One of the things I liked the most about Grim Dawn, was the ability to just give someone loot you had in your bank. No restrictions, nothing. In game currency means next to nothing in that game anyway, and I didn’t see it hurt game play. Maybe I’m wrong, but it just felt good to get a drop you knew your buddy needed and was able to surprise them with it the next time they logged on.
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It depends on how it works. Grim Dawn is a weird example, but…
- You can trade, but most people don’t due to unverifiability of items and mostly feeling like they don’t need to
- There are some items I just can’t seem to get, which does cause me to either quit that character or get burnt out
- It doesn’t have an economy, so that isn’t a chase factor in its own right, which reduces playability on some level
- If an item is behind content I don’t want to farm, I’d still rather be able to trade (such as rogue-like dungeons–I fkn hate rogue-like “content” in ARPGs)
No, this is no way to set up a trade system. It creates more problems than it solves.
Binding items can help a lot. WoW had a reasonably good economy system up when I played (end of Vanilla until end of Cata). This was when it was a lot less common and a lot more difficult to hack/bot/RMT etc, though, so those dangers must be accounted for.
I feel like most of the animosity people have toward trade systems people have is derived from PoE. Let’s maybe think of some better alternatives rather than assuming it has to be like that.
This is an issue created by an unnecessary limitation. It’s better to just not have that limitation.
This is also why I don’t support “bidding” systems. The only use case I see for locking a seller out of his own item is to avoid bids he doesn’t like. Buyouts don’t have this problem, so the alternative I would prefer is:
You list an item and it doesn’t appear on trade for 15 minutes. This means you can post it or take it down at will, and you have that 15 minutes as both a safety net against someone snagging up an accidentally priced item and against people abusing this to manipulate the market.
You can play this game for 20 hours and get the picture, lol. That said, I disagree with your premise here (bolded part). Loot is boring and crafting feels terrible. The game in its current state certainly doesn’t need trade, but for all the wrong reasons. I’d rather assume these are going to be fixed, though.
As for the idea that trade and crafting/looting should be compared on a “power” basis, this is one of those BS GGG lines of poor reasoning they use to justify making so much of the game worse than it has to be so they can justify their economy. I’d rather EHG took their lessons from old school Blizzard than GGG on this and make the top end chase gear bound (untradeable), which still leaves plenty of progression gear available, and whatever they do to make loot interesting can be assessed as well. For the most part, you want to let the players decide the economy without allowing the economy to give them everything. This is the only method I have seen work reasonably well.
I think the pitfall I want to see EHG avoid the most is focusing more on having an economy than having a reason to play. This is probably PoE’s biggest pain point, as far as I can tell, when it comes to people getting frustrated and quitting (not counting the people who just get bored and quit).
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EHG calculates by algorithm [how often is this or that item class searched/used/purchased; how often are the affixes/affix combinations searched/used/purchased; how many players are and were online the last 24h and how much gold do they have in total; how rare is the item or how hard is it to get it; etc.] a minimum and a maximum value of the item to be sold now (or all items in the game); and so on.]
→ Due to supply <-> demand, the price may oscillate between the minimum [changeable] and maximum [changeable] price. -
Each player can have a maximum of 5 items for sale at a time (max 24 h).
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If a player does not sell an item, it goes to the bazaar at the minimum price.
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Purchased items and idols are account-bound, exceptions are runes, glyphs, affixes and the like.
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EHG finds out by algorithm, which item-affix-combinations are currently or over a longer period of time NOT traded by players for players and sporadically offers corresponding goods.
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Boss drops are account bound.
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Maybe a maximum amount of gold that can be stored should be introduced. (found that in D2 also in order ^^')
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If they did trade like this, I would not only quit the game, I would shred it in reviews. This would be completely unacceptable.
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The only reason anyone is even discussing “Trade” and “Economy” is because other ARPGs have such things, so the assumption is that LE has to also have those things.
This is called the “Appeal to Tradition” fallacy: Appeal to tradition - Wikipedia
ARPGs do not need any sort of economy to work just fine. Now, allowing players (in an Online game) to interact, and in that interaction swap or give away their items, is perfectly fine. But just remove the very concept of an “economy” from that idea. It isn’t necessary.
