The Case FOR Having a Trade Economy

I’ve said it in other places and I’ll say it here. Excluding trade from a multiplayer ARPG is a fatal mistake, and it will ultimately result in LESS hours played, LESS retention, LESS income for EHG, and LESS longevity for the game.

Trade allows for many new playstyles, and a lot of super-dedicated players like myself will just lose interest in LE if there is no trading system. If LE wants to be relevant and competitive in the multiplayer ARPG market, they’ll disregard all of this hesitancy around trade. There are a few things to acknowledge in this discussion:

  1. People will always find the absolute most efficient ways to progress. Just because trade might offer a fast track for some people who have spent all of their time playing as efficiently as possible doesn’t mean that it directly affects you or that you should judge trade itself based on that fact.
  2. There will always be people who have an advantage over you in a multiplayer scenario, whether in regard to time investment, availability of funds either real or in-game, game knowledge, or having a team of backers. The top 1% of players will have whatever they want regardless of whether or not trade exists, so using “ease of access” as an argument against it doesn’t really make sense.
  3. Every single player should not have easy access to the same exact content without a certain amount of time investment and game knowledge. Casual players who have 30 minutes to play daily shouldn’t be grinding empowered level 100 monoliths a soon into a reset, nor should they be an extremely important factor when designing end game systems.

The current market of long-haul online games is basically built on competitiveness. Look at all of the most popular games: League of legends, Warzone, Apex, Valorant, Rocket League, Fortnite, Dota, etc. There is something about these games that make people want to play for THOUSANDS of hours, and that something is the competitive player vs. player nature of them. Obviously, these are different genres entirely from LE, but taking PoE for example, the game would not be where it is today without trade, despite the problems people have with it.

Trade provides a few key elements to an online game:

  1. You have the feeling that you could drop something rare and valuable every time you kill a monster. This creates fuel for grinding that you just don’t get from non-trade games. Taking current LE or Grim Dawn or D3 for example, the excitement from dropping items is a lot lower and different than it is in PoE. Finding a super valuable item in PoE comes with an intense rush of excitement that you just don’t get from other non-trade ARPGs.

  2. Crafting has more meaning. Crafting in a trade economy creates an extremely enticing way to make money, whatever that ends up being on LE. It also makes hitting that lucky affix way more exciting. Now you have a choice, do I sell this item that might be super good for my character? Or do I use it to progress? If I sell this item, maybe I can fund a build I’ve had my eye on but don’t have access to the items quite yet? These are trade-league questions and can create an interesting decision-making scenario. Although this may feel like artificial depth, this does introduce a certain amount of complexity that isn’t present in non-trade games.

  3. Playstyle choices. In a trade economy, you have a lot more options of how you want to play. Do you grind a specific area or zone for items that other players don’t have the patience to grind? Do you corner the market on specific items or crafts? Do you craft strictly for profit? Do you grind for raw currency to buy your items? Do you grind for raw currency to buy crafting materials to create your own items? Do you play wall street simulator? Do you not even interact with trade at all and just play SSF? Do you create a boss build to farm for boss-specific drops? Do you create a carry build that charges currency for completing hard content for people? And many more.

  4. Purpose behind the grind. Think about D3 or Grim Dawn. Sure people enjoy playing these games but with D3 gear acquisition is incredibly easy, the game feels like it has zero depth, and none of the progression mechanics feel impactful. With Grim dawn, It’s easily one of the better ARPGs out there but the lack of multiplayer and community completely takes it out of the running for being direct competition with the best ARPGs on the market. Playing either of these games has a distinct “feel” like something is missing. They immediately seem more geared toward console players and casual, and there is WAY less incentive to play once you’ve completed end game progression. Progressing has to be grindy, otherwise, your game becomes stale too quickly. There need to be several layers of goals for all types of players, and though it might suck to hear as a casual player, a lot of them need to be geared towards the ultra-dedicated portion of your player base.

  5. Competitiveness. Having a community constantly vying for top-tier items and decked-out builds is healthy. It’s the only way LE will have any form of competitiveness past completing any of the quest lines. I love in PoE when I hit a lucky craft and get to post it to global or guild chat, or someone on my friend list who is trying to craft something similar. Having top-tier items right now has almost no meaning outside of what it provides for your build, and although that can be exciting, it’s one-dimensional excitement. I know that If I get a 1/1,000,000 absolute perfect item in-game, I can’t do anything outside of using it to kill monsters to get other items that I will now just filter out because having anything worse than my ultra god-tier item is pointless. Trade gives more meaning to items, from the second you start killing monsters and dropping items all the way to after you’ve completely min-maxed a build and can no longer get any upgrades.

