And to be clear: having the best items locked behind impossible RNG is just the same as having the best items easily achievable. Either of them takes away your incentive to hunt them down.
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I think my experience applies to this point.
My two 4 LP items have been the bee gloves, and this useless axe, neither of which are worth using as legendary since an exalted item is just better.
How long did it take you to get them? I’m curious about other top players’ experience. How long it took them to get 4LP items and which ones they were.
I’m going to have to find the thread to prove you wrong. (or that my memory is crap. either would be good to know)
Good luck, if it exists, it will be from before Feb 21, 2023.
Edit: I should warn you that this is a bit of a trap because that’s when we announced the Item Factions.
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my memory is crap.
Here’s the thread: Dear EHG, I lLOVE TRADE...but - #10 by Llama8
And here’s Llama8 telling me you had already said that drop rates would be reduced.
I hate being wrong. It sucks. Sorry Mike.
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All good 
The amount of info we dumped in that initial thread was a lot and I see mistakes from it all the time so it’s not just you at all.
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Dude, you came back on the internet, admitted you were wrong, and apologized.
That already puts you in a category that 99.999999% of the entire internet is NOT a part of. THAT’S steppin’ up. 
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He also admitted I was right… Though my typos in that post were shocking.
who said that
Exactly what I think and why sometimes I’m debating about the current drop rates and legendaries with good LP gated behind layers and layers of RNG.
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Not nearly as much as they like to think they do, and even less so in a game that has a box price instead of being purely MTX driven for its revenue. And to the extent they do, the rarity of the absolute most perfect items is not what keeps enough of them around to matter.
They’re also the ones most likely to throw shitfits all over the community about anything they don’t like, try to stir up drama, shriek about new MTX and content, try to negatively influence others about the game, engage in review bombing over any perceived slight, and be toxic to the more casual players. They’re not as important to court as you seem to think they are.
Having extremely rare items that very few people get to see (which have no meaningful impact on gameplay above the imperfect versions) is a pretty far cry from “You get everything in a week and then you’re done”.
<1% of a game’s community having a dysfunctional relationship with games that doesn’t allow for anything except the Gold medal to be a reward doesn’t make Silver and Bronze stop being rewards for the >99% of players who are too busy playing the game to get mad about meta crap.
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I agree with you there, but from what I’ve seen so far in LE, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It might change in the future, as LE becomes (we hope) more popular. But right now it seems like a very positive community here. And that’s in no small part to the role the devs play in interacting with it.
I was just making an extreme case, but the point might still apply:
-If you’re a top player, you’ve played a couple weeks and you have a few 2-3LP items. Why would you keep playing pushing for the 4LP items when you know you have barely any chance of getting one? And if you do finally get one, it’s more likely than not to be on a mostly useless item?
-Likewise, if you’re a semi-casual and you’ve played for a couple weeks and you have a maybe a few 1LP items, why would you keep playing when you know the chances of getting a decent 2-3LP item are slim to none?
In those cases, what happens is that you most likely abandon the character and make a new one. And after a few times doing that, you stop and wait for the next cycle.
Again, I believe this will be mostly an SSF-issue. Those that trade will be able to work towards buying new and better stuff. Since it seems you won’t be able to resell items you traded for, the game will mostly become about going after gold so you can trade more.
ARPGs are about showing you a carrot to keep you going for more. But if you never reach the carrot, you stop pushing. So a balance is required where the top tier items are at least achievable every once in a while.
I have faith that the devs are going to at least try to balance the game so we always have something achievable to push towards. But factions are going to change the way we get loot, and the change will most likely be huge. It’s clear that different players will always have different views on what the loot should be like. So might as well just wait for it and make our judgements then.
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I have a sneaky suspicion people are vastly over-estimating what the effectiveness of trade will be. Especially when you consider the item drop rate will be tuned down for those people. It’s not like the market will suddenly be flooded with 0.00000000000001% rarity items, just because there’s more people not getting them as drops.
And that’s not even considering that there might be trade (bound item) restrictions on certain items, effectively taking them out of the market.
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It’s mostly a numbers game, really. If you have a chance to get a 4LP item every 10k hours, for example, that means with 1k players you can expect a 4LP item to drop every 10h.
Of course, it’s not so linear, but the more players there are, the more rare drops will happen.
And with trade, while not all those items will hit the market (some players will want to keep them for themselves, or might not realize they’re worth a lot or any other reason) you might still reasonably expect that there will be more good items accessible with trade than without. Especially as more casual players will luck into good items and might prefer to simply sell them for a lot and to buy just mid-tier gear for themselves.
It will all depend on the adjustment to drop rates and how many players we will have playing at any given time, and how many will be trading. And I expect there will be a few adjustments post-1.0 to tweak things to how the devs plan those to be.
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This is true, but they have a cost associated with them so the top tier items may well still be out of reach of “normal” players (due to the gold price versus the probable amount of time get one to drop).
But as you say, nobody knows 'cause its not in LE yet.
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Yes, that is to be expected. But the overall, let’s call it quality of loot, will still increase across the board. You’ll have a lot more low-tier stuff for sale, and some more high-tier stuff for sale. Casual players will have more choices to gear up, top players will have more chances to min-max.
If you compare to PoE, even with all the problems their trading system has because of price fixers and snipers (and scammers), same thing happens. You want to find some double corrupt unique, you’ll usually have a few to choose from. They are expensive, obviously, so most people can’t afford them, but they’re there mostly for min-maxers anyway. And on the other hand, if you’re just trying to get gear so your build works reasonably well, you can buy a bunch of stuff for 1-10c easily enough and don’t have to keep praying for drops.
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Yes and no.
Your computation does not account for the fact that there is 1K players competing for the one 4LP item that dropped.
If everybody wants the 4LP item in question, that item will remain scarce even with trading.
The impact of trading is in allowing players to convert one unwanted drop into another.
Things become more accessible with trading when items have different values for different people. 4LP items are likely to be highly sought after by a lot of people. When there is something that everybody wants (and no reliable way to target farm for it), the impact of trading is greatly diminished.
Well, to quote you, yes and no. 
4LP items are highly sought after, but maybe the 4LP item that drops is for a meta build that you have no interest in playing. Or it happened to drop for a casual player that would rather just sell it and gear up his current build properly.
But the point I was making is that if you don’t trade you would need 10k hours to get said item, but with trade it’s quite possible it will be available in the bazaar. So trade is likely to bring item quality up by that point alone.
I think the flaw in your reasoning is that there will never be an item that EVERYBODY wants. Some people prefer melee. I personally dislike melee. If a 4LP item for a melee build drops, I’ll sell it. So overall, availability and quality of loot will increase with trade.
That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to realiably get a 4LP item every cycle, maybe not even as a top player. But it will make it easier.
I expect medium tier exalted gear to be very cheap in a free market.
This is mostly because of how crafting works.
In crafting a high-tier exalted item you are going to produce an industrial amount of almost-good-enough items.
With trading all these failed crafts are going to flood the market. With a high supply, I would expect these failed crafted items to be very cheap.
This is all speculation, there are a number of variables that we do not know yet. And specifically the costs associated with trading, I believe you need a resource to trade, which is the currency of the faction. Depending on how the system is tuned it might behave in wildly different ways.