In Lost Ark, where there are lots of carries paid with ingame money, they ended up noticing that some of the characters paying for carries were bots. I thought that was hilarious. 
High level players ending up unwittingly power-levelling bots…
Anyway, it is not about trade, it is about multiplayer, and that’s simply a fact: if you have multiplayer, you will have carries. No way to avoid that.
Yeah that’s why RMT is a dated argument from my point of view because as soon as there is player with player interaction you open the door for something that can be RMT’d.
Bunch of posts bringing up gold as teh currency to trade for, so to put some reality to that:
Gold has a value in the game, that value is based on the loot you can get from vault. If gold were the currency we had to use for trade, then every item would be valued relative to both time to farm it, and relative to time to farm the gold for an x power item from vault.
And with the items you can get from vault, it would probably end up being that it would take more gold than you could make in the time to farm that item normally, outside of very rare items, because vault can give very good items.
Honestly gold as a forced currency for trade would be terrible, it ties a specific system in the game to trade, that has nothing to do with trade (well outside of using it for gifting, but i assume in this hypothetical world, gifting doesn’t exist)
Like the trade gameplay for most people, where we use gold to buy items from other players, would be selling a rare item you got that dropped that you don’t want, and then going into vault and spending that gold to try and get something really good for your build. Which honestly isn’t terrible, it just seems weird to tie the vault to trade like that.
A more specific example: Player gets a rav void drop, they can’t use it for their build for whatever reason, that rav void can now be sold to someone for a bunch of gold, they can now go run vault a few times and use that gold to try and get items that are useful for their build. This could be good or bad.
I agree in a sense that gold for trading would directly make the vault irrelevant, but that is a cause of the insane randomness of the system. The vault as a gold sink doesn’t even comes close to value/game time for it to be resonable. One run inside the vault is 500k-1m gold (which is in the range of 3-6h of game play) and the rewards it gives you are jack all. I have sunk around 15m gold into the vault and I haven’t gotten a single usable item besides scrolls and runes. That’s the case of RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. If gold can be used for anything remotely useful, nobody would be doing the vault.
I think that’s a causation by the vast amount of “bad” affixes the items can roll, which comes from having so many defencive stats that need to be capped. It all ends in this kind of frustrating situation, where an obviouslly good T21 ring is unsuable, because it lacks Crit avoidance, or because it has a bad base. Which imo, trade solves, as this falls into the category of “great items, I can’t use”. I may have 2-3 stashes full of T21-22 items, that by themselves are amazing, but my gear is so tightly put together (capping crit avoidance, endurance, all the resists, glancing blows and 100% crit), I simply can’t use. I actually still use a T17 relic, because I can not find the same base with better stats on and it’s not even anything special (mana regen/crit multy/cold res/hp on a poison res base).
RMT transaction for carry is different than direct RMT transaction for item. One still involves RNG for the player that the bo…err Guide will drop what they are after with the stats they want. The other is just the player browsing a third party site and selecting what they want. Upon transaction completion a mechanism to start the item delivery process is kicked off. EHG the developer(not you) has decided that this is an acceptable trade off. I certainly hope that EHG has methods planned or in place to mitigate the “Guides”
RMT is RMT is RMT no matter how you want to twist it again. Aas soon as you use Real Money and trade it in for items or services it’s RMT. RMT is simply often used by people who dislike trading and they simply ignore every other aspect of RMT that’s why the topic pops up and your reaction proofs the point that people seem to okay with RMT as long as no direct buy is involved. Double standart at it’s finest 
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I did not say I was ok with RMT, I’m Not. EHG has decided that the risk of RMT with gifting is ok. Their decision, not yours, not mine. I actually would prefer some limited trading. Just not at any significant expense to drop rates, and in a way that does not lead to rampant abuse. Trade is no use to me if I would still need to increase my play time past the current semi casual amount just to afford an item, that used to drop for me just fine, that is now priced out of my reach due to unrestricted trade.
Solution
Open trade with a 90% nerf to drop rates.
@Llama8 had to tag you because i knew you would appreciate what’s going on here. 
We all have different ways to enjoy the game and nobody here knows any actual statistics of how many people enjoy which aspects, except maybe EHG with the survey, but even that is going to be extremely limited compared to the number of people who play these games.
Nobody is wrong for enjoying the game the way they enjoy it, even if that is through RMT. Whether it’s against ToS or not.
When someone says “everyone likes it this way” or “nobody likes it that way” you are leaving out the group of people that don’t like it this way and do like it that way, and those people clearly exist in almost every case that has been mentioned on the forums.
The best thing we can do is present information from out own point of view without labeling it as a majority view or as fact. There are pros and cons to every system EHG will come up with and there will be those who like and dislike anything we get.
Just a little reminder that people unlike you are out there…
I think I finally see the distinction between both groups here. Traders see farming and grinding as work, whereas people against trade see it as part of the fun of the game. The fact that you’re monetizing your time playing a computer game gives it away. I don’t even think about stuff like that when I’m playing the game. I’m just having fun, and if something cool drops, then great.
One thing to remember is there are way more than 2 groups.
There are people who want trade because they enjoy trade.
There are people who want trade because drops aren’t frequent enough.
There are people who want trade just to trade with their friends.
