The Case against a Trade Economy

This approach seems to backfire every time. Just balance it as if the game is SSF and have trade as a functional feature. It doesn’t matter how quickly someone gears up because they should still have plenty of content to run and they earned the currency for said gear by playing enough in the first place. This is especially true for a game with seasonal cycles because that progress/wealth will be intermittently reset, so the base grind will still be there each new cycle.

If it’s a choice between a functional trade system where I have to deal with botters and spammers or a shit trade system that tries (and likely fails) to combat them, I’ll take the former every time. It’s a small price to pay for an overall better game experience.

yes because items dont drop identified in PoE, I posted it many times on reddit etc, if you run the ‘items are identified sextant’ and set your filter to highlight dropped mods ie Flaring, good items drop but because its not viable to ID 1000 items to find a single one people hide them completely

If you run a monolith in LE with 450 rarity, similar amounts of garbage drops as PoE but its all hidden on a filter as well

imagine how different this game would be if everything needed to be identified to even see its mods

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I don’t mean higher quality drops because of trade or as a result.

I mean as a gameplay design decision, having quality over quantity when it comes to drops and not using trade as an excuse to decrease quality and increase quantity using PoE as an example. I’d lean more towards balancing around a mostly SSF playstyle.

I’m gonna be happy with it either way, mostly because I trust EHG to make good decisions or at the very least experiment and listen to feedback. I definitely won’t be one of the people complaining about the eventual system. I agree it’s an incredibly hard task as a dev.

An interesting point here, actually. Personally, I kind of like the feeling of having to identify drops, though there’s definitely a good argument to be made that PoE overshoots the mark and involves too many clicks and too much inventory management.
I’d like it if Exalted items dropped unidentified though, would be exciting to unveil them, rather than be able to dismiss them outright upon dropping by mousing over.

I’d rather games move away from the whole “unidentified” thing, personally. Usually it just adds up to picking up more trash to be disappointed in and wish you weren’t wasting time doing that.

It’s a tricky thing to balance correctly, for sure. It does play into the whole topic of item value, loot excitement, and how to manage that in relation.

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The item’s value doesn’t change. It’s really about excitement, but having identified who knows how many (millions?) of items across many games over the years, it really just feels the same as loot box mechanics. I guess if you’re into the Skinner Box mentality, it can be more exciting, but I’m personally not.

It’s really a question of loot excitement and time spent looting, which kind of changes depending on whether you’re in a trade environment or pure SSF. I think the Skinner Box effect has its place and value, the tricky part is getting it right to where it feels exciting and not like a bait-and-switch or an extra step to gameplay.
So for example, in D3 2.0 legendaries dropping unidentified feels completely pointless, bc you just fill up your inventory and run to Cain. In PoE, they went a bit overboard with everything being unidentified as well as having to pick up and use more things to identify them. That was a conscious choice for a trade environment, I believe, and it kind of works, but also feels excessive. As a result, a lot of loot gets ignored.

It’s all a question of how you want the player to engage with loot - how often do you want that sense of “oh! cool!”, how much time do you want the player to spend with picking up and looking at it. I think part of making LE’s loot feel more exciting may lie in applying that effect to Exalted (and maybe Legendary items, whatever those turn out to be). You’ll have 1-x drops per Echo at higher Corruption values, and that gives you something to look forward to unveiling/identifying after the run. Without any unidentified drops at all, you kind of risk running into the situation of loot “feeling” overly simplified, because with a good filter you spend less and less time engaging with loot as you progress. This is also part of the reason why I think a Trade environment is kind of a bad fit for the game right now.

I imagine this choice against identifying items was made intentionally, and that is another factor on top of the 4 mod-basis and everything we discussed that makes Trade seem like a hard nut to crack in this arrangement.

I honestly can’t think of a game where I would rather things be unidentified first rather than just showing what they are. It’s just extra tedium and at best you’re trying to apply an illusion of potential value. I don’t find that exciting, but I guess some other people must, because we keep seeing this in games. I’m more interested in having good loot drop in the first place and having good systems in place to craft or manipulate them.

Like I said, I think the right balance helps make it feel exciting, and not just a nuisance. I think if the best item categories, which do not drop as often, require a simple right-click, it could add some excitement to loot in general.

To me personally it feels kind of bad when an Exalted item drops, and I can just dismiss it by mousing over. I feel like I should be motivated to always pick it up, because they drop rarely and have the potential to be amazing. Doubly so in a Trade environment, imo.

I do agree it’s a bad idea to go the PoE route and have everything unid as well as having extra drops to pick up and manage, it’s just too many clicks and too much time wasted.

I guess the difference is that I don’t want to be “encouraged” to pick up trash that I don’t want anyway. I don’t see how you get around the nuisance factor here.

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By only having the rarest item categories that have the best chance of being valuable/useful drop unidentified, thereby you don’t have it happen constantly, and you’re not just picking up everything with a tiny chance of “success” on id, but have a decent chance of identifying something valuable.

By not having it drop identified it isn’t “trash” immediately, but keeps its value potential until revealed, which makes the base category drop more exciting when it happens, imo.

But it’s still just the illusion of value. The item is most likely trash anyway. It doesn’t fix the problem.

Well I mean, if the problem is a lack of excitement in drops, I think it does help fix that. The other component would be having the right balance of RNG, drop rate and general viability of various mods for various builds, both in a trade and an SSF environment, to make drops generally always feel good.

I do think a general sense of “ZING” - purple drop! Oh boy, what is it? - can generally help, especially on the more casual side (which is the vast majority, lest we forget).

The purple drop is exciting in its own right whether it’s unid or not. Hiding its stats doesn’t change that, but does open up room for disappointment. The important part of what makes an item exciting is its perceived value or usefulness, not whether there are extra tedious tasks associated with it.

I think we’re talking about different aspects here again. I’m talking about the player perception, and the loot experience in general, you’re talking about itemization in terms of stats vis-a-vis value.

Don’t quite get the point about potential for disappointment - I personally feel it’s underwhelming if i can mouse over an item and dismiss it without even picking it up. Something is missing there which I consider elementary to ARPG gameplay, which is inventory management and deciding what to pick up/when to head home.

I understand what you’re saying, but I just don’t find those elements engaging or exciting for gameplay. They are just extra tedium.

Well, we just want different things :slight_smile:
Like I said I think games like PoE went overboard with it, but it has its place in ARPG gameplay, and I think it adds something to the loot experience.

Items should be identified. The act of identifying all items is called “toil” or “tedium” and provides absolutely no value whatsoever.

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Well I wasn’t talking about “all” items, I made a point specifically to not do just that.
But I think unidentified rarer, more valuable items with higher potential are a good thing, I think it adds to the drop excitement for me.