I am deeply in agreement with EHG’s early philosophy of item drop.
Therefore, so far I believe EHG is right about trade system. 
Personally, Shopping game is enough exist one. 
Edit
EGH→EHG 
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There is only one solution for us all. The community that I often see on in-game-chat loves Grim Dawn. There are also people (max 5% of whole community) that mention about “PoE is better…because have trade-system” but still play LE somehow. For me and those who love Grim Dawn it is clearly that we like SSF and possibility to obtain the best possible gear without trading and spending whole day on marke-place. I like to PLAY and kill monsters to drop unique items, gather them and makeing builds around them. I wish LE have NPC that sell me an very rare things for a reputation (or other value that I need to gather) I gathered in dangerous places. I don’t need other people to trade. But for those people that would like it - just make separate OPEN world-multi-player-online-AREA where they can join, trade, SCAM, steal, use BOTS, use third-system-programs…whatever. Just don’t make others like me - who want to JUST play offline - to suffer. Also don’t balance drop rates down because of trading. I’m playing longer then 2 years and didn’t drop single Bastion. I not want to spent next 10 years to drop one item after MP comes. And I don’t want to trade it. Just let me play how it is.
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I dont disagree, my earlier comment was I dont really care if there is no active trading in LE as long as the developers address some way to make boss uniques only farmable in some other fashion
But others players like myself also get dopamine from finding valuable things we can trade away for others so it works both ways
Seriously what are you actually talking about here, the whole point of consumable items to drop is to be used. Just because LE’s crafting is much more simpler doesnt change the fact you are still ‘feeding orbs into a slot machine’ do you want to know how many T18+ Staves I ‘bricked’ trying to get a 5th Affix from a Despair rune? It was over 12 staves and I gave up. Never hit it, thats me 'feeding orbs into a slot machine correct? Since I had no control on the outcome all I could do was click and pray for a result. I couldnt ‘block mods’ from appearing or use other knowledge in place to secure affixes or narrow them down
Still I stand by my point to me it sounds like overcomplicated cherrypicking but maybe I missed something and I’ll reread the post again when I have more time at my hands 
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No problem farming 25h for an item IF i get the item in the end. I’m not that har into the grind anymore that I’m happy with .0006% drop rates from back when I played LI2 ^^. Kadala is BS true .
Yeah but you have no options in LE you need to targetfarm the same old mind numbing boring content to get the target farm anyway Why should I need to do other boring content to finaly get the item I grinded for? I don’t want instant gratification but I don’t like needlessly complicated systems as well if you know what I mean . I’m all for getting items while playing but in a timeframe that isn’t bonkers ^^.
Well I like trading as a general idea and I think it’s mandatory to have (almost) free trade with friends just so you know where I’m coming from because You are wrong here. Smart people will always play the market and get rich and richer no matter what. Not everyone is good at trade and market maipulation and those players will be shafted because a Bastion for example will sooner or later cost a bazzillion of whatever rubberducks are used as a made up currency. I don’t think your oppinion will stand a reality check at all but that’s just my oppinion 
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That’s all me as well as my friends and the community member of my clan want as well. I simply try to find a middle ground for everyone but I think it’ll never gone happen .
Uhm it’ss like that in every game I played with free trade it’s simply supply and demand. If something is in high demand people need to pay a lot that’s true to every game of the past. There need to be a game system in place so items can only be sod for a said ammount and then there will still be rich and poor out there.
That’s why walking sim builds are so fun ^^.
How early are you talking? I think you ment the recent change of mind from their philosophy they advertised since kickstarter and what they shied away from not long ago.
Yeah EHG ends the circus and comes to a final verdict no matter the consequenses.
raises his lil fist (almost) free trade for friends ftw!*
Its basically putting Kadala with guarantee uniques for a significant cost at the end of a Dungeon… if you want a needlessly complicated system I can show you pictures of peoples Harvest garden setups in PoE …you will go insane
LE isnt in the position currently now or in the very near future to just ‘allow’ free trading without serious changes to their core systems as everything will just not make sense, you do realise one of the most commonly traded currencies in PoE rarely gets used by players it just sits in a stash or gets passed to another player either accumulating/devaluing on a daily basis rarely do they leave the economy by a spread of players, most of the Divines are consumed by a very small percentage of crafters
The other is Chaos orb which I rarely even consume anymore, dont need them to reroll maps, or gear. you use them to add mods to your maps…they have little value these days, and why Divine orbs went to 300chaos as you can only fit 600chaos in your inventory per trade
If free trade was allowed in LE and someone found a Ravenous Void what would it be worth?
I will say this when D2 original and the Expansion were released. I was able to trade freely. IT was fun I had mules and I was able to help friends. Decades later D2R gets released. And sadly a third party website ruined the trade market now players were able to use real money to buy items. I wish trading could have limits to prevent the pay 2 win mindset of many players today that is my greatest fear for Last Epoch.
