My Trade system suggestion to avoid buying ready items/skipping unique prog

Feedback and Suggestions
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Recently i came back to this game and mostly due to one game (Yup, that one) having some kind of identity crisis. And this time… i got really hooked, Community did great work by making guides in building tool, new uniques really give me a “you have a reason to play” feeling and overall god this game is getting better and better - and thats from a guy who played selfcurse in 3.13 in poe, i live for zoom zoom yet the way this game plays somehow makes me still feel good. Just wow.
But to the topic - recently i saw a lot of people talking about how Trade should work, i was thinking about if i shoul post here that as i am tbh not veteran, newbie at best (around 150hr) but better now or never i thought and here i am!
It feels so simple that i won’t even be suprised if someone got ahead on me but hey, another voice in worst case - so here we go.

The way Poe shaped trade as a core gameplay loop over the years became it own grave - when i started it felt magical, when i got gud it gave me wings, when they destroyed crafting it felt… like mandatory. I feel this fate won’t touch LE as much yet future is bright like sun and like Ikar the closer this game will be to it the more ways to break something.

My idea is to make 3 categories - shards, exalted and unique.
Shards market would be free - as a currency we could use glyph of shattering - which is the main genarator of certain shards. It would allow players to easy but them and sell those that they don’t use for now while also getting more currecy to make more and so on. Less popular builds would get easier time getting their stats and so start to be more appealing regardless of how perfect gear has to be while more popular ones would be more of a chase dream.
Exalted - gold, we have Arbor for getting Exalted items for gold so once again - we could pay or use it to get one item we crave for or try get someting valuable which allows us to gain more gold for other stuff we need.
“BUT CRAFTING WOULD BE DISCARDED, YOU JUST BUY WHA-”, Because of that - exalted items can only be sold “foiled”, what that means - if you get exalted item untill you use anything on it - it is foiled, after its original forging potential goes away this item is bound to you and you cannot put it on market. Addationaly, if you buy item its automaticaly unfoiled making it untradable again - to make it unflippable. This would make it so you still have to make your own decisions about what you want to do with your iteams and not farm days for perfect body armor made by someone who sits 24/7 in forge. OFC it would make less of a chase as you could get items that way, but at the same time its not like you get gold out of thin air, you still have to grind for it by playing and to make it more balanced we could make it so blessing giving more gold is removed to avoid one-blessing meta. You would still often go for exalted items you get, you would feel rush of dopamine by getting one rare exalted item but this time with “OMG I GOT 5 MIL GOLD I AM SO LUCKY TIME TO GET MORE ITEMS I CAN TRY TO CRAFT ON” rather than “…maybe one day when i build that build? its one piece tho :/”

And last - unique items. Here i would just suggest either making new currency for that (something like “glyph of gamble - use on exalted item to make it unique or destroy it” that is pretty common or something, honestly its hard to think as rune of Ascendance is pretty rare and it would make some items not worth to sell… but hey, maybe thats the right price? i mean, paying 4 of them for perfect roll 2 lp item? or 20 for 3 lp boss drop? again, i feel like this one is hardest to came up with currency, but when it comes to selling i would make it so you can only sell 5 unique items at the time - you have to decide what is worth of taking and slot and how much is it worth, at the same time i would make it so you have to “Discover” a unique, making it so you can’t skip progression by getting a unique you havent droped this league/season. It should be a tool to make you min max a build, not to skip chase item chase.

And… thats all i have. I feel like everything else would be a bit too much and not needed, runes are in right place, scrolls too, in worst case feel free to put them to shards category.

Last type of item - idols.
For me - they should be untradeable, they should be not perfect, you get the ones you need and after you find the better one - you get an upgrade.

Thanks for reading everyone and i hope its not everyday suggestion… but even if it its - i am happy to hear that similar minds are here to say things i am to lazy too ^^ Have a good day y all!

2 Likes
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I really like the idea of trading “foiled” exalted items.
I think it has a lot of merits.
It prevents speculation, since things cannot be traded forever.
IF the economy stabilizes into the correct prices it will not destroy item progression.
It gives use to good exalted drops that are not for your build.
It makes so trading is not limited to just shopping for upgrades, as you noted you still have to put some work into it.

The main issue that I see is that it would significantly decrease the impact of item drops as a mean of item acquisition.

