I’m not ready to give any information on 1.0 yet at all.
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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.
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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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 
.
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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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In the not so distant future you will be able to feed it what you are looking for in a build, and ChatGPT will spit out a planner for you, complete with a leveling progression guide. For additional fun I wonder what it would say if you fed it the recently(awesomely) transcribed dev stream 
Unfortunately the transcribed dev stream is too long for chatgpt to handle
I should probably be slightly concerned that you know this, but I’m not.
When I compare with other ARPG / MMORPG I played, I can understand why trading is such a crucial issue :
WoW auction house was fun, but I remember spending significant time in it. Diablo 3 auction with direct purchase was a pay-to-win and sucked the fun out of the game. And PoE crafting and economy is so complex that it’s a barrier of entry to new players, and it’s very hard for casual to get into it. So yeah, extensive trading = extensive time spent “not playing” the game.
But, on the other hand, I also tried farming Exsanguinous for 20 hours (which is a long time for my casual-gamer-adult-life), with no luck. I keep telling myself that trading would have maybe allowed me to sell the other stuff I got for that item (and relieved some of my frustration).
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Yeah. If they were open to expanding the gifting system after 0.9 they should have said it. There’s literally no excuse not to.
I’m not sure they were even open to expanding it when they wrote that gifting update. The survey they released was preceded with a statement that:
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.
Would it be beneficial to retake the survey after the questions in the survey have been altered since the survey first launched? Did it change much?
Honestly, I’d be fine with trade being limited to something like guilds / friends (even if they weren’t present while the item dropped) and limiting the people you can have on a friend list or in a guild.
My gripe as a casual player with the system as it stands is : I won’t always play at the same time as my friends, so me getting an item to drop for them or vice versa would suck.
I’m fine with higher drop rate but no game-wide trade (D3 loot 2.0 was fairly fun)
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I want either no trade at all, or a modified AH style. What I DON’T want is what PoE does. I don’t want to have to message random players and use a 3rd party site. I want to walk up to an NPC and just get the thing I want. No complication or scam. I would still prefer no trade at all with added ways to target farm.
For “modified” auction house, I mean putting in stopgaps so that people can’t corner the market on items and price gouge. For example, make it so a player can’t buy more than one of any given item per character. Can’t buy an item you also have up for sell. Can’t sell an item you just bought for 2 weeks or something.
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From a software engineering perspective, this is not an easy thing to do. Only way to do this in the exact way you are asking would be tracking every single friend/guild member per item, which is crazy. Current gifting is fine because they know the max number of party members is 4, that is only 3 players per item and always the maximum. Unless friend/guild member count is super limited, it is crazy to apply this to more than a party. And allowing trading with people who became your friend after the item dropped means basically no restriction.
Another possible solution I can think of is tracking when an item dropped. So suppose you dropped an item on February 19th, 11 AM. Anybody who was your friend before that exact time is allowed to trade the item. This system works 99% of the time just fine. But every once in a while you will have situations where a player is your friend when an item drops, then they stop being a friend and become friends with you again. But now you can’t trade the item anymore.
Amen. I see people saying trade will make people quit much earlier because they will be done with the game earlier. I don’t know about that. But I do know I quit multiple times because I have limited time to play games and doing the same content again and again for dozens of hours just to get a unique just to be able to try a build is not how I want to spend it.
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That’s exactly how it would be implemented and if they left your friends list then that’s a minor drawback.
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Fun thing, I also have a background in software engineering! The implementation I had in mind would be something like :
- Item drop date
- player for whom it initially dropped (calling him the “finder”)
- A function to check if the receiver was friend with the “finder” before the item drop date
- Since you can freely share loot between characters, I’d implement the friend thing to be on an account basis, rather than on a character basis.
- I’d also put a limit on the number of friends one can have
This way, your friend could also trade that item, but only with someone who was YOUR friend when the item dropped. A system that works 99% of the time (and more importantly, leaves little to no room to be abused) is fair enough. It may be because I’m old, but I don’t have that many gaming-friends. So unless the limit on the number of friends is super restrictive (say, less than 10), I don’t think I’d need to unfriend people on a regular basis.
So you admit you dont want to farm the same content over and over for an item, so what do you plan to do with the items once you get them?
if 20 hours to get the item is too long, do you plan to play for 20 hours after you have all your items for literally 0 purpose?
Based on your own statements, its a lose lose for you whether you get the items or not, because your issue isnt having items or not, its that you are not interested in the core gameplay loop which is doing a singular action for many hours.
Arpg’s are not really rich variety games. They are more about the systematic grinding then they are about story, or unique experiences. Tbh once you have done normal monoliths, there is nothing new to experience. Same thing with dungeons at t1. Tbh if your goal is to not have to regrind things? the game is done in about 10 hours tops. maybe 15 if you take the time to find one of every dungeon key.
So why do you even need gear? You can beat all the t1 dungeons and normal monoliths and experience everything the game has without needing a single item.
The reason you grind is to get better loot, so you can grind even faster for even longer for even better loot.
The way I read @DuckWho’s comment wasn’t a statement against grinding for better gear, but more about locking builds behind unique items that require too much of grinding.
To me, Last Epoch is all about trying new builds : Respec is easy and re-levelling is fast just for that reason. LE’s skills/passive system is also one of the best design I’ve seen in recent years. As someone who enjoy not following meta / builds-by-experts, I find it fun and refreshing when something “click” and you get a bump in power just because you changed your skills and their synergies.
Hence, the line I would draw is : locking a build (i.e. new gameplay) behind a very-hard-to-get-unique is a “No”, but locking 300 corruption / T4 dungeon behind a 2-3 Legendary Potential very-hard-to-get-unique is a “Yes”.
So yes, you’d still be grinding to get the best loot, but you’d have “easier” access to baseline loot that enables you to test whatever ideas pop your mind.
From a purely social view, I think that limited trading with friend is better than simply “increasing drop rate”. You can now be exited by the drops your friends get. Too much loot, and you have an experience like Borderlands 3 (where you don’t get that sweet dopamine rush anymore when uniques drop)
I agree with this take, but the problem is the definition of what is “build enabling”
unlike say LL in path of exile, where you get more auras, a new passive, etc, something like the LL ward items isnt a “new build” or “Build enabling” by that logic every unique is build enabling because by nature it adds a unique effect.
But if they are super common, they might as well not be unique. And most of the items people define as build enabling are just not in my opinion. People also like to point at herald of the scurry as build defining, when really its not. its just a really strong summon wolf helmet. All it does is add some damage to a wolf build. You can still play a wolf build without needing to use the helmet. its rare because it has potentially +3 summon wolf, built in shred, and good baseline stats as well. If they added a passive in the wolf tree that turned them from wolves to squirrels, it would not see as much hype as the helm generates imo and would then 1000% not be build defining.
I think people just want access to strong builds without having to grind for them.
But I think its a mix of items being too rare for their actual power level. Scurry and bastion deserve their rarity level. Where as stuff like plaguebearers staff and Exsang do not.
So its not just a “more drops of all kinds” situation, just the devs need to consider “why are some of these sought after items so rare, and do they warrant it?”
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Imo like half the “uniques/target farming” dilemma is just BoH and Exsang being absurdly dominant in their niche. “Shields being worth it” or “ward as a meaningful defensive layer” are not things that should depend on a solitary “build-enabler”. Ofc ppl get frustrated when they can’t find these items - the game has core mechanics which you practically don’t get to use until you get them.
In almost every other case there’s a graduated progression where t20 rares are perfectly serviceable, exalts are great and insisting on a perfect unique or legendary is just being impatient.