There have also been plenty of ARPGs that do have trade that aren’t big or fail. Trade isn’t the deciding factor for most ARPGs that either fail or stay niche.
Inquisitor - Martyr has trade, and it isn’t big, even though it gets lots of updates. It’s not even that bad of a game. Their servers are at least better than Wolcen’s.
As much as people like to hate on it, Diablo 3 is pretty popular and has no trade. Considering how few content updates it has gotten, it is doing surprisingly well.
Torchlight Infinite launched without trade from what I could gather, but it was later added. Seems to be doing fairly well, even though it’s a mobile game.
Undecember (This is an ARPG right?) seems to be doing okay - but it only has 48% positive reviews as of now. There is no direct trading as far as I understand it, but that doesn’t seem to be the reason for it’s low score. That seems related to their choice of anti-cheat.
Torchlight 3 failed for reasons other than trade.
Wolcen.
What are some other server authoritative ARPGs? I can’t think of all of them. Did they fail, succeed? What are the reasons why?
We really have no idea how big D3 is anymore. But there really aren’t many people clamoring for D3 party trade in other games. I play D3 each season but the big reason why party only trade isn’t an issue is that items drop like candy and there are lots of crafting options to reroll items. Gear acquisition in that game isn’t nearly as fun or immersive to me compared to D2R or POE.
Undecember unfortunately has an auction house with a currency you can buy for cash. It’s pretty P2W honestly. Their population on Steam is not great but the game failed in South Korea pretty badly the year before it came west. Their recent content update didn’t really move the needle much population wise.
Torchlight Infinite doesn’t have multiplayer at all yet, but I’m pretty sure they had the trade house in season 1 and definitely do in season 2. Season 2 attracted fewer players than season 1, at least on Steam, and that trend is likely to continue. They, like Undecember and D:Immortal, have mobile markets as well though.
Wolcen was abandoned by the players and devs for too long to recover. But they are adding the promised next chapter in the story. I don’t know what the trade situation was there as I ended up playing offline due to the servers not even working the first few days.
Pagan Online bombed hard at launch and they abandoned the online portion of the game. I thought it was just an unpolished game with weird design choices.
Marvel Heroes Online lasted several years but was shut down in part due to a sexual harassing CEO and the game not being profitable enough for Marvel. Mu Legends and Devilian were just ports of mediocre P2W Korean MMOARPGs. These were just cash grabs.
ARPGs fail to capture a large enough audience to continue development for lots of reasons. We know that the most popular ARPGs have had open trade. We know that trade is already a very divisive issue just among the people on these forums and the subreddit. And we know that not having a free market in your ARPG is accepting a non negligible number of potential customers will avoid your game.
I’m curious to see if they can come up with a way to limit trade and allow you to target improve your character that doesn’t rely on super low percentage RNG. If they can do that maybe the game will indeed stand out as player friendly and different. And able to build a dedicated following over time. I think that’s a huge risk for a 100+ person company making a game that can’t leverage a well known IP.
Oh god I forgot about Pagan Offline (it’s now called Pagan Absent Gods, the irony)
To me it looks most ARPGs fail or succeed not due to the presence or absence of trade, but based on how the developers treat the game (updates, maintenance, server stability, etc).
Path of Exile is a special case, as it is the only ARPG that we know reaches the numbers it does. I doubt either Diablo 2 or 3 reach anywhere near those numbers, but I think that’s at least partially due to it having no box cost.
One thing the most popular ARPGs have in common is a ladder. Diablo 2 and 3 both have a ladder, as does Undecember.
I think a large part of the reason that Last Epoch has a strong core community, in an early access state, is due to the ladder. I believe it has gotten bad over the last year, but EHG tried to stay on top of it in the past. With the move to authoritative servers, the ladder will not be so easily cheated.
Maybe the presence of a ladder is more important than trade?
Martyr always was trash tier and only the 40k fanboys play it because 40k is written over it. The game and the fundamental game systems have been so bad I had to tell them 15 times that you can become invincible without problems because the math of the game is flwaed from start to finish. The Meta is still pretty much the same and they game suffers from the same problems it had from release and the promises they broke. Martyr is a pathetic excuse of a game.
D3 was sold as a game with an auction house to begin with so the popularity isn’t that big because of trade or non trade. D3 is doing well because the entrance level is low and you get as much loot as in other games when you run a 1000% mf cheat. People like to be showered in items and D3 offers the most time respecting gameplay of every hack and Slay game out there that has seasons.
TLI still has no multiplayer compatibility so it’s apples vs oranges but if the only way to trade is the AH it’ll still be a flawed experience.
Undecember is the most p2w crap game out there and unbalanced af… don’t even start with this abomination of a game.
TL3 was hands down crap.
As of today wolcen ist still a bad joke but makes some people happy who always wanted a bit nicer graphics on a hack and slay
Well Lost Ark is a hack and Slay mmo but other then the ones you counted outside of PoE and Hero Siege I can’t think of any. Then again we had a lot of pretty bad hack and slay releases since D2 so there isn’t much to speak of from my point of view.
