Item Gifting Development Update from our Principal Game Designer

Developer Blog
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So far I have seen zero of these threads I need to rereat the whole thing as it seems.

Because it’s a pc game and I don’t care? There is loot I need to play a certain build that came to my mind without playing the same game loop for 100h+. My time > Items in a PC game. With that in mind I got a lot of time and I can play 24/7 and I played games like LI2 and farmed items with a drop chance of .0006%. Now I’m a bit more grown up compared to back then and I value different things.

What makes loot valuable for you? What kind of loot is worth more then have a BBQ with loved ones for example? Insert whatever thing you like to do. For example no loot is worth more drop/time then reading a book I like/time or cooking and eating a nice meal per day and so on and so forth.
Pixels in a videogame have ZERO value to me and I play them as long as they are fun and entertaining because fun and entertainment have value to me. The way to get an item IS valuable but the builds I played with an Exsang for example have been more fun then the time I needed to spent to get one.

That’s the next point we don’t know where the drop rates will end up. Will the get reduced like the exp gain will get reduced? Are there going to be like they are now? Or do we get at least D3 drop rates because we have the same shitty trade like in D3 that’s more restirictive called gifting?

Shoot! I’m all eyes and ears about your ways… at least 10 at best so I can pick some please!

I’m not on Reddit because of… you know… Reddit. I talk soley about this thread we having our conversation in. If someone wants trade for no other reason then having 4 LP uber items and whatnot that’s a fair thing to say but unrealistic non the less because of the rng upon rng upon rng LE has backed in the item system. On top of that said people most likely never trade in the intended way but use RMT when they don’t get what their kiddy tandrum think the deserve.
Then again do you want to ruin trade for 100 people because 5 of them are rotten apples? Quantify the numbers to your liking.

On the farming matter… no problem to run content for 20h to get something. No problem running repetitive boring content aka monlith and dungeons for 5h to get something. Maybe I just played to much LE for my own good and I should take a breake :smiley: or maybe I look at the game with a more objective view… don’t know. When I think about having not the choice to gift a friend an item I droped while he was offline to walk the dog playing said content gets even worse and worse for ME.
I don’t want to derail this and that’s a ME problem I just want to throw in another piece of why some people think trade is good. Sure in this example trade would substract possible gaming time but at the End of the day I don’t care. If a cycle or gameplay system is fun I play it for hundrets of hours but if said system get’s boring after 10h and I find a way to make certain parts faster and come to an end in 30-50h then It’s fair game to me. (aka skipping content)

Hey the CT’s already tested the system and it seems like EHG is happy with the 5-20 replys they got from whomever. CT’s can be happy they have no CT forum tag anymore because when things went south in the past I don’t want to know how angry people would be about people who tested this.
On the other hand there was maybe some missunderstanding what do I know.

There is only One thing I want to be able to: Trading with my friends/guild members like in every other MP Coop game I play. Working togheter for a greater good is a nice thing for me and the people I play with. This includes playing togheter hanging out in a voice chat do hard content and to trade stuff to people who need it.

As I researched for another thread… trading in isometric hack and slays has always been a thing with a tiney ammount of exception to the rule.

Just another compromise solution… make the droprates as stupid as in D3 and I’ll swallow the pill and be good with it because I get 50/10 Minutes while beeing semi afk watching po…ng on the second monitor.

Hey we agreed on something that’s something after all :slight_smile:

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I mean the hack and slays that have trading also have full on item editors…

A good example is for me and my friends, if we play terraria and kill a boss 15 times and no one gets the 10% drop rate item we go “well we got fucked by rng haha” and spawn it in.

But that is a single player game, not a game as a service. As sad as it is to say, it really does fall into a problem on an individual level. There still has to be some form of game, and getting that right for everyone just wont happen. TL2 and Grimdawn have trading, but you can also mod the game, which is not something you can do in PoE for example, because PoE is a service that is “online” where as TL2 and GD are peer to peer services.

The biggest problem with giving your buddy an item while he was walking the dog, is that yes, 5 bad people out of 100 will ruin the bunch. Because those 5 people will do whatever it takes to undermine the system and break it.

We see it every day in every day life, and sadly games are no exception. if this was an offline peer to peer only game, id 100% agree with you. But this game is a game as a service, so there has to be some grind and systems in place to make people actually play for more then 20 minutes when they boot up the item editor give themselves 4 lp in every slot and dumpster 1000 corruption.

edit: just cause were talking in 2 threads, im 100% down for full on trading aslong as LP and exalted are off the table. I honestly think my only issue with trade at this point is I dont want people just getting the best items through some random means other then actually playing the game and going through the hoops of grinding them out.