The ideal scenario would be a perfect balance of trade, crafting, and gameplay. Ideally, this would mean that SSF is a viable playstyle and doesn’t exclude anyone from progression, but also that your above-average player isn’t getting burnt out in a week or two after a “league” releases due to having no long-term goals. I strongly disagree with the idea that trade shouldn’t be a thing in LE, and I know that I among many others would consider an online ARPG without trade to be a lot less enticing to play.

On the subject of RMT bots and gold sellers… This is an unavoidable thing. If there is money to be made off of a video game, people will do it. RMT is obviously not good for an economy, but outside of having an ultra-aggressive anti-cheat, there’s not much EHG can do. Using RMT bots as an example of why trade shouldn’t exist is pretty ridiculous. The pros for players FAR outweigh the cons. Hell, look at the current ladder. There are people who have used Cheat Engine to hack their character to progress on the leaderboard despite the fact that there are literally no benefits or rewards to doing so outside of seeing your name on a list. There will never be a way to completely prevent people from hacking, cheating, selling, exploiting, etc. It’s in the nature of video games and the best we can hope for is that EHG is super active when it comes to banning and moderating.

TLDR: I think excluding trade from LE would ultimately result in the game not having the means to compete with PoE 2 or whatever other ARPGs are around when LE is ready to launch due to the fact that trade adds a plethora of additional game play styles and motivation to play beyond end game progression.

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Spot the inconsistency.

Sounds great in an ideal world where your previous statement (shown below) is false.

That’s quite the hot take you got there.

Yeah it’s not about having the best items, it’s letting everyone know you have the best items. Sounds like something out of a Sam Hyde sketch manifesto.

Why don’t we just go straight for a RMAH instead, since its unavoidable and at least this way it’ll benefit the devs?
I think this innovative idea will really work out.

TL;DR:
Yeah, I think the game should have some form of trading. k thanks

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Do you think you just made some earth-shattering mind-blowing rebuttal by using a bunch of quotes out of context with some snarky one-liners?

"availability of funds either real or in-game, game knowledge, or having a team of backers."

My point was to say that people tend to get really envious and spiteful when they see other people having something they don’t, but the lesson here is that no matter what you do that will always be the case.

"Every single player should not have easy access to the same exact content without a certain amount of time investment and game knowledge"

This is in regards to casual players feeling butt hurt over having to grind to achieve anything because people generally want instant access to whatever content a game has to offer. Content existing doesn’t mean by default that you should have access to it. Combining it with my previous quote acts like the game we are discussing has a current method to bypass that as a casual player by throwing money around, when in fact the two statements are not really related to one another. Glad I could help clarify.

Having a bunch of different ways to play a game while some people find the absolute most efficient way to do so is not a mutually exclusive scenario, in fact, they’re completely unavoidable with or without trade. You see it with the current system of farming blessings. Some people just skip everything and farm a bunch of bosses per hour in monoliths, while some people would rather farm the entire zone. Is one of these wrong? The answer is no. Whether or not people decide to maximize their profit or efficiency is up to them. If you have the choice between a system with almost no variance or player agency vs. a system with tons of options where you can kind of play your own way, people will choose the latter almost every time. You actually kinda helped to prove my point of why trade is beneficial to progression. It gives those ultra-dedicated players goals regarding efficiency and doesn’t really impact casual players because they still get to decide how they play.

Saying it’s a hot take really took your counter-argument to the next level. I am now totally starting to see your side of things. /s

“I know that If I get a 1/1,000,000 absolute perfect item in-game, I can’t do anything outside of using it to kill monsters to get other items that I will now just filter out because having anything worse than my ultra god-tier item is pointless.”

You forgot to address this part of the quote you took out of context. It’s not just about showing off items to your friends or getting lucky and posting stuff to global, it’s about the point of having the items to begin with. If I find a god-tier item for a build other than my own, currently my only option is to stash it or make a new build. In a trade economy, I have the option of trading it for items for my own build or if the item is good enough possibly buying a few items for a new build. This gives an entirely new meaning to farming for items past min-maxing your own build or searching for items for others, and adds motivation to farm past finishing whatever end game there might be.

