Suggestions for improving Merchant's Guild, Bazaar, and Trading

Feedback and Suggestions
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Let me preface this by saying that I love this game, and have played it to the point that seeing my playtime on steam is somewhat embarassing. I want to see more people join our ranks, and I want to see this game succeed.

Recently I saw a dev response in discord that EHG is “Extremely Satisfied” with the state of factions, which tells me that EHG does not devote as much time to MG as they do to COF. Especially since the bazaar only received a few basic QOL improvements in this most recent season (which were a great start, don’t get me wrong). I believe that the entire faction system should be overhauled, and there are many excellent opportunities for improvements to the game in this realm! Reasons and suggestions below.

Problems:

  • All MG faction ranks can be summed up as “You can now buy and sell a different kind of thing on the bazaar”. This is a very boring implementation of rank rewards.
  • A large portion of the player base never engages with the bazaar, or even has the option to.
  • Favor is useless once youre max ranked. The only thing to spend it on is gambling, and the gambled items are universally garbage. Not to mention that you cant even gamble in bulk since there is a bug that makes the gambled item show up on your cursor as well as in your inventory when you shift + right click, requiring a separate click + delay before you can buy another.
  • Having the item types for the bazaar spread across dozens of specific NPCs is a baffling decision, when it could just as easily be a dropdown box that affects other available fields from a single interface.
  • Affix ranges in bazaar for searching, and searching by item is a good step forward, but affix ranges are all over the place for their values and frequently do not match their actual value ranges.
    • If the values listed for the fields cannot be relied on to reflect the true values for the affix, then you should just return it to a percentage based slider.
    • When searching for ranges, it sets the max value as the lowest range by default, this is not the case for the range filters for uniques in the loot filter, so why is it the case here?
    • You cannot tab between the min/max fields, this is just an annoyance.
  • Item listings never expire, resulting in bloated search results.

Bazaar/Trading Fixes

  • Bazaar should be able to be used by any player regardless of faction.
    • Keep the COF specific item tags from prophecies/rank reward items and make it so they cant be sold on the bazaar, but allow COF users to sell untagged items.
    • Items being untradeable after purchase is a good decision and should be kept, since it prevents market fixing.
  • Add the ability to search for “items with X amount of tier Y” affixes. Being able to specify individual affixes is nice, but its very limiting when searching for things that you could havoc around instead. Like if I want any level of a few specific affixes and need at least one t7 and one t6 affix but dont care which ones are which level, it is currently impossible to do so.
  • We should be able to exclude sealed affixes from affix searches
  • Add a maximum duration to bazaar listings, and just dump the items to the “sold” tab when expired since there is no mail system. No favor refunds, etc.
  • Players should be allowed to trade any tradeable item to other players, and have it become tagged as untradeable afterwards.
    • I understand the idea behind the “resonance” system as a prevention for RMT, but maybe we should be more concerned with building a consistent player base before trying to fix nonexistant problems by removing core genre functionality?
  • Modify the Bazaar interface to allow for searching for any kind of item, instead of having item types having separate interfaces. This is pretty much the same menu that already exists for loot filters.
  • Have the Bazaar take a cut of the item sale price, rather than inflating the price by 15% at listing

MG Rank Suggestions

Implement actual benefits for rank ups, such as:

