Future of limited trade

I think that limited trade is the best way forward but it is currently in its infancy and we are looking at an unoptimized implementation. To understand what a perfect system might look like, let’s establish the key elements:

  1. Addressing bots and farmers. There may be other ways to tackle these but for now, this is one of the big benefits of limiting trade.

  2. Keeping people playing the game and not spending all their time trading.

  3. Allowing people to trade with their close friends.

  4. Keeping players from decking out their noob friends and robbing their experience.

Our current system addresses 1, 2, and 4. But I think 4 is much less important than 3. Having a group of friends that you can share the game with is great and being able to tell someone that you found something for them makes memories and builds community.

With this in mind, I would like to propose an alternative system. Each player can select a small group of friends with whom they can share loot that drops. Items are then “soulbound” when they drop; not to that person but to all of those accounts. It becomes a feature of the item which cannot be changed.

This still limits the ability of bots and farmers as well as excessive trade. It also allows you to trade within your group of friends and not have the “feelbad” of finding something great for a bro but they just logged out.

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Given the recent announcement of the new system, I have some thoughts. I think that the new system is much less restrictive than what I had in mind. It also did not expect them to go this far.

Despite how much they are opening up trade, new system handles 2, 3 and 4 pretty well and I think that is worth commending. I am a little worried about 1(bots and farmers) but they say elsewhere that they are taking the problem seriously.

Resonance is fairly similar to what I had suggested with some big differences. Both systems require pretty extensive tracking of who is playing with who. Both allow you to trade items with your friends and it doesn’t matter if they were online at the time the item dropped.

Resonance has the advantage of not adding a bunch of tags to the items themselves, instead offloading this function to the resonances. A disadvantage, however, is that it really isn’t directly linked to the item and so there is ultimately nothing stopping that perfect 4 LP bastion of honor from going to any random person on the forums in exchange for cash.(except some playtime together)

The factions are also quite generous in what they allow; with COF groups seeming quite formidable. I am a bit worried that we have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. With that said, I think the faction system is very cool and I am excited to see how it plays out.

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Hi

I think resonance is indeed a very nice addition to the game and fixes the main shortcoming of the gifting system (and one of its main purpose) : being able to really help a friend with loot even if sometimes it happen that you don’t play together or on the same zone.

But I see that you fear that this allows people to perform some kind of trade arrangement. Where you see a potential issue, I don’t see any problem and think that this doesn’t go against EHG vision, for 2 reasons :

First of all, to get a resonance with someone, you need to play with him for an “very extended period of time”.

Without knowning exactly what this means, I think I does mean what we can imagine. It will surely correspond to many hours of play, which, for most people, will require many days (most people can only play few hours a day, and maybe not every day :slight_smile: )

Considering EHG POV on the item acquisition subject, for this someone to get your item (using the resonance mecanism), he will have played the game, which is one of the major conditions to be able to get good items.

Second, considering bots, their goal is to be efficient. Being forced to play many hours to eventually be able to get an item is not efficient. Most of the constraints EHG designed about these new systems (gifting/resonance, MG, or CoF) perform a very good job to prevent most of the abuse potential of bots or full market players by making most ways to do so very cumbersome.

Whatever you want to use as a system : gifting or MG or CoF, you will have to play the game to achieve anything.

Thus I truly think that bots won’t be as active on LE as on other games which are less restrictive, and that if ever some of them wanted to challenge what LE has to offer to them, due to all thoses constraints they would be more easily detected by EHG scripts.

They made a genius move with all those 3 systems, I love it and can’t wait to see it in action ! :heart_eyes:

*edit: typo

I really like the new system, it seem perfect, except resonance.

