Merchants Guild (Bazaar) Should Have Rewards

[smacru]

CoF has Prophecies, these give HUGE bonus’ when farming anything, idols, weapons, armor, you name it CoF probably has it. It makes CoF so enjoyable I’ve only watched things about Merchants guild (I did select it, walked around for 5 minutes, realize how big Bazaar was and said nope.).

Why would I bring up Prophecies?
Well, if Merchants had “Prophecies” something like you go to the Bazzar to talk to (similar to CoF) a accessory trader, weapon trader, armor trader, or idol trader, you could have these people give you missions, like…
Ex. “Find a Thorn from Blood Spires”
These “Thorns” or whatever the mission would entail, could have a drop rate, nothing too rough so that way you can at least get 1 done in a mission if you have a handful of these.
Edit: Not trying to have this be a “worse CoF” type of thing, but some sort of reward for doing something within the guild.

What about trading?
I think everyone agrees, there should be NO friction when it comes to trading. It shouldn’t be faster for me to edit my loot filter, drop all my items, pick up the ones that are better, and reorganize my stash, then it is for me to price check a sword, axe, helm, and boots I got dropped in my last map. The solution? Make a single NPC in Monoliths or a button that opens a menu in the Y (Guild menu - similar to the “View Observatory” button), at the top of this new menu, have 4 sections “Weapons, Armors, Accessories, Idols” from there you can use filters to sort for what you need.
Even a hotkey to price check an item, Ex. “Hover + CTRL + J” instantly pulls up a menu and shows you all those same items listed, then you could change LP amount and see whats there.

If you read all of this thank you. I’m just an average ARPG enjoyer, I play these games for fun, Last Epoch is the most fun I’ve had in an ARPG in years, probably because I’m doing everything myself. I do love to trade, I feel like a lot of others agree when I say that trade needs more… or less. I cant imagine the endless nights the devs have put into making this game what it is today, and what it will be in 1, 5, 10 years. The amount of work that has gone into the Bazaar and CoF was not an understatement. I do believe trade needs some more work to have it compete with CoF.

[Jerle]

@smacru

I think everyone agrees, there should be NO friction when it comes to trading.

I’m a strong advocate for trade (especially in LE) and I disagree with this statement.

[syltphademus]

I do think MG needs more to it than it currently has (especially for offline play), but I don’t think ‘CoF but worse’ is the right play.

[smacru]

I’m interested to understand why you think trading should have friction? Some maybe, but having 2 load screens and taking 30 mins to price check 5 things is a bit too much no?

[Jerle]

There are two ways to get items in ARPGs - “playing the game” and trading. Each has its own associated friction - playing the game means “going out there to kill monsters” while trading means dealing with whatever inconveniences in trading. Also remember that everyone is looking for the easiest way to get items and gear up; often times, people would sacrifice fun just to reach their gearing goals faster.

A frictionless trade system means it would always be easier to gear through trading than playing the game. I think it’s obvious at this point why that’s not a desirable situation. And this is also why POE hesitate to make trading any more convenient for players.

[smacru]

I do agree with this. Like I had said, I’m just an average ARPG enjoyer, I dont know all the ins and outs and why _ is like _ yet. This makes sense, I only have 2k hours in PoE and I do find myself buying way more often then I need to because its just open site > filter > whisper > accept inv > done. So I do agree, but with the current amount of friction, I don’t want to play MG. If there was 1 trader, or 4, and it didn’t take so long to load (will hope on a fix for that eventually) I’d play trade.