  • “Caravans”, allowing a MG player to dispatch different types of caravans with different kinds of goals, using differing levels of favor and/or gold and different durations depending on the caravan. Durations could be time based or could be related to completing X echoes.
    Mechanics:
    • Depending on the difficulty of the expedition (like item rarity) favor required will increase. The more specific the target, the more expensive and the more difficult it should be.
    • Caravans could fail due to attacks, and need guards which can be recruited for favor (after a specific rank level)
    • Speed of caravans could be affected by additional augmentations. The player could have a pool of resources like guards, vehicles, transport, navigation, etc that would have different effects.
    • Items from caravans should be able to be sold on the bazaar, so they should be untagged.
    • Ultimately this should not be able to reward as many items as CoF prophecies should, like not even close. It should cost a large amount of favor but it would actually provide a benefit to being MG aside from just giving the ability to sell stuff.
      Examples of rewards:
    • Obtain more of a specific imprinted item (including idols), with varying levels of success, with chances of those items having the same affixes/ranges.
    • Obtain gold, increasing with favor expended
    • Obtain a specific, generic type of item, similar to a prophecy.
  • Increase gold obtained by a variable % range
  • Increase memory amber obtained by a variable % range
  • Increase bones/materials obtained by a variable % range
  • Increase vendor value of items by a variable % range (calculated on sale)
  • Add a rare (like rune of creation rare or greater) drop for a rune that removes all tags from an item.
  • Improved MG favor gambler, let it reward T7s or uniques more frequently. Im not sure if it can even give a T7 in its current form.
  • Reduced/removed bazaar cut on listings
  • Reduced/removed favor for bazaar listings
  • “Negotiation” selections that behave similar to blessings, only allowing to pick one:
    • Weaver - some way to add a specific affix to a weaver item for the first roll. Perhaps a rare rune + shard in the forge
    • Teamsters - Chance for caravans to return with an imprinted item in addition to their other rewards
    • Zerrick - +% gold gained
    • Masque - +% memory amber gained
    • Skarven - +% primordial materials/bones gained
    • Nemesis - Increased chance of adding legendary potential to egged items
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Not to speak of it being actively detrimental as it messes with the natural itemization progression heavily.

Getting a Uberroth unique at Rank 3 while exalteds are vastly later is one of the dumbest designs I’ve ever seen.

It absolutely is.
Peak dog-shit design. It’s absolutely fine to have the NPCs sitting around… but the interaction screen has to be universal for convenience.

This is a prime example of shittification by following ‘form over function’. Gets a pure failing grade in design.

No! Anything but that… have EHG get their asses up and make a cohesive and proper system rather then those bandaids which are garbage.

I don’t want to see even a single instance of percentiles anymore. They’re atrocious, infuriating and non-functional. The game keeps the actual percentile in mind in the background and doesn’t display items properly because of it.
Idol with max Health roll? Sorry, let’s filter out a quarter of them because you set the percentile a little too high! Not like you needed them, right? You wanted 5% max health with the 86% only… not the 85% anyway… it’s a massive difference! /s

Yes, that is also true, albeit this is vastly less important overall.
The solution is a single ‘reset’ of the bazaar every Cycle-start. Removal of items into a separate space to pick up.
Also the bazaar listing needs to be limited in slots, it’s atrocious for market design to have someone using 5 minutes of farming in high corruption to swamp the market afterwards and ruin the opportunities for those not even reaching there and which need hours to achieve a fraction.
Stops their ability to rise up through the ‘ranks of value’ so to speak.

I’ve mention the cross-faction functionality since the beginning and have been talked down about it since people don’t understand the principality behind it and always come back to ‘but I don’t wanna have to trade!’ which is fair… but a senseless argument depending on setup.

First off, MG needs a exclusive currency and not Gold, Gold does cause issues as it leads to cross-usage between the factions and hence double-dipping options, causing a severe imbalance in design and ruining others designs like Lightless Arbour as it becomes entirely worthless this way.

Then aligning with the respective faction is supposed to give you a significant bonus related to their primary design. For example a 5%/95% split of functionality.
Align with MG and you get 20 times the amount of currency allowing you to trade.
Align with CoF and you get 20 times the boost from drops comparatively to a MG aligned one.

Now 20 times sounds much, right? But I mean in relation to the current percentiles provided.
If you get 2 instead of 1 Idol (as example) then that means it’s a 100% increase. To make that into a viable thing for both it means a MG player gets 5% extra drop only as it’s 1/20th of the going rate.

This allows no double-dipping as it’s going both ways anyway and the focus of a character can also change accordingly without nonsensical downsides that hinder the game substantially.

Yes, the search functionality in general is at best described as ‘barely sufficient’ still.

‘But EHG did so much!’ yeah… and still it’s sub-par :stuck_out_tongue:

All for your improvements in direction to the usage of the database in better ways, that stuff should’ve been available from Day 1 anyway as a given.

Yes, in general the faction tags are utterly useless anyway. They have not a single upside, only downsides.