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LE was never sold as a “game as a service” game ^^. Sure you could define it as such but I think noone ever did and I never heared a dev say so.

If there is nothing to breake aka economy what do they breake? worst case they be “done” with the game in 10h and go into babyrage because they flawed their own gaming experience.

Still if 5% of the playerbase is doing such kind of crap there are still 95% left who play the game. Even genderrepresentation and everything that comes with it takes more then 5% possible players away from a game. I don’t think free trade hurt games like PoE that much.

That’s something I already said like 100 posts ago :D. Just to make things clear… I want free trade I don’t want completely unrestricted free trade. Exalts and LP stuff can only be gifted and for example 4 LP can’t be traded at all because your toon won’t let go of it :D. Adding restrictions is no issue at all, restricting it all togheter because they don’t come up with an elegant solution is something completely different.

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That’s exactly why we don’t create a “hands free world where people can do whatever they want”. I’m sure you know that there are many things between no trade and unrestricted trade, right? Also, by “best way to play” you’re probably talking about the most efficient way in terms of gear over time, right? Because the “best way to play” is not really something that can be objectively said. To some people it means listening to every dialogue and doing every side quest, to other people it means skipping as much content as possible and farming endgame content while others might say the best way to play is dominating the leaderboards. Of course there will always be people that cheat, nobody will ever doubt that, but I’d say that most people won’t cheat or try to get all their gear by trading and some of the other paranoid claims some people in here have, as long as the game offers enough good content and ways to actually farm the stuff you want.

I don’t even know what to say to that.

Last I checked, games with a “rampant economy” are doing quite fine. Sure, some PoE leagues are better than others, but I wouldn’t say that the game is “destroyed and dead” or something like that. Same with D2R and other games that have free, unrestricted trade. But I’m sure you will give me many logical reasons why, despite their devilish, bad and destructive free trade system, these game are still doing quite well. :wink:

Also, calling trading cheating might be some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard in the past few months, no offense. Besides that, the challenge and progression is something that the developers have to provide. And removing certain elements to create a false sense of “providing challenge and progression” is either bad game design or just lazyness. It’s literally the devs job to make sure their content, be it gameplay content or trading, does not destroy the gameplay loop. Nobody says that’s easy, but again, not adding those or even removing them is just bad design or lazyness. Please remember that I’m only saying this because the topic of trading was mentioned since the start of this game. If the game was first announced as a game without any trade then things would be very different. Nobody, except for a few trolls, would complain because nobody would have bought a product that says “no trade” and expected trade. But the fact is that some people bought this game because they expected to be able to freely trade with their friends, because that’s what was written on the product. And the whole “It’s an EA game, things can change!” argument does not mean that people aren’t allowed to complain about the current trade decisions. It doesn’t mean that they are entitled to get trade either, but it’s a valid reason to complain when a product claims to have a feature which, to you is a selling point, but ends up not having that feature.

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Those games dont have a rampant economy. D2R is just D2 remade, which you can just edit items into if you want so literally who cares.

PoE does not have a rampant economy. Unlike EHG, GGG takes the time to completely balance the game around trade. This is why there is a big fat warning lable on SSF “This is a challenge mode, we dont balance around this” There is no divine shards, because those are called chaos orbs. Just trade if you want divines but dont have them.

PoE is a success in spite of us trade not because of it. Even the pro trade players look at poe and go “yuck” half the time.

You mean like stamina systems or other limiting designs that exist to add friction to your gameplay so you have to play around game systems? Shocking.

Removing trade is not “lazyness” its choosing to balance your game around players engaging with your systems.

Sure they mentioned trade at the start, but they also mentioned lots of things on the road map which have since been axed, why is there no one up in arms for those? Because trade is just a buzz thing for like 80% of players who just are poe refuges who dont know how to play an arpg where they are not just grinding some content they dont even like to make the maximum gold per hour.

There is people caught in the crossfire who want to build small group trading operations, but these people who want to go full market seller “I dont wanna farm bosses, so I wanna buy those drops” are not actually interested in ARPGs as a genre, they are interested in PoE.

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That’s an assumption and you are wrong :D. I think I played almost every isometric hack and Slay there is and PoE is the H&S I like the least. There are people out there who are intrested in H&S and trading alike ;).

Why is everyone overexagerating and selling the own oppinoin as matters of fact when they are to a certain extend simply wrong? Not only pointing at you @DiceDragon with it but your post make it pretty obvious what the main controvercy is.

