When it comes to trade, if you have a system that doesn’t allow for people to get the items they want or sell items for something of value, it’s a failed system. There’s just no getting around that. Especially with a certain troll’s ideas of “no economy/profit,” this is doubly true.
There may be other systems that can work better than an AH, but I haven’t seen a game do it yet, so history is the authority there.
Don’t misrepresent my stance. It isn’t anarcho-capitalism–that would be something more like a raw barter system that PoE set out to be. I consider that a failed system for a number of reasons and have for many years. The “I’m gone and will review dunk the game” is only if they choose one of the many obviously terrible trade systems–not merely a suboptimal one. Barter-only or bid-only would be such a system (shit trade ideas). A player market with some controls aimed at keeping botters under control would not.
While i dont really have anything against a well made trading system, i dont really see the point of it as of now. I can only speak for myself, but so far i never felt the need to trade anything in order to progress. If no drastic changes happen to how and what loot is dropping, i think alot of people will be just fine without feeling the need engage trading.
I also do hope that the loot system in future versions will keep these properties, so that people will never feel “forced” to trade in order to progress. Trading should only be an option for people that enjoy doing it and never a requirement in order to progress - or greatly speed up the progression of - the game.
Well, this was discussed at length earlier in the thread, but the tl;dr of my position on it was that loot in the game’s current form doesn’t warrant trade, but is also boring. I want a lot more variety of loot and a good trade system to support it, but not fall into the D3 fallacy of thinking you have to nerf drop rates to “balance” it. Trade will self-balance as long as you have enough stuff that players consider worth trading.
This. The extreme SSF nature of the game and how people are setting up loot filters (extremely tightly filtered to only the build being played) makes me uncomfortable. But I’ve tried not to comment too much about this and (fingers-crossed) hope that it is this way primarily because MP and trade hasnt been introduced yet. And not that the current metagame is the intended foundation for LE.
I do agree that the game as of now most definitely doesnt fail to provide you with good items to carry you right to the upper endgame (without spending extra time actively farming, but by just pushing higher and higher). I think right now the game just drops a little too much of it. I like getting items i can utilize and craft on but i dont like tons of crap that i will never have any use for. I do hope we will get further options to alter items tho. Right now the itemization feels very basic.
I know some people think I’m being some doomsayer or hyperbolic when I say that I don’t think this game will be long-term viable without trade, and there are many reasons I say that, but here’s another consideration…
PoE has many flaws (as basically all of us are aware), but recently I’ve gone back to play many other ARPG for a little bit and I realize that they all push me back to PoE–they are all missing something, whereas PoE seems to have all the critical components.
Grim Dawn is probably the 2nd best ARPG on the market currently, but it’s mostly a SSF game. It’s really hard to care about loot that isn’t for one of your primary builds. To this end, most ARPGs are missing trade and it’s one thing that does constantly bring me back to PoE–even though I hate how its implemented, because it’s still functional for the purpose trade serves.
Torchlight 2, Diablo 2, Sacred 2, and to a lesser extent Dungeon Siege 2 – These all have narrowly confined build paths, so if you have played these as much as I have, you run into the problem of not having new builds to try (or are interested in trying).
Wolcen is an incomplete mess, but compares well to D3 in terms of scope and content. Unfortunately, this is where LE sits right now too. I’m confident LE will grow, but I wonder if it will grow beyond this and how long that will take.
What PoE has that brings me back to it:
Deep and broad character building/customization
Trade
A fairly wide spectrum of endgame content; just wish the campaign wasn’t mandatory and that it wasn’t all centered around the goddamned Atlas
Multiplayer that mostly makes sense, though still has its own issues (and some content clearly isn’t meant for it)
A huge variety of loot that has many uses
LE is excused from not having some of this yet, but there won’t be any excuse if it releases still missing some of these–unless EHG is okay with just competing with D3 and Wolcen.
I also noticed, that the game has some kind of “smart” loot, where most of items you find (even uniques) are “compatible” for your class or carries properties for it. I think thats a pretty hot topic and people got very used to it being like that. So people can afford to play with very strict filters. It makes sense on one side but on the other it makes it a little “what ever” (i hope you know what i mean) and removes the “thrill” of finding really good items.