The whole thing can be removed and the single ‘cannot be traded’ tag kept. That’s literally all that’s needed.
I’ve never understood why you need ‘MG Rank 6’ for example as a tag. All character share your level of the faction, faction level doesn’t drop… there is hence no need to ever declare ‘this rank is needed’ outside of player-to-player direct trade with resonances.
And even then… ‘cannot be traded’ should apply to player-to-player trade as well. It’s the equivalent to ‘soulbound’ simply. The current system is atrocious.

Overall the whole design of how items in CoF are affected is nonsensical as well. CoF is supposed to increase quantity of drops. That’s the primary function. You can adjust the functionality beyond simply duplicating items beyond but that’s it. Don’t ever change the quality of base drops themselves like LP upgrades or Affix tier increases.

The whole system should drop ‘base items’ which are tradeable and then go along and duplicate those base items and adjust only those duplicated items within the system.
So a 0 LP unique can turn into a 1 LP unique. A second item dropping can turn into a exalted when it’s not. A second item dropping as a T6 exalted upgrading into a T7 and so on and so forth.

This itself already removes the vast majority of discrepancies in power in a massive way. Actual choice, actual meaning.

Exactly, baffling why not even such a simple concept is a thing for EHG.
It’s also atrocious base-tier design not upheld.

Interesting concept! I like it.

Generally ‘helping out the respective faction’ being the thriving factor of progress should be a given… hence time invested into them rather then just playing along.
And aligning with them rather then the others (hence having a sort of hero as a advertisment for their faction) provides the bonus.

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Yeah, but that’s because they don’t like trading & are probably grateful thatthey have an option where they aren’t fucked over on drop rates & forced into trading just because the people who like trading like trading & the game needs to be balanced around them. This isn’t an AH problem.

Yeah, I think it should probably be used instead of gold. Something needs to be used in place of gold.

That’s a thematic decision, but yes, it is mildly annoying to have to go to different stalls.

No, that defeats the entire point of the item factions.

They can, via the AH. Direct p2p trading was removed in 1.2 for RMT reasons.

Kinda like Kingsmarch mapping? Yeah, maybe?

This I kinda disagree with though, the point of the trade faction is to be able to trade with other people.

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You mean that’s the only one which are left since the others have gone somewhere else.

Favor for MG is a general bad thing to have. The only reason to have it is to provide access to auxiliary systems… but the buying/selling should be handled through a exclusive consumable of some kind solely. The gambling needs to be empowered substantially as well and can actually provide a combination of currency + favor.

Function over form, that’s all I’ll say to that.
If your ‘theme’ screws over function substantially then it’s a failure and shouldn’t exist.
Basically the comparison to ‘a shiny turd’. Shines… but is a turd nonetheless :stuck_out_tongue:

Depends on the setup, it’s not a mutually exclusive option to be had, you can set the system up to allow focus into either without enforcing the other… but also the ability to move around and not have any major downsides by either way overall.

It’s narrow-minded to not take that into consideration and we’ve had that conversation far too heavily already.

Another failure of EHG plainly spoken as the resonance system instead is a massive steaming pile of turd currently.
It was mandatory to rework that but the failure to do so has only done more damage to the community.

It’s more about thematic mechanics without reducing the value of CoF. But you need to have a method to keep on playing the faction half-way decently even when the market itself collapses for some reason. It’s just a measure of extra stability… not needed when you got a half-way decent active community and proper systems though, agreed there.

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That is a ridiculous assertion, that everyone who left did so because of MG. Some would have, certainly, but given the issues LE still has and the relatively smaller season 3 compared to season 2, I’d imagine it’s a relatively small % of the total leavers. Plus there’s the expected attrition over time.

There’s a balance between the two. Just like how nobody would want all mobs/characters to be basic rendered cubes/pyramids/etc & the world to be a flat grey plain because that gives better fps. Sometimes you do take form over function because it makes things better.

Yes & no, I guess it’s narrow minded to have a particular view on how you want your game to be. Plus armchair-dev-ing is way easier than actually building something.

No, it more feels like being able to freely trade plus getting better drops via the other mechanics. It directly reduces the value of CoF because CoF is all about not trading & finding the gear yourself plus target farming/prophecies. The above mentioned examples of other mechanics all feed into reducing the loot drop disparity that has to exist between MG & CoF. Therefore you want to slippery slope your way into having the benefits (or some of) both at the same time.

