Currently, the only currency for trading is gold. How do you like the idea to allow for other trading currencies, such as:
keys, including harbinger eyes
runes, like rune of creation or runes of ascendence
shards, like lvl. of whatever shards
or even numbers of items, such as 20 rings or 10 amulets, or 30 random uniques…
I think that some really interesting trades and strategies would appear. E.g. trading gor random items and RoA for rng luck uniques. Or trading for Harby eyes to aberroth farm. Or trading to target rare shards…
The biggest issue I think would come of that, is a subset of players who will min-max those trading strategies you mention and e.g. create a pure Aberroth farm build that trades (some of) the drops for more runs. This is also why dungeon keys don’t drop inside that dungeon itself: The design intent is that you need to occasionally not be doing that specific content for keys.
A potentially lesser issue is what D2 had: where an item just becomes the new de facto currency. Imagine if all the prices on the Bazaar were just “X RoA” instead. That would create no “interesting trades” at all, and only ever devalue the use of RoA for its intended purpose.
Plus, it would disable their ability to ever implement a “tax” system to reduce gold inflation in MG, especially in Legacy (but it’s even visible in seasons).
I feel like that would be just … messier and not fun. I’m not against selling/buying things you listed, but trading without gold as intermediary ?
Why would I choose to sell for a very specific thing (like 20 affixes of +1 to a skill), knowing that I will have way more potential buyers if I go for universal currency ?
Or if I hunt for a specific unique with X LP, the chances that there is a better/more convenient deal than with gold is very limited. That would just be frustrating to see that the only item that I’m searching for is listed for 20 bananas and a song.
Also, nobody will ever use “number of items, such as 20 rings” when it’s incredibly easy to come by. I mean, 20 exalted rings ? I probably can farm that in… 1 or 2 minutes, in empowered monos ? So what, people will ask for a ludicrous amount of the items ? “I have a 3LP Tempest Maw, I’ll exchange that for 140 exalted rings”. I don’t want to collect 140 random trash exalted. That doesnt sounds like fun, and it’s the exact reason why EHG made vending items in town such a pointless thing : they don’t want the game to be too tedious and cumbersome. Even the seller will be annoyed when he makes a sell : "Oh great, now I have to sort out those X random items that fills pages of my stash and will probably be all T6 Increased Stun.
1 no. Key tab will be added to count them like shards to free space and not to trade at all
2 and 3 no for MG as both are planned for somekind of exchange like common affix 5 shards for 1 skill shard. And something for runes, if I’m not wrong
4 no. Wrong game
The changing of the core system type itself isn’t good, while PoE’s system is functioning the current one can (it isn’t currently, thanks to awful setup) be functioning.
It suffices the detach trading from gold and create a specific currency solely for trade + a guaranteed over-time sink. Buying and selling as a taxation should be a decent start with more - they need to be viable ones - options beyond.
This also allows to reduce the value commonly traded by a magnitude. A good measurement would be 1 to 1000 roughly. So while you would get 1k gold you instead get 1 of this specific currency at the same time when playing MG.
This would alleviate the current issue of - very easily - reaching the technical gold limit for item prices, making the upper end of trading functional again and staying at least for a while.
It’s funny that GGG did such a great job with PoE1 (your words) and botched the same principles so bad on PoE2. We’re getting a massive inflation rise because they got rid of the sink you had in PoE1, namely crafting bench recipes that used divines, so now divines have no real use for crafting, everyone is hoarding them and their price (and all item prices as a consequence) is skyrocketing out of control.
First of all that’s the wrong premise you’re going by, the reasoning is not divines having no use, it’s the other crafting mechanics providing a bottleneck which didn’t exist formerly.
Namely alteration orbs, which means no high-end items to divine are created reliably which means the value for divines is notoriously low despite being hard to obtain. The solution would be to increase the drop-rate for annulment orbs massively instead to counteract it.
But that’s a PoE 2 issue and we’re in the Last Epoch Forum, I’ve left the feedback according to that there already.
It functions and is not at the technical limitation though, that would be a inventory full of mirrors as a price as a breaking point, which we can both agree is nigh impossible to achieve. We see that exact issue though in Last Epoch as the storage limit for gold is reached. Hence there need to be measures taken to counteract that since the system otherwise is not functional.
And a functional system is always superior to a non-functioning system, no matter the downsides. hence if the potential of another system is higher you adapt it until it is made functional… which LE has the option currently and should’ve focused on as it would be the biggest selling point currently in the genre on the market.
We don’t see that focus though, maybe it’ll change, maybe not… it’s wasted potential in the current state though.
That’s not what longtime creators in PoE, like Ghazzy and Ziz, have said, though. Which makes sense. You spend a lot more divines in creating an item via recipes (for example, the prefix/suffix locks) than you actually do divining a finished one.
It’s funny you saying that when your very first sentence in the post brought up PoE in the first place.
Well, that proves the (quite obvious, really) fact that you cannot have a viable long-term economy based on a resource that keeps on growing all the time and never disappears.
Cyclical games might, just about, get away with it thanks to the time limit, but Legacy (or too long cycles) will always be doomed.
I don’t know if the best solution is simply a tax, or a brand new MG currency, or what the OP suggests. But Kulze is right on one point: doing nothing at all cannot possibly work.
None of them are dedicated crafters, especially Ziz has a very skewed view since he’s a HC player. So always take those infos with a grain of salt, there’s no big major crafting streamers as it’s not really enticing streaming content, you’ll have to look out for the posts in Reddit and the Forums as well as asking crafters. I’m one of those people actually, I craft nigh everything since I got ages old characters (which the build sucks by now but I want to outfit them optimally nonetheless) where I try to achieve mirror-crafts by now.
The bench missing is definitely a downside there, but it’s not game-breaking. The second biggest aspect is unique divining after all, which is strong in PoE 2, and the third one is top-tier item divination. Especially for the top tiers it can take thousands of divines to finish a single item depending on affixes, especially armor or accuracy are 2 major contenders for that.
The correlation with LE is also there, it’s fairly visible even if you look out for what the symptoms are. Since gold caps you can’t reliably trade top-tier items, that’s a worst-case scenario breaking the progression completely.
And since there is no (viably rewarding, that’s important. LA is not viable as it is a higher cost then outcome in 99% of the cases and hence long-term will always loose you equivalent gold-value, so it’s avoided) sink of any kind unlike in PoE that also means people will get more and more of the currency which causes items to become respectively higher priced at the same range of power.
The 2 pillars of a game economy are:
removal of the currency through a reliable mean to counteract inflation as well as possible. No matter the option, as long as it’s used reliably.
Ensuring the numerical value of said currency is kept as low as possible to ensure the longest possible functionality for the market before it breaks, this allows the time to implement methods to counteract any sort of theoretical end-of-life situation through new content.
Currently LE sadly breaks both of the pillars, and that means it won’t ever function. A single pillar could uphold the house maybe… wonky but maybe. But none? There’s nothing to hold up the system which builds upon it.
I hope they will never ever implement the ability to trade access to bosses.
I absolutely despise putting a market value on a boss attempt. It absolutely disincentivices trying to actually learn a boss, because if you are not 100% safe and successful there is too much risk in attempting it your self and you are much better selling the access.