For me that thrill is absent outside of a few uniques because they never drop in a ready to use state. Knowing I will have to craft them and that means it will likely brick before it gets where I want it just kills the excitement. At first I really liked the crafting system, thought it was somewhat innovative. Now I dread interacting with it.
I actually manage to get a little excited about exalted item nodes and i think they are great. Exalts dropping in echoes from random monsters is not so great tho. I am not a fan of this “run to objective as fast as possible” anyway and i think thats a massive gamedesign flaw that needs to be worked on. The loot should come from killing monsters and not by opening the candy bag you get for running fast. Exalted items should come either from killing monsters or the bag at the end.
I actually like the candy bag, but I don’t feel pressured to rush it. I kill everything in the way. It’s just that nothing in the bag is exciting, usually.
Generally speaking, both of them are trash containers, lol. Pretty rare to get something that makes me feel happy about it. Again, this is because almost all of it is aimed at forcing you to use the crafting system and I just don’t like it anymore.
The crafting system is kind of limiting itself right now. I hope they will find ways to make it more interesting instead of just upping tiers with high chance of bricking.
What initially drew me to the game was the class/build system.
What pushes me away is itemization and respec system.
There are plenty of builds I’d like to try, but the respec is extremely discouraging because it doesn’t become tolerable until very late game. Then you have drops that are boring and crafting is not just unfun, but actively hits your natural negativity biases repeatedly.
I wonder if such a system over a long period of time could contribute to an increase in depression among people who are predisposed to it, kind of how slot machines gambling does (though that includes losing a lot of money, so the causes may be incidental rather than correlated). Just a shower thought, anyway…
Hmm i cant complain about the respec system i think its kinda ok as it is right now. I do think tho that if the game would be released with the current crafting system, there would be ALOT of people complaining about it. I think its great that the devs tried something new with it but it needs further work to remain compelling in the long run.
I agree with this.
Here is what I DON’T want the trade system to mean:
Nerfed drop rates
Progression balanced around trade making item acquisition easier
99.9% of items found on the ground useless and not worth picking up
Here is what I DO want the trade system to mean:
Progression system that is expanded upon slowly over time, giving players more long-term goals to work towards that aren’t able to be easily bypassed by buying a bunch of items off the market
Way more complex and interesting itemization to where build diversity and depth is increased and buying/crafting/finding items for a build isn’t boring
More ways to play end game without trade being 100% necessary to progress.
Trade to me means that I am always playing with this sense of excitement that I might drop something worth a ton of currency. PoE has this draw for me and it’s a lot of the reason why I play after I’ve hit my progression goals. For this to happen, items need to be exciting, itemization needs to be expanded upon, and there need to be way more interesting and long-term end game goals.
To be fair, this will happen eventually as your gearing approaches best in slot regardless of how you’re getting your gear it’s just a lot quicker with trade. Once you’ve got to the point where all your gear is 4x t5 affixes (of the right affixes on the right bases) then the only upgrades would be 1-2 t6/7 affixes which are going to be very difficult to find on the right bases either with some slots free to craft up the remaining needed affixes or the correct affixes already in place.
But in a trade economy where there are fewer but higher quality drops, ideally you wouldn’t filter out 99.9% of items because there should be items dropping that you can use for other builds or sell for currency.
I mainly brought up the point because of PoE. The game is so outrageously bloated and you can do a juiced end game map and drop and filter out literally thousands of items in a few minutes of farming. Not to mention that the affix pool is so huge with so many tiers that items aren’t even worth picking up due to the fact that finding 1 that’s worth anything is ridiculously unlikely.
My point is to say that I hope with the introduction of trade, item acquisition through good old-fashioned farming stays viable, or better yet, one of the best ways to get items.
Why would there be higher quality drops in a trade economy? Either there’s no difference because they’re balancing drops around SSF or the drops are worse in a trade economy because they’ve balanced the drops around the assumption that people will do some amount of trade?
They could make exalted items non-tradeable, so you’d get up to t20 faster in a trade league but you’d still need to farm for those t6/7 items. shrugs Quite glad I don’t have to solve this particular gordian knot since IMO there will be a group of people complaining regardless of how they implement it.