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Staves are not consumables. Staffs are items you can use. When you got that staff with the right affixes you got excited, because its the tool you needed to play your character. When you got your second, third etc staff you are now hoping for an improvement, to make an end game item. Obtaining end game gear is not supposed to be easy, regardless of the ARPG you play.
The difference between a staff and an orb is that an orb could be anything. It doesn’t matter anymore if you want an endgame staff, axe, mace or helmet. Since getting a good item as drop is impossible the only thing that matters is collecting as many orbs as you can - hence the farming simulator. You run around the map and you pick orbs, something a script can do for you (why do you think POE is infested with farming zombie bots?).
There is no player involvement at all… you don’t get to evaluate item affixes, you don’t get to make a decision if an item is worth collecting. Every time an exalted staff dropped in LE you took a second to read its stats and you made a judgement call if that staff was worth picking. POE takes all of that away.
I’m filling out the survey and I’m really torn, because…
Many of the questions regarding trade, assuming trade is added to the game, I’ve answered with a “pro-trade” stance.
That being said my very first answer is that trade would make me unhappy but if it’s added I will use it to find the optimal gear.
So I just want to say that I hope all the answers that look “pro-trade” are weighted by the fact that I personally don’t want trade added.
That being said I wasn’t around for the previous test weekend and I’m not sure how Gifting worked, but I think Gifting to friends is a totally viable option.
Honestly the drop rates have felt good enough that for the most part I’ve felt like I can find any item in the game, and I would hate to see the drop rates go down.
Unlessss…Solo Self-Found drop rates continue as they are and I can continue to play that way?
I guess the thousands and thousands of rare items for sale right this moment on PoE magically appeared there and were not looted off the ground or crafted by someone no they appeared by apparent bots who are low level Necromancers farming small liquid currency items
I’m not interested in having an economy or an “auction house” or anything of the sort, and I absolutely 100% agree with the rationale behind the choice to deprioritize trading in Last Epoch. But rather than explicitly preventing it or heavily mediating it, I’d prefer to have trading be completely unrestricted but also unprotected, because sharing with my friends who are playing the game is a core part of how and why I enjoy games.
I think as a stopgap solution, only allowing gifting to people who were there when the item was dropped is alright, but that then has the negative incentive of not wanting to play without my friends in case I get a good drop for them that I then can’t share. In that circumstance, me getting a good drop that I don’t really want becomes worse than a non-event, it becomes someone else missing out. I agree that the game should be about trying to get the things you want yourself, but I think that actually engaging with your personal community can be a fulfilling part of that - asking around to see if anyone else has any spare idols with a given buff, or a friend realizing they’re low on a specific shard and being able to give them some, or getting a really good staff drop that I can give to someone playing a mage but would otherwise ignore, those are all things that enhance our shared experience.
So I’d rather have trading be no more than “if I drop an item on the ground in a safe zone with other players, they can all see it and pick it up”. The only changes I’d make for this would just be for convenience, rather than limitations:
- Items dropped in field zones don’t show up for other players and remain instanced to you, just so there’s no confusion about whether something was dropped by a player or is just loot
- Loot filters are disabled in safe zones so you can always see the things other people dropped
- A way to drop gold would also be appreciated
So no safety measures to allow for people who are specifically trading to be protected from scams, because that is the behaviour that it seems you want to discourage, and also no measures to prevent people from doing it anyway if they accept the risk and that’s what they want to do. People will certainly establish out-of-game auction houses or trading agreements on top of that, and procedures to mitigate risk like trusted middlemen or dead-swap protocols, and I think those are all cool consequences that are really interesting to observe. The challenging part is making it clear as the maintainers of the game that this behaviour is explicitly unprotected and unmoderated, and that there is absolutely no recourse if you lose out. It’s on the community to moderate itself here.
If people choose an experience of the game that includes using these tools, great! Good for them. Trust that others whose experience will not be improved by them will simply choose not to use them. For me, and most people I know, it’s much more important that we can be communally excited about our finds, because that makes playing the game together that much better. Any direct restriction that’s effective at preventing trading will make the system itself essentially so limited it’s not worth considering at all, and is roughly equivalent in value to it remaining completely impossible to share items.
Having the opportunity to trade with friends is nice, but if an open trading system were about to emerge, it would imply a sharp decrease in drop rate to balance the game and the newborn economy.
Problem is, for people who do not have an economy farming approach and would not be happy to trade (mainly because it implies to know the drop rates, the current prices of each single items not to be scammed, and so on and that’s not necessarily what you want to think about when you play a hack n slash game), that the pleasure of dropping good items would be severely reduced, and thereby would force them to make trades (in which they don’t take any form of pleasure) to have a decent chance to continue improving. The reward and pleasure in ARPG coming mainly from farming and dropping good items.
For trades, I can just go on spend my time on a stock exchange.
Last but not least, if a form of PvP would have to see the day one day, it means that it would be the people with the biggest wallet who would me the more competitive, which doesn’t seem enjoyable to me, since the issue of the fight wouldn’t be the result of the time and effort the person spent in his character but rather the amount of money or currency spent in its gear.
