Last Epoch Trade Survey

Developer Blog
534

While the survey doesn’t address who does and doesn’t want trade and who wouldn’t buy the game if it wasn’t what they wanted. I’d be curious how such a divide would(could) be measured. It’s actually a fairly important decision business wise.

Anyway, the most interesting idea that has popped up from the discussion is making certain drops/upgrades more deterministic by using a token system. Where the tokens are collected only by playing and turning them in doesn’t guarantee rolls and such. They would at least provide an incentive to keep trying to upgrade certain gear slots in a way pure RNG does not. It just can’t be as prevalent as it is in D3 with crafting and rerolling items.

I am also warming to D4’s plan to allow the trading of item bases but not anything better. Last Epoch could do that as well if the devs chose to.

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536

Thank you for the reply and to Andrew TIlley for doing transcripts! (fr ty so very much for these!)

Personally, I am still very confused about if trade is coming or not. Even in the stream transcript:

" Q: Will you guys add trade?

Mike: We’re still digesting information from the survey we sent out, if we want to or not, what that’s going to look like…"

I am super confused? I understand not trying to be specific due to the many unknowns, but is there going to be some form of trade added after the 0.9 release? EHG released a previous statement which said there would be no trade, only gifting. EHG has also stated in previous statements there would be trade, a bazaar, etc.

Are you able to give us some kind of clear answer if trade will be in the game in 1.0? I do understand it is all up in the air currently, but this is all super confusing to anyone that doesn’t live on the forums keeping up with everything.

If there was just a simple yes or no, that would do miracles to clear up the muddy water. Everyone thinks you’re going to do this or that, and in the end there is still no official answer than ‘maybe, maybe not’.

Also, how effective was the survey? Was there multiple votes from the same IP, for example? Could a bot have influenced it in any way? Why change from the original ‘bazaar’ idea and totally scrap all forms of ‘stranger trade’ (sorry couldn’t think of a better term lol). What percentage of LE owners actually filled the thing out?

Personally, I bought copies of this game because I like multiplayer worlds where there is interaction between different people in different aspects. If an item dropped and it was decent, why can’t I give it to a new player? What if I start some cheesy guild and want to give items to guildmates? (not asking for a guild system lol) Why would I be forced to add people to my friendlist just to ‘gift’ them? Doesn’t this only encourage workarounds for abusing the gifting system? Doesn’t that make the title ‘friendlist’ more like ‘tradelist’?

Why does it have to be this complicated economy in the first place? Why can’t I trade an item to a random stranger?

EDIT: sorry juggling this between work and I forgot to press the reply button so I deleted previous post

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537

Short version tonight.

I have a feeling that some information has gone through a game of telephone and been slightly altered.

We recently announced that the 0.9 patch would have gifting only. We talked a lot about our priorities for finding loot out in the game as a fun and viable way to play. This unfortunately got repeated as “no trade” quite a lot. The 0.9 gifting announcement post has more detailed info on 0.9.

Details on what the game will launch with are not available yet. It is still being designed. The survey was one method of feedback we are using. I can’t share the results of the survey.

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538

Don’t worry, I read everything and still have no idea why there is so much fuss for what is just one patch amongst others. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Nobody knows for sure (very probably including the devs).
Personally I have always been convinced that there will be someday, but that’s just my feeling.
And obviously I don’t know what form it will take, nor with which patch number it will come.
But EHG has stated many times that they are still open to any ideas and willing to consider new paths, so yeah, my money is that sooner or later there will be something.

539

Very well said, people understood for some reason there was no future option for trade after the long statement about how EHG want to items found be the core of the progression/excitement.

Not wanting another game about currency and efficiency over the joy of finding and crafting upgrades is just great, give to many of the players high hope for the future of the game.

Is also somewhat hard to understand that the game doesn’t have a fixed secret plan to 1.0 down to every detail, other than the features outlined by EHG that they were comfortable enough to tell us (finishing the remaining classes and the game story).

Sadly this is how many people’s mind work. If tomorrow EHG comes up with an experimental trade system and tell us is just an experiment and will be on in the next official patch so people can play with it and give feedback, we will have a crap load of people that will understand that the “experiment” is definitively how trade will look like in LE release.

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540

And that’s exactly what gifting in 0.9 really is, an experiment. I’ve had many people report that their opinion of gifting only has changed (both ways) since playing with it in the preview events. It’s really hard to give feedback on a system you haven’t played with.

Having said that, it’s not about wanting to avoid the currency and trading elements but rather enable the discovery and hunting elements. In a magical land of gumdrops and jellybeans, if both could coexist in a system where people can trade if they want to but not need to if they don’t (and still play together), that would be pretty cool too. Not saying this is even possible or that we will ever try to do it.

We have many goals for these systems and we have to prioritize and design to hit as many as we can.

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541

I mean I get where your coming from, but this is sorta just a given.

Its one of those genie in a bottle situations. its very easy to give more of what you already feel is okay if you want to add some more, but its almost impossible to take away something that has been given. it being a “Beta” is really no excuse.

if they launched a patch with full trading as an experiment then took it away the next and said “sorry that didnt work out” it literally would shatter faith in the devs, and the game would quickly become a cesspool of screaming for it back until the game crumbled.

It sorta does not matter what feature you do it with, be it trade, experience, or drops. Extreme shifts in the game like that are just never good.

So it makes sense that the devs are extremely cautious with what they put out there, because if not it will create false expectations, and experiences that are not intended.

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542

Thanks for remembering us :purple_heart:

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Yeah, I can agree, we have seen the effects already:

We have seen this happening in PoE, where the devs didn’t want the game to become a screen cleaning speed-running game, and that one aspect couldn’t be taken out of the game.

