Yup, that’s going to be a really tough one for sure. I think we can do it 
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Not to be negative, but I don’t. As long as you can trade with strangers, there will be a “black market” for real money. Even if you make it completely anonymus over an ingame auction house, there will always be ways (see for example Arche Age). 
Doesn’t bother me much, but no game managed to block that effectively without restricting trading 
To add up, it’s not even about trading. There will always be RMT; no matter what game, loot system, platform or restrictions.
Creating restrictions for the game to avoid RMT always ends up with developers shooting themselves in the leg, just like Torchlight Frontiers has, which isn’t even brought up in ARPG discussions anymore.
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Like I said, the primary action that we are trying to restrict is RMT. We still want players to be able to get items in game through the Bazaar. We want the experience of being a RMT seller and the experience of being an RMT buyer to be difficult enough that it’s just not really worth it. We also want the in game systems to be good enough that it’s just a better experience to use the in game systems.
We know that people are going to do it. We just don’t want the main way that you gear out your character to be going and spending $20. We’re doing what we can to make playing the game fun and cheating at the game annoying and boring.
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May I ask how exactly are you planning to do that? I personally cannot imagine a system which would make the RMTers life harder, yet wouldn’t affect the average player.
The concept of RMT exists due to people having higher expectations than what their present or short term future goals are. What is hard for a buyer, is easy for a seller; this gap will always exist. I mean Venezuelans play manually to RMT for 0.5$ per hour in Runescape en masse.
Cannot trade = the seller will play on the account.
Restricted loot = the seller will have a group who will speedrun for the buyer.
Restricted trade = the seller will provide highest tier equipment for the buyer to sell over time.
Banning accounts = very bad idea.
Only way to lower player’s expectations is having easier to achieve milestones / achievements.
Only games where RMT barely exists that I know of are Street Fighter( no rewards, you get messed up too fast) and Team Fortress ranked mode( no rewards, too casual game). Even Diablo 3 which in my opinion is way too easy to use RMT for, has a giant RMT scene which is VERY CHEAP!
There are lots of little things that will help achieve this goal. I would love to dive deep on it but I don’t really have the time today. (trying to get some skill fixes in before the next patch). If you haven’t read the plans for the bazaar yet I’d give that a read as it outlines several systems which will deter RMT.
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It’s not a bad start, by restricting trades to mediocre items, their value will lessen the incentive to buy them with real money. At the same time, when you won’t be able to trade legendaries this comes at the cost of frustration, when you search for a specific legendary for ages, and only find ones that you don’t need.
Apart from that one loophole concerning RMT is obviously that you can buy gold for RMT, by placing a common item in the bazaar for 2 million gold, and the gold seller buys that from you, giving you the gold that way.
It’s a slippery slope, and when in doubt, I’ll always tend towards freedom of trade, and whoever thinks they need to buy stuff for RMT shall do so, I won’t.
(Depending if all legendaries will have the same rarity, you could include a legendary for legendary trade. You can’t buy a legendary for gold, but if you have one, you can offer it against another legendary. Maybe even restrict each legendary to only be tradeable once, so that it leaves the economy as soon at it was traded.)
Top tier items will be tradable through the bazaar. Some things people do to crafting those items could cause them to become untradable. For example, a crafting glyph could be 100% success chance but binds the item to you so it’s no longer tradable. (This isn’t implemented yet but it’s a general example)
Selling crazy cheap items for ultra high value will give a percentage to the bazaar itself, thus helping with inflation and repeatedly doing this may be cause for warnings. I say may because we haven’t set out specific guidelines as to what behavior is OK and what is not. We would be more interested in restricting the RMT gold sellers than the players interacting with those systems.
Because we want to foster a competitive scene we would like to keep RMT as rare as possible.
As for the legendaries, not uniques, most legendaries will not be tradable and yea it sucks to pick up one that you don’t need or want. We do have a plan for them to still be very useful. I don’t want to give too much away about that system because it’s still very early and could change but we do have a great plan for that.
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I said legendaries very deliberately 
I’m fine with everything that restricts or lessens RMT, it’s just that so many companies tried so often to get rid of them, None succeeded, and in the end all that was left was RMT still being a Thing but legit Players had to deal with strangest of restrictions because of it. I just hope that you don’t spend too much time on such Things, it’s basically the same as copy protections.
For sure, we know we can’t get rid of it completely and we aren’t going to try. The primary goal is to have the game be fun and engaging for the players.
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I like the discussion about the trading system. But I want to ask something about your multiplayer plans (if it is ok?
).
Are you able to share information on the following?
- I liked the Diablo 2 system very much: Creating own games with restrictions and gamenames that give a hint about what you want to do (e.g. monolith runs). In what direction are your plans going?