Your incredibly snarky take on RMAH is interesting. Again it does absolutely nothing to provide a counter-argument, but interesting nonetheless. My goal was simply to say that using RMT and gold sellers as a reason for why trade shouldn’t exist doesn’t really make sense, because those are problems with any game that has an economy. You can’t just use some totally extreme suggestion to benefit your argument, because there are plenty of games out there with successful trade systems that don’t use RMAH. Gold sellers being a problem shouldn’t discourage developers from adding trade systems to their games, because the pros far outweigh the cons IMO, and despite it being a hard battle to fight it’s worth it to provide a trade system for your players. It sucks that people buy items or currency from gold sellers, but outside of banning them there’s not much you can do. Even in games like Diablo 3, people use real money to buy leveling, gear, and carry services. It’s literally just a thing that comes with any multiplayer game, and that doesn’t mean developers should just give up.

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My rebuttal is:

Bots.

That is all.

Thanks, I do try my best but no need to go overboard.

It doesn’t, but that’s what trading will result in, and as per your previous quote, something you’re fine with.

An imbalance where some actions are far more rewarding will impact casuals more than the hardcore players, a casual player will have to seek the more efficient ways of progressing if they don’t want to grind to a halt, whilst someone that already plays the game a lot can choose to dick around between more serious farming.

Key here is that it’s desirable to balance the progression methods, not just go “Oh it wont be balanced anyway, so what does it matter if we tilt the scale even further?”

Cool, always nice when people can come to an agreement.

Right, carry on.

Accepting it (you) is giving up.

I didn’t really hold a strong opinion on trading one way or the other, but you’ve convinced me that it might have quite a lot of drawbacks.

Thanks for making this thread, sometimes you just gotta listen to people in order to realize where you stand on things. Good night man, hope I can wake up to a stimulating continuation of our discussion tomorrow.

Perfect amazing points, let’s just steer LE in the direction of Diablo 3 so you can sit on your toilet and play for 30 minutes every day on your switch and be #12 on the leaderboard.

Let me get this straight:

  1. Everything should be equally rewarding, no farming method or build or items should be better than the other (Talk about a challenge for the devs!)
  2. Nobody should have a competitive advantage based on how much time or effort they can sink into the game. (80 hours a week or 1 hour a week, we are all equal! Rejoice!)
  3. People who spend very little time should have access to the same amount of content, gear, and build potential as people who are playing hours and hours daily. No unfair advantages here!!!
  4. Trade will only result in everyone using mommy’s credit card to buy gold which will allow them access to end game content and this weawwy fwustwates you because if they’re ahead of you in a game and they didn’t have to work hard for it that sets you back as a human being.
  5. In your mind, if there are efficient ways of farming, the less-efficient ones will cause casual players to grind to a halt and be unable to progress regardless of the abilities of EHG as game balancers and developers. Also apparently the developers are apathetic and can’t be bothered to balance the various ways to progress so actually casual players are just screwed. Go play Diablo 3 filthy casuals!
  6. Acknowledging issues in other games of RMT and paying for services (that will exist regardless of trade or not) is actually in fact just giving up.

Hey, I have an idea, let’s take your argument even further. Why doesn’t EHG just shut down the game and online servers? Let’s make the game purely single-player so that we can COMPLETELY AVOID ANY KIND OF PAYING FOR SERVICES OR CURRENCIES, at all costs let’s make sure this doesn’t happen so we don’t upset SrsBznz. The integrity of the game depends on people not doing what comes naturally to them so as opposed to investing in ways to combat it and keep things as legit as possible for our online community we can just become an offline game.

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Hey Devs and moderators,

Are you seeing this?

This dude. SRSBZNZ. He IS the problem with your forums. The OP put up a thought out and articulate point and this dude just craps all over it. Offers nothing of substance. Just tears into the OP post and nit picks it. he has drawn the OP into a debate that is worthless.
Stop canceling the people making sense and ban these people.

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I think he’s offering a lot of good points, and I say that while also being pro trade. Both posters here are being very snarky with each other, and so are you. I do agree with you that I would like to see everyone in this discussion be a bit more respectful so that we can avoid having another forum post get locked because people can’t be nice to each other.