Also they envision “crafting” are just slot machines with currency, and they f’d up with Harvest, so they are destroying this mechanic by bits patch after patch, because of the huge impact it caused, they can’t simply get rid of it in one patch without losing a good chunk of the playerbase.

544

Yeah, that’s why EHG are so hesitant to add stuff that they aren’t sure is absolutely the direction that they want to take LE in, if they did but it didn’t work (for them) then taking it away would feel really bad for the people who loved it.

Exactly, one of my suggestions was to do an AH as a “league-specific” thing with the intention of removing it after the league ended, but that still runs into the issue you talk about above. Sadly.

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545

One thing that this survey didn’t really allow me to convey is the following idea.
Disclaimer : I have no idea how to implement (as in, actual design of the system) this in practice, but if the question is “what do you want for trading in Last Epoch ?”, this is my answer.

The best TLDR of it I can give is : I don’t really care to play with people, I just want to be able to trade with a selected few.

In longer words, some kind of Group Find. To take an example from Path of Exile (yet again), think, very small private league (hard to say how small, 5 ? 10 ?). At character creation, you select a few people (account/characters, more on that distinction later) with whom your character is “allowed” to trade with, without having to play with them. This allows me to play alone, on my own time, without having to schedule being able to play at the same time as others, but if I get an item I can’t use but that could be really useful for my friends’ builds, then I can just give it away to them.

I feel like this would not warrant a huge (if any) reduction in drop rates, could still consider some limitations : the ones I like the most are not being able to trade items that are already crafted on (but if say I send an Exalted to my friend, they can craft on it ofc), including legendaries, nor idols/shards (maybe runes ?).

Having it done at character creation avoids the problem of “I’ll just wait until I really need some very important item, and add that specific person who has that item to trade with them”. There is an issue with shared stash too, the system would be easily circumvented otherwise, maybe traded items become character bound ?

Like I said, lot of technical issues to figure out with an idea like this, however I feel like it isn’t really far from what EHG wants for trading ?

546

I’m a non native speaker and I have my troubles with writing english but I understand it pretty well most of the time. That wall of text can be understood in many ways depending how optimistic or pessimistic you are. If there was a short definitive statement like “Gifting is a placeholder system for now and we are working to find better/other solutions.” a lot of troubble could be saved.

Instead we had something that could have been written by a political party because it’s widely interpretable from: “There will be no trade and they try to cover it!” to “That’s it for now more to come.”. They should either translate their announcements or make clear statements as black and white as possible.

So no trade is a possibility still And nothing get altered all to much :smiley: ? As stated above pretty please be more black and white in official statements so non native speakers have an easier time.

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547

I’m sorry, I can’t provide any more information. We don’t have the information about what will happen yet so I can’t share it. I’m not sure how much more clear we can be.

Here is all the concrete information at this time:

0.9 will have the item gifting system as previewed in the last 2 multiplayer events.

1.0 will have a yet unknown system.

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548

That is significantly clearer and less ambiguous than the original gifting reveal.

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549

I think the most important thing for a lot of the people that reacted very negatively about the trading system would be, that they know EHG will work for sure on “something more”.
Either an expanded 0.9 gifting system or another system on top of that.

Is it already save to say, that 1.0 will have a different system than 0.9 trading?
(either an expanded gifting or another system on top of gifting)

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I’m not ready to give any information on 1.0 yet at all.

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551

I saw this Survey and answered it, and I was unsure if I answered how I really wanted to answer it, but I answered.
In the end I just hope that everyone is going to be pleased about the overall trading.

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I think a system that is more polarising is better than a system that is mediocre for everybody.

I rather have a really good system that some portion of the community really likes and the other dislikes.

Maybe EHG can come up with something out of the box, that hasn’t been done before (at least in a ARPG).

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553

This is all I want to know to sleep save and sound and it’s everything I wish that was in the announcment because with these words I can lean back and… well… drink a coke or something.

How on earth should I know this? I can’t read peoples mind and I can’t read what people don’t write as well. What Mike said and @Llama8 quoted as…

…is important to me because this is the first time I can rest assured there WILL be system in place at release. I’m not the center of the universe and If I dislike hte system so be it but untill this point I was under the asuption gifting is for 0.9 and then whatever.

It’s time too look for english language class because to much is missunderstandable and I can’t ask the devs every time to interpret sections of announcements and it seems they can’t make their announcements as short, informative and not missunderstandable as Mike :smiley: .

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554

Well, upon several readings of the original post on item gifting, it still reads to me as “no trade” more than anything else.
Just for fun, I fed the content of the original post on trading to chat gpt, and asked it if it though that trading would be added:

Based on the information in the blog post, it seems unlikely that the developers of Last Epoch will add another form of trade. The developers initially planned for an auction house or player shop style system, but the more they considered the complexities of economies and trade systems, the more they realized that such systems would damage the progression of the game. They also considered the potential for an economy to grow too large and dominate the game, making item drops less exciting and ruining the balance of the game’s combat. As a result, the developers have decided to pivot away from having economy-based trade and canceled plans for the Bazaar. Instead, they plan to rely on powerful target farming methods to facilitate specific item acquisition and to continue allowing players to share discoveries with friends.

That is not to say that the chatgpt interpretation of the blog post is correct, it’s just to say that it is reasonable to reach the same conclusions.
Furthermore, at no point in the 600+ discussion on the original post, anyone from EHG intervened to rectify this misunderstanding that many of the discussing parties had.

PS. sorry @Macknum made a mistake in making the response, and now it appears I am responding to you rather than @EHG_Mike

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