Let me make a very rough example to explain my point.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are 10 meta builds in the game, and that you are playing one of them.
Let’s also say that a “good” exalted item is an item that is worth crafting on for any of these 10 builds, and that good exalted items have an equal chance of being useful to each build (and only that build).
In this highly simplified world, when you drop a good exalted, there is a 10% chance that it is an exalted that is useful to your build.
You can still sell the other 90% of your drops, and use the result to buy good exalted from your build.
If the trades are one-to-one, this means that for any one item you drop and craft yourself, you are buying 9 bases from other players to use for crafting.

Obviously, I needed to make a lot of assumptions to get to this number (each exalted is only useful to one class, all 10 meta builds are equally likely to drop a good exalt, etc.).
However, I belive that this is a good toy example to see that this system would mean the market is vastly more effective for generating items worth crafting than actually dropping them.
You still have to play to generate the necessary gold, but engaging in the trade system would massively boost the effectiveness of crafting (in my highly simplified example it would be by ten times, but in practice this would be very difficult to predict).

I don’t think it would necessary feel bad for those of us who are used to PoE, but it probably would end up feeling mandatory for players to engage with the system.
I think that one of the main things that people want in the trade design is that if you don’t want to trade, you should not feel that you are missing out too much.
How much is too much is up for debate, but I feel that this system would qualify as too much.

Maybe I am being overly pessimistic, or maybe there are good ways of counterbalancing this, lets discuss.

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Honestly, i think that it wouldn’t be as a big deal. Its not like its impossible to clear everything with how the game plays now in reasonable ammount of time, compared to PoE where getting items needed for doing t16 and content such as sirus or maven needs either boring leaguestarter or lots of time, luck and resources in ssf.
As long as game isn’t balanced with perfect items with mind (Like PoE nowadays) it should allow people to have good time playing by themselfs. You can get content-melter alone, but you could use trade and try to min max to be immortal.
Also Item system in PoE is very strict, max res or gg, attribute req or gg, 4-5k life or gg etc
Epoch allows for much more freedom which makes it so you can but don’t have to trade as you can use every item for your class and not every item has to have perfect stats.
In the end my Idea of trade is to make polishing builds possible while also not making game balanced around players having polished builds.

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lol, you can steamroll 98% of PoE with pretty average gear. you can be T16 mapping with 10 chaos budget and a Tabula

Theres only 7 uber bosses which are a massive gear/skill check. other than that the game is actually pretty easy after 2 weeks of a a league

1 Like
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That was the part in the post that screamed at me as well.

There are actually 8 ubers currently, the random blue pack on the Lake! I just saw Quin’s latest rip. he could afk facetank Uber Exarch but got more or less instagib’d by a random pack from a box :thinking:

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When you play leaguestarter sure but if you lets say wanna try winter orb you need lots of backup currency to make it feel good which is good and a bad thing at the same time. Imagine if you needed to play LE for lets say 20hrs of full optimised soulfire bastion to get resourcess to make your autobomber feel good to play and not die to random rare. If you are mostly alch, few scarabs and go player like i am it takes way longer and overall getting this build at the level of leaguestart build after a week would be an entire month of the league investment. Why is that? Because We have spellsupression check, aura checks, life checks, attribute checks, resist checks etc… Combined with randomness of arch monsters where one time you get zombie who walks so slow it goes backwards and another time you get some crazy gargantuar storm/frost/firestrider with haste on some expedition monster and you just think “…do i really have fun?”

If you want an example of perfect item balance - spell supresion on gear nefs, if you wanna save some passive points you need to t1 on most if not all slots. If you play away from right side of tree you will lose lots of travel nodes to ever get there.

Was it really so bad that you could use t2/t3 spell supresion and still make it work and if someone would invest they could free up 1 or 2 mods for min max?

To do maps you don’t need perfect gear, but to feel good about them you kinda need to invest a lot compared to how it looked few leagues ago even before harvest was invented.
Moving player power to gear, buffing enemies, now making uniques rarer and re-rolling affixes crazy expensive.

You should’t have to spend most of your budget on not dying in arpg, amd currently poe does oposite of that. In LE if i have 50 poison res i don’t feel like i need to threw my exalted void dmg ring away to fit in, i have a choice you don’t really have in poe right now.

Maybe its burnout, maybe its bad mindset but i am just exhausted of having to sweat everytime i want an upgrade thinking if item that has x stats and open suffix and dexternity needed exist.