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Trade and Economy are not the same thing, though.

I am pro-trade. I posted an example of a trading system which has no economy attached to it, and therefore, is immune to bots, farming, RMT, etc.

Any proposals for an Economy, however, open up the door to RMT instantly, and are, for me, a non-starter.

That’s fine. I’m pro economy too, as well as an SSF option that the devs are balancing for. I don’t really have any interest in debating it either way. I really just would like you all to be nicer to each other :slight_smile:

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To me. ARPGs is basically about item acquisition and much of the value of items comes from their value in a trade economy.

Like I said, threads like this converts no one. But I’ll like to lend my weight to OP.

That is all.

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Trade goes against this at its very core ? You’re giving opportuniy to casual people to skip a whole gameplay loop in order to acquire their items.

I strongly disagree with you. This has nothing to do with trade, on the contrary. Trade is lowering this feeling by a marginal amount.

What trade does is lowering the ceiling for acceptable items. Want double resists and a stat item ? For a total of T10 on this item ? Just buy it for 10k gold. Done. Whereas if i loot it myself i’m gonna think right away : “niice, it’s perfect for me, exactly what i was looking for.”

Rare and valuable items (let’s say the equivalent of shavronne or headhunter in PoE) can still exist and get you excited when they drop for you, making you Litteraly think " oh nice maybe i’ll make a reroll for it."

Same goes for chase items : do i want to grind gold to buy it in a marketplace? Is this exciting ? Do i want to set up my lootfilter for all meta builds, while taking it from an external site that is keeping everything tracked and updated or just make own loot filter tailored for my own needs ? What’s the most exciting ?

As you said earlier :

If it’s better to open all chests, loot their gold and run without killing monsters (hello vanilla D3 gold run) is it exciting ? Do you want this for the game ?

That’s maybe your own belief, but that’s not the case for me. I have almost 3K hours in PoE and i NEVER get excited about drops. yeah sometimes i get an exalted. Nice.

When was the last time i looted a build defining item ? When was the last time i looted a crazy rare and though NICE i’m gonna wear it right away ? When was the last time i got an upgrade from my own loots ?! How can this be exciting ? Running valdo’s rest over and over and loot shards ? Grind mindlessly the same map (exemple old atoll or burial chambers) in order to accumulate currency ?

In Grim Dawn, when i loot a RI or a legendary or set item i’m thinking right away how nice it is and what kind of character could make use of it. If that’s not good design for loot i don’t know what is.

Not necessarily true. DO you find crafting in PoE exciting ? No (at least without harvest). Again, that’s due one specific fact : if you open the market to everybody, then you have to lower the droprates. Then it’s crafting only for the richer, because shards would be rarer. Or good base rarer.
If trade wasn’t messing with lootrates, i could see your point though. yeah crafting specific stuff and cornering a market mind sound fun for some.

Same thing. Actually you can find everything by yourself in Last Epoch. No need for trade. And that’s a good thing, it makes people play more to find incremental upgrades. If trade is implemented, items will be made rarer and the playstyle choices will go DOWN for anybody not willing to trade. (hello SSF poe)

That’s exactly what made me quit PoE this league in two weeks. Why the fuck am i grinding for ?! I can’t target farm uniques, i can’t target farm rare items (bye harvest), i’m just doing the same thing over and over expecting the next time to be different (winning the lottery ticket in ultimatum encounter for example).

I don’t see why trade would be required for this ? As long as there is multiplayer it’s fine.

We do agree on this. But i guess i strongly believe that there can’t be trade without a strongly and negatively impacted solo self found experience.

i’m gonna add something else while i’m here :

Nope. I strongly disagree. Trade should be heavily limited, for example available just within the same party (as in D3) for it work.

If there is a reason i’m burnt out on PoE, it’s because of trade. Everytime i start a character, i don’t see myself finishing the build by my own means anymore. That was also one of the first reason POE was so hard to get into at first. (and still for some of my friends : Every time i ask them to join me for the next league they say “that’s the ARPG in which you buy your stuff instead of looting right ?! No thanks, maybe one day.”)

