So…
So far, this sounds horrible.
Oh, sorry, I forgot:
A lot of us were hoping the answer was “Not at all, no droprate changes whatsoever.”
So, there’s another nail in the coffin…
Trade systems that do not provide an ability to search for items you want are a game design anachronism. I have never been less interested in trading with other players than I will be if this is how I’m going to have to do it and I have to question if that’s the goal.
I am extremely disappointed.
I believe that’s the point. You have to make a system like this extremely cumbersome in order to dissuade players from using it as their primary method of item acquisition. It’s similar to the gambler. The few seconds between each gamble aren’t there for computation purposes, they exist to make the process inconvenient.
It seems like, if I were to construct two sentences, like this:
The Bazaar is being designed solely for sentence 2. Meaning, there will be no ability to fulfill the desire of sentence 1 in LE.
And I don’t see what’s wrong with that. It’s not as if the specific item you need doesn’t exist in the Bazaar, you just have to spend a lot of time looking for it.
I won’t bother creating a Player Shop under this system. Not saying no one will, but when the people interested in trade don’t create player shops, then the trade system won’t really work well.
Pretty easy to bypass that issue when you make selling easy but buying hard.
Dissuading players from using trading as a reliable method of item acquisition is a goal without any value. Other studios care way too much about it, to their games’ detriment, and I had hoped EHG was better than they are given how many other things they’ve done very right in LE so far.
The experience people want when they think of trading with other players is reliably acquiring specific things, not window shopping. If the my mindset is “Boy howdy am I excited to wander around looking at a random assortment of BS and maybe there will be something I want but probably not.”, I will scoop up my grandmother and go to an antique show.
A trade system as inconvenient and useless as this is has no reason to exist. If the point is to make a system people don’t want to use, just dump randomly named NPCs with random item rolls on them into a town somewhere - it’s the same gameplay experience for much less development time and fewer players annoyed that trading is worse in LE than every other game.
The goal is to have players actually play the game. You run into content balancing problems when upgrades are too easy to obtain.
I get the sentiment expressed in your second point. I wouldn’t go to the flea market hoping to purchase a Ferrari. I see the Bazaar as something that exists for players who want to interact with it and not a core function of the game. I think balancing the game around things you kill and find is a sound decision.
Agreed.
I understand the notion of “If players can sell/buy any item they find, then the trading system will by default become the best place to acquire the best items for your build.”
Is there any way we (the players) could salvage this proposed system?
Let’s say we decide to self-organize. We decide to make our own form of a Marketplace.
Step 1: Player seeking an item posts it… someplace. Chat would be annoying (1990 called, they want their Trade Chat channel back…) We can come back to this later.
Step 2: A seller sees it and has the item. They post that item into their shop and PM the buyer.
Step 3: Buyer enters/exits the Bazaar until the seller comes up in the RNG. Goes to their Shop, buys the item.
Now, this is still pretty horri-bad.
In the end, this would be a ridiculously cumbersome system to get items people want for their build, all designed as a “Work-around” to the lack of a proper trading system. And if players pull this off, then the “trading system” will still be the main place to get that specific item you need for your build, it will just take a long time.
End result: this really doesn’t actually meet EHG’s goal of “the trading system shouldn’t be a place to get the best loot for your build.”
The developers responded to a similar post on Reddit:
Leaving and re-entering the Bazaar will not reroll what’s on offer.
It sounds nearly identical to how Mike described it during several of his dev Q&A streams. Here are a couple such examples:
Personally, I look forward to seeing how it works and feels once it’s fully realized and implemented.
Nothing about convenient trade precludes players from “actually playing the game” - in fact, it can often make them play more by improving their ability to try new characters and builds, or get past brick walls that would otherwise take an unreasonable grind. They’ve been consistently trying to bury trade throughout POE’s lifetime, and yet despite how convenient it is anyway thanks to third party tools, they still “actually play the game” anyway. The only difference it makes is how annoyed you are when you’re done trading - not whether or not you do it.
No, you don’t. You run into content balancing problems when you throw fully unfettered trade into a game without any semblance of cohesion or thought behind it (like D3 did). The idea that convenient trade destroys game balance is a cockamamie idea that players got sold on by bad game devs, but it is not a foregone conclusion. Making trade suck in order to slow the usage and therefore the power curve is lazy design at best, and it has been in every game that does it - which EHG has genuinely shocked me by cranking it up to 11 - on a scale of 5.
The Bazaar was called “current plans” and “a work in progress” and that means it isn’t yet final. EHG has done a lot of things right and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ll realize the quality of this system does not line up with the quality of the rest of their game. But I will not support yet another game that wants to give me the middle finger because I sometimes want to trade with other players for upgrades or build enabling items in a way that is convenient.
I really feel like Mike should know from the numerous other games that want the same thing from their inconvenient trade systems that this is a dream that does not manifest into reality, no matter how hard you try to force it to.
The only possibility of player-driven solutions I can think of is a third party tool and website that players collaborate on to aggregate what they are listing into a single location, so that it was searchable and filterable. It wouldn’t solve most problems, but it would at least help you not constantly waste massive amounts of your time wandering around the Bazaar clicking on who knows how many dozen different shops, having to check each item individually to see if you care about it.
At some point it has to because otherwise you’re only trading with a fixed set of players forever.
Yes, I was thinking the same. 3rd party site with decent tools to manufacture your item (similar to the Build Planner, but with specific rolls), list your name and price. Players find 10-15 sellers for the item they want, go to the Bazaar and RNG-shop to see if any of those seller’s shops comes up.
Yes let’s make trade hard so people have to continue to gamble for their gear. I’ve leveled at least 18 characters to level 80+ (highest being level 91)
And I have only had an upgrade to an item I was wearing after level 25 drop in game 1 time. And maybe have had like 5 or 6 items (in total) drop that were craftable upgrades. So yes let’s make trading difficult so the Gambler Guy’s store doesn’t go broke and he becomes homeless.
If the strength of a character relative to the difficulty of content with or without convenient trade is equal (i.e., balanced) then why do you want it?