The Case against a Trade Economy

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504

Lets look at trading and item rarity. I’ll start with just 2 players, and a rare Boss item which drops only 1% of the time on Boss kill (major boss, like Lagon or Emperor of Corpses).

If both players run the boss 100 times, they should get the item once. In reality, however, RNG is RNG, so its possible 1 player got 2 and 1 player got none. It happens, this is a small sample size.

So, the item dropped its proscribed 1% of the time as the Devs intended. If Player 1 trades their extra to player 2, the only thing which changed was ownership, but there’s still only 2 items after 200 runs, as intended. (Again, this gets better with higher sample sizes).

But what is the effect? Player 2 would normally run that boss X more times until the RNG gods smiled on them. But with Trade, they don’t have to. They take the currency they got from those 100 failed runs and hand it over to player 1 for the item. Player 1 now has 1 item, currency from those 100 runs they ran themselves, and currency from another 100 runs from player 2. So, while the items have evened out, ownership-wise, the currency has tilted to have a wealthy and poor player. But no worries! The process can reverse when Player 2 has the extra item, and Player 1 buys it, so now we’re back even again. 2 players, even items (per the drop rate), and even currency.

How did this affect the game?

  • Players didn’t need to grind for their desired item more than the proscribed drop rate (i.e. run same boss 300 times to get a 1% drop item due to bad RNG luck).
  • Players could even choose to focus on the currency (dunno, maybe kill a lot more monsters than you normally would, not skipping them) with the express knowledge that with enough players in the game, someone is pulling good RNG and has extras for sale, so their own RNG no longer really matters.
  • But, now, you have some players not even running the boss, because maybe currency is more abundant in just echo nodes, so the drop rate is lower than intended, because some players aren’t shooting for the item, just currency.

None of that is meant to support or oppose trade, its just what I could think of as the effect of Trade. It’s not exhaustive, so please add more. My goal here is to understand more objectively the effects of trading. And by trading, in this case, I am talking about open, unrestricted trading, not the Bazaar as proposed. i.e. if full trading exists, what is its effect?

505

As if this means a fully comprehensive search option, no other trade (quantity) limits and NO gold transfer caps, then the following:

GREED!
+

a) At a certain point, you will be able to equip and test new builds more cheaply than with the previous Gambler.

b) There will be more (top) builds with absolute best values (all items with some T6 and T7) on all armor pieces and slots.

c) Over time, some individuals or groups (guilds?) will emerge who can get the new items introduced by EHG (strong legendaries, uniques and sets etc.) on average and also absolutely much faster than the vast majority of other players.
These will put the said new items for above-average prices in the auction house and sell.
Other players will be able and willing to pay these high prices and try to sell their goods at higher prices to compensate for their high expenses. [price inflation]

d) External “real money sites” will eventually open up (possibly including bot farms)… because greed eats brains.

Last Epoch would still be quite playable.

I would still suggest a more restrictive trading model.

PS: There is certainly still some missing, additions are welcome.

Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)

506

There’s way too much theory in here. Everybody pretends to know what happens if player #1643 sells an item.

Of course trading will make things easier. But also more accessible. I can’t just trade some ingame currency for a badass BiS item right away. I need to have something in exchange. Be it ingame currency or another badass item I’m willing to trade for the currency for obtaining the targeted item. It’s not pay to win. In both cases I have to play the game and farm for either currency or tradable items.

This will generate more satisfactory moments in general. Not only will you be happy if you find a rare item for your current class/build, but also if you find something good for other classes/builds.

If you play no trade and find a Smokeweaver for your Rogue, you are “Yeah Baby!!”. What happens if you find a second one? You are “WTF!!! RNG is fooling me!” In a trade economy you are “Nice, another one I can trade!!”

I have so much fun with trading stuff, I don’t care if it shortens the time I need to max my gear. Because it would mean that I might be able to max my gear during a Cycle if I am lucky.

Also the economy gets reseted every 3 or 4 months. EHG can observe and tweak numbers.

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507

Numbers that would impact those who do not trade.

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.

508

This doesn’t hold up mathematically.

