I do not think anyone will question that the gold exploit is a bad thing, regardless the discussion on the other thread is useless, I mean to fix the problem, not whine about it.
How to Reverse the Gold Inflation:
Solution #1:
Remove gold as currency used in the MG bazaar, and make it purely for vendors, lightless arbor / dungeons- Items dropped from ANY vendor, dungeon, or traded player to player, or friend to friend, or dropped on ground and picked up with a special tag or acquired while playing in multiplayer with other people gains the NONE TRADE ABLE
Items that can be used with MG will be required to have the Tradable tag: from drops that are gained while under the Merchants Guild Tag - but not from lightless arbor, or ANY dungeons where a secondary PLAYER was present, any vendor where currency is GOLD
ALL players who played online, will have their gold set to 0.
Regardless of account age, going forward or backwards.
Players will instead use a currency called Marks that are earned by playing solo, and only under the Merchants Guild Faction.
Assumption: A full reset, all items in Online, Legacy and Cycle, are reset
No exceptions, Content creators INCLUDEDED, no favoritism of any kind
Combatting RMT
Last Epoch Devs will hire new employees whos job is to sit exclusively in game all day and watch ALL Player chats Logs and world chat and will manually VAC and IP Ban all offenders. This will be a hard ban. LE devs will also follow Links by gold sellers, and full DMCA and legally sanction gold sellers, and boosting services.
The above assumes end of the cycle yes. Either now or in 3 months. A complete reset. To do this now or later is not something I am gonna discuss, as that other thread already has that discussion.
How would that solve anything though? All youâre doing is changing one currency for another. When you get a âMarksâ exploit, the same thing will happen again.
A lot of the exploiters are able to exploit, because they run in groups, and get to high corruption and then acquire a lot of gold, and then toss it into lightless arbor, and then duplicate the items.
If you make drops from lightless arbor not trade able, or from exploits that may or may not come from vendors, you remove the ability entirely. If you playing in a group and cant trade items, removes boosting entirely. Items you get wont be trade able.
Because Marks are only solo found, you cant replicate them as easily no? If you are worried about duplicating marks, make them entirely server based, and not interact in anyway with the PC client. This requires EHG to determine how many Marks each item costs. And having each item on market to have a fixed price. This prevents any inflation.
Another solution is to give each item a unique drop ID. If any item has a unique id and its duplicated, you perma ban the person. Just remembered about that option.
Your solution wouldnât work on the current 2 exploits. The first one required simply charging a billion gold for a trade when the other character didnât have enough and would go negative.
The current one required using cheat engine to change the value being traded.
No items were duped. It was just currency that was changed from X to Y.
The cheat engine one, why would that even work? Dont they have anti-cheat? I know its known to be bad at doing its job, but editing Hex values? Nutty. Simple solution to that too. Have a value of gold squish, and have each gold have a unique item id. Not ideal but would fix it no?
The billion gold one seems like a oversight. Maybe cap the trade limit way bellow that? I heard some games bug out with large numbers. A currency squish would combat that?
It was an oversight that shouldnât have happened. Basically one person set the trade at a low value and accepted it and the other changed the value with cheat engine and the server trusted that.
They fixed it and most likely future similar exploits like that.
So its the handshake between the PC client and the server, I heard of the same happening in New World with the Faction Guild houses. I heard of variants, DC during handshake, dropping items during handshake, etc.
Simple solution. Have fixed variant on what a trade could be by having items have a relative value. Then instead of accepting a handshake, manually verifying all trades, to combat it further limit it to 5 a day per player. Not sure about the cheat engine one.
As I said, it was an oversight on EHGâs part. The server shouldnât simply trust the info coming from the PC and the serverâs should overwrite it. Iâm sure they fixed it and also made sure to patch it in other places as well.
It was a rookie mistake (from a studioâs standpoint), but they learn from them.
Wouldnât a much simpler solution be to make favour cost for buying and selling proportional to the gold price. e.g. 0.1% of gold price? Want to list something for 1,000,000 gold that would cost 1,000 favour, 1bil gold would require 1mil favour (pretty unattainable). Plus require the same favour to buy.
That would have a few effects:
Non inflationary economy, favour would be earned then spent - never accumulating.
Would bring in a natural price cap (established by player base) - favour past a certain point would be too much to ask.
Would stymie RMT gold transactions - both seller and purchaser would need obscene amounts of favour.
Hacks would be more difficult, requiring both hacked gold and favour. Monitoring of favour changes is much easier - itâs impossible to acquire lump sums of favour legitimately, so any account that does is a cheat.
