From reading their posts on trading, I’m willing to believe they’re just bad game designers, because none of their arguments are even vaguely coherent or logically consistent.
That said, just separate yourself from the devs for a moment and think about the design implications of having trading available but not separate from SSF: Trading makes acquiring items way faster and it magnifies the effect of the drop rates. If you balance the game’s loot progression rate to be good for ssf, you end up with a lot of items on the market, reducing prices and the time it takes for traders to gear up and be done with the game. If you then go balance the drop rates so that the acquisition rate is more reasonable through trading, then it makes it slower for the SSF people. If you have a desired maximum item acquisition rate and won’t separately balance these 2 play styles, this is a zero sum game and some playstyle gets shafted. In PoE’s case, they’re obsessed with player retention, so want to keep the item progression as slow as possible, but still insist trading is important, despite the fact that it’s effect pulls counter to their first goal. Hence we end up with unplayably bad drop rates for SSF for everything from loot to even content.
Beyond implementation issues, what makes GGG bad devs is that they haven’t well thought out their design goals and won’t listen to reasonable player feedback. This design tension IS something LE will need to deal with if they want trading in their game. But I have a lot more faith in them than in GGG to find at least some reasonable solution and adjust based on playtesting and feedback. Off the top of my head, the simplest solutions to this:
Just don’t do trading. What purpose does it serve in the game? What are the costs?
Split trade leagues from SSF and balance them accordingly. If people really want to trade, let them, I just don’t want my drop rates to get nerfed into oblivion for their sakes.
Do trading, but keep the balance of the game approximately where it is and just accept that people who do want to trade will be done with their experience a lot sooner than the SSF people. If you’re not obsessive nut jobs like GGG, just be ok with the idea that people like to experience the games at different rates. If someone wants to shortcut their progression time through trading, maybe that’s fine. Again, just don’t let it affect my experience negatively through your design.
You complain about GGG not listening to players and then ignore all the people who say they want trade in the game. My stance will always be if you don’t like trade, don’t use it. It has zero effect on YOUR experience if it isn’t even a part of it.
I absolutely hated the fact that if you wanted a good a build in PoE you pretty much HAD to trade for it and only made it to maps once because of it and stuck with Grim Dawn instead.
In fact, the biggest draw I had to this game was that there was one: no multiplayer.
Two: when multiplayer gets added the trade would be very obtuse so the main focus would be actually grinding and engaging with the game’s systems.
Instead of focusing on trade, I much rather have systems that allow for target farming of the Uniques you want.
There is no version of a trade system in which I am being presented with random sets of items being sold by other players that I will find practical, useful, interesting, or fun. The presentation of the system is not what I have a problem with - it is the core system. I don’t need to try it to know I will not like it.
EHG spending time and resources developing a fake trade system instead of other features that are actually fun and interesting is absolutely an impact.
What you should have learned from that experience is that how Blizzard implemented it was completely without thought for the impact on the rest of the game, and that was where the problem is. There are numerous steps they could have taken to prevent what happened with the AH in D3, and they took zero of them. You can’t map a totally thoughtless version of an AH onto here.
Also, I think it’s really weird that some people keep trying to bring up “botters destroying trade” or whatever as if that doesn’t already happen everywhere that trade exists in any capacity. Friction doesn’t affect bots and the RMT companies that use them. It affects human players.
A bunch of people keep explaining to you why trade being a part of the design of a game impacts how the devs design the overall experience. If you don’t want to at least engage with that fact then stop having this argument, it’s not gonna go anywhere useful.
As far as my first bullet goes, I wasn’t dismissing that trade could add something to the game, it was a question. One nobody who says trading is important is ever able to give me an answer on. They just take it as a given. That’s fine… people can like things without entirely knowing/being able to explain why… but answers to that question might give some insights which would be useful for designers looking to implement trading as a feature or creating some alternative to it which addresses the same things people enjoy about trading but better/less disruptive.
