Greetings, Travelers. I want to address the feedback we’re seeing that many of you are disappointed about trade in Last Epoch being limited to Item Gifting.
While this system will not change for our nearing 0.9 release and our priority remains the same: keeping Last Epoch’s loot system rewarding for solo play and not sacrificing that for trade, we would ideally like to find a solution that pleases everyone and makes trading fans feel like they can fully enjoy Last Epoch. It’s entirely possible that we were incorrect when we concluded that there wasn’t a more expansive trade system that would both satisfy people who want trade and not overshadow item drops and crafting.
One way in which we may have been mistaken is in our assumptions about which ways of constraining trade players would be ok with, and which they would not.
We are asking for your feedback with a short survey to help us steer in the right direction. If you would prefer Last Epoch not to have trade or not to have trade beyond the existing item gifting system, please still answer the questions from the perspective of what types of trade you would be most ok with.
I’m sorry but this survey needs to really be redone, the way things are phrased and grouped seems to be heavily biased. Like:
How important for you is being able to trade with friends compared to being able to trade with strangers?
“I don’t care who I trade with as long as I can trade”
This seems like a nonsense question and some of the answers seem to communicate a strong negative when it’s not really warranted. Or the answers are almost identical such as:
“Being able to trade with friends is more important” and “It’s only important to be able to trade with friends”
I’m still going to fill it out but it seems rather boxed in.
People are just afraid of something different and new. Give it a chance. Y’all have had fantastic intuition with the guidance of this game so far, don’t cave to people saying they won’t play it if there’s no trading.
I understand wanting to be able to trade with friends though I guess. Perhaps if there was a system where when you got an item drop, if someone was on your friend’s list at the time of the drop, then you can trade it to your friends for 48 hours or something. This way people couldn’t add new players to be able to trade it, after the fact.
You can only trade an item for a item if both buyer and seller agrees, both need to agree within 24h and you cannot cancel from your end once committed to the trade.
Items that have been crafted on cannot be traded, the buyer however can craft afterwards.
Legendary items, idols, shards cannot be traded.
Items get a trade tag, so only items that have the same tag can be traded, or 2 of the previous trade tier items can be offered to the seller for a higher tier trade item.
Also not being ablwe to put multiple options as most important seems like it’s not gonna paint a real picture of this. I both want to interact with an economy at times, and have use for really good items my character can’t use. And then I also like having trade, becuase it makes ssf more rewarding because of the relative difficulty, but other doesn’t give me a box. Just ‘other’.
I don’t think the bias or anything , is intentional. But it’s very apparent that this has been put together by someone who either doesn’t have any interest, and/or experience in trade in an arpg. Or someone who’s trying to hard to not make it sound like they want trade.
Overall it’s ya’lls survey for your game, but this is just bad data collection.
My actual short survey-like answers to the questions:
I would prefer trade and the game being balanced around it, I would use trade sometimes, I know multiple people who probably won’t touch the game without it (they arent here to answer your survey, because you dont have trade yet)
If LE had trade, the most important thing to me would be the existence of an economy, and the ability to sell good things, alongside the relative/percieved difficulty of ssf being higher. (Further note- the games drop rates are too high right now anyway, even if i didnt want trade, i’d want lower drop rates)
Trading with strangers is more important than with friends, only because I don’t know what trading means here, and I don’t think the gifting mechanic is good, and that’s the only info i have to go off for what ‘trade with friends’ might mean. I really can’t answer this question, I don’t know what I’m being asked.
Similiar to the above, I don’t know what this is asking. I can barter with someone in dm’s in the chat box, i don’t need to go to a zone with them? I don’t understand what bots means here, game run bots, player run bots etc… Is this an npc representation of the player that sells their stuff at a stall while they arent on? If so that’s a way different vibe to just ‘bots’, which has massive negative connotations right now.
Waiting for things bad.
Kinda similiar to 3 and 4, while initially i don’t care if somethign was locked off, I don’t really know how this would exist. If you blocked off all boots, it’d feel wierd and out of place, if it was just idols bigger than 1x1, that sounds reasonable, except then the grind is more gonna be on idols than anything else for a lot of people etc… I can’t really answer this question, without knowing what it would change for me, getting t20+ gloves with all affixes you want, and perfect idols, are two very different things in terms of game time, and power level.
I don’t really care if nothing was limited, though legendaries not being included makes some sense.
The same as the above answers, my buying and selling enjoyment is the same, because its all tied together.
