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.
But you can’t compare them. POE items, for the most part, are created. Created based on what is popular/meta at the time. There is NO way to create a 4lp item in LE. The only method to obtain one is through loot rng.
That’s why I’m saying I don’t think trade will have some huge impact on the availability of the BiS/near-BiS items. Because rng still plays the deciding factor. Sure, a 3 or 4lp Abberant Call might drop… but it is well-rolled? There’s no way to change either of those things.
Sure, it might make 1 or 2 lp items easier to obtain, or even just obtaining gateway Uniques will become easier. But I seriously doubt trade will drastically change the availability of the chase-items. Even moreso when you consider Llama’s point as to what price those items (when/if they do hit the market) will command…or if gold will be worth it to people who have put in the time to obtain them in the first place (already sitting on a dragon’s hoard of gold).
Good enough items are already easy enough to come by. That’s the complaint of the nested-rng system we have. That good-enough is really the best (most)people can hope to realistically achieve, and it’s already too easy to obtain.
Of course, this will all depend on the amount of players that are trading. You can easily see the discrepancy in PoE between the hardcore and softcore market. There are way less hardcore players, so the market prices and even availability of items is much less. Even as a rich player in hardcore you might not find what you want. But as a rich player in softcore you can almost always find it.
I disagree with that. I think you can compare them. Sure, many items in PoE are crafted, but many aren’t. You have corrupt gems, alternate gems, uniques, corrupted or double corrupted uniques. All those are dependent on RNG. And most builds will run a few uniques.
Likewise with LE: you have crafted gear, exalted crafted gear and uniques with or without LP. Some you have control over, some you need RNG. It’s still the same. With enough players trading (re my comment above about hardcore/softcore PoE trade) availability will always increase.
Again, this is similar to PoE. The really rare chase items are available for trade. They’re just so expensive that they are only effectively available to top players. But it is available to them, usually. Much more so than trying to get them themselves.
Also, you’re forgetting about a key point (which also happens a lot in PoE): top players will often play a build for some time, min-max it and then move on to the next. Very often they then sell the items from that build to finance the new one. Thus making the really good items available in trade.
I’m sure that dying moving all the items on the character off the hardcore market has nothing to do with that either. There’s also not the same market for crafters in Hardcore, so most of them apply their trade in the Softcore server(s).
We can wax poetic all day about what we think will happen. You can continue to use POE as your baseline for comparison…although, outside of both games being aRPGs with loot drops, they share very little in common. At the end of the day, you think everything will be fine, and I think things will stay relatively the same as we have now, just with an additional layer thrown on top to make it look more appealing. I hope I’m wrong, but so far, I haven’t seen the issues with loot in this game take any strides towards improvement, stemming back to the mostly-lateral changes to forging many years ago.
This is disappointing to me, because overall, I enjoy playing LE. But I keep running into that same wall of playing for a week+ with no progress, other than a few passive points, to show for it. My character(s) can complete all the content, but as far as getting them to that ‘finished’ stage, it seems to be with ‘just good enough’ gear. And that really doesn’t compel me to invest much more time than is required to get to that ‘just good enough’ point.
As was mentioned in this thread already… eventually, you have to allow the carrot to be gotten. Otherwise it no longer serves as an incentive. I’ve been playing LE well over 5 years now, and I have very few carrots to show for my time.
Just because it’s available in the bazaar doesn’t mean you can afford it, was kinda my point. Assuming items are priced “correctly” (ie, that the price scales with rarity) then the item that requires “10k hours” to drop (or whatever) will be priced out of the reach of all but the top x% of players, in a similar way to it being out of reach (by dint of play time required) of the lower playtime end of the community.
If it’s like PoE/D3’s AH where you can sell whatever you want as much as you want, yes. And yes, I’d agree that “failed” crafting would increase the supply of better stuff no matter how yu cut it.
That would be Favour, yes:
There are limits to comparison though, some concepts just don’t carry across.
