It was how I read it at first. While the practical difference is probably inconsequential, there’s a difference between using the Appeal to Tradition from these separate stances:
The proper criticism to point 1 is that if the game didn’t do it, people could say it was an Appeal to Tradition based on some games not doing that. If it’s point 2, then your argument is appropriate, because it just disqualifies the premise.
hence my request to reread what I wrote 
I mean of what he wrote–not yours. I generally disregard the “your opinion is the only one” finger-pointing people do around here as anything legitimate.
Good luck finding all the gear for Summon Carrion Golems aura-stacking build with all those primordial things and cluster jewels needed… You can’t do any build in SSF.
And yes it is hard to get a specific item in PoE without trading since… always.
Yeah, I was gonna leave that one alone, but a theme I keep seeing with SSF folks is a lack of differentiation.
Not the same as…
It just seems like they don’t get what the issue is. I’m not knocking them for preferring SSF, but it definitely doesn’t help their case when they start talking about trade.
I have for 4 leagues straight in HCSSF. Not hard as long as you know the best drops and use vendor recipes. just have to spam the golem maps until you get what you are looking for.
So has EHG actually stated in print what the bazaar is actually going to be? I have looked and I have not found very many details about it. Other than they will reveal it when they think it is ready.
I don’t believe so. At least, I haven’t found anything substantial either.
So I want to address some of the main points of discussion that have been raised, because I feel there are some misconceptions and misunderstandings. Maybe I should have opened it up with a definition of terms first.
The post is about a trade economy, meaning interaction between players outside of parties/friends, either via barter or currency medium. Trade between friends/parties doesn’t constitute an economy or a danger to the itemization balance, and I think it is very safe to say this will be in the game, at the very least.
“Just play SSF” or “Just ignore drop rates/balance and allow Trade”. This is a major misconception. Whenever you allow free trade between players not in the same instance/party, you are exponentially opening up the access to gear. This means you have to consider drop rates and item power while factoring in the additional access options, and that is where the troubles begin. As to the “why”: if gear is too easy to obtain, progress feels cheap (in a bad way), and the game feels pointless too quickly, if gear becomes too rare and valuable on Trade, it feels too harsh and like an endless grind. Trade essentially functions as a 3rd factor on top of item rarity/power and drop rate, complicating the ratio of finding the sweet spot for drops to feel good. Which brings me to another point:
The reason itemization feels so good right now in LE is the fact that items are limited to 4 mods, and the mod pool for individual items isn’t that massive. This means that you have a very good chance on any drop to get something usable at least, with the very convenient and deterministic crafting system assisting in making loot generally more usable than in most comparable ARPGs. The danger here with Trade is that because the drop system is so lenient, adding this 3rd option of access will trivialize it utterly. Right now the game is organically encouraging to engage with the well-made loot filter system and crafting, and hunt for “your” loot - which doesn’t take all that long to obtain (unless you’re aiming for tippy-top Exalted items). It works. Introduce an economy to the mix, and suddenly you’re faced with the prospect of people not having to engage with either, and just grabbing gold and buying what they need (depending on the iteration of the system). Cue “nothing ever drops/loot feels bad” complaints, because the player never even bothered to engage with the systems at hand which make loot interesting and the entire structure engaging.
“We don’t know anything” My entire post is based on the notion that some form of economy will exist, as EHG have frequently mentioned there are plans for some iteration of it. Mentioned early on were an ingame Marketplace with a bidding system for example, and limitations to what would be tradeable. They’ve also stated that things may have changed since then, but I don’t believe they will have changed in any drastic way.
In fact, I think a bidding system would be a good way to ensure that Trade doesn’t have too much power, the inconvenience of having to bid and wait, with little chance of actually obtaining an item, and the natural demand-driven price development would ensure that powerful items wouldn’t be too accessible too quickly. The problem here is, if you place restrictions on what you can trade, and keeping the current lenient itemization system in mind (see above), this option becomes irrelevant compared to just playing the game naturally, so the point of it existing is questionable.