Just as some quick and dirty examples from stuff I’ve picked up discussing this at various times:
Trading is a community building feature: Definitely a desired goal for a multiplayer game, it’s just from my experience trading rarely ever produces good player interactions. People looking to trade are looking for it to be as quick and drama-less as possible. A good interaction in PoE is one where you whisper a bot, they instantly invite you, sell to you, then leave without saying a word. When people start talking it usually gets toxic or scammy. Not because “hur dur game community toxic,” but because the setting and motivation for that interaction isn’t really conducive to fostering anything better than that. If you want community features, idk, make guilds, make content that requires or is at least better with a group, make customization features like hideouts for people to show off, etc.
Trading makes dropping good items that aren’t useful for your build worth something: That is true, although there are clearly alternatives to accomplishing this and some of them might be at least as good or better than trading. Naive solutions: Diablo 3 RoS - style smart loot. If everything is for your character, you don’t need to worry about what to do about loot that isn’t. A vendor which you can sell your high end gear to to receive some kind of currency commensurate with how good it is. Prices wouldn’t be determined by meta market forces since the vendor doesn’t know what good gear for x build is, but it could know “Oh this item is this rare or this powerful, so it’s worth X badges/gold/whatever.” Not saying these are necessarily good solutions without more careful thought about them, but they in theory do what this part of trading accomplishes.
Trading lets players get specific items they want faster/deterministically: The hilarious thing about this is that both PoE and LE HAVE solutions to this, but in PoE’s case, their obsession with trading has caused them to balance most of these alternate systems to be borderline unusable. For regular items there is crafting. PoE’s crafting is so random and expensive that spending the crafting items as trading currency is better than using them to craft for all but the most high end players. Last Epoch’ crafting is pretty reasonably balanced. Maybe things fracture slightly too often for my liking as it is now, but it’s a basically good system that’s close to being a good balance. For unique items, they can be dropped as rewards from specific content so players can set goals and target farm for them. Again both PoE and LE have these systems in place, but in LE you can actually get those items if you go for them, in PoE they nerf the droprates so much that you’d be better off just efficiently farming currency on maps to buy it rather than trying to specifically farm for the item you want.
But this is just stuff I’ve manged to think about from talking with people about this. Please feel free to add another perspective. I don’t want to discount your likes and dislikes, I just want to drill down into the details a bit and recognize that trading, or any design element of a game, is composed of a mix of smaller things worth considering on their own.
Y in last epoch its ok, but try to playu POE without tradeing, and new league with no previous league items, as new player you have no chance, you maybe end 10 acts, and even white maps will easy prove this game is not for you. Poe devs nerf drops so beter items are accesible during trade, becuse someone of 200k players drop this one rare you need. Unique items are worth somethink only becuse of 6-link scam. Unique items never should be tradeabale only should be droped only.
Trade in poe is forced becuse you gets tons of shards which as a parts are nothink, so you must trade with others to fullfill this which you want and sell the ones you need. Its like LE crafting shards 10x more rare than now.
Drop Rates for items from monsters is set by the Devs based on SSF.
Every time you engage in buying an item via Trade, your personal drop rates decline for a fixed amount of time.
Every time you engage in selling an item via Trade, your personal drop rates decline to a lesser extent than when you buy, but still drop a little, for a fixed, shorter amount of time.
The two reductions stack.
Ta da! Non-traders are not affected, as the drop rates set by the game remain the same 100% of the time for them. For traders, the drop rates fluxuate, based on how much they trade.
Still nothing has changed about the disparity of gear acquisition speed.
If I can window shop the exact gear I need for my build, it matters nothing that my droprates are lower for the following week, because I simply would not need them: I’d already be fully equipped.
I wouldn’t really call you a trader, per se, if you just want a few items and then done. Most Traders trade - a lot. They do it constantly to generate revenue to buy those really expensive items. At least, going by other ARPGs. LE is different, and obviously, we don’t even have all the Loot Tiers yet (no Legendary in game yet), but I was just trying to propose a concept of how you could balance droprates around the act of trading which then would not affect SSF.
My opinion is that the amount of time farming currency and loot should correspond, as that is generally how “economies” work in online games. i.e. fairly common items sell for very little currency, super rare items sell for a ton of currency. So, as a person engaged in the trading system you either farm loot or currency, your choice.