If the drop rate of ItemX is 1% from Boss Y, then the entire server should see 1 of those items for every 100 runs of that boss (on average across all players). Having some players with 0 and some with 2, whereupon the ones with 2 trade them to the ones with 0, does absolutely nothing to the rate of acquisition of that item. It only has to do with its distribution. There are still precisely 1 item for every 100 runs of that Boss. If players run the boss infrequently, that item will have low distribution. If that boss is run constantly, the player base will be inundated with that item. This has nothing to do with Trade, and everything to do with its drop rate. Just because players move the items around among them doesn’t make the item more abundant. The only thing that makes it more abundant is running that boss more.

To be clear, I am against trade/AH like some games have, I am just stating a fact that trading doesn’t make the rate of acquisition higher, per the POE dev’s post. It makes the acquisition more deterministic, and reduces the effects of RNG.

Without Trade: run that boss anywhere from once & get item (Holy Lucky Roll, Batman!) to 1000 times and never getting it. That’s pure RNG for that one person.
With Trade: RNG is smoothed out because the unlucky person accumulates currency playing the game, and the lucky person who gets multiples sells them off.

The claim that Trading (open, unlimited trading) increases acquisition rate is just mathematically false.

Basically, that POE dev is arguing that if the RNG ISN’T working correctly (or rather, is “streaky”) then certain items will be “harder” to get for some, and that means the drop rate is (SOMEHOW?) balanced. But if players even the RNG curve out by trading, he perceives that as increasing the drop rate (SOMEHOW?) and feels they have to reduce it.

TL;DR - the POE dev is bad at math.

509

It does not increase the droprate, it increases the easiness with whitch to obtain such item, because not everybody who drops it will want to use it.

So I have the chance to drop it for myself, plus the chance that anyone who does not want it will drop it.

510

Yeah. That’s why I said

Just add trade to the current state of the game and see where it is going. People will more likely be able to get desired items because they can trade stuff they don’t want for currency to buy stuff they want. But as I said, people will need to find stuff they don’t want for trade first to be able to obtain currency. You can’t buy your way to glory at a Cycle start. You have to invest time first.

Solo droprates are in a good spot right now. Theres also the possibility to target farm items from mono bosses.

I’d rather test it out and see how it feels and works out if EHG adds their currently planned trading system.

When it really brings the doom to all systems and balance some people here are foreseeing, I’m sure EHG will change things.

511

A lot of the recent discussion here is a retread of topics discussed at length earlier in the thread. PoE devs are also not “bad at math”.

Just to clarify one particular point: it’s not as easy as simply saying “what do you care if others can trade, just don’t do it” - from a design perspective, in a loot-driven game, you cannot simply slap on trade and not consider the ramifications. The entire game revolves around the aquisition of loot and is balanced around it. How often should interesting items drop, how frequently should a player find or craft upgrades? What feels good, what feels bad and demotivating/too grindy? What is a reasonable period of playtime during which to expect/want a player to “finish” a build in endgame? Should it even be possible to reasonably “perfect” a character within a season?

All these questions and more are relevant, and cannot be ignored when considering the existence or lack of trade in an ARPG. LE is currently balanced around SSF, very clearly so, to the point that introducing any kind of “open” trade would feel somewhere between irrelevant and harmful. Exalted items drop frequently enough that an open market would be flooded with any the player does not want or has an interest in breaking down, thereby - for example - the main endgame item chase would be fairly trivialized. If Exalted items are pick-up/party loot only, then trade would currently only serve to speed up the already very well balanced early game.

It seems clear that the current plans (linked earlier and viewable in the announcement part of the forum) do not include a more “open” form of economy, and is to stick to the SSF balancing format. This form of Bazaar could potentially be quite successful, in that it may something you want to engage with surrounded by other players, for the small chance of finding something highly useful for yourself - but without the risk of it being so reliable and deterministic that it bypasses playing the game itself too much. I look forward to seeing it implemented.

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512

Nobody on the other side of the discussion to yourself is talking about the server-level drop rates, we’re only talking about the effect at the player-level and at that level trade is an additional source of loot. With trade, I don’t have to go anywhere near empowered monoliths to get any of the boss-specific drops (assuming they are tradeable), I don’t have to go anywhere near monoliths to get exalted items (assuming they are tradeable). I could get to lvl 55 and trade myself a set of BiS t6 exalted items to massively increase my character’s power. And yes I’m deliberately handwaving away/ignoring whatever it was I was doing to get the currency to buy the items in the first place, maybe I have an awesome line of Llama’s llevelling ggear.

