I agree with this somewhat, personally I don’t see any point in trading in last epoch simply cos all content is easily doable solo with mediocre gear found or crafted yourself. I also see no point in multiplayer unless you have a group of friends and wanna kill some mobs together. In a game like poe where the end content is very difficult and requires people to have godly insane gear to clear, sure trading is the answer for alot of people. Last epoch is totally fine playing with the gear you find and craft and still reach that end game easily. No item is out of reach, sooner or later you will get it.
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Yes, ultimately I would prefer not to see ANY trading in LE whatsoever. Right now, as the game stands in single player there is no real need for it. ALL items can be obtained by ANY player, it just takes more time to get some than others. I think that trading, while ideally sounding great, actually is a detriment to most games it exists in UNLESS the goal is to provide a monopoly-like wealth mini game for players.
So, as Zaodon says above, I think the first thing that the LE devs really need to consider is the WHY are they introducing trade? What function is trade being introduced to perform? Is it:
- Do they want an economy mini-game which encourages “flipping”?
- Is it a mechanism for players to be able to skip grinding & buy rare drop items?
- Or is it merely as a Gold Sink?
My own opinion is, as I said, first I would prefer zero trade.
However, if they are determined to have it in the form of a Bazaar, and it is #1 then there needs to be something like poe.trade. I am against this myself as it encourages all the crap we see at poe, botters, fake listings, hyper inflation, etc etc. There could be some ways to avoid some of this as Neokortex indicated above.
If it’s #2, then a simple Bazaar system with player shops and NO 3rd party site would be perfectly adequate. I also really like Neokortex’s idea of an item becoming account bound when bought from a “shop”, that would eliminate the flipping issue. I’m not a fan of the auction style system myself, I would rather just see a “see it/buy it” system. Make the items being sold priced based on the sellers desire or knowledge, not a published “going rate” system.
As far as #3 (gold sink systems) go, I have yet to see a trade mechanic introduced to combat that ever working in any game that I have played over the years, and bear in mind I have been gaming online since the very early days of sfc3 in the late 90’s. If you avoid giving an economy any important role, then the balance of gold in a player’s account becomes pretty meaningless anyway if they are not playing SSF so gold sinks are irrelevant long term.
The immediate length of this one thread within hours already goes to prove how divisive and complex the topic of trade becomes within a game. What I fail to grasp is “why bother”? Just skip having trade altogether imho…
It doesn’t have to stay that way, but it can still be a bit heavier.
I don’t play as much as I did 20 years ago, but that doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t get boring so quickly.
It’s clear, most want either nothing or much more control on trades.
→ For me, just the chance to bid for urgently needed items [which just won’t drop for me] would be enough.
That’s how it is.
EDIT:
What about:
→ You could also let EHG control the bazaar ONLY. There would be sporadic contingents of various items (for example 10 times Beast King, or 10 times the Omnividence, or 10 times the same Magic Gloves etc) and each player could bid on one of them per account. The 10 highest bids will win the bid. The frequency with which the Bazaar makes such offers depends on the current number of players and should be calculated accordingly. All bids and bidding periods of course again not visible.
EDIT 2:
To rummage around in private bazaars for months until you finally see the item you want somewhere and possibly get it, just also sounds… um… intense.
Yeah, being able to get those accursed Smite idols would be nice.
When I heard there will be trade I always thought about how they do it. It is already quite easy to get decent items in this game. Good bases to craft on drop often and it is mainly the crafting which can feel bad at times.
Also the game is designed in a way, that you can play with mediocre gear for quite some time. Maybe you miss out on some resistances, but that isn’t a death sentence in this game. Yeah maybe 30% increased damage here or some crit multi there would be nice, but you will be fine without it. A lot of power comes from the skill trees, so gear isn’t that important like in other ARPGs.
With an AH it would be trivial to get almost perfect items, since there is probably a never ending supply of good crafting bases. You sell the ones you don’t need and buy the once you need. Good general bases drop all the time, only the specific ones you need are more rare. My stash is full with items I could use for other chars and builds, with insane roles, not even speaking of exalted items here.