Yeah, if the trading community isn’t sufficiently large then it falls apart.

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Never stated that, did I?
I stated those focused on MG left because MG is shit.
Which kinda is a natural given when the stuff you wanna do turns out to be broken.

There absolutely is!
And the line always prefers function.
Something can look like shit and be beloved as long as the function is top-tier.
Nothing is beloved when it looks lovely but performs like garbage. We got a myriad of examples on this side of the equation while there’s barely any on the other (exceptions apply as usual).

One of the biggest factory games is ‘Shapez’, a free game on .io. It got a successor with ‘Shapez 2’ which is very well received as well.
The first game has basically no graphics. It’s as basic as it comes.

Then we got Dwarf Fortress, that game is literally a ASCII graphics game, you got letters and numbers with different colors moving about and that was a massive timeframe all there was, on top of a completely horrendous UI which made getting into it horribly hard.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the game basically all modern zombie survival games have shaped themselves in some way. That’s another barebones game graphically which at the basis is a ASCII based game. Project Zomboid for example was created because the developers were inspired by that game, and it’s become a major hit, even naming a challenge mode by that game.

There’s a large portion of ‘minimalistic’ games out there, and those are what set the bar commonly as they solely base their gameplay on function.
The second you include form you better have it be ridiculously well done to make up for any loss of function. Because form is meaningless without function… but function without form still retains meaning.

Not taking the possibility into consideration is, hence outright removing the mental possibility.
That’s all, the second part is nonsensical as you the inclusion of that follows the open-mindedness, not the other way around.

feels.

Which inherently already means it’s not a necessity.
You can design it in ways that it doesn’t provide that but still has meaning, which is the point here. Coherent design which fits thematically without hindering.

And reduction of value is meaningless if the value is nonetheless higher then the alternative. Especially when the premise is supposed to have both being equally valuable as a optimal outcome, which we’re so far away from that it’s even nonsensical to mention ‘but muh value of muh mechanic is reduced then!’
Yes, that’s the goal… comparatively CoF is simply superior, and I won’t get into the topic once again since it’s been utter nonsense in regards to arguments there the last time.

Everything is a slippery slope. It’s a very easy excuse to make.
The current status is that MG is so utterly atrocious and those comments solely look like ‘better not show them that they could be equal to not give them any thoughts that could ever be reached in the first place!’

Nonsensical fearmongering.

It also falls apart if the mechanics upholding it are utter and entire shit. Like we have in LE still being the case.

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You asserted/implied it, yes & I quoted the relevant section. Maybe in German that wouldn’t have been the case.

Ok, let me rephrase, how many arpgs (“proper” loot focussed, 3rd person isometric diablo-em-ups) excessively chase function over form to the point where they’re as I described earlier? Different genres don’t really matter do they, since we’re talking about arpgs? 'Cause you can go the other way & talk about the requirement for photorealistic gfx that other genres have nowadays.

So you accept that you’re not talking about EHG since they’ve made many changes for QoL in the past few years, just not necessarily ones that you like/want.

That’s not what the OP was asking for though was it.

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Yes, but they’re also played by a very small portion of the playerbase. Dwarf fortress has around 1k people playing it now, got a 30k peak. Shapez 2 is a bit below that and Cataclysm is way way way below that.
Even Hero Siege, which is a pretty well done game for this genre, barely gets over the 1k mark with their pixelated art.

There will always be some people that will prefer mechanics over graphics, even to the point of sacrificing the latter for the former, but most people have a minimum standard of graphics they enjoy, even in this genre. Especially when there are options that have them.

Can you design it in a way where players won’t be able to start MG, get all their build gear (including rare uniques like Aaron’s chest), then switch to CoF and get the drop bonuses, thus being miles ahead of someone that never wants to trade?
Because, if I recall correctly, one of your main points is keeping the gear when switching factions.

The current system allows separation of the leaderboards by faction (EHG hasn’t done that yet, but you can). And in a way where there is no benefit to running one faction, jumping to the top of the leaderboard and then switching back and being on the top of the other leaderboard.
With your system there is never any separation and therefore there will emerge an optimal strategy of aligning with one then switching to the other (and maybe switching back again). Which means that players that don’t want to trade will either be forced to follow the same strategy if they want to be competitive, or they will be unable to compete.