As the cycle starts youâd need to accumulate gold, but after a certain point would be limited by favour.
This could be rolled out mid-cycle (now) - all of their ill-gotten gold would be useless, other than LA. Youâd need to do something with current listings to force relisting though.
Longer term youâd probably want to refund favour for delisting items to allow people to find the level/regain favour to get that item theyâve just seen. But thatâs probably a more involved change as youâd have to deal with rep in some way.
Eventually this would free up gold for gold sinks - personally would like to see a lucky forge (maybe at the end of a dungeon) - could require large amounts of gold for each craft you make on the item but gives you two rolls, presenting two alternative outcomes. Allowing you to either optimise for forging potential cost or best rolls. Normal forging in great, but when youâre buying really expensive bases itâs soul crushing when your first three clicks eat all of the forging potentialâŚ
Non-tradable tag functions already as itâs supposed to do, why include vendors and dungeons? Thatâs dumb, makes no sense to remove core content from the list.
Keeps gold dupes dangerous because of Lightless Arbor as well but is a mandatory aspect. Far less severe at least.
Also group play has to be included to allow those tradeable items to drop, period. Punished for playing in a group? Thatâs also a bad idea, canât do, ruins the game for those and hence you push them away. No more group play hence.
RMT combat:
RMT is mostly relevant because of MG, to remove RMT have scaling favor costs, all thatâs needed.
Your âjust hire more peopleâ and let them do it options is not a realistically possibly one, never was, never will be. AI can do the job in the future maybe, sucks for now.
Also you canât put legal actions towards most of the gold sellers as they often work from countries where that isnât forbidden to do, hence no legal sanctions possible.
What you describe is common gameplay and not even an exploit, not even remotely.
Thatâs as far removed from âexploitâ as you can be.
Yes, involuntary dupes and fuck-ups from the server side by missing a single security check as a hence unwarranted un-contestable perma-ban? Nice⌠just what the gaming industry needs. Another VAC ban method for doing absolutely jack.
If you know what anti-cheat does and how a cheat-engine works you also know that there simply was a check missing for that specific interaction. They instead took it and did the second viable option⌠remove client-side bit and put it server-side only as it shouldâve been from the start.
And a cheat engine is specifically there to tamper with values in the memory, hence by design⌠a cheat engine does only one thing and thatâs changing bits which shouldnât be accessible at the moment. So yes, since Hex values are nothing else then 16 bit bundles you can change em.
Handshake exploits and cheats are the most common area of fault for those systems, yes.
Hard to test and make 100% sure every is guaranteed to be non-corruptible as we see.
Shouldnât have happened anyway, was a mistake from the testing environment but a forgivable one, especially with the speed of solving it.
Yes, exactly that.
Recommending it since 1.0 together with a change from having a favor listing cost to a limited listing amount max.
Overall healthier for the market, current system is detrimental.
Which hence would be taken care of since listing wouldnât warrant favor cost anymore, meaning free re-listing.
As for the worry some might have, namely price fixing:
That happens when people buy up and re-list cheaper variants of an item which makes others buy your more expensive ones, a gamble to get more then you paid for the cheap ones.
Usually you would re-list the cheaper ones more expensive as well, which isnât possible. So a very hard thing and nigh impossible in LE already.
Also unlike PoE in LE you canât ignore trades, theyâre automated, so also low-price price-fixing canât happen, people will just gobble empty your supply and stabilize the market automatically.
The main issue we currently have in that regard is the design error of making people not thinking into detail about how the system works and hence listing for â0â gold. Which needs to go.
As for @Nolj kudos for the overall post there, well thought out.
I think the current problem is that the way MG is set up people feel like they have to sell stuff at 0 gold just to rank up and be efficient (which is a wrong notion).
I did that initially in the first few days, until I realized I was better off selling them for some price, since it doesnât matter if they buy or not.
That being said, after that period I still listed plenty of items at 0 gold, but simply because I thought they might be useful items for leveling and just wanted to put them up for sale if anyone wanted to grab them.
On the other hand, most people leveling donât have access to AH, so thereâs that as well.
In reality giving away your belongings is no issue. People can do whatever they want with it after all. But for a game dev in a online environment of this exact genre? A nightmare!
Giving things away in a closed group between people âknowingâ each other (or actually doing so) is fine. Itâs a small environment and no impact in the grand scale of things.
The moment it happens in a big manner on the other hand - like MG - it becomes a major issue.
To get currency to buy better items a player needs to sell items to achieve that reliably. Thatâs the premise of MG in the base functionality. Handle the market well and youâll progress through your efforts.
