Oh, you mean an early access game? What about that makes you think that LE would be in a “finished” state?
As I said before, yes and no. Your friends with worse gear can still join you in your higher corruption content and get the drops as they occur, they just might want to avoid facetanking stuff of their defences can’t cope with it (only an issue if they’re melee which is probably 1/4 of builds).
At this point, is there any trading system that hasn’t been done in many other games before? So calling gifting “uncreative” is a bit silly since it could be applied to anything else they came up with from the bazaar to a full AH.
IMO, it’s probably a bit of both. They do want the majority of a player’s gear to come from killing mobs (teh horr0rz!!!), and they’ve not yet been able to come up with a trading system that a) still supports this, b) isn’t filled with ridiculous and arbitrary hoops the player has to jump through to trade & c) doesn’t necessitate nuking the item drops into the ground because trade is always significantly easier to get the gear you want when compared to praying to RNGesus (assuming b doesn’t apply). And to be fair I don’t think this a particularly easy circle to square, are there any games that have such nice drop rates and unrestricted frictionless trade? PoE certainly doesn’t (sucky drop rates plus trade that makes me want to go feral and gouge my eyes out), D3 doesn’t (no unrestricted trade, or shit drop rates plus frictionless trade back when it launched), D2 I’m not sure about but it didn’t have frictionless trade and it did have RMT/D2jsp/scamming (which is what lead Blizz to shove the AH/RMAH into D3 which then necessitated nuking the drop rates…), GD doesn’t have mp servers so the trade is similar to D2 but you can just edit your gear in if you want to trade that badly.
True, but people also don’t play for the entirety of a season so there will be plenty of time to keep up with 2 season-based games, not sure about 3.
That depends, if there’s a totally unrestricted trade system like D2 or PoE, no, you can just use a third party site, whip out the banking card of your choice and dial up the gear level your bank balance can support. Thinking that that isn’t going to happen in a fully open trade environment is naive at best.
I’m very curious what it was like back then, I just can’t get into it. 