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Chronicon
Dwarven Realms

Those are the 2 major ones in that category, albeit Dwarven Realms is more related to having a cheap graphical setup rather then a focus on mechanical aspects. Chronicon is nigh pure focus on mechanical aspects, though that game sadly has a issue related to repetiveness as the core mechanic is based upon speed-clearing.

Also the count of those games is generally low… it’s always been the case.
Why?
Because while those games are ageless and undying the majority of players buy into shiny short-term fads instead. The better the graphics the less staying power games generally tend to have. There is after all no possibility to stay at the edge of graphical fidelity, much unlike mechanical finesse.

I don’t count ‘QoL’ as things which are nowadays the basis of the basis for a system of that sort. If you’re 20 years behind then nah thanks… sorry to say, I also don’t count having a pause button as a ‘QoL feature’ but a necessity nowadays for example.

And the things in MG are below the minimum standard still.

Absolutely, and I agree!
That’s the counterside after all, as was mentioned… there is a balance between function and form, just that you have zero staying power with solely form… function is mandatory to exist, form is not.

DF had no form and survived. CDDA does, Caves of Qud does, Supreme Commander (1) does… and so on and so forth. All games with staying power long-term have strong mechanical basics.
Games which fail tend not to have that as substantially.

But ultimately… it’s nice to have a good looking game that fails compared to a bad looking game which doesn’t, right? :slight_smile:
We can talk about it being good/bad properly when EHG manages to have their game actually survive, because their focus being so much on costly high fidelity aspects rather then mechanical finesse is the major reason for their failure.
Why?
Because then it would’ve cost a fraction of what it did to maintain, and hence LE could survive on 1k people unlike it does currently.

And that’s absolutely fine!
But you still gotta provide the function.

Yes?
I mean… that’s really not rocket science, you just gotta math our the end-results and adjust it accordingly to the already seen acquisition rate? Unless EHG has not even put measures into place to see who buys what sort of items from the database… which would be a major shortcoming for balancing measures.

If you got the data you don’t have a problem to adjust according to what it provides… you just gotta make sure to have the data.

And if not you go ahead and do the conservative route with CoF being overtuned simply in comparison to ensure you can adjust MG’s mechanics accordingly upwards in terms of rewards to be reasonable as a end result.

Yeah, I can also start working towards a random world record… but ‘can’ and ‘does’ are two different words.

Which system? I didn’t even provide a system, so how can you judge one? I provided a design idea at best, and you can realize nigh any design idea. :joy:

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Both are mandatory if you want your game to grow and be competitive in the market. You can say that function has more weight. But without form your game won’t thrive either. It will be relegated to a very small portion of the playerbase that doesn’t care about it at all.
I’m one of those players that don’t care about form. I still enjoy the occasional roguelike with blocky graphics or even just ascii symbols. But I know that in this I’m in the minority.

There were plenty of friends, more than 15 years ago, who said they couldn’t play D2 because the graphics were so bad. And things only escalated since then.
So yes, in this genre especially, along with a few other niche genres, function is more important than form. But form is also necessary if you want success.

Games that have no form (or barely any, it’s impossible not to have any at all, after all) and lots of function are games that survive with very low player counts because they appeal to a very very very niche type of player. They certainly aren’t huge successes that made their creators rich, with the exception of minecraft.

How would that fix it, though? Your proposed system allows you to start in one end (MG) and finish in the other (CoF). So unless there are big penalties for switching, you’ll always be ahead of a player that only does CoF.

The only way I can see that working would be to allow you to invest 12 ranks into MG/CoF freely, with the last ranks of each being the most powerful.
So if you only want trade, you place 12 MG. If you only want loot, 12 CoF. If you want trade and drops, you place, for example, 7 points in MG and 5 in CoF. Or 4 MG/8 CoF.
Then you could give overtuned rewards to both MG/CoF ranks 10-12.

Ok, let me rephrase that. The current system allows separation of the leaderboards by faction (EHG hasn’t done that yet, but they should have).