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5K life is pretty much nothing for any build - it’s very low investment. LE has also defense requirements that you cannot skip so it’s not any different in that department.

In the end my Idea of trade is to make polishing builds possible while also not making game balanced around players having polished builds.

There was a good reason why GGG tripled the boss HP and did nerfs all across the board - the game was stupid easy with no point in playing again the next league because the previous one you already killed the strongest boss on the second day of the league.
The league before the nerfs and boss mega buffs( 3.8 ) was actually one of the worst player count leagues they ever had since 3.0 at 74K on Steam. Now in 3.18 and 3.19 it’s up at 150K.

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Well, not quite. 3.0 had a peak of 98k, 3.1 (70k), 3.2 (82k), 3.3 (96k), 3.4 (75k) & 3.8 (75k) were all lower, every other league had higher peaks than 3.0.

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You misread the sentence a bit because I worded it awkwardly, - it says that 3.8 had the lowest numbers since 3.0 was released. Looking now, 3.1 did have lower numbers as well. I was just taking this from memory.

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I do think bosses should be some kind of challenge, but the way it is now often times random mob on random map is bigger challenge than shaper. Also remember that Covid happened and durring that time a lot of people discovered poe. Kalandra got such numers because they didn’t said a word about loot nerfs or harvest destruction (tho i was kinda expecting that) and now even people who play say trade is dead cuz people quit.

Game was balanced but since they buffed archnemesis and nerfed itemisation its just more grindy for getting to the same point you did league ago.

And yea in LE there are requirements but its not as strict as in PoE. Having 50 poison res wont make your build 30% worse instantly or you don’t have to cry about not having 15 dexternity on your gear

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PoE’s way worse than that. If you’re 25% under the resist cap (75%, ignoring any +max resist) you’ll take double the damage compared to being capped (50 damage v 25 from a hit of 100).

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I used it mostly as a quick example but yea, resists in PoE are crazy punishing and damage is made with them in mind which makes sense when you only need to cap 3 and optymaly get chaos to 0% or more, but when you add more and more statchecks lie spellsupress, defence auras, attributes etc and suddenly take options from players it just becomes a mess for someone who is sweating at the thought of searching for right item to fit a build (finding dex or accuracy for CoC to this day makes me nervous).

Like currently i am playing Autobomber after Bowmage and it just feels good being able to say to myself “i will fix those phys res later when i use blessing to fix my fire res” rather than “aw shit bricked for now” (Yea i know about harvest change res but it was pain in the ass before if you didn’t spec and avoided tft and now its costly)

Freedom in LE is a breath of fresh air after PoE, only thing that is a bit tedious is kinda the randomness of exalted items (but you still can use some of them, save good ones for other builds durring which you can drop some perfect ones for your other build or in the future just sell them (ofc all current ones will vanish/go to some kind of shared ssf) and save up for good bases to craft on) and unique stockpilling (as someone who is currently “monkey sees build monkey copies” i wish i could have some kind of spreedcheat which ones are worth looking at and which ones are just trash untill trade comes around)
Also shards but honestly after i got used to buying runes from the shopkeeper and checking for rare helm/body armour/relic mods its not as big of a deal and the longer i play the less problem it should be

1 Like
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the ability to get exalteds with base choice+affix choice on market would HEAVILY increase the quality of loot for player characters, even if only uncrafteds are shown. There would need to be a loss in crafting potential as well for it to be the worse option for perfect gear, but even then, some people will search for T21/22 items that rolled naturally, and buy them for obscene amounts of gold(to be fair though, if they require that much gold, it is a case of they would have tried to farm it otherwise).

While an exalted may be useless to you, there will be a ton of builds that may want that exact item. And hundreds of people will be tossing their better exalteds onto the store.

Even hyper optimized attempts at perfect items will want to use something like this.

Also your unique ideas do not work, if it needs you to find the unique first then it is useless as you are buying something you already have, if you limit number sold, even if you limit to ONE, people would be mass selling omnis or other high value target farmable loot.

Long story short, no matter what, either the trade system makes it easier to get useful items and thus effects game balance - or it is not worth using and thus does not.

This is in a game with a VERY powerful crafting system though, so even if item quality is made easier to get, chances are some people will be running around with near perfect gear even in solo self found

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