Another summary reply to some of the discussion, I apologize for not quoting individuals but it’s a rather complex topic and I feel I have to expand on some factors.
First off, I would kindly ask to keep discussion civil, for one, and to refrain from dragging political discussions or debates about real-world economic systems into this, because it frankly has absolutely no place here.
This kind of goes to show that the topic is surrounded by a lot of misconceptions and misunderstanding, and people bring in quite a bit of emotion without grasping the design notions at play.
The crux of the issue is that you set out to design your ARPG to be fun in core gameplay, you want your basic class/skill/gear design to be engaging, and combat to be enjoyable. Now you want to set out to ensure that there is as much replayability and longevity to this loop as possible, without having progress turn into tedium and a perceived “grind” too early.
I must once more stress that the topic is about a trade economy, meaning the free exchange of drops between players not in the same party or on each others’ friend lists for ages. Drops being tradable in parties is not part of the issue here, and doesn’t pose any challenges to maintaining itemization balance integrity.
The focus is on ensuring that Trade does not make playing “normally” and engaging with Crafting and Filters mostly irrelevant. And the difficulty herein lies in the fact that it is incredibly hard to find that sweet spot in making Trade feel fun and actually adding another layer to the enjoyment of the game, without having it immediately become the go-to method to progress your character and virtually bypass a large part of the core gameplay structure.
“I don’t care what others do, let them trade for all I care” doesn’t really apply here, because you cannot, by definition approach itemization design without factoring in Trade. As i’ve attempted to describe in earlier comments, it is not a factor you can just ignore as it throws the balance out of whack too easily.
This is, unfortunately, an area where developers cannot rely purely on community sentiment, and have to be the adults in the room and make decisions for them, because (and I know this will may be unpopular), it really is a case of “You think you do, but you really don’t”.
As somebody who has played through barter p2p in D2, ingame AH in D3, non-trade smart drop SSF in D3, and the general chaos of everything existing in PoE, I can safely say that no game has so far managed to hit that sweet spot I mentioned above, for various reasons.
Every game has run into massive issues of Trade either being too overbearing and posing significant challenges to maintaining core drop functionality in endgame (“i enjoy playing because I feel motivated to find upgrades or interesting items”) or becoming an annoyance to the majority of the playerbase. If it becomes too convenient or accessible, the itemization has to be designed to accommodate this, which is why Vanilla D3 felt absolutely terrible to progress in Inferno, because progress without playing the economy was virtually impossible and drops felt very bad as a result. The opposite extreme in D3 2.0 felt very rewarding and fun early on, but rapidly lost its long term appeal as loot lost its appeal very quickly. The barter system in D2 simply encouraged a massive 3rd party black market and rampant botting for RMT. And PoE tried to both balance itemization around Trade existing, while simultaneously maintaining multiple layers of complexity for SSF progression and keeping Trade as much of a hassle as possible.
None of these approaches worked, all had a massive impact on replayability and community perception. LE has a unique opportunity here of being in a state that basically works for SSF without showering you in smart loot, while offering an intuitive, enjoyable Crafting system that is not unnecessarily convoluted and fun to engage with, and still preserving a typical ARPG endgame progression of long term chase goals.
As i’ve mentioned before, a Bazaar with bid-only interaction might be one option for restricted selections of items, however let’s play that through: by it being bid-only, you are practically forced to time your sessions to “snipe” an auction you want, and simultaneously vastly reduce your chances of obtaining it. This means that it automatically leads to much more frustration and time “wasted” instead of just playing the game normally.
If you open it up to a buyout AH or marketplace, access becomes both too easy (trivializing the vast majority of gameplay in terms of drop progression, from campaign to Empowered Monoliths), and making itemization in endgame unnecessarily complicated to balance.
Some of you enjoy Trade, so do I, but I’ve also never enjoyed a pure SSF ARPG as much as I have LE in its current state, and I believe it is way too dangerous to allow Trade in virtually any form - except for party/friend list Trade, which fits into the organic SSF nature of playing together/long term, and doesn’t add the same kind of exponentially derailing factors to consider.
Now as to “current drops are boring/crafting is bad for reason x”, i’m not saying it’s perfect rn, obviously more is coming and iteration is needed. But the core structure works better than any ARPG i’ve played, and I truly have played them all.
Is it really worth opening the Pandora’s Box of another factor to balance it all?
), the premise of “no money” in Star Trek was that there was, in effect, infinite supply (if you aren’t a Trekkie, its because of replicators.)