Every Hack andSlay has their little niche but I hardly can’t belive it’s worth to keep them rolling when I look at Wolcen for example and I even have a hard time thinking about Martyr but then again 40k fanboys buy everything 40k is written over.
Well I have been playing this game for almost 4, and a half years without trade, so honestly, I dont care too much about it, but if it were implemented in such a way that it felt great to the majority of players - casuals, and grinders, then I would be ok with it, and I would most likely participate in trade too.
What if we we make trade the last straw option? Free trade but every time you want to buy an item you need to pay the item price and 25% of your saved gold vanishes in thin air… let’s say time want it’s taxes back from our char who’s jukmping back and forth in time or whatever. The rich can’t get richer and at some point people think twice if the buy an item that will cost 2005000 just because they accumulated so much gold.
On top of it RMT sides can’t sell so much because if they use trade to buy an item to deliver money to a buyer they loose all collected gold they have left and gold is account wide but not tradeable.
This is kind of two birds with one stone minimises trade but still leaves the option to get a desired item every now and then and make people want to get rid of excess gold and use it because it vansihes while trading so no items that cost billions of gold, no To little RMT and still free trade that restricts itself because it disposses players.
Just a wild thought that crossed my mind all of the sudden.
hello everyone, I wanted to give my opinion, as a last epoch player I have more than 1000 hours played in this game. Trading is vital for many of us, since it motivates us to craft things we like, if trading is reduced to just in games of 4… it’s a bad experience. I think trade should be free, like; have an auction house and that you can trade everything, a rune for an item for example and that nothing is tied to 4 players. Thank you and I hope that the trade changes the truth
The developers made a wise decision to go with a restricted system for sharing items. Limiting trade to only allow gifting of items to players that were present in the same session when the item dropped is the way to go. This will encourage people to play together as they can share their spoils, without the negative consequences of a global trading system.
If global trading will be introduced, at the very least it should be limited to items that are below a certain rarity. Unrestricted global trading will lead to bots and spam because there will be real money traded for items and in-game currency; players can just buy all their end-game equipment, and Pay-2-Win is anathema to fun.
If so, can we please have a survey that is heavily biased toward the negative impacts that trade has on ARPGs? Here are some sample questions I suggest:
Do you think that Last Epoch should be turned in to a pay-to-win game by allowing players to buy items that are advertised on third party web sites?
Do you think that the best geared and most wealthy players in the game should be people who flip items for profit?
Do you think that players should be required to spend more time trading than playing the game in order to progress in end game?
Do you want the drop rate of the best items in the game to be so astronomically low that you will never loot one for yourself?
Do you enjoy having to sell almost all of the great items that you find in order to earn enough to buy the items that you need to progress?
Do you enjoy having to spend time researching the value of every potentially valuable item that you find in order to ensure that you don’t get ripped off when you try to sell it?
Do you enjoy finding out that you that you previously sold an item for way less than it was worth?
Do you like it when almost none of the items on your character were found by you while playing the game?
Do you enjoy being constantly interrupted while playing the game by other players who want to buy one of your items?
Do you enjoy being insulted by toxic players after making them an offer that you felt was fair?
Do you enjoy spamming world chat or using third party web sites in order to sell each valuable item that you find?
Do you enjoy world chat to be flooded with trade spam?
Please make Last Epoch a great ARPG, not another trading sim.
I remember doing stuff like this after d3’s launch. I was just a 13yo kid, and I would just sit there and refresh the item screens until I saw something that looked conspicuously under priced. I would immediately buy it and then sell it for 2x or 3x more. I made tons of money this way, more than if I just played the game. The funny thing is that I didn’t even like doing it, I just couldn’t stop myself because “playing the market” was so much better than actually grinding for loot. Trade systems invariably divulge into these kinds of silly, cheesy behaviors. Please EHG, I want an ARPG not a stock market simulator.
The EHG team is approaching the size of GGG. They can’t get by on anywhere close to the concurrent numbers they’ve had. POE has had leagues that started with 100k+ concurrent users and stated that they still didn’t make enough money. And that they can only afford to have that happen one league per year.
The “core community” for LE isn’t nearly large enough, especially after pivoting on their trade philosophy in the kickstarter. You’d expect them to get well more than 10k requests to join the beta test on the first day alone. Yet they had openings for quite some time. And unfortunately only hit 2k+ at the pack the server time.
Inquisitor Martyr has ladders and is pretty middling in terms of population. Wolcen will add ladders and I don’t see that saving them.
Grim Dawn has seasons but the lack of dedicated servers hinders interest in their game. LE having ladders and dedicated servers but limited trading will hinder their ability to attract lots of players from other games.
That’s the problem bias all 16 points are invalid… some a little some to an extend that is funny if you are into bad jokes :).
Then again it’s important that you told the devs their survey is baised and not good enough from your point of view and that you want a game without more then gifting tops.
Then again the 16 points made me giggle that much I can’t be serious about anything I read there anymore ^^.
If they where to do it and hopefully figure out hoops to keep the bots at bay, and not crush thedrop rates, my vote would be for unmodified normal magic rare 0lp unique and shards, no glyphs lp unique or exalted.
all 16 points are invalid… some a little some to an extend that is funny if you are into bad jokes :).