You actually already provided several in our latest big discussion about this. None of which allowed pure CoF players to be on equal footing. But in this case, I was mostly refering to this one:

This system means that you will start aligned with MG, get the x20 currency, get your base gear, including the rare uniques, then switch to CoF. At that point you’re only a bit behind the CoF players in terms of currency for prophecies, but miles ahead in terms of current gear.

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Major? Do I need to give you a definition of “major”?

It’s pretty much single digit as far as the genre goes (& it’s a bit of a niche genre).

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Yes.
And first you need to ensure you can at least survive on the market. Growing can happen when you’re existing… if you don’t then it’s over.

As said, form is important for growth, but still, without the foundation of proper function you cannot ever sustain yourself. Survival can happen without form though nonetheless, thriving is hard but survival isn’t.

And with the current state that would be disastrous.
With proper setup it wouldn’t. Removal of the double-dipping options.

I went mildly into the basis for it above, not going to make a novel this time here though. If the basis of how the systems are setup changes then the building upon it also has different flexibility. Namely that CoF is only working if you actively engage in CoF at the time… so you have zero bonus if not… and for MG accumulation of value does only happen in a substantial manner when you align with em, hence it has exactly zero meaning outside of preference which you choose at any time.

Like so so many things… :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes, alternative ones. Every time a new small thing comes along I adjust… ya know… how it’s supposed to go when you get new information rather then pressing on what was done before?

First of all… the accumulated rewards over time from ranks (favor) need to scale accordingly, so invested time is meaningful.
Which currently outside of CoF it is not anyway, so that’s an issue.
Not to speak of CoF influencing base items rather then being built upon increasing quantity and influencing those newly created ones solely. So a base situation + bonus rather then adjustment of the base situation itself.
Next up we also would have the premise of value here for buying items. That’s a issue related to target farming for CoF, which is a shortcoming there and needs to be tackled accordingly. This can be done via the prophecies easily, because let’s say it plain and simple: The prophecy UI is really not great… the core system is… but the functionality of how you get prophecies is kinda bad. More targeting options, and proper pricing related to potentially received value, which makes early game acquisition on par with MG, which is the major issue here.
Same for MG, market functionality and support for profiting as you progress need to be upheld to provide a smooth experience. Which it doesn’t. This includes also a proper system to ensure you can only buy and list items according to your state of the character roughly, not magnitudes beyond or below.

Chronicon is SP and ages old.
Dwarven Realms is also SP.
Both games are dirt-cheap and profitable for the developers.
Is LE profitable for EHG?

End of question… your product can be the biggest one in the world… as long as it’s in the red it’s worthless financially, it’s failing. Investment beyond return.

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Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I believe that the best system for what you want that would still please both the people that want full on trade and those that want none of it is a multi-class system for the ranks.
Redo them in a more logical way and so that the last ranks are way more powerful than the previous ones, then let people pick between them, distributing their 12 rank points among their 24 total available ranks.

This way, if you want to go full CoF or MG you just put 12 points into them, if you want a bit of each, you just distribute your points among them.

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Also absolutely fine. Wouldn’t change much either… if you loose all boni by switching or you distribute points accordingly to mix-match… makes no difference. The point is simply to not double-dip into the rewards at any given time.

It’s like choosing between doing monolith runs for profit or doing boss-runs for profit… you cannot do both, both are nice, but you are only one person after all. So having them both accessible is no issue as you cannot do a monolith run with a boss to have both at once. At that point it would be nonsensical to ever do either/or as the combined is obviously superior in return, but since that’s not existing we can choose which we prefer simply and switch willy-nilly related to our mood.

Never in the mood to trade? Always CoF!
Hate RNG drops and want to deterministically play towards results? Always MG!

It’s that simple really.

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The goal of the points in my post were not to force people into using the trading system, but to make it more accessible. If people want to be able to buy the occasional item that their prophecies refuse to reward them and they have the gold for it, why shouldnt they be able to? SSF exists if people truly want to have a solo experience, it shouldnt be implied as part of the CoF experience.

It really doesnt. Item factions should be for different styles of gameplay and different types of item farming. Gating the entire trading system behind one faction with no other rewards aside from access to the trading system is just not a good design.

