The thing is, I really love trading… I love the idea of finding something and that thing has value to it, even if it’s something that I can’t use myself.
However, I do not like the trading system in Last Epoch. It’s fine that it has a cost associated to it and that you can’t just hoard the auction house and stand there all day farming the AH rather than playing. All of these things I am fine with.
What I do not like is that you can’t trade items that you’ve bought. And I just found a way to articulate it.
Let’s say I buy a house for X amount of money. Then I upgrade the house by extending a building, fixing the garage, replacing the roof etc. Now I live here for let’s say 10 years and all is good. I love my life there and I enjoyed living in this house. Now I get a new job or just get tired of the same surroundings or even just finding something I like even better!
Now I can’t sell my current house because it’s a one-time purchase. That means that I can’t afford the new place unless I’ve saved up a lot of money.
However I spend all of that money on making the current house even better and making my living quarters as good as possible and therefor I have not saved anything up…
Now take this story an put “a build” instead of “a house” and “buying items” instead of “upgrading the house” … This is how trading feels in Last Epoch.
I feel like I have invested all the time and money I got in one thing and enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it… But now that I want to move on or found something better (eg. new build), now I have nothing of value to trade with and build the other build…
It just feels aweful to me and makes me not wanna do trade. I’d rather just do CoF and find gear myself, though I would much rather engage in trading as that is a huge part of my ARPG experience.
What I like with trade is that I feel like my character (eg. house) has value and that I can convert said value again to invest in new stuff.
You already have the points you need to play and farm to get and a lot of other restrictions on the trade that makes it so you can’t just play AH all day.
Therefor my suggestion is to allow items to be tradable unlimited times. Or if this isn’t possible to do due to concerns or other design descisions then at least make items tradable for +1 time per LP on an item. So a 1 LP item can be traded twice, 2 LP trice etc.
It wouldn’t be the perfect solution to me because I enjoy the feeling of wealth (meaning gear I can resell if need be), but it would be the next best solution for me.
At least I hope you will look more into the trade as it’s a driving force for me and currently I don’t wanna engage with it and therefor stops playing sooner than I would without my prementioned changes.