Given that mechanism, everyone engaged in trading will naturally get items and buy items based on the drop rate of said item, as I said. And inevitably, the game Devs will lower drop rates based on trade. And that affects SSF folks.
So with my idea, Traders would just accept the lower drop rates and move on, its really the same whether its only for you or for everyone. The only difference is the SSF people aren’t penalized for the abundance of tradable items in the marketplace.
Because it affects how the devs balance drop rates.
The devs either expect players to trade to get their gear and reduce the drop rates (D3 on launch) in which case anyone who doesn’t trade suffers from lower drop rates. Or the devs balance drops around not trading and anyone who does trade can gear up much faster.
One way to slow down the “gearing buff” from trading is to make trading harder/more onerous in terms of finding the gear you want (LE seems to be going down this route), or you could put a cap on how powerful gear could be traded (so the most powerful gear can’t be traded, such as gear with t4/5 affixes couldn’t be traded).
You seem to use Chris from PoE as an excuse, yet you have not read the article I linked a few messages above. Let me highligh one paragraph:
Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can’t be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can’t use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.
That more loot + trade = faster loot acquisition isn’t really a disputable point. Nor is the fact that were they to make dropsrates lower for the sake of lowering the rate at which traders acquire gear, it would also reduce the rate at which SSF unless they did something about that.
I mean, they can decide HOW they want to deal with that problem, but it exists nonetheless.
We’re just talking about how they might/should go about that.
Right now the very concern being discussed in this thread is how the devs seem to be approaching this based on their past comments. That doesn’t mean they won’t change things, but we’re talking about how we know things stand right now. The info we have is:
Similar to PoE, they want to make a trading system (for some reason) but they don’t want people to actually use it that much. The proposed solution seems to again track with what PoE did in just creating artificial frustration for the people who dare interact with the system they put in their own game and could have chosen not to make if they didn’t want people using it.
That they haven’t entirely ruled out reducing overall droprates, including for SSF, in order to balance trading means THEY MIGHT DO THE THING YOU’RE SAYING THEY WOULDN’T DO! That’s the whole argument! If they had emphatically said “No, we will never change the SSF experience in order to work with trading.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion. We would very much like for them to not do that so that trading DOESN’T affect us like you are so stubbornly insisting it doesn’t despite all evidence and arguments to the contrary by just saying “Like, that’s just your opinion… man…”
See the 2nd post in the thread. The Devs of this game want drop rates based on SSF, but might adjust a little based on trading. Again, that’s not “Nope, no adjustment at all”, that’s “a little adjustment.” Which is a non-0 amount. Which is bad for SSF because of trading.
I already proposed a system which does lower drop rates only for traders and not at all for SSF. I’m sure people can somehow think of other ways to achieve that.
Right now, the Bazaar is not going to be a place anyone can find key gear for builds, so I don’t foresee it getting used for that purpose. It will be far more likely to evolve into a “newbie twinking” mechanism, where good rolled low-level gear gets sold so that you can fill an odd requirement as you level. i.e. You’re perfectly fine with a random item so long as it has X + Y on it. So the Bazaar will fill that niche.
I just wanted to poke my head in and let everyone know that we are actively reading every post in this thread. As always we take feedback from our community very seriously and will continue to do so.
I think that the opening paragraph of our multiplayer FAQ might not be quite clear enough. The information is what our current plans are but they are by no means set in stone. We have already been in heavy discussions about many parts of the multiplayer FAQ based on early feedback from the community.
I like to think that we are an adaptive group and when something doesn’t work, we pivot. Some of you have been with us for a couple years and have seen several systems vanish or be heavily reworked based on player feedback. Sometimes it’s a little hard to see a system you worked hard to develop get scrapped but I know from first hand experience (old passive grid) that it makes for a better game if you can let go of things that aren’t working. Even if this gets released in the form we have outlined, it will still not be immutable.
This is not a call to slow down the feedback at all. If anything, it’s a request to keep it flowing. Good, bad, something else, we want to hear it all.