I mentioned this in a different bullet point in the OP. Punishing the entire player base for the actions of the very few is a huge kneejerk reaction. They should be targeting the RMT users directly, not removing core functionality due to a few bad apples.

I dont know what this is :). I think it was in my head from No Man’s Sky’s freighter expeditions.

One of the primary points of this post is that the trade faction should enhance and reward trading, not be the only way to trade. The more options provided to the player base, the better the game will be.

The loot drop disparity absolutely does not have to exist, or at least it does not have to exist to an extreme point. That was the idea behind adding extra functions and rewards to MG, but not having them grant nearly as many pure drops as CoF. Add better target farming prophecies for CoF as well, or improve the way that prophecies are obtained so that people arent spamming rerolls looking for specific things over and over. Make the loot explosions even bigger, i dont care, just have those be the CoF-only items.

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That was not his point. We all know that CoF and SSF aren’t the same thing. You can be CoF and still play with your friends.
His point was that if you have the possibility of trading+getting the full CoF experience, then players that don’t want to trade at all will always be behind.

So there has to be some drawback if you want both to keep the game balanced for both the players that want full trade, those that want no trade at all and those that want some of each.

This I agree with. The rank rewards for MG aren’t good. They should give you relevant bonuses for trading, like a discount on the tax, extra trading slots (they would need to implement a slot limit first), discounts on re-listing and stuff like that.

It does, though. Trade works because you have thousands of players all farming alongside you. If you want a specific unique that is rare (or one that you can’t even get yourself like the Uby drops), then you just get the currency and buy them because someone else farmed it for you.
CoF doesn’t have anyone to farm for you. If you want a rare unique, you have to get a lot more drops (or with better quality) in order to compensate for that.

Getting an Aaron’s will in MG means getting some gold (or whichever currency you change it to) and you have dozens available to you. Most of them cheap.
Getting one in CoF means dozens of prophecies and it might still not drop.

So if MG players have close to the same drop rates as CoF, then players that don’t want to trade at all will always be at a disadvantage and the game will be balanced around MG and their drops (like PoE does).

Which is why a multiclass system could work, where you choose what the loot drop disparity is and what your trade abilities are.
Otherwise you’re only forcing people to trade, even if they don’t want to, because that is the most efficient way to play the game.

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Yeah, but that’s talking aside form what was said, isn’t it?

‘I want to ask for a system which doesn’t stop people from interacting freely with the stuff they want!’
And then the message of ‘But that would screw over those which only want to do one thing!’
is just senseless.

Why? The premise for that notion is not given yet… how is that deduction hence made? It’s without basis, it reacts to the former situation, not the expected one after all… so it’s absolute nonsense.

Or just a proper setup… ya know… instead of this utter garbage EHG made there in terms of limitations for cross-faction stuff. One of the worst I’ve ever seen plainly spoken.

First off… re-listing shouldn’t cost anything at all, it should be time-limited. For example only allowing it after 2 hours.
Solves the issues about price-fixing and removes the existing issues where the market is just a risky non-rewarding mess as you need to invest twice for a basic function.

Not to this extreme though, by far not.

We’ve people talking about ‘farming up 3 T7 items’ in CoF while people in MG barely ever see a 2 T7 item at all, and definitely not on the market.

It’s ridiculous how far in magnitudes the power difference is for drops. That has to be fixed simply. Even with 1 million traders the supply/demand wouldn’t make up for it, demand already outpaces… so more people wouldn’t change the ratio.

MG also not, my Gold doesn’t fall out of the sky. And I need substantial amounts of it too to acquire proper items.
The part about items being worthless is because the market is swamped, which is removed by enforcing a listing limit per account. So then suddenly it’s more even again from what currently is screwed up.

MG has so many issues that people can’t even see what ‘actual function’ and simply ‘broken side-effect’ is anymore, at least most can’t, as your argument showcases.

That’s also because of the broken MG system, hence in need of fixing. Not a inherent problem.

Minimal cost for items needs to be limited, and it needs to be limited according to rarity of acquisition and power of the item itself, not some arbitrary rank.
That item is ‘very rare’ for drops… so it should also be ‘very expensive’ on the market, enforced.