Restrictions to Trade make sense if you want everything tradable, but not easily and immediately accessible, doing both (restrictions and inconvenient form of economic interaction) just turns it into an inefficient hassle nobody will interact with. And here we run into the never-ending issue of having economic interaction be too convenient or accessible in an ARPG, because it can tip over into making the core gameplay loop (kill monsters, find loot) feel annoying/trivial/grindy in a variety of ways.
I just want to contest this, because people keep saying it as if it’s a given. Loot right now is boring and the crafting feels awful to use for reasons mentioned in other threads. Trade literally won’t impact this one way or the other. However, assuming they fix this, I’ll just reiterate what I said earlier.
SWTOR has a busy economy. There are people that trade as their primary in-game activity and become pixel billionaires. There are cabals, consortiums, price fixing, manipulation, speculation, wonderful give-aways to new players, collusion in and out of game, and basically every good and bad behaviour you might expect. This is almost entirely driven by what most would consider cosmetic MTX and accessories. Even if you aren’t a market person if you get a rare decoration drop you immediately think “sweet! that’ll go for 10mil easy!”
They do all of that without you being able to buy or sell your Awesome Lightsabre of Awesome +12.
From the viewpoint of an ARPG player I think most would SWTOR has a super active trade and economy that ticks every box, except the ability to buy power in-game. You need to play the game for that. Whether they personally want the same for LE, or they actively want to buy/sell in-game power is up to them.
Edit: Forgot to add they have the familiar “if it dropped in your party you can trade it for up to x hours”.
In this way, every player would have the opportunity to offer items that he himself does not need and considers to be halfway valuable, and to sell them at a reasonable price.
The drop rates could also remain halfway up.
If the requested price is too high or no one wants to buy for whatever reason, you are out of luck and the item you didn’t want to keep anyway goes for the minimum price.
What is the problem?
Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)
For someone as pedantic as yourself Llama, I am disappointed that you actually agree with his premise.
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I don’t & I never said that I did. Zaodon originally said that we were only discussing trade/economy because other aRPGs have it. I then said that I thought that we were discussing it because the devs have said they’re going to do it. While I disagree with his inclusion of the devs in the discussion, that’s entirely his prerogative.
Zaodon then went on to describe trade but I disagree that allowing the free flow of goods isn’t an economy which is what I read as what he wants/thinks:
IMO, an economy is the emergent behaviour of many people freely trading their stuff for other people’s stuff (even if that stuff is “just” goodwill, aka, you giving me your stuffs for free 'cause you’re nice & want to make me happy). If random people can meet up & swap/give away their stuffs, that’s trade, but it’s also the fundamental activity of an economy.
I don’t like the idea of restricting trade to between players who are friends or in a guild. I am well aware that this opens the door to botting and other undesirable behaviour (including the shift of gearing away from drops/crafting to buying stuff) & I don’t have an answer to how to prevent that without penalising legitimate players. Fortunately I don’t have to. 
No, their most recent comment on it was that it’d be a physical location.
As @miffy says, balancing an easy trading system with the current powerful/deterministic crafting & the desire for people to get gear from mobs is, I imagine, a monumental ballache, assuming it’s even possible.
SWTOR also doesn’t have the kind of gearing that LE (or any other aRPG) has. Unless it’s changed in the years that I’ve played it, you’d pick your item base of graphical choice, whack in your armourings/mods/enhancements for your dps/healer/tank build & you’re done (with the best/required armourings/etc being from raids but some good enough versions being world drops or craftable, ignoring the set bonuses).
Any multiplayer item interaction in LE will open the gates to RMT and bots and trying to balance the rates against it will make the life of individual players miserable similar to PoE where your drops are balanced around the collectivity and so you are never going to drop an item or even find a league boss encounter, unless you stamp a 500-2000h grind.
Otherwise it’s going to be trivial to click some button to acquire Best in each slot. Also “farm money for gear” is a very ugly grind loop.
In the opposite side of the spectrum my imo best ARPG (GD) is mainly a single player experience that allows me to have an infinite stash and if i really need to i can skip hours of ingredient farming (e.g. farm here X hours to drop N ingredients for your recipe) to spawn an item, voila.
source: among various accomplishments done are “killing diablo” in D3 patch 1.2 during RMAH period, various poe leagues farmed including a lv100 done (finally), various endgame farmers in GD, got insanely rich in GW2 doing trade & crafting (the real mmos non rng crafting as in buy orders for ingredients, create armor set, sell set), played Eve online for a couple years? (it has a realistical economy)
This is where our vision diverge i guess… There is a difference between having trade as an option and balancing around trade.