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As soon as you allow players to interact and in that interaction swap items, you have essentially laid the groundwork for a barter economy. Now you could limit it to loot but all that does is make it harder and more tedious for players to get something of value in return instead of standardizing the trade with some kind of currency.
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^^This. Exactly my thoughs.
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That was fun, but unfortunately not accurate.
→ This is completely unacceptable as a basis for discussion.
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Again, not true. Same Appeal to Tradition fallacy.
Your mind sees a “Trade window” with two sides, and double “Accept” buttons. You see that, because that’s what all other games have.
Instead, just see a “List” in a dialog window. The list shows items. You can select an item off of the list, and click “Take item” button. You get the item off of the list (and its removed from the list).
Imagine a dialog where you “Add item to List”. It has an open space for an item. You drop an item, and click the “Post item” button. That item disappears from your inventory and goes on the List.
Is it trade? I mean… yes, technically.
Is it that image in your head of Trade like in other ARPGs? Nope. No need for that.
In this system where people can just put stuff in a list that anyone can take at anytime without giving something in return or acceptance of the trade what happens when someone wants to abuse this.
The trade system you have are advocating could be brought down with one person writing a bot or macro to open this list and take any items that show up.
I see some requirement of giving something in return or acceptance of the trade in place because it’s necessary to prevent a crippling of the system by just one bad faith actor.
It’s not an appeal to tradition fallacy it’s acknowledging that you have to have some system in place to prevent blatant abuse of the trade system. This is why “Accept” buttons exist in other ARPGs.
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Telling you how terrible that concept of trade would be is perfectly within acceptable discussion. You want to see a game get review bombed? Because that’s how a game gets review bombed.
The only thing this concept of “trade” would accomplish is that people end up using 3rd party sites to negotiate what goes on the window before they put anything there. It’s basically a worse and somewhat crippled version of what PoE does. Oh, yeah. It also invites all the room for scammers!
There appears to be some confusion between barter and trade here. I have stated in the past that EHG needs to decide what is going to be the foundation of an exchange, if it is currency then it will end up being trade, if it is items then it will be a barter system. Until that core question is answered the prior 50+ posts are conjecture.
Don’t worry. Even after that question is answered, there’s gonna be plenty more conjecture. 
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Uh, no.
- Items take up inventory/stash space
- There is no trade window, so they would have to have multiple characters logging in, filling up, and then logging out.
- They then can’t DO anything with the items, other than just be dicks and keep them from other players. This is easily detectable by EHG (literally just look for accounts with characters filled with random items who never log in again)
There is nothing ECONOMICAL about this system - no one can abuse it, bot it, spam it, or otherwise exploit it.
You haven’t outlined how that would actually work in the way that you say it would. Why wouldn’t they be able to do anything with those items? What’s to stop them from just spamming tons of accounts to swap items between, use bots to feed cash into them for more stash space, and generally just wreck this whole system?
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Let’s say you’re a gold farmer (the common term for these people).
You can’t make any RMT (Real Money Transactions) in LE because it has no economy.
- Do you set up a bot farm for LE?
- How will you recoup the money you spend if you do?
That rules out RMT bots.
So, you think some malicious prick is going to automate accounts and scripts just to empty out the “List” for no reason? Really? You think they have the cash for that (game costs money to buy each time for each new account)? You think they can protect their IP Address like the gold farmer companies do? That costs cash.
Not going to happen.
I think the first time some guy with even a inkling of computer knowledge decides this game isn’t for him there is a chance he throws away his account screwing up the “list” just to be malicious yes.
This is the internet people aren’t reasonable and responsible adults 100% of the time, occasionally people are jerks.
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Assuming only 10,000 players total, and assuming everyone generally puts something up on the list, the malicious guy can’t even begin to dent the list with his one account.
That said, all EHG has to do is limit “Take an Item” to once per minute, or no limit but easily detect when someone is spam-taking items. The solutions are mindboggling easy to prevent abuse.