That’s exactly the problem with Trading. The items they are decked out in have a Drop Rate where they should NOT be decked out in only half a month, because they are fairly rare items. So, now the Drop Rate has been overridden by the players. What do the Devs have to do? Lower the drop rate. And Behold! The SSF and non-trading players are now screwed.
That’s why Trading does not belong in a video game where its main (and really only) purpose is Loot Hunting. It is precisely equivalent to a crossword puzzle with answers printed on the back of the paper.
Well, I don’t agree that it’s an either/or question myself. But, if you do go with an open economy, the game needs to be quite drastically different in its approach to crafting/itemization. The current iteration does not seem suitable to the type of economy some people keep wanting at all, and would conflict with it.
There is certainly room for ARPGs with an economic side, and ARPGs focused more on the gameplay itself.
Imagine an online crossword puzzle.
Imagine a button on it which launches a side-mini game, like Minesweeper. If you win that mini-game, it fills in a random letter on the crossword puzzle.
Is it still a crossword puzzle? Sure.
Is it just easier as a crossword puzzle with the presence of the mini-game? Absolutely.
Do crossword puzzles NEED a mini-game to fill in random letters for you? No.
People are mentally attaching “Trading” to “ARPG” only because other ARPGs have done so. EHG is proposing a Crossword puzzle where you have to solve it yourself.
Well, that’s not quite true. There have been plenty of good ARPGs without any kind of economy.
There is also the very valid argument that trade does add value to drops, and can extend replayability of an ARPG. However, like i’ve gone into many times in this thread, the cons outweigh the pros in my opinion, when it comes to giving devs the freedom to create fun and innovative systems within the ARPG framework.
Trade is a crutch and a problem to consider, first and foremost, when looking at the core gameplay loop.
Interesting comments. This Bazaar suggestion is going down the road of “make trading more difficult/less efficient”. However, this doesn’t solve the problem Zaodon mentions below:
Succinctly said. By allowing full open trading you are guaranteeing that players will skip large parts of a normal SSF progression. The key conversation to be had at the end of the day is whether this skipping is a good thing or not.
I’d guess that most people who play these types of games enjoy finding things themselves or crafting things themselves. The fact that LE has a following at this stage basically confirms this since trading is currently impossible. However, when a game reaches a certain level of time investment to reach the endgame content there is a tipping point where many players are not able to engage with it since they can’t invest that much time towards gaming. Allowing these players to skip some progression that is more tedious can actually improve their enjoyment of the game and increase their longevity.
Put a different way, Chris Wilson mentioned during his SC Trade podcast that “trading is the ultimate determinism” and he is absolutely right. With a large enough community you can farm some not so rare component that has value, and eventually you are guaranteed to get a valuable item. It is just a matter of time, and with a large ecosystem this time spent farming lower components is MUCH less than if you were to find/craft the valuable item yourself. The only ways to combat this are:
making the end result of the trade less good (downgrade a random affix tier, 10% less quality)
making trade more obtuse/slower (bazaar, no trade website)
making less things tradable (account bound items, limited trades per item)
If you don’t think trading is a problem at all then none of the above options sound good to you. To me, a light touch applied to all of #1, #2, and #3 would strike a middle ground of trade being AN OKAY option but not THE SUPERIOR option for character progression.
I did my best to use the search function to find this argument, but I find the whole artificial gatekeeping to be pure nonsense. People want to play games to be able to experience everything that the game has to offer; gating it so that the only “good experiences” of the game (being large-scale battles and the loot that comes from it) come from raids just devolves into toxic group formation where if everyone doesn’t do things perfectly, they get barraged with “get fucking good, scrub, I just wasted 4 hours of my night for fucking nothing.” The only people willing to put up with that are the “whales” who are already addicted to it and get the dopamine from being the uber-paladin of the server, who invested hundreds of hours getting the perfect DPS combination that comes from choosing the only “viable” option of skills out of the 15-20+ abilities there are.
From a less-toxic standpoint, how readily available loot is intrinsically ties into skill balancing, which is the other big thread in these forums. If the ONLY way to play Marksman, or Werebear, or other skills, is specifically tied to this one Unique that opens up the best DPS, a cascade of toxic reactions happen. The Devs nerf the “good” option, which pisses off everyone who invested hours into obtaining the good Unique. At the same time, they have no idea how to buff the “bad” options, because nobody is even bothering to test out the unviable options as they’re too busy having fun with the one “good” option.
Ideally, the best option is to balance out the skills so that the “chase” (either through Markets or farming) doesn’t happen until people are relatively pleased with their build progress (probably a certain corruption in Empowered Monos), and then can check the market for rarer items while they’re either farming Gold and Affix shards at a level they’re comfortable at or leveling up other characters. It’s all dependent on how many “viable” playstyles are around at the end of it, and how many people are dedicated to particular playstyles.
I’m happy to sell / give away the great Rogue Assassin backstab uniques because I don’t care about being an Assassin. I play pet builds, and I want good items that help out pet builds. I want to test out skill trees and node allocations to make different pet styles viable.
As for WoW, I merely mentioned it because the point was raised that accessibility always increases sales/subs/revenue. And WoW being a good example of precisely the opposite happening, very consistently, since this approach has been taken.
I’m arguing that artificial scarcity does not always increase sales and such either. I do expect to get all items that I want to play with - eventually - because I want to test out pet builds against each other, and propose ways to buff underwhelming abilities and slightly tone down (and not slash) OP abilities. Without the proper Uniques to test it, I’ll never be able to provide a great comparison between different pet skills, which makes it possible to provide decent feedback.