I think the Bazaar is one way to introduce trading without having people rely on it for gearing. The main gear, you get, should come from playing the game, it is what makes an ARPG interesting imo. The Bazaar just gives you the opportunity to sell good bases, unique items and maybe get some for yourself. I see it as a secondary way to get some items and sell some of mine.
I think quite a few people want it to be the main way to get items, but this is just wrong way to go. I really think people want it to be like the next PoE but with an auction house. In PoE you just pick up currency and high value items, to sell them and buy your gear. It is tedious but it works but I will always prefer a system where I can drop and craft my own gear. In PoE it is infinitely harder to craft the level of gear you can do in LE right now and mainly because of trading, to not “ruin the economy”. I can understand that having all your players run around in near perfect gear from the start is probably not what you want in a loot based game.
As someone else said I would also be completely fine without any player to player trading in this game, but I also like the idea of such a Bazaar, just as another option to might find some nice things and also make some gold.
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You could probably do a decent trade in decent bases with 2 t5 affixes.
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I really dont see how their proposed system will be an enjoyable trade experience based off the description.
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Yeah, I don’t disagree, we’ll need to see how it pans out.
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I don’t really see their system as a “trade” system. I think of it as “another source of RNG loot, if you want to spend time ‘farming’ the Bazaar.”
I’d rather farm bosses than the Bazaar, though.
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We have alot of differences in views. But on this, I agree. It’s like “farming the bazaar” as you put it, and I dont think I will find it fun.
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MMOs thread that needle all the time. Take cues from them. That seems to be something that EHG is really good at - looking to other games for inspiration and pitfalls, and coming up with hybrid approaches that combine great aspects of different systems, often with their own originality thrown in. Just keep doing the thing they’re already good at doing. The Bazaar as described is shockingly incongruous with most of the rest of LE’s design, to me.
Here’s an example: One of the reasons D3’s AH caused so many problems is that items were infinitely recycled back into it without any thought. Buy strong Level 30 item, use it until Level 40, sell it back on the AH. Done playing your Demon Hunter? Puke all the gear on the AH. That problem can be heavily mitigated with systems of item binding that remove items from the trade pool and prevent an infinitely growing inventory. Bind instantly, bind on craft, bind after X number of crafts, bind after time, bind after time equipped, bind after a threshold of echoes or monsters or bosses killed. Bind more quickly/strictly for certain types of items - exalted, higher level requirement, higher character level, higher level content completed with it equipped. These things are all options as pieces of a better trade puzzle.
They should at least try. That’s what I want. Not be so terrified of the bogeymen of “breaking game balance” or “making an item editor” with a great trade system that you make a severely worse trade system than many other games have. Don’t try to manifest this fantasy of community building and player interaction that ignores that no other game has been able to force it on people with crappy trade. My primary frames of reference here are POE and Warframe, and I would rather deal with their trade problems all day if I had to choose. And in neither of those games has the AH-in-a-browser-instead-of-in-game destroyed game balance or created item editors.
Like, think about what we’re looking at here. Wandering aimlessly around from random shop to random shop, manually inspecting dozens (hundreds?) of items? Sifting through tons of absolute garbage put up for sale by new players, spaghetti-at-the-wall salesmen, and trolls? Stumbling across a great looking item that gets sniped out from under you while you’re looking at it and having to pray to the RNG gods that you’ll one day find something like it, randomly, again? Having a total free-for-all for predatory sellers because buyers have no ability to compare prices for similar items? Or even worse, having to engage in adversarial trade through haggling? Feeling compelled to go back every to see if this time maybe there’s something worth buying?
Some people seem to be focusing on that great item deal find experience but forgetting that it will be one in a million. What’s above is what will be most of the experience. That’s not going to be fun to engage with and I have no idea why anyone thinks it can be. It’ll just be tedious and frustrating. And I resent that because if I were to continue playing, I would never subject myself to it but always feel in the back of my head that I should.
