completely removed.
I am not sure, I hate trading and what trading does to the game but for some reason, many people enjoy it. I would love some Self Found option so I can play with other self found players, but also I want self found option to be actually meaningful, not like in PoE, where they just shuts all trading and call it SSF…
1 Like
If you allow people to trade in the same way that PoE/D2/GD/etc has trading, then you’ll be able to have RMT. If it’s via an AH with bidding that makes RMT a lot harder (though I’m sure they’d figure something out).
Nowhere did I say the devs shouldn’t consider it. Nowhere. I simply cast my vote in regards to the title of this thread.
RMT will still exist even if there is no trading. D3 has RMT. All RMT stands for is “real money trading” and this is not limited to items/crafting materials only.
It’s not always about value. Sometimes it’s about convenience. Depending on what is tradeable, it could be anything from desirable crafting bases, to runes and shards, to specific Unique items. In games where there is heavily restricted trading, people sell entire accounts. In games like WoW, people sell raid slots.
If there is a way to get or do something for less effort, there is generally someone willing to pay for it, which means there is someone else willing to profit from it.
And this is fine. I don’t care about RMT either because I don’t participate in it, but I also don’t want my game experience to suck more because of anti-RMT measures (i.e. lower drop rates).
Even D3 has RMT. Account leveling, paragon farming, loot sharing, etc. People are very good at finding ways to sell anything and everything if they can profit from it.
The RMT in PoE is just stupid. There are even RMT sites that publish character builds on youtube, and if you follow the link to their site they openly advertise RMT. Sure, I can ignore them, but I also consider that these sites might be the first “resource” a new player finds, which means it can shape their entire attitude about the game. Especially if they come from a F2P background where buying power is essentially a standard practice.
1 Like
Just a thought:
What if you could only trade with people on your friends list, and before they could trade they had to be on your friends list for 48 hours?
-
I certainly wouldn’t want to put down any $$ for something I had to wait 2 days to get.
-
A by-product of this might be people “staying friends” with RMT traders so that the next time they want to buy some gold or an item, they won’t have the inconvenience of waiting 2 days. Wouldn’t it be easier for the Dev’s to spot a character w/ an unusually large number of friends (and trades) and subsequently investigate them for RMT?
It certainly would complicate trading for people not actually friends.
Just a thought.
That’s an interesting take on the topic. I don’t think an average player would want to wait two days to complete a trade, though.
I think the devs need to determine how much RMT they consider an acceptable cost of implementing an economy, and then try to control the excess the best they can while not creating any absurd hoops that legit players would need to jump through.
Just off the top of my head -
Go with an Auction House-style trading interface. Bind gold and items to the player they dropped for, but allow items to be listed on the Auction House to be purchased with gold. Include optional listing fees/transaction fees to act as a gold sink.
This makes gold RMT harder because gold is not tradeable player-to-player. It would rely on the gold buyer listing items on the Auction House and the gold seller successfully finding and purchasing them (since the listings are blind).
This also makes item RMT harder because the item buyer would need to know exactly which listing they are purchasing, and it would also cost them their own gold in addition to the real money they paid. If the seller prices the item too cheaply, it could get sniped by another player. If the seller prices the item too high, the purchaser might not consider the loss of gold worth their money.
Yes, I know voice calls/streams are a thing and there would be ways to work around these kinds of restrictions. As I’ve said before, RMT will happen whether there’s an economy or not - the idea is to put in roadblocks that make it more of a pain to pull off while not asking your legit players to jump through too many hoops.
Ensuring all trades go through an Auction House interface could also make it easier for the devs to log/track transactions and spot trends that point to RMT accounts.
There are probably better concepts than this. This was just off the top of my head, but hopefully it expresses my point well enough.
2 Likes