Just because trade exists does not mean you have to partake in it. Trade has always been a part of PoE, yet you still played it. Just because you do not like it does not mean it shouldnt exist for players who find enjoyment trading. I will always be a SSF player, but find absolutely nothing wrong with people who spend their own valuable time interacting in the game in a way that does not appeal to me.
This is why I said a while back, I hope the devs learned an extremely valuable lesson here. Instead of keeping trade talk on the backburner while they developed it, for YEARS they filled people with expectations with a system that turned out to be literally nothing.
If the droprates are so bad you can’t get the items you want then you need to trade or play a different build. PoE is big on trading and the droprates suck then again you can buy almost everything with enough currency. This alone make people belive they need to trade to get whatever they want.
Sure they could farm for 300h more just to maybe get the needed item butthat’s totaly out of proportion. This leads to the counterargument. If there are enough drops you don’t need trade at all and the droprates could be nice so noone is in need of a trade system at all.
I realy like the option to be able to trade but not on the expense of other people. I’m all for a middle ground on the topic because it’s nice to get the item you want dropped but it also feels nice when you know you can buy the item if it don’t drop.
If we have good droprates and trading everything is fine because noone needs to trade anyway but saying average Joe should suffer bad droprates and there is no need for him to participate in trade is just… wrong ^^. I play PoE SSF without any specific build in mind and use what I get and play some trash tier kind of stuff because of bad drops untill I’m at a certain point and I’m able to make a half decent build. That’s on me and that’s a huge waste of time and effort not everyone can make and shouldn’t be forced to make.
That’s my biggest issue with the whole system but then again I calmed down when they announced the followup on trading that will be there.
The thing is everybody who is anti trade is assuming and guessing on how much better drop rates will be without trade. This set of people are now setting expectations for how they want things to be. What happens when those expectations are not met? What happens when EHG pulls a GGG and says “we are buffing rates by 50%!” like GGG did early last league when they alienated so many people, but in reality that just means instead of a 1% chance at your item dropping, its now 1.5%. Now EHG has an entire new subset of players who are pissed off!
The anti traders also dont realize how potentially destructive these assumed better drop chances can be. A perfect example of this is D3. They have more or less the same system EHG is talking about, you can trade with people in your instance, and at the end of every rift the sky shits uniques. How are the retention numbers each league? Bad. Players get bored of getting the gear they need and then running the same damn rifts over and over again. Its ironic, these people think they want easy access to items in an ssf setting, but in practice, they dont. The numbers dont lie.
Good point show me said numbers please… the official ones at best.
The thing is everybody who likes trade is assuming and guessing the game will die if there is no trade. This set of people… ah you get it I’m sure.
The whole topic is like beating a dead horse and EHG needs to come up with the announcment on trading because even I can’t bare the whole back and forth anymore .
D3 is a fundamentally more basic game with a lot less min maxing and without a plethora of stats.
It has a very basic gearing system in conjunction with a very simple skill system.
All of that leads to being “finished” with your character way faster compared to other games like LE or PoE.
Is that a bad thing? No, not necessarily. It is just different.
I think EHG will have a rough idea of how long it will take to “gear out” a character and having trade or no trade will have an impact on all the balancing surrounding it.
Just because a game has “good drop rates” and it being SSF friendly doesn’t mean the player retention will be bad.
It is just about balancing it in a way the devs and the community wants it.
Just to add to the discussion, it’s also important to add that most people that play ARPGs usually do not play then like MMOs (as in dedicating multiple years of effort in a single character).
The vast majority of people that i know that play ARPGs plays in short bursts where they will play the game for 1-2 months, develop a character and quit for a time to play other games only returning to to the arpg after a couple months/years for another burst.
And that’s not a problem! For some reason the “new generation of gamers” fed by the whole “game as a service” of the past decade created the illusion that you need to play the same game daily and forever or you are losing your time (which is incentivized by all the “daily bonus” and stamina/dungeon entry system that became the norm in the game industry recently).
If you can play a game for 10 hours and have fun by doing it, the game already succeed, you don’t need to play a game forever as a job for it to be considered good.
I think that’s unreasonably harsh. The way you say it, they’ve been actively communicating about trade as it was I kickstarter/etc then done an about turn. What happened was that they made a few statements (kickstarter and the ~2 dev blogs about trade) then gone radio silent until this thread. People filled themselves with expectations based on the scant messages from EHG about trade then, understandably, some of them lost their #### when it turns out that EHG have largely changed their minds (or at the very least not figured out how to fit a square peg in a round hole).
Now, I suspect that if EHG had been (painfully) transparent about their internal discussions as they happened, I think that people would have been less surprised about the change but that process would have taken resource away from developing the game to manage the community and respond to them/us, so they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Also, hindsight is a wonderful thing, as is armchair developing when you have nothing at stake and don’t have to do the work.
I don’t take this for granted even when human nature makes it the most likely case. Then again there are players who play hack and slays for the story and people who play ssf and so on and so forth. I can’t say for sure “Most players trade!” because I have no eveidence to proof this statement.
Hi, this is RPGIGAN, a youtuber w/ over 7k subscribers focusing on D2, D4, POE, and LE (admittingly not much Last Epoch, only because I’m sure to play much more when 0.9 comes out!)
I’d like to give my input on trading in the game’s future. I often have the most fun in POE crafting items to sell for in-game profit. Those are often my most popular videos by views. Many people play the economy for generating game revenue more so than just farming. Crafting in Last Epoch is excellent; as good as POE. This is something D2 was always lackluster in (crafts are essentially rolling runewords, blood crafting jewelry with pure RNG, etc), but targeted crafting drew me into Last Epoch when I first got it, back when items would have fracturing potential rather than forging potential.
I think there is an easy fix to this dilemma over trading in the game: Simply release two types of leagues/ladders at a season.
Free market version: unlimited open trading. This is great for people who want to play a truly min/maxed build and buy a lot of their gear, or for people who want to craft for profit in the game or showcase crafting like on my YouTube channel.
Example name: “Free Market” or “Open Bazaar” etc
Party trade only version: Perfect for people who want a SSF playstyle, or to only trade amongst their friends. Friend trading could be locked to people who have been your game friend for at least 1 month to minimize RMT “friending.”
Example name: “Item Self-Found” or “Hunter-Gatherer” etc
Have You considered barter trading? The currency being exalted items/uniques/shards (not legendaries) + crafted items being non-tradable? This way You ensure items must be picked raw from the ground + you ensure there is need to craft them for making BiS.
For instance:
I need T7 flat phys 2-handed sword (either to use or slam onto legendary), another “trader” needs at least T6 life helmet, which I luckly have. We trade with eachother, everyones happy. I have my crafting base, he has his helmet.
Chance that someone finds perfect item for his build is very low, there is always almost need for crafting. This is where trading shards may help. There are rarer ones, there are rarer uniques also, I think it’s possible to balance it somehow (or maybe the market will balance on it’s own).
It gives “extra” value to for us worthless exalts, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
There can be either automated system for exchanging or just a system for listing things. I search for something I need, find it, write to the guy if he wants to trade, easy done.
Well, that is not bartering 1 cow for 10 pigs, that is bartering 1 exalted item for another exalted item. It’s nice you know that people invented money, now learn why did they do it. I don’t see that happening in virtual game with resetting economy system.
On a related note did you see how much loot the solo and mp streamers dropped. I think I recall some of the streamers implying that it was to easy, solo or not
MP is super busted right now. The difference is exponential thanks to multiple systems favoring MP over solo and each system is a powerful advantage in it’s own right.
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