I think things probably will stay quite similar to current, but with an additional layer on top to make things feel more appealing. If you like the idea of trade, you’ll be able to trade for stuff that will increase the “drop rate” for what you want. If you don’t like the idea of trade the other faction more directly affects the actual drop rate of what you might want, both directly based on faction rank (from what they’ve said, up to & above the current drop rates at max rank) plus however the #### prophecies work. But yes, we’ll just have to wait & see how things pan out when the rubber hits the road.
I think that the factions will be a step in that direction, for both trade-lovers and trade-haters.
Yes, but that was also my point. Trade will make it so that the incredibly rare items will become available to the top players. Which is how I think it should be. It shouldn’t become easily available to casual players. Unless a casual player happens on a rare drop himself through sheer luck, they will still never see those items.
But the top players will be able to see some of those items on the market and get some of them, as opposed to playing for a year and never seeing one.
On the other hand, the casual player will have access to more choices for “good enough” gear.
I never defended that 4LP items should be easily achievable to casual players, just that they should be somewhat achievable to the top ones.
I never expect to have one, personally. And I expect that if I do drop one I’ll end up selling it. Because I’m not interested in min-maxing. I’m more interested in getting builds to work decently well (into the 500s or more if possible, but not a priority) and then having fun with a different build.
Personally, I usually dislike both trade and crafting. I end up using trade as the lesser evil. PoE trade especially is quite awful. They have a good basis for it but then allow price fixers and snipers, they allow RMT, and all that could be easily fixed really. However, if you’re a casual player and all you want is decent gear to get resists and a few stats, then it’s good enough.
I expect to use LE trade the same way. I’ll be mostly playing on my own and occasionally buying low to mid-tier gear to fill my builds. I don’t really see myself using the other faction much, but I’ll wait to see how it works before commiting to that.
Yeah, that’s fair. At least LE’s trade won’t have price fixers (no reselling) & it’s unlikely to have snipers though there could still be RMT (since you can use the trade faction to trade direct with any other player you party up with).
Yeah, RMT will be hard to get rid of entirely, but I think their planned system for trade makes it so much harder to get away with. After all, having to farm (meaning actively play the game) so you have enough favor to trade means that you won’t have trade bots around. And it seems like there’s gonna be a tracking system in place as well, so I don’t think we’ll get profit markets like we do on D2/PoE.
And not being able to resell will definitely hurt the price fixers, since there’s no real point to it, but even more than that, the fact that players can simply immediately buy stuff from you without your interaction definitely takes care of them. It’s what I’ve always said that PoE trade needs to instantly become a lot better.
Not really. You find your desired scum RMTer, pay them, then they party up with you & they sell you your 4LP Wings of Argentus/Ravenous Void/whatever for 1 gold & you both pay whatever favour it costs.
Have they said how favour will be gained? Bot-coders are smart cookies, if LE becomes big enough, I’m sure one will be able to code a bot to do the same thing that a normal player can do to farm favour/gold/etc.
PoE has tracking systems, it still has RMT.
That’s more likely going to be due to the box price. Everytime a bot/RMTer gets banned, they have to buy a new copy (cha ching) & they then have to make enough RL cha ching to cover the cost of the box plus whatever other costs they have, it’s a barrier to entry. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
Yeah, why Chris is some anti making player’s lives nicer for buying consumables (crafting mats, maps, currency, etc) I don’t know though I kinda get why he wants to make it a ballache to trade for actual gear.
I’m sure it’s because PoE gets a little off the top from the RMT services. I mean, how else do those guys have 50 mirrors for sale on day 1 of a new league?
Yeah, they said you gain favor for either faction by killing monsters. And since trading spends that favor, then you have to kill more monsters to have favor to trade again. So it’s not an easy system to exploit for big money, like D2 or PoE is. You might still do it, for example a player that made a build and just wants to sell it for RM will probably have enough favor for it. But it’s not as easy for a business to be made from it. Maybe still doable, but then again, also vulnerable to LE countermeasures to it.
