there’s no solution to RMT unless you (1) abolish trade completely, (2) devalue everything, or (3) tie accounts to peoples real life IDs. instead, just make a system where it feels good to play with friends and share loot.
this friend lock mechanism won’t work. the bazaar will be used to make the real-money trade.
hey jump through the bazaar and look for my seller. his name is XXXXX and dressed in all red. he’s selling some nonsense item for a lot of money. buy that and i’ll transfer over the $$.
you either hire someone to handle these cases, looking over tons of transactions, or ignore it. any thing you code to catch people will be circumvented. oh you check for unreasonable purchases of items? they’ll do the trade in smaller batches. you look for too many trades from 1 account? they’ll have an army of bots doing the trades in parts.
so there’s no solution. all you can do is obfuscate it as much as possible. which is fine, but not if the trade-off is a worse experience for everybody else.
If possible this sounds like a very elegant solution. Even if you don’t soulbind as long as that time and date stay when traded you can form a mini group found trade guild. Any new people the receiver adds to their trading friends it wouldn’t matter because those new people could not receive the previously traded item.
It’s a little off-topic, all this chat about “friends” and “guilds” but I agree that it is important for any game that is going to go MP.
Has there been any official mention regarding “Friends” or “Guilds”?
I don’t recall reading anything, but I haven’t scanned back through anything historical much. Perhaps one of the longer standing members has read something in the past on where LE stands on these topics and could enlighten me?
Cool. It’s not a priority for me anyway, both of the guilds I still belong to haven’t played together in any game for a few years now. We spend more time on fb than in any game together.
Late to the party, but I like the sound of it.
As may be obvious based on my lengthy thread on the subject, I’m not a proponent of introducing a full-fledged trade economy to LE. And frankly, the game isn’t being designed with one in mind from the get-go (although that could be changed, of course).
I think this sounds like a rather unique approach which has to be experienced first in order to properly evaluate it.
I’m definitely a fan of no AH, no option to deterministically search all of the economy, and no real barter.
Honestly, the proposed bazarre doesn’t sound that appealing.
If I need a sword, for example, I wouldn’t have much fun clicking on vendor after vendor after vendor hoping to find something. And if I find nothing, resetting the whole thing for new random vendors to click on over and over again.
Also, I don’t know what currency is planned but it might have to be something other than gold, since golds only value is for gambling.
So far we know Gold will be the main currency, and even with or without a bazaar, LE needs mroe gold sinks.
I am pretty sure gambling and stash tabs will not be the only gold sinks.
Maybe we get some advanced/rare crafting or potential other endgame system needing gold.
Oh god that sounds like a… bizarre… and terrible system. I really hope they don’t reduce drop rates for the sake of trading and I hope they recognize that artificial frustration isn’t a great design tool.
Honestly I kind of wonder how much trading has been thought out as opposed to just taken as a kind of given. Do the devs have some specific goal they want to achieve by adding trading? Or did they think trading was a required feature and have been working backwards to figure out how they want to do it?
I think trading brings 2 positive aspects I can think of:
Community- Poe tries this by forcing player interaction. (Imo it’s 50% 50% hit or miss). I don’t see how the proposed Bazar would incorporate it but I see many people push back on that, myself included, preferring a some system that small groups can form a close sense of community.
Discovery- somewhat for the buy but more for the seller/finder. Trading let’s you get excited for great items that you normally wouldn’t use.
In it’s current state I think the Bazaar needs a “smart shop” system that allows to spawns shop that are more likely to sell items you could be interested to buy.
How to do that ?
Shops sellings all items with a price above your total gold should not spawn
Maybe allow the player to choose between 2 or 3 filter maximum. Players shouldn’t be able to search and target exactly which shop spawn but have more chance to find something interesting :
Shops selling items for your class
Shops selling unique / non unique items
Shops selling items with the total affix tier sum is above or under X
Maybe you could also introduce some ranking or reputation for shops or shop allow player to give a tag (from a small list) to their shop dedicated for leveling / bossing/ farming content Y.
Another idead could be to put the shops in areas dedicated to their respective tag so players would only visit areas thei are interested in like on the North east of the Bazaar are the “leveling shops”, on the south sentinel shops…
i don’t think this is true at all. I can see people not engaging, but I can see people really engaging with the system for the thrill of the hunt when tired from mapping, wanting another style of loot hunting without the adrenaline.
I have to agree here;
The POINT of trading systems is to make it EASIER TO FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
If you make a trading system that IT DELIBERATELY DESIGNED TO BE INEFFICIENT then it is effectively the same as if IT DOES NOT EXIST.
If it is less effective than just monolith farming with a high strictness loot filter nobody is going to do it. As it literally takes less time to farm the item yourself than to find it in bazaar.
I think the design philosophy is playing the game (killing monsters) and crafting should always be the best option to find your items.
However you have the possibility to be lucky and find items in the Bazaar but less effective and it also gives the option for players to sell their items that doesn’t suit their build.
But the current idea seems very unreliable so it needs some adjustments, like smart shop or something else.
I would rather see every player have a POE style hideout where their vendors are and a in game search page that indexed everything for sale. Once you locate the item you want, you go to that persons hideout and buy from their vendor.
I can see why the devs might go with the random vendor idea. If this game has 5000 players for example, and 2000 of those players make vendors, its kind hard to put all of those vendors in a room for people to browse.
From a buyer point of view, clicking on vendor after vendor hoping to randomly find what I’m looking for, then resetting the room to get new vendors to click on over and over would get frustrating really fast. I would probably give up and just go play the game.