Most people who posted here didn’t even care about economy and trading that much and there are always the same conserns:

  • Item aquisation of not target farmable items
  • trading with friends

I reread some of the posts and noone said “Turn LE into POE!” or “I want to breake the possible trade system in place because reasons!” or “I just want a shortcut to finish the game in 5h spo I can cry about the lack of content!” or whatever boogieman the trade haters pull out of their sleves next.

I get the droprate concern and I think it would be bad to reduce the droprate if a trade system or a pimped up gifting system is in place. There are ways to counteract this easiely… decrease the droprate a bit in normal mode with trading (I don’t call out restrictions here) and increase it in SSF by the same ammount.

Most mouthy players look down on normal mode anyway and if you don’t play ssf hardcore noone cares about you. Poof all problems sold… trade haters have SSF and trade lovers have trade aaaaand done.

I rather split the community a bit more then to possibly loose a chunk of the playerbase or potential costomers in the future.

Then again the best thing that can happen to me personaly is free trade but exalted and uniques with LP as well as gold aren’t tradeable as a restriction in place. This way people have to play the game but can aquire build enabeling items in a differnt way then rng and friends can trade stuff but still have to play the game.
On top of it gifting wasn’t a waste of time and can stay in place for exalted and unique items with LP but said items are only obtainable buy the gifting rules.

I think this might be the best of both worlds that require the least balacing effort because non exalt non LP unique items are vendor trash anyway.

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In response to trade creating a shortcut to finish the game, do you anti traders ever consider the process of acquisition? Lets take PoE as an example, lets say the player is deadset on getting a mageblood.

They spend 45 hours farming whatever map drops the div cards necessary for the belt. Like most of us, they have shit rng. At the end of the 45 hours, they have 0 cards. During that time, they acquired 10 divines, a ton of chaos, and many items that had value (hi economy).

That time spent netted the player enough currency for the mageblood. There was no shortcut, they didnt break the system, they used the curency made to buy the item.

Without trade, that player would be empty handed, and mostly likely upset and bitter they invested so much time trying to acquire the item, and may chose to spend there free time on a game that doesnt punish you unnecessarily. Is that really what we want?

Sorry for this ramble, I just got out of the hospital for a TIA and my brain doesnt want to work at its normal capacity of 85iq :joy:

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On Blizz’s closed servers? Really? I agree in not caring about what offline players/characters get up to.

Why? There are other choices EHG have made (eg, skill respec system, masteries not respecable, can’t just swap between specs at the press of a button) that also turn people off (though probably not quite as much as gifting), would you also want different modes that enable these so as to not reduce the playerbase? And if you’re splitting the playerbase more you’re likely reducing the number of people you can play with.

Oh god no! Do you want bartering? I thought you wanted a functional/free/frictionless trade system.

Alternatively, they whip out tier credit/debit card, Google an rmt site and buy one. Fortunately, this affects “no one”.

:frowning: hope you get better soon mate.

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Horrid news and huge F no shot I’ll be playing on release. :confused:

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Doesnt work, so you are saying ‘boss drops xx unique to little and I cannot buy it off anyone to alleviate my suffering and I have to non stop farm it forever’ so you are the suggesting based on ths feedback the devs do what? add the item to the core pool? lol no the correct response would be to keep the drop rate at a low level and allow people to trade for it… but instead what generally happens is you farm it over and over and over and quit

Just like I did when I farmed Omnis for 3 weeks daily and didnt get it and then rage quit LE. PoE league has been going just over 3 weeks and im on my second build, first build hit 100 and has very good gear but nowhere near maximised, second build has tonnes of work to do and i wont have the currenct anyway to finish it

So in 3 weeks I can hit 100 and get 40 challenges and make a new build (lv 93) albeit I had xmas holidays to play more… In 3 weeks of power farming Omnis I got a couple of exalted pieces and not the item I wanted, 3 weeks. This is not something I want to repeat and wont

Game is basically dead to me without free trade as I hate feeling like shit when I put in hours of work for an item and it wont drop and theres nothing I can do but repeat it ad nauseum or uninstall. no patience anymore for it

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You are not wrong, if there is an economy, there can/will also be rmt. I dont think building a game around rmt is the right approach. At the end of the day, this is a video game. If some idiot decides to spend money to cheat, then well, that person has issues none of us can help with. I dont know if a system can be implemented to curb it, I do know GGG has some sort of code where people obtaining god like gear at a low level get flagged.

And thank you, I truly appreciate it!