Now, you as a new player start out and want to sell your item since you see âitâs a nice item and someone might need itâ and hence go to MG and do that. You list it, obviously not the best but not the worst. You get some gold.
But then in the current situation instead you see 5 pages of prices like â1k goldâ. So, not worth even the effort, itâs less then a gold shrine. Interacting with the market itself is a negative hence.
So now how do you get the funds for better gear? You donât reliably, you exchange rare drops - which happen rarely, hence rare - gradually to get even more rare drops. The mediocre or low drops are not a way to even get gold at all.
So youâre stifled in your progression, you wonât see any progression for substantial amounts of time. No increments.
So that happens because of several reasons:
First of all, Reputation is hinged on Favor usage. Since listing costs favor and it has at least the âpotentialâ of rewarding you with something back many people start to list everything they canât see value in. Just throw stuff inside.
Since an uninformed player though has no idea how to price-check and what is valued how much this affects everything from low-end to mid-tier prices.
All rares? Worthless.
Most T7 affixes? Worthless.
Non-LP uniques? Worthless.
Sets? Worthless.
Leaves only LP uniques and specific affixes where the demand outstrips the supply. This is natural to a degree⌠but expedited through the process.
This happens because listings arenât a informed decision but instead a necessity to progress the system. No need for the bases at the trader? Throw random stuff inside MG and hope for the best! Now MG is flooded with cheaply priced items and the lower market collapses.
Then we have the second ones, those mis-informed. Favor gives progress? So when I sell and item it gives progress? Well⌠it doesnât hold true when you know it, but itâs easy to misinterpret for some people. Itâs set up to misinterpret, because why would the listing itself be a bonus for me? It has to be the selling in the mind of some people automatically.
Boom, â0â gold flood.
Your market is even worse off.
So your whole progression suddenly is a mess.
In a healthy environment for a market there needs to be a cost (not a trade as we have now) aligned with using a service. Listing needs to cost a resource which we need (gold for example) to hence enforce informed decisions. So if it costs gold and doesnât sell itâs a net loss for us, period.
Some âgoodwill peopleâ will still be there but decisively less, thatâs fine.
It allows people to âprogress trough their effortsâ in that system though. Put something in, have it sold, get more out then put in. Nice!
This then allows them to get to the higher priced items and acquire them this way.
A market usually makes it so you can take time-investment out of your gameplay to progress inside the gameplay. More effort spent in the market = less in gameplay, reward accordingly higher though since you give up progression for the interaction with the mechanic and that is to be rewarded.
So a naturally self-regulating market system always leaves open opportunities for profit solely because of the effort needed.
Which brings us to another piece of it which destroys that: Limiting listing amount through Favor rather then a hard-cap.
If you only have a limited amount of âslotsâ to bring into the market as an individual youâll make more informed decisions on what to put in there. It artificially limits the quality of items youâll present the community. Someone playing tons will only present high value items, since those give the best return value per slot and they can fill it up.
Since those donât present low value items it created a natural vacuum for people earlier in the progression line to fill up with their items and still have a competing environment to profit from.
This doesnât happen.
So itâs bad for many many reasons.
Exactly, one of many.
Also exactly, and that should be limited by design, so if you wanna do goodwill it has to come with a price rather then a reward.
To be honest, the thing Iâve missed the most in LE as compared to D2 (and even PoE to some extent) is simply being able to grab a bunch of useless loot (to me) and go somewhere and drop it for new people.
This was a fairly common occurrence in D2 and in my opinion was an overall positive thing for the community.
Granted, this was mostly because stash space was very limited and muling was annoying, so more advenced players just dumped the lower tier stuff. And if youâre going to do that, might as well give it to someone.
But the fact remains that it did help D2 community as a very helpful community for new players.
I also miss the fact that if a friend comes to D2/PoE I can also simply dump him a bunch of gear to get started. Which I canât do in LE.
In the end it doesnât really matter because I have no friends playing LE, but itâs still a limiting factor.
Anyway, that was a sort of sidenote not really pertaining to topic.
OSRS has the same concept for example. Yes, it definitely does make the community overall more enjoyable as helping out others becomes more of a norm.
With how the instances in LE are set up though I understand why it isnât happening. I would definitely enjoy the end of time to be a proper city though with 100+ people inside at once⌠so you dropping loot then is a thing that could be expected and people socializing there simply to pass time while playing the game could become the norm.
Overall a positive thing.
But the market itself shouldnât ever have this concept there, it serves no actual purpose and is a detriment as youâre not âattachedâ to the person doing the goodwill. So it needs to be personal.