Trade, as has been said before, provides the player an additional route to their gear, one that only indirectly involves playing the game and killing mobs.

It makes your acquisition rate higher. If one is only concerned the server level drop rates then the most logical form of trade would have the least friction (ie, a full on AH like SWTOR/GW2 etc have) because that provides the best player experience while trading.

No, they just aren’t doing the maths you think they are.

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513

But a single player is getting 10 drops every 20 runs with that 1% drop rate, because their RNG is crazy lucky. That is where that line of logic utterly breaks down. You can’t look at a single player when determining drop rates, thats nonsense. The only option is to look at server-level drop rates.

Let’s say you set the drop rate of ItemX to 1% from a hard boss. Game launches. 10,000 players buy game, get to boss, and 100 of that item drops every time the boss is farmed by the player base. Say they can farm the boss 1/day. In 100 days there will be enough of that item for all players. After that, it becomes vendor trash, because everyone has one. Or, people make alts who also need it, but eventually, saturation is reached.

But that’s a bad example as its premise is that the population is static. Now, we have to add 10,000 players every X days who are new (no item), and 10,000 players every Y days who quit and do not “give away their stuff.” So, now we need to ensure that the drop rate of ItemX over time matches the TurnOver rate (new players/leaving players) such that the item remains desired, but not saturated. This drop rate will, by necessity, be determined by that TurnOver rate, and thus need changing by devs as they monitor population.

So, if the TurnOver Rate is greater than the drop rate, that item will be rare - not everyone will have one.
If the TurnOver Rate is less than the drop rate, that item will be (eventually) common.

Now, players can interfere in this by Target Farming that boss to the exclusion of all else. It has happened in other games. This means that, as good as the EHG Devs are at monitoring TurnOver rate and adjusting the drop rate of ItemX, it still could get saturated.

In addition, patches and/or leagues/seasons could over-value or de-value ItemX. This means players could either target farm it or utterly ignore it. That also affects saturation rate.

Again, all of what I just posted above is assuming totally open trade/AH, which LE isn’t planning at this time. But I’m just making sure that the idea of “Trade” and a “Trade Economy” is understood properly. It is an error to think of acquisition rate at a single-player level, because Trade Economies are server-wide.

It seems to be that if items do not either Degrade/Break over time, or Bind somehow, then no matter what the item’s rarity/drop rate is, it will eventually saturate the player base given enough time if the drop rate isn’t kept below the TurnOver rate. Adding degradation, binding, etc. serves only to modify the above formulas. But the fundamental effect of Trade remains, regardless of the numbers, that Trade evens-out RNG. That’s really all it does, no matter how you slice and dice it. It does not make items more abundant. Only drop rates can do that.

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514

You also can’t balance things around a short term statistical anomaly. You’re not going to have a 50% drop rate on an item that has a 1% drop chance for a long time. The fact that the devs aren’t going with an open/frictionless trade system shows that they think of the individual’s gear acquisition rate as much as the global drop rates.

And as an accountant I’m aware of what trade or an economy is.

515

Well, then maybe we’re saying the same thing, but differently. If a game has open trading/AH, then the effect of it is that drop rates of items determine their saturation level when placed up against a fluid player base (new players joining, old leaving).

If a game does not have open trading/AH in the classical sense, then drop rate RNG is not smoothed out, and different players will see different results in trying to obtain specific gear.

The Bazaar seems, to me, to fall somewhere in the middle. It will allow some smoothing of RNG for “basic, but important” gear (like getting missing resists on certain bases for your build), but will act like “No trade” in regards to final build gear (players will be subject to SSF-type acquisition.)

516

I probably wasn’t paying enough attention while watching LE streams.
But as far as I can tell crafting components are available in truckloads so this problem de facto does not exist. Not now, at least. And is unlikely to become an actual problem unless some really awkward drops (or crafting) overhaul would occur.