There are people who don’t want trade because they don’t want to have reduced drop rates.
There are people who don’t want trade because they don’t like interacting with the auction house (which may or may not become the best way to obtain items).
There are people that like grouping but don’t want trade.
I’m sure there are more but I can’t remember all of them.
But what about the people who like it one way or another…
We’ll most likely never get good feedback when you look at the number of participants because only a fraction of the actual playerbase even realises that there is a big discussion about trading. Most people play the game and care for patchnotes ora build at most. I thing the biggest part of the community is indifferent on the topic because those are the people that are quiet and you never hear from.
On the other hand it’s easy to cheese the survey and say 127k times that you want free trade 
or non trade whatever cheese you like more ^^.
I agree with you on this one 
I think it’s likely that the majority don’t even care one way or another and will just play the game however it is, regardless of trade or no trade.
I hope EHG gets useful info out of the survey and I really hope it isn’t abused.
I never said that people don’t pay for item carries. I said that the value proposition would be far to low to support a stable market around it. This is especially true when looking at a ARPG. You can’t stop RMT completely even without trade or multiplayer as people still buy and sell accounts. You can put systems in place to make it so unprofitable that it naturally phases itself out or is done by such a small section of the player base it has little to no effect on game health.
My argument is and has been that restricted gifting benefits outweigh the small amount of risk it would generate if handled correctly.
As for soulbound grouping. Again it is not possible to scale past the group cap. If the group cap is four the dev team would only ever have to balance around loot acquisition of 4 players. You could have 1 static group or a million static groups. Soulbound grouping is a closed circuit economy that only involves the item drops in the zone the group is completing and the people in the group. You can’t ever impact more than 4 players at a time. With only the group cap to worry about loot acquisition for groups could very easily be tuned to fall in line with single player acquisition. If that has to be balanced at all. I’ve personally had no issue in any loot based game I’ve played acquiring loot at a slower rate than a group.
The point I’m making about RNG in LE is that drop rates for most items are so high you can almost guarantee them in a specific amount of runs. I’m talking upper 90s if not 99.9% for most items with enough time investment. Could systems be introduced to improve item acquisition even now? Sure. For example:
I could see a system where upon reaching level 100 timeline bosses drop tokens. These tokens could be exchanged for an item that unlocks an Uber boss fight for their timeline and that Uber boss drops 1 chase unique for that time line guaranteed.
Pity systems like the one I mentioned above do probably need to be in place if not for chase items, at least for stop gap versions of those items when seasonal content becomes live. That being said its been my experience that most items are reasonably obtainable given enough time.
RMT is objectively wrong, especially if it diminishes the experience for others.
Would you want to deal with the global chat of Last Epoch turning into a bot fest like PoE? I certainly wouldn’t.
Everything else you said is fine, I guess.
Amazon and Ebay both spent $$$ to build the infrastructure necessary to facilitate trade, so I’m sure they would agree with me.
The suggestion is not to trade for currency. The suggestion is that every trade comes with a market fee, an amount of gold you pay to the market for facilitating the transaction.
For example, you have item A, and you want to trade it for item B. Because you are trading for item B, you pay the market 1,000,000 gold to facilitate the trade. You do not pay the other player; you pay the market that makes the trade possible.
For me the biggest issue with no trade is that it will almost certainly mean the game will only be a niche player in the genre. And if it becomes too niche, it will impact everything from content creators to EHG itself if they can’t sell enough copies and MTX to support continued development at a scale players really want.
Another issue is that some top tier rolled items (such as 4LP of a specific item) are designed to basically never drop for you in a seasons duration. And so, without trading it’s kind of a bummer to have such chase items that are completely unobtainable during the season without trade (and a large population of players). Such rarity works better for non seasonal games AND for items that aren’t best in slot for any builds. The hardest to find Diablo 2 holy grail items really are just for collecting rather than using.
My issue with gifting is that it works OK for a group of friends but in PUGs you may end up with selfish people that won’t share with you even if you share with them. And if you get a godly item you can only get back what those people with you are willing to give.
Free trade lets you get fair value for the item. This expands the game greatly for people that love to craft and want to spend crafting currency to make an even better item to sell.
Can you please provide some examples or other sources of information that suggest this is true?
But I feel like that exactly what this survey is for.
EHG wants to see how they can alienate the least players, while still holding true to their vision.
“Trade” is multi layered thing and different people expect different thigns from it.
On top of that, you don’t really know if its gonna be “niche”, because despite the outrage (which was expected), there are actually quite a few people actively supporting the direction of gifting.
So while there might be a lot of players that gonna be alienated, there might be as well a lot players coming in, because they try something different.
I personally think that this whole thing will give LE a little bit of a rougher start (with less peak numbers early on) but over time if they keep the game in the right track, they will show and prove to people, that it can be done differently.
If people start realising trade is not the only solution to the main reason they wanted to have trade, they might give LE a chance, even if they initially didn’t play the game because of no trade.
Yeah, and I’m sure d4 is going to be a “niche player” because it isn’t going to have the trade system you’re describing either.
Of all the arguments on the subject, this is by far the most ridiculous. There’s no evidence that most people care about having a full blown auction house like you do. In fact there’s more evidence that people don’t want that.