Poe did the second, it focused too much in the economy and in the end all loot that is not currency lost all it’s meaning, and is completely filtered out by the entire playerbase(including people playing SSF after a week), and playing SSF is not really an option, since the encounter/drop ratio is balanced around the economy, which makes the main pillar of poe (build diversity) shrink to almost nothing.
That’s why balancing around ssf is better. Because it gives players options. If you want to engage the market, just farm gold and trade for everything, it’s up to you, no one will be pointing a gun at your head and saying you have to trade or you will not accomplish anything.
In this system you have the choice to only trade for build defining uniques for example. it’s up to the player to decide how he wants to approach the game, and in my eyes that’s good.
My vision probably differs from yours because for me ARPGs are about the journey, not the destination. It’s not about having my character use full t28 pieces of gear what is fun for me, the fun is in the journey to get to that point (character growth).
For example the biggest letdown of poe for me, is that the combat and the loot became so bland that it feels like working, you have to work your atlas, you have to work your maven, you have to work your delve, etc…And all that is done by literally exploding screens full of enemies that are either completely harmless or completely lethal (sometimes the same enemy in the same map can be both lol). The journey became just a chore.
While at least for now, LE journey is outright more engaging than poe, you can keep crafting better and better gear as you go, no need to stop to trade for more than half of your total playtime like in POE.
Tl:DR having an economy will not be detrimental as long the droprates keep being balanced around ssf, since you will not be forced to interact with it if you don’t wish to.
I disagree. Having a “Free Item Bazaar” where people dump unused and/or extra items for others to take (freely) would provide more opportunity for people to find a nice item for their builds than trying to play SSF and get it themselves.
In other words, as soon as a standard “Trade” system (with economy) exists, it will immediately impact other players even if they don’t participate. I agree with you that if the Devs don’t mess with drop rates (i.e. if they continue to balance around SSF), the effects on non-participants is minimized, but not eliminated.
Because you believe/fear that the devs will nerf the drop rates when they implement trade. The devs haven’t said anything on the matter. So, with all due respect, all of us saying “XXX will happen if they implement trade”, is purely conjecture since we don’t know what the devs intend because they’ve not told us potentially because they may not have decided!
Yes, this is what happened in Sacred 1 & 2 and it was awesome. Someone would join the server & say that they were going to drop a load of stuff on the island (where you spawned in MP).
I’m curious, if the devs don’t change the drop rates, how would that affect an SSF player? How easy or difficult it would be to get an item would remain the same, unless the SSF player feels sad because other people are able to get more stuff faster via trade than they can.
This was my thought too. I don’t see how it affects a non-trading player at all if the devs don’t hack up the drop rates to “balance” trade (like PoE or D3). At that point, trade basically doesn’t exist and doesn’t hinder their gameplay at all.
They have a plan but aren’t going to tell us what it is yet.
So all of this is just conjecture.
I think loot is too basic right now to drive such an economy, though. I hope they fix that before releasing MP.
I’d like to see some sort of barter-board, for uniques anyway.
You post a bunch of unique items, and select the target unique you want to trade with. You would need to transfer the uniques you want to trade to a ‘bank’, so they can’t be used/dropped/etc while they are available for trade.
Other players can sort by uniques they have, and items they want, to see if any are a match.
When the other players find and confirm the trade, it auto-trades the items between the two players.
There could be a limit to the amount of available trades, or you could chose to trade all your posted items for the same unique multiple times.
Why I’d want to see unique trading? Because unlike rares, you know the special effect of a unique, and there may be specific builds for specific uniques. Trying to farm one random unique can take forever, and there may not be a good way to ‘target’ that item.
I don’t think the same ‘barter board’ would work for rares, because it’d be much harder to match xyz rare between two players. “I want a ring with these affix’s, have this necklace”. “Ooo, perfect necklace, but… I don’t have that ring. Oh well, guess I can never trade…”