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Quite literally a drop rate balancing issue and trade is not the only solution. In fact, in comparison to different target farming methods, maybe combined with a bad luck protection and/or playing cooperatively, because it means 3 more chances for the drop to occur, trade is the solution with the most downsides, as explained in the OP.

And without free trade your party members are probably more inclined to actually gift you the items, because there is no trading value associated with it. It literally only exists to empower characters, not as a token to exchange for currency.

In general: what I do sympathize with is the idea of not being able to trade with your friends, if they weren’t in your party and same zone, when the drop occurred. That seems quite restrictive, but I also understand EHG being very careful, since even a restriction, like “be friends for 3 days, before trading is possible”, can and will be exploited by RMTers. It will all just take a bit longer. Maybe putting an eligibility flag on a dropped item corresponding to the party members at time of the drop, so the zone restriction is removed, is a decent compromise. But they probably will never make it possible to just deck out your friends characters with your stash items.

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Thats completely unfair to people who arent trying to abuse having ‘friends’ online (people are NOT your friends btw and will fk you over the second they can) to further their own agenda in an aRPG

See you dont get it, you feel because you have a ‘friend’ you should be able to trade with them, no if I cannot trade with ‘acdndcdgvf’ for items then you cannot trade with your ‘friend’ its the exact same thing, the only issue is I dont have parasitic fake relationships with online people and try to abuse ‘being their friend’ to get items lol this is getting kinda pathetic now

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Bout to make alt accounts so I can like this a few more times :rofl:

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I only mentioned this and my sympathy for it, because other people mentioned it.

What I meant is, that RMT sites would abuse the friend system to effectively emulate free trade with a time restriction. Hence, why it is not a solution and I, whatever my sympathy for the idea is, don’t think it will happen. This has nothing to do with “parasitic fake relationships” or whatever you’re talking about.

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Name one that is as heatet and big as trade… one is enough so you might get how big this is compared to other thing EHG changed. Most systems in place are in the range of genre standards.
Trade is just something different and when I look at the past it get’s even more obvious. Kickstarter->trade
Bazar forum post->trade
after several bazar threads->no trade
after no trade backlash->gifting
after gifting announcment-> angry people who have been in a rollercoaster for years while EHG looks like they even started out not knowing what they want or they make up their mind every now and then and you can’t tell where aim for.

I’m pretty sure no other topic is a back and forth like this one and equaly controversial.

I simply pictured a some groundworks I would like to see as restrictions. The thing I would like most is to simply throw stuff on the ground or to have a shared stash with my friends but both options most likely won’t make it so the only realistic option is 1:1 trade from my point of view.

Just wait for the trade haters who’ll tell you that currency farming is easier then item farming as shown in your example and that it’s far better to need 42h to get one card instead of farming 45h for the currency to buy an item.
This is something I tell people since the topic of trading came up and every time they don’t want to understand that 45h of farming currency still is playing the game instead of whatever they have in their minds.

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RMT is technically more healthy for your game

RMT players have money, they buy MTX as they have disposable income, that goes to the dev

Not even sure why its an issue

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That’s because they’re dead set that trade means all transactions take place with RMT currency/items, and bought by people that have zero desire to play the game theyre spending money on. Because trade = peepul naut plaing teh gaime.

Hell, I’m old enough to remember when we couldn’t get runes automatically being added to the rune storage because people might want to use them in trade. But hey. I guess somewhere along the line, someone convinced them that trade ruins games.

No, player frustration and lack of content ruin games. Not trade.

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Well, it drives away the people, who want to actually achieve things in the game, when people can just buy their power.

No, because having any trade functionality at all will open the doors for RMT, not because everything will be RMT. It is an undesirable and inevitable consequence of trade.

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And just having the game online opens the doors for cheating, botting and item duping. As I’ve said before, how far down the what-if, boogeyman rabbit hole do you want to travel? Multiplayer and grouping opens the doors for RMT carries and farming.

What’s your point, exactly? That we should restrict everything that has a possibility of quoteunquote bad things happening?

The funny thing about this whole RMT hysteria is that it’s not even the reasoning given for not having trade in the first place. It’s the excitement about finding loot yourself and not relying on trade. But, that actually removes the inherent excitement of finding loot in the first place. Rare, common? It doesn’t matter, unless it’s the piece(s) you are looking for. I felt zero thrill when I randomly found a pretty damn rare Helm of the Scurry. Why? I had zero use for it. I had no interest in playing a squirrel build, and it had(has) no value else where. Can’t even vendor it for any worthwhile amount of gold. So that just means that unless I’m actively looking for a specific drop, or planning for a future build, all drops have the same value to me — 500 gold.

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