Same again.
10/11) It takes like, a handful of hours to get past mid levels, trading during this portion of the game makes no sense. However I’d like to be able to get items to use on alts to level them faster through trade. I’m not sure if this is about the level of item, or the level trade would be unlocked.
Extremely important the seller gets the full price i pay. But only because I’ve never seen a tax system applied to an arpg trade system, and the only thigns I can think of for that would be terrible. The only reference i have is mmo’s, which doesn’t seem like it’d translate to an arpg.
13/14) I would prefer to be able to craft on items after recieving them in a trade, because otherwise that means when i sell items, I have to worry about crafting them up first. I’m joining these because I really can’t answer them separately, but the options are too different. (It’s also real biased having that very specific case for buying them in there, but not a counter for it when selling, I really really do care more about having to worry about knowing the perfect stuff to craft on something when selling it, and im sure other people would to. The buying side of this is way less important to a trade system)
I don’t have any idea how to answer this question, the % less drop rate I’d be fine with for trade being in the game, is whatever drop rate is balanced for it I don’t care how less that is, I just want to play the game with trade existing in it. Let alone that I already think the drop rate is way too high, you could halve it now for no reason at all, and I’d enjoy the game more.
Please, please, please do not gut the drop rates to accomodate for trade.
LE is great because the game is balanced around killing monsters to get loot, not trading. You can farm pretty much anything in a reasonable timeframe. Changing that would be a horrible idea.
This. I’m so much more worried about being able to hand stuff off to my friends - whether they were online with me or not - than getting some sort of “value” out of my items. I found it, and I’d like it to be used, even if that’s not by me.
I really want all of the items in the game to be able to be “hand me downs” to someone - even if I don’t know them; and personalizing gear to you is part of the enjoyment of building up a character - so the character gaining the items should be the one responsible for crafting on it, making it legendary, etc.
While I’m fine with the current system, I think it would be better if you could trade freely with people on your friends list regardless of when you got the item. If you want to put restrictions on the item in crafting capacity or any other factors please do! But not being able to give something to someone because they weren’t in your game is just silly in a genre where a lot of people play solo a lot.
I really prefer being able to deterministically farm stuff, so as long as the changes made don’t completely screw up that part of the game (by over 50% drop rate reduction) I’m fine.
If you are worried too much about full-on trading, what about limiting only gear trading, for example by making legendary items and idols not tradeable and/or longer trade times, but not limiting trading of materials (shards, runes, glyphs), to make people use crafting more.
Talk about bias, how about not being a choice in there for someone that doesn’t want trade and thinks it will actively hurt the game? Half of the questions force an answer saying we would get enjoyment out of trading.
Yeah. Felt the same. Still answered. Let’s see how it goes. I’m very curious to see what would be the answer from the community as a whole.
I’m also very intrigued that EHG went back on this as it is a hot topic. Kudos to them for trying to do their best. I suppose having two different “servers”, with trade (and adequate balance) and without trade (with another adequate balance) would be too much work… Or maybe splitting the community isn’t great for the game ? Between league / masochist / hardcore / SSF …
Exactly. I would honestly hate if the game was balanced on an economy like PoE, with horrendous droprates and an over-reliance on trading with strangers. Being able to acquire strong items on your own (either with crafting or drops) in reasonable time is a big part of the game’s identity. I would be perfectly happy with just being able to exchange stuff with friends whenever I’d find an item they would find useful and/or appreciate, even if we’re not playing together in that exact moment. It’s just that the system is place it’s very restrictive. I see where the devs are coming from, and I don’t really disagree with them, but the idea needs to be improved upon.
Yeah, that and the oh by the way if we have trade we going to gut drop rates. It’s just bad, that’s totally steering feedback.
Like imagine you are SSF and all your gear is yours, you dropped it, crafted it, etc. Now this says your experience is going to get worse, that might push you to answer in a negative way to the idea of trade.
“I prefer trade with player interaction but only if the players are always bots”
does this mean players set up a bot to trade for them while being afk/offline/in echoes?
That is the reality of trade though. The ENTIRE point is about balancing ease of getting specific items. If trade is there to make all those things easily purchasable, the drop rate has to be balanced down so there are fewer in the market. Demand exists in both systems. Trade makes supply increase A LOT because of so many people dropping the item and not wanting it and just throwing it up for trade.
If every player wants an item, trade will have little to no impact on that item. If only 5% of players want an item, it becomes worthless and near infinite supply in a trade system.