- What happens if somebody joins the 5th monolith run and ends it successfully? Will he get the arena key or does the counter function individually?
- Do you have plans to implement a “companion system” where players can choose a npc of one of the existing classes to aid in battles (also a feature from Diablo 2… this game was so awesome… sorry)? And if you do would we be able to bring those companions into multiplayer matches?
- Will there be a votekick system
- Will there be a system to report players for bad behavior, cheating or exploiting? Propably needs lots of resources on your side.
- Will there be emotes?
- Will there be prefab voicelines for things like “Follow me!”, “Need help!” or “Fuck me, they’re all over us! We’re doomed!”?
Would be nice to hear more about the multiplayer part.
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I would love to be able to give you the answers you are looking for with all those questions. Most of them aren’t really decided yet. D2 is a big influence in our online experience. We are going to make our system a little different in order to fit the different gameplay systems. I’ll do my best to give answers to what I can.
- It will probably be part way between D2 and PoE. We really like the D2 lobby system where you can create game names etc. We’re not a huge fan of the general separation that it can give to the community sometimes. We are probably going to make that lobby feel a little more like a town itself, which fun fact was the initial intention for D2 in the first place.
- First off, the rate at which you get arena keys will change dramatically. We know that the arena is a sweet system but we really don’t plan on it being the primary, secondary or even tertiary end game system when the game is released. It’s going to be more of an extra little thing you can do on the side sometimes. We initially added it as a way to have things to do when we only had 30 mins of content. I know that’s not really what the question was asking though, I tried to dodge it because I don’t know yet
I suspect that we will work out a system to try and make the player’s participation in an event reflect their reward proportionally. - I love D2 mercs too. It’s actually one of their primary character building systems. We currently don’t have any plans to have a merc style system in the base game. (reading between the lines means that this might come down the road as a temporary feature?)
- I’m not sure yet. I suspect that the party leader will have a little more control over the party than anyone else. We’ll have to discuss this internally before making an official decision on it.
- Yes, we will have a system to report bad behavior. I’m not sure what that will look like yet but we can’t really sustain a positive multiplayer environment without some sort of it. As a side note, I really loved the old LoL community arbitration system where you could participate in the disciplinary system and got a proportional reward for being better at it. I don’t think we’ll do that but I just wanted to share
- I’m not sure if we’ll have emotes yet. I think that emotes and/or dances would be a cool thing to have. I think it would help to express the different character personalities. We’ll see.
- Well, with lines like “Fuck me, they’re all over us! We’re doomed!” how could we not? But seriously, I’m not sure. We haven’t talked about this one yet. I suspect that we might not. Being able to send sounds to other people’s computers over and over can get real annoying fast. I think that if we can do it well, it would be awesome. I’m not sure if we will try or not.
As always, general disclaimer: we’re still developing these systems and it still early days so things might change in the next few months.
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Thanks Mike! It’s great to read your thoughts on this matter 
Thank you for your answer.
Regarding arena you make me really curious about what your primary, secondary and tertiary endgame activities will look like. 
Lots more movement haha.
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I enjoy solo and group play. Mainly just do random group play but will occasionally play with RL friends. I don’t like battling over loot (i.e. racing for who picks it up first). Hoping you guys have a good system to control the loot so it’s fair for all party members. Thanks for the update. Looking forward to playing with some other players.
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Currently we are planning on having individual loot per person. We have talked about making this an option that could be turned off or some sort of hybrid option too but for now the plan is just individual loot for everyone.
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Glad to hear, makes group play so much more enjoyable for me 
Why would you even consider PoE when looking at MP! I put near 1000 hours to PoE so I am not a hater, but there is a reason why 99.9% of people play solo. Why are you looking at a game for MP inspiration where 99.9% of players of that game play SOLO?
Sure you can look at PoE on MP for reference. But Its 2019, there should be matching, & allow people to easily add friends & clans. People who want to play specific content can play with friends or clans,
You can have advertisement on a notice board,s or chat groups for grouping, but match making should be the default for public games (IMO). Ideally if I want to do say content X, 30 sec max I should be in a game & playing.
You shouldn’t (most time) to have to scan through a list to find an MP game you like, hope the creator add you, then wait in game for enough people to join, before starting.
Diablo 3 MP is simple & elegant. Pick difficulty, pick game mode, & boom, in seconds I am in a game. If I enjoy the experience, I may ask some of the teammatea to be friends, & ask them to join my clan if they do not have already one.
If I want to play specific contents, all I need to do is PM my clanmates or friends & we have a game within 2-3 mins.
Of course it can be improved. But its decent & very little downtime.
Is multiplayer enabled yet? If it is how we add and invite friend?