The issues of MG have to be fixed first and foremost since discussion is always this utter nonsense pointing towards the broken shit and explaining ‘but this won’t work because ot it’ when a healthy market system wouldn’t even provide those pitfalls in the first place.

Can we start talking as if MG would be healthy for such a suggestion hence? We know it’s broken front, back and center… it doesn’t change that suggestion with a reasonable system in place wouldn’t be a net positive under normal circumstances though.

18

Behind what exactly? Even if they made it available, nobody is forcing people to use it, and many likely wont. If someone is concerned about behing “behind”, then being able to buy things that they are missing can be nothing but a boon.

I get the concept of what youre saying, but its not nearly as delicate of a balance as you make it seem. And again, I am not calling for drop rates to be “close to the same”, I even specifically said that it should be “not even close”. It is just meant to be another vector for farming. And having CoF items remain as CoF items, it would allow people to do a mostly self-farmed build while still being able to purchase those pesky items that will not drop for them.
I do like the multiclass idea, allowing people to pick different aspects of each thing, though that would be a tough implementation.

19

It’s not senseless, though. If you have the ability to freely trade and also get the bonus loot drop explosions at the same time, then it means the game will be balanced around the ability to have both at the same time.
Which means that anyone that doesn’t want to trade will be miles behind everyone else.

If you design the system with drawbacks so that you have a balanced gameplay wherever you want to land on that spectrum, like with the multiclass suggestion, then that’s fine.

The only reliable tactic to get 3T7 items are via Nemesis and imprints. Neither of those are affected by CoF bonuses and both are available to MG. So both factions have the same chance of getting one.

You have no reliable way to find out if there are 3xT7 on the market or not because the UI doesn’t let you search for them. You’d have to list them all and then go page by page.
Another reason why you might not have many in the market is because they are very rare, so players would rather use them for themselves.

You can get specific unique items, most of them under 1M gold, which take a lot longer for CoF to get. They’re there in the market because thousands of people are farming for you and found the unique you want and they didn’t.

You have dozens of uniques that are semi-rare or full on rare (like the aforementioned Aaron’s will) that you can buy cheap and allow you to start playing your build right away. Those same uniques will take dozens of prophecies to drop for a CoF player. So yeah, you have lots of people farming for you.

This is only true for top tier items and meta build items. As can be seen in PoE, if you need a relatively rare unique for your build and it’s not a meta build, you can buy it very cheap immediately, rather than farm for it. Because thousands of players are also farming and they don’t want that unique.

The common dirt uniques in PoE cost less than 1c. There are dozens of different ones that cost 1c. And PoE has a listing limit based on your stash tabs. So that clearly isn’t the issue. Or not that relevant for this particular issue.

This means that if you need a specific common unique in PoE, you can either farm for hours or you can simply pay 1c and get it in 5 minutes of play.
Likewise, if you want a specific common unique in LE, you can get in 5 minutes with MG. And even if you impose limits on listings, and even if you impose a time limit on listings, you’ll still get that common unique for dirt cheap with MG.
And it will take longer to get it on CoF. Might even take a few hours. Or even a couple of days. Depends on the RNG.

20

That’s what the whole talk is generally about.

Imprints are affected though as much as I know? I mean… I had several tagged imprinted items dropped by now, despite having a non-tagged imprint. So it is somehow affected.

And you also drop 3 T7 in CoF naturally. Very rarely… but you do. Which is simply not a thing in MG, you can go hundreds of hours without seeing one.

Sure, but you also don’t see 2T7 on there… so maybe there are 2-3… in total?

They ‘don’t exist’ for MG, the drop-rate is so low that they’re a unicorn item.
In CoF they aren’t.

Which is the issue of the broken system, not a base-issue.
Minimum pricing is and always was mandatory but never done by EHG. They have exactly zero clue how a market has to be set up to function properly and what functionalities are needed to sustain one. It’s quite clear.

It’s less true for top-tier items actually, quite the contrary.

The higher quality the less likely to have something else in your posession which is even higher priced, hence listing it is the most sensible choice.

Limiting has the biggest effect on low-tier and mid-tier quality items as those are easy to provide in the hundreds.

But no cost for listing, you just shove shit in until it’s full if you don’t wanna waste space.
In LE listing comes with a cost.