Its “just” got an additional time sink (killing mobs) compared to the other games, but I assume that making a bot to kill mobs probably isn’t the most difficult thing in the world. I’d imagine it’s an added % inefficiency chucked on top. I’m sure people will still do it (if LE gets big enough), it’ll just be less efficient than doing it in PoE/etc.
I mean, kinda. If LE wants to they can stop the bots. D2 is actually a really great example of this. D2 had lots and lots of bots. They would occasionally ban a few but there were always a HUGE number of them online. When they made D2R, all those bots went away (sadly, because some were really useful, like chaos run bots or enchant bots). So there is a way to prevent them, or at least mitigate them a lot so they’re not so easily profitable.
And as you mentioned, the upfront cost of LE will also factor into that. I expect we’ll still have some RMT going on, but I doubt it will ever be as severe as in D2/PoE.
Don’t forget that direct trading comes with all the same restrictions as Bazaar trading, including that you can’t trade items which have a faction rank requirement, so if you buy it at the Bazaar, you can’t resell it through a direct trade either.
Read my thead I posted in this thread from months ago as I have posted this MANY times in the last 2 years that the game has no fundamental tangible consumable items that players are seeking
Other games ie PoE have self run/made economy. Chaos Orb/Exalted/Divine etc which are consistently being used. People hoard Divine/Exalts like cash but they are supposed to be spent…like cash
My idea is this game needs consumable runes to keep an LP chase going, thus creates tangible items to be able value other items - you cannot craft or ever get a ‘perfect’ item in LE its virtually mathematically impossible
50 mirrors dont exist even after a week or maybe 2. GGG are directly informed when a Mirror drops. A player got 3 mirrors in a drop from a Betrayal npc ‘Drops 3 additional currency’ and got 3 mirrors. Chris Wilson apparently checked the code and confirmed it was possible
If 50 mirrors exist on day 1 GGG are spawning them apparently
GGG added a /kills command a few leagues ago and ive been averaging about 1.7-2M kills a league. Ive played for 10 years…ive found 1 Mirror. Ive probably killed over 40million mobs at a conservative number maybe since clear speed was a lot slower years ago but I also played a lot more years ago
I am relatively new to Last Epoch. I’ve been playing for 3 weeks and am still working on my first build.
I’ve been farming a Primatic Gaze for a good 2 weeks, which I need for my build.
I’m on the road in Black Sun. Initially with 0 corruption, I’m now at just under 350 corruption.
I have about 300 echoes behind me. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Prismatic Gaze.
I find the loot opportunities unusual. After 10 years of PoE and 20 years of D2, I have to say that loot doesn’t really feel good in LP.
The ability to farm loot specifically should work if you offer it that way. When I open the map in my 350 Black Sun, I hardly have any echoes that offer armor. But dozens that just throw out an epix. If I find an armor echo and do this, a green set piece usually drops which is already dozens of times in storage.
I also have the impression that the more Corruoption you accumulate, the more garbage drops. Yes, more drops, but mostly just more garbage. When something good drops, it’s not for my class. It’s always things for other classes. It feels like LE is programmed to not generate the loot the player needs. If there was at least trading.
Yes, trade will be especially useful in that scenario where you’re trying to find a piece to make your build work, whether it’s a unique or an idol. Especially for idols, since it seems like idol drops are weighted to drop your class more. Playing with other classes, I’ve yet to find crit throw idols for my hammerdin.
As for the high corruption only dropping more garbage, that’s actually expected. Low-tier uniques are more weighted to drop. High corruption only increases the amount of loot that drops and doesn’t change those weights. So if you now have x10 drops, it will be 10x more garbage. It just helps because your 0.01% of a good drop will effectively become 0.1% instead (or whichever number it actually is).
Overall I think that trade will make things a lot easier for casuals and semi-casuals. Top players might have an easier time finding top-tier gear, but it will basically change their gameplay from grinding for drops to grinding for gold for trades, and trading lots of low/mid gear to further get more gold.