So I can understand how trading should not provide rewards immediately (and I’ll be on the records saying the Bazaar is a great way to approach it), but if I’m going to continue providing feedback, I do want access to the best pet items to see if it skews how the skills are perceived at endgame or not.
The reason I was suggesting #1 is that I think as long as the best items in the game can be acquired through a mechanism players will jump through all sorts of hoops to make it work. PoE had people using Discord groups to trade Harvest crafts that were initially designed to only be performed by the player who found the groves. So I hope EHG goes far enough on #3 to put a suitable cap on what can be traded for. If PoE has taught us anything it is that #2 alone is not enough to stop dedicated players. It actually just breeds resentment from the players who ask “why are you making me jump through all these hoops?”
Time will tell. It does seem interesting that basically nobody is suggesting something around #1. With so much of item acquisition in ARPGs being based around RNG it just seems odd to me that trading wouldn’t also have an element of RNG to it. It is this key point that makes it so attractive as a method for acquiring items. The certainty of it.
I am good with having friction in trading, but #1 is a no for me. The essence of trading in economics is you get what you buy. Having item you buy degrade randomly will give negative reinforcement instead of positive one that playing games supposed to provide. Fracturing mechanics has already invited so much complaints (in other threads), and I can imagine another avalanche of complaints if trading will also degrade the affixes(akin to damaging fracture).
Other kind of friction sounds good to me. My preferred one is soulbound once traded.
#1 just seems like a very harsh way to disincentivize trading. RNG should stay out of trading imo, it doesn’t make much sense to me. Restrictions and “friction” are fine.
Isn’t the solution fairly simple? SSF mode for people who want to play SSF and trade mode for those who don’t. In an aRPG what other players do, certainly doesn’t effect your own gameplay.
That depends on how the drops have been balanced. If they’re balanced differently between trade & SSF then yes, you could have parity between the two different “modes” in terms of how easy/hard it is to gear up. But if it’s just one set of drop rates for both then one mode will affect the other.
Yeah, envy & “keeping up with the Joneses” has never affected anyone ever anywhere… And no other company has ever based their business model around that.
This is why we + EHG are discussing the topic at all. The game either needs different drop rates for SSF/trade environments or it needs to pick 1 universal drop rate. The universal drop rate is usually chosen, so wherever EHG lands on trade will affect us all since the game’s drops will be balanced around their chosen implementation. The more accessible/powerful trade is the more drops need to be reduced to compensate otherwise you have power creep. The exception to this is if you have drops that can’t be traded since they can be balanced independently of trade. So I hope EHG strongly considers using that tool (it sounds like they are).
I’ve been searching and I’ve yet to find any conversation where EHG confirmed or discussed drop rates being affected by the addition of player to player trading, unless I’m just missing it?
What other games have player to player trading where the addition of the mechanic has led to adjusted drop rates? Also, have those devs published what the drop rate % was prior to the mechanic being introduced?
From the Official Last Epoch Multiplayer FAQ developer blog under Loot header:
Are you changing loot drop rates or crafting because of multiplayer?
Perhaps. But if so, not drastically. We want the drop rates to be mainly balanced around self-found and feel we are doing a decent job of this right now. Because of the way the trade system is planned to work we don’t believe this will throw off the balance of the item hunt drastically.
EHG has been a little vague on the topic, but there is an economic reality to opening up item acquisition through trade. EHG likely wants some notion of competition in the multiplayer community via ladders or something in the future. How trade is implemented potentially has a large impact on how people acquire items (i.e. vanilla D3), so EHG seems to be very cautious in how they introduce this system.
The caution and vagueness I can understand as the systems are still being developed. This ultimately leads to the community having to make assumptions about the approach. I also agree that how trade is implemented could potentially impact how people acquire items. What I don’t quite understand or subscribe to is the notion that if an additional resource pool that may contain a drop is created (aka: player-to-player trading) that doesn’t necessarily mean the drop rate is going to be affected.
An item that has a 10% chance to drop still has a 10% chance to drop no matter how many are farming it. Unless the item itself has a finite # of iterations in the item pool then adding multiple players to the trade pool doesn’t increase that drop rate beyond 10%.
Correct me if I am wrong but the belief that adding player-to-player trade will inherently increase item acquisition is basically Gambler’s Fallacy right? The notion that increasing the frequency of an event doesn’t change the outcome since each event should be considered independent and the results have no bearing on past or present occurrences.
If I had to throw my hat in the ring for a particular camp, I personally like the idea of being able to trade an item I’m not using for one that I might. Knowing I’ve been able to empower someone else’s character does render a bit of satisfaction and I get a nice bonus in return. Not to mention, having items rot or sold for gold really isn’t that rewarding. If drop rates are affected as a result of adding player-to-player trading then I fully support separating the mechanics of SSF from non-SSF to balance accordingly but again, I don’t think that’s necessary.
One other point I’d like to address is the notion that player trading will somehow de-value the idea of loot hunting. I think part of the reason this caught my attention is because “something” isn’t being acquired for “nothing”. What I mean by this is Player B has an item Player A wants. Player A isn’t going to show up to Player B’s shop empty handed. Assuming Player B understands item value, they’re going to want something in exchange from Player A. Player A still has to acquire something of worth and more importantly, worth to Player B. That may be an item that had a 5% drop rate vs the 10% drop rate item Player B is looking to trade. It’s a matter of perspective and while we can certainly boil it down to bare mechanics of “I trade, I get items faster”, that’s not necessarily the case.
Ultimately, it’s in EHG hands on what values they want to tweak or not tweak and I have read the blog on the proposed Bazaar solution so I won’t pass judgment until we know more.