Items can still be traded directly in MG using favor. Bots will farm favor, while playing the game. And for the buyer that will be just a small additional necessary cost. I don’t know, what that time requirement to drop resonance is even doing then, apart from inconvenience. We don’t know how much time is “very extended period of time” (new meme already?). If it is 24 hours and I play 2 hours with a friend each day, that will take me almost two weeks to start sharing items. While bots will start selling items right after the season start.
Resonance is a whole new system to implement across the game, new item and UI to store and use it. Just tracking the time spent between players will be a huge data table.
I would like to share items freely between friends, for me that is a big part of playing together. We can do our own business in the game and not always play in a party, but still want to share useful drops. Like in POE we use guild stash instead of trade window, as a convenient cross-instance exchange system. Maybe coming with a guild system please?

This or maybe track time, when an item was dropped and when a friend was added to the friends list. Then don’t allow to share old item with a new friend. Adding one line to an advanced description of an item is still much simpler, than resonance system. It also solves RMT and makes sharing more convenient.
And to not “ruin noob experience”, I think of a possible solution – track characters level, that has dropped an item, and allow to only gift it to the players, that has reached similar level across their account or more.
As for resonance, I see some examples of ruining non-noob experience.

  • Imagine new season drops, I play to level 30, my friend plays to level 30 while I am at work, and drops a good leveling item for my build. With current system he cannot share it, and will be able to do that only after X hours of playing together, when I don’t need that item anymore.
  • A group of 5 or more friends, how should they handle the resonance system? Permutate their party every few hours to be able to share items after the campaign?

I know devs read these posts, and will discuss all problems to come with the best solution. May RNGesus bless them with luck!

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No, they’ll need to get their MG rank up and farm faction favour to be able to sell items. It’s not an ideal way to completely get rid of bots but it’s probably a reasonable speedbump that doesn’t too badly affect legitimate players.

Not really, it depends how gregarious players are. If they only have a relatively limited group that they play with then the data set is, by definition, limited. I’m not a coder so I don’t know how practical that is but given EHG have come up woth it, it must be reasonably practical.

Probably not since that’s just free trade (which PoE already has) with extra steps.

Until RMTers add all of their (prospective) customers to their friends list. I know it wouldn’t be an ideal way of conducting business, but it would be a way round that particular restriction.

So your friend that plays a lot more than you, gets a load more items can’t then give them to you because you don’t meet the comparable play time threshold? Surely that punishes “noobs” more than leet streamers?

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I still believe that the newly proposed system is too restrictive. There are many hoops and time gates preventing that small group of friends from freely exchanging items among themselves.

I would much prefer something closer to what you had originally proposed, in which a small group of friends are able to have items drop bound to the group.

This basically wont ever happen, because then the correct play is just to create small guilds/friend groups where everyone goes CoF and spams resonances to trade better gear more often.

MG has a few gates, favor and gold as well as selling slots. The only gate for trade between two people(peer to peer trade) is favor. You can trade an item to a person you have never even met for 1 gold and whatever the favor cost is.

if your friends are playing the game they should have favor, if your friends have no favor all the time to accept your items, then they are just getting hard carried by your items anyways which its pretty clear the devs dont want that. Your friend needs to play too in some capacity.

like in the current iteration of MG, if you play for 4 hours, log off, and your friend logs on plays 4 hours then logs off. and the next day you go to swap gear with each other, you should both have enough favor to trade freely among each other. It only becomes a problem when you play 12 hours and your friend plays 10 minutes and you try and send him a bunch of items. Which is a degenerative play pattern.

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I’ve meant character level, not time played level. So if my friend drops good leveling item at level 90, I will need to level any of my characters up to 85ish, then I can use that item on a new character for leveling.
Resonance system is probably the best among the other variants. Would be cool, if players will have to build up resonance meter just once and stay resonant even after season reset.
Also please add a visual effect for resonant players, like small pulses on the ground. Add different tiers of resonance (leveled when using an item gifted with resonance) and reward with different effects for reaching different tiers :rainbow:

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Ok, that’s fair, i missed that in your post, not sure i agree with it though.

Or have increasing graphical effect based on how close to whatever threshold “very substantial time together” value you are. Though that could look odd if you’re close to the threshold for resonances to drop with 1 player in your party but a long way off with another.

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