At any given moment of time, there are more than enough crafting bases available at vendors and enough sources of shards to keep crafting competitive with trading. Be it leveling or pushing Endgame.

sigh

Humakind invented trading (and, by extent, currency) exactly to avoid making EVERYONE engage in crafting EVERYTHING.

Even worse.

In real world rare human have equal access to, let’s say, cooked fish and smelted metal. And needs in cooked fish and smelted metal are different for each human.
In in-game conventionalities it translates into lack of even access to all crafting mods and crafting outcomes (because, you know, RNG governs drops). And needs are uneven there too!

Even within same skill usage, there are significant differences in preferred mod combinations for different players.

Following this path might make 95% of loot completely obsolete, I’m afraid…

Trading is natural. Currency is natural. Everything else should dismantle thousand years of history of trading development first, invent a really good justification for doing so next. Yes, exactly in this order. Knowing roots helps with pruning branches.

Then what’s the point in all these shinies if odds that these will be usable for my builds are… let’s say, not as high as it would justify these items’ existence in my stash AND I can’t trade these away to people which needs these?

We’re reinventing Diablo III’s economics, I’m afraid. And we were reinventing Path of Exile few quotes before.

There is nothing worse than understanding that I’m fed up with current build, willing to change my playstyle… and being unable to do so since, DESPITE abundnance of players which are more than eager to use my gear and share with me theirs, I can’t get what I need and give what they need.

‘Restart from level 1 and hope that RNG will have mercy upon you’ approach to MMO design was acceptable for nineties.

We’re in 2021. We finally invented convenient trading in MMOs to mitigate this and handfuls of related issues which distract the player from actually enjoying the game AND contributing to other players’ joy.

There is no point in taking few steps down the evolution ladder.

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517

I agree, the point of trading is the convenience - I would rather have convenient trading systems.

There is no point to inconvenient trading, in my view it is worse than no trading at all.

They want trading but also want people not to trade too much, it is silly.

518

Then it will not work. As people will get really good bases off of the item filter alone.

The Bazaar has to be searchable at a speed similar to how the item filter works when running through zones or it will not even be worth the time hovering over the items.

That can only work if 1:the Bazaar itself is searchable or 2:the Bazaar puts the items “on the ground” and hides ones that your filter doesn’t want.

and in the second case, it would have been better to just make it searchable.

Unless they remove gamble, there is no reason to use a low reliability AH

519

Not sure if it was said before, but here’s my take:

The only trading that should be possible, should be with party members in which the current item droped off for.

AH, Bazaar, w/e the trading system is, the second you make power available to buy, it devalues everything the game stands for. The game is about acquiring power with effort, not money. Fight for your loot, craft it, or else it loses it’s meaning.

Acquiring unique or valuable items is tremendously more satisfying when you acquire it with effort. On that note, unique items could be more fairly distributed and not lessened to met demands. If you demand an unique item, fight for it.

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520

Item it’s more about luck and not about effort in my opinion. You can be a very good player and builder if you have no luck you will never get the perfect item you looking for.

Of course more time you putt in the game and you will get more drop and more corruption to improve you’re luck. A no life will have better gear but it’s not a better player or builder.

We can love this game and don’t have time to get the perfect gear to realy andjoy the build we have in mind.

Imagine I have a level 100 and spend a lot of time but I never get that’s Legendary I need to make my build shine. I have realy no luck for me but I find another rare Legendary useless for me. And another player is in the exact same spot as me. We will be both very happy to trade. And in my opinion it’s not différents to drop because we made a équivalent trade hard to get.

Luck and time is not effort for me. Two good player who enjoy this game will never be equal in time to spend and luck. It can be very frustating and trade can help in that’s case.

Sorry for my poor english… I hope I manage to explain what I mean.

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521

I disagree with you guys. Why can’t I bought the items that I want from the Bazaar if I don’t have much time to play 24/7?
And yes, I love playing games solo without mates

522

I agree with this, trade exists so that you can get the item even if unlucky by trading in the stuff you DID get lucky with.

523

I couldn’t care one tiny bit how folks or myself get their loot.

I just want to kill monsters and get and or buy things.

Pretty simple…

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