I would rather there be no outside-party trade at all than feeling perpetually at odds between FOMO and annoyance because of a trade setup this unwieldy. Discouraging people from using trade as primary acquisition is a bad goal that is better met by just not having trade.
“Within your budget” is where this falls apart. Items that are good enough for it to matter if there are a lot of them are expensive, and that includes good bases for crafting. That is part of what prevents trade from being “an item editor” - it already happens in other games. And calling convenient trade “an item editor” ignores the fact that you still have to “actually play the game” in order to get something to trade with. You can’t just roll a character on Day 1 and poof, there’s all your items forever. That’s an item editor. Needing to level up, acquire items, understand value a little, possibly sell some items yourself, so you can buy that high value, rare, build enabling hat from Big_Boi_1999 - that, too, prevents it from being “an item editor”.
Exactly this! As described it could just be replaced by a set of NPCs with randomly generated loot.
Because I’ve got two Smokeweavers sitting in my stash from drop luck that are going to rot there forever since I have no interest in the builds that use them. With a good trade system I could convert them into valuable items for specs I do want to play.
What I’d get instead from The Bazaar is rapid liquidation of those items, but no way to ensure I can convert those sales into items I want. My ability to purchase new items with my profits would rely entirely on RNG and the extreme tedium of manual browsing of dozens, hundreds, thousands of shops and items. That is a shitty experience and I would rather have no trade at all.
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And that’s one reason why we will use the Bazaar but not spend much time in there, and instead we will spend most our times on the field, killing mobs. The more I read all this, the more I think the Bazaar is exactly what I want and what I need.
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This seems like an interesting but bizarre (no pun intended) system, and I doubt it will release in the form it was described. Sounds like all it would end up doing is encouraging an out of game system similar to Path of Exile where players would co-ordinate out of the game to trade with each other privately.
I am almost certain with how much emphasize they put on saying, that items are tradeable with party members, when they were in the party at the time that item dropping, that you will not be able to trade outside of the Bazaar System, which solves this Issue entirely.
One of the good solutions for pure rng shops - bazaar has some kind of internal loot filter. You can choose categories and than bazaar feel you with players’ shops with close by items. So like you choose unique swords and all shops in Bazaar will sell at least one unique shop. For balance perspective you should not be able to mention level or exact tier of item (for uniques - name), so we have valid market with balance, player interraction and much easier item progression
I’d be interested to know how the game decides which shops to show to which players.
Will the system take an average level of items in the shop and show it to characters in a certain range?
Display from a random pool of all available shops?
Will accounts that haven’t been active in X months have the same priority of showing up as more active accounts?
Can one person’s shop show up in multiple characters’ games?
Will the system try to diversify the shops it displays to a buyer based on quality or type of gear?
Will someone’s shop with all white items have the same chance to display as a shop with all purple items?
Will sellers be able to figure out techniques to make sure their shops are displayed more often than others?
Will sellers be able to attract certain buyers? For instance, naming their shop “Sentinel Armor Only.”
What if my shop simply hasn’t gotten displayed in anyone’s game in a while?
I gotta be honest here.
EHG could have a special NPC called “Bazaar Master”, and when you sell off items to them, you get extra gold, and he keeps all items sold to him. When a player opens his Buy window, he offers a random selection of those items for sale. The random selection refreshes each day at midnight EST.
This would be almost identical to the system being offered, yet no one would call it “Trade”.
The Bazaar sounds like a system similar like going into a warehouse. You go in an look for things you might like. Sometimes you find what you searched for. Sometimes not. Sometimes you leave with something you didn’t search for.
This is like shopping. Many people enjoy this kind of trading in RL. Not everybody is solely focused on Amazon or Ebay.
So I’ll make my opinion when we get to test it. I get the idea behind it.
And I’m glad that we don’t get that 0815 Auction House from D3 where after 4 weeks the BiS items are sold for 1 Gold in packs of hundreds.
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