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So I am very much on the “against-trade” side of things, but I actually have to disagree with one thing you said here
It doesn’t really matter if trade is there or not.
Even the person with that amount of currency did play the game for that.
So at the end it will be the person who put more time into improving their character.
Having trade or no trade doesn’t really change that, because the currency need ot come from somewhere.
The things you do to get the items for you character would very likely be different, but at the end of the day its about who puts more hours into the game (or who is “more efficient”).
Both farming for currency (when they is an economy) or traget farming specific items slots (via target farming capabilities) does consume X amount of time).
Well correct me if I am wrong then, I have €, I spend them to buy currency of the game, then I trade currency against items.
Where is the amount of time I spent in my chat to hear it ?
Wait, you are talking about RMT (real money trading) here.
That is related to a more open trade discussion, because more open trade system can have RMT as a side effect.
But it was not clear to me that you talked about RMT in your post.
I thought you meant with “biggest wallet” the people that already played thousands of hours and have ingame currency stacked up.
I watn to add another response to this, because I haven’t seen this brought up yet.
Witht he current gifting system, there are multiple ways, that while very awkward, would allow dedicated people to set up systems to enable people to group up and have significantly more efficient progression/grinding. This would lead to very specific bits of content you do, and specific sways in which you do them together, to get gear as efficiently as you can. It would be awkward, not super fun, and with very very very little choice, and would enable a lot of griefing.
If the current system of gifting was the only thing that we went into the game with, a lot of the negatives people have brought up about trade would be in the game. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t dropped the drop rates yet, the drop rates are higher doing the optimal thing, becuase its optimal. Therefore to match the pace of what people see from content creators etc… who are more likely to be doing the efficient stuff, or in races, again the optimal stuff 100%, they would have to be doing that same stuff, otherwise they are getting gear way slower.
As far as I see it right now, opinions on if trade is good or bad in the game are meaningless. The game already has the negatives, you can’t avoid it with any implementation of trade, because players will figure out how to use the systems the best way they can. All you can do is make it so it doesn’t have more negatives, and right now it does, way more.
The general feedback has always been that either people who are for trade love the idea of bazaar type stuff. Or people dont want trade at all. Those are the two camps. Clearly with this survey, you’ve realised that trade is something that the game will suffer without, clearly with gifting being added previously, you understand the feedback you’ve got constantly since bazaar was declared not happening, about the need to be able to trade with freinds.
So for me this really comes down to a pretty simple resolution, it sucks for people who don’t want trade, truly, but when gifting alone has created super awkard, bad, optimal gameplay, and people desire a way to trade with friends at the very least, adding an actual trade system makes sense, and tying in the bazaar to it makes sense. That’s what the majority of posts have always been wanting, have always been asking for. Gifting was an attempt, but let’s be real, it misses the mark in nearly every situation.
It’s ya’lls game at the end of the day, but you really need to just accept that the idea of very limited/no trade is a bad idea, and to an extent in the case of limited trade, just very naïve about what players will do with a system. Sure bazaar could end up similiar, but the thing is you shouldn’t fight it, if the players go down a route, just make it fun for them. Don’t fight them on it.
Also lets be real, by ya’ll making this about trade vs drop rates, so many responses from mroe casual people (by their own omission, at least in terms of calling others ‘hardcore’ players) currently into the game have just been that if trade comes they’ll stop playing, because they dont want reduced drop rates. THis is gonna massively conflate all your data, and I hope whoever over there is pro-trade realises this enough to point it out in whatever discussions you have, cus goddamn lmao. (But also drop rates are way too high as it stands so ya know…)
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Considering how rare some items are, I don’t think so. LE already have very scuffed drop rates for their more rare drops. The most I’m ok with is 20% reduced drop rate, accounting you get 1 Orion’s Eye every 800h as it is right now (on average) .
I don’t think it is fair to balance the game around trade; drop-rates should not be affected. I think it has already been established that free-trade is off the table, but it is imperative from my perspective to be able to trade with my friends - that is the whole reason we got into the game; the promise of being able to trade among ourselves.
With the game already aiming to have microtransactions, I have said before that I wouldn’t care if there was an additional monetary cost to enable trading - such as a trade agreement or the purchase of a shared ‘Guild Stash’ where items could be exchanged between a small group of individuals.
Edit:
I also do not believe that there should be restrictions on Idols or Affix Shards; this has been discussed before but I believe it to be an unnecessary restriction (much like the current ‘gifting’ system).
how can i “trade with friends” if i’m solo player ???
You can’t with the current system.
the thing I fear most is tons of botters / flippers /cheaters that enevitably would appear with open trading available in LE. I don’t want that. And I’m not against trading as is. No. But I don’t see a way to avoid all those scummers and RM trading.
For me - restricted trading (aka Bazaar) was the best solution. Where other players are just randomly selected and you see what they can offer as if they were NPCs. So you can barter with them or straight buy their items with gold.
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