I can kill a8 sirus and maven with a starter build, but can’t find upgrades by my own mean. Craft something with a maven orb ? out of reach…

The only way for the last year at least for me to enjoy PoE was to exclude myself from the trade economy. I went with my best buddy in a private league, where people were trading and not bothering to make crazy money. that was such a nice experience. Sadly, harvest loss made this less possible.

While talking about harvest it’s a perfect example of why trade isn’t healthy for a game : harvest was very good for retention. i’ve never made more builds than when it was available. i crafted gear again, and looting items felt nice. But trade ruined it because you couldn’t have something SSF friendly that is not broken in a trade environnement.

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Ok I will do my best to reply to all of this…

One of the arguments against trade is that trade and economy systems generally tend to highly benefit the ultra-dedicated players over the casual ones. “The rich get richer” is a common complaint in PoE and on these forums regarding the economy and certain “abusable” gameplay mechanics. If you factor in the fact that every once in a while a casual player might RMT and then have access to the content because their character is decked out, then yeah that specific situation kind of goes against what I originally said. I was saying that not everyone should have access to all content easily to provide support to my philosophy that there need to systems in place for long-term and heavily invested players that might just not purely benefit casuals, and trade plays a part in that.

I totally understand this argument. More items flooding the market = less worth from items that actually drop. This is and always has been a tough thing to balance for developers. I think Diablo 2 is a pretty good example of a multi-layered drop approach where you aren’t just dropping rares and hoping they’re worth something. Rare uniques, sets, runes, and bases always had worth, and furthermore, rolls on each of them could increase the worth tenfold. PoE is not a good example of a game that does item drops right. As far as your own preferences while you play, in a trade-based ARPG you do have that option to bypass the grind to buy your meta item. For some people, this IS exciting. For others, it is not. In the same way that setting up your filter to highlight meta items vs. highlighting stuff that YOU want is a choice of yours, all of this totally depends on how you want to play. Trade offers you those choices, while also offering a lot of other choices for end-game players.

I won’t pretend to know how efficiency-obsessed people will play this game. I do know that no matter what, if this game launches with multiplayer, people will play it in a way that the developers never intended. You see this ALL THE TIME with PoE. It’s kind of impossible to predict what people will do for the sake of profit, efficiency, or competition, but it’s an undeniable fact that they will do whatever it takes to get an advantage. I of course would not want “chest runs” to be that thing, but we are already seeing people run through monoliths only killing bosses to farm blessings, and trade/multiplayer aren’t even out yet. Yes, trade will inspire certain people to play more efficiently, but not having trade in the game isn’t just going to prevent that as a playstyle.

This is specific to PoE in my experience. Don’t confuse how poorly PoE loot is done with the concept I am trying to portray, and what I expect is the goal for EHG ultimately. That goal is for trade to be an optional but fun avenue for players to progress and collect/sell gear, while actually playing the game and dropping loot doesn’t have any of the excitement taken out of it. I would NOT want LE to turn into a PoE clone because I am in the same boat of being completely over the gameplay loop of grinding hundreds of maps for scrap currency shards. Of course, useful drops in any ARPG can be exciting, but without the ability to trade those drops there is an element that’s missing from that excitement. It’s more a playstyle thing, and less an undeniable fact. Some people (this thread and the other serve as proof) would prefer to only play the PVE experience and not trade. My post was made in an effort to say that I think not having trade for the sake of these players is a mistake and it excludes a large population of ARPG fans who WANT that competitive trade experience.

I do not find crafting in PoE exciting. I think LEs system is WAY better. I am a person who makes between 500-2000 exalts in a league depending on how profitable just playing the game is, and I ABSOLUTELY hate going 10+ ex deep into an item and being back at square one because you missed 1 crucial annul. It’s a system that feels horrible to interact with, and it’s incredibly unintuitive and unapproachable for casuals. I was a huge fan of harvest, though it did feel a bit too strong. I am not here to pretend that I know how to balance a trade economy, but using PoE as an example I’m sure EHG can figure out a good place for loot drops vs. economy.

Yeah, this league was a major letdown. I think I’m sensing some burnout from you and that already makes a game like PoE incredibly hard to play. At a certain point, ARPGs are just grindy games that require you to invest a lot of time if you want to get amazing gear and progress. IMO that’s how it should be. If everything is too easy then people will get bored. Part of preventing this from happening DESPITE trade is having complex mechanics and gameplay content that’s actually hard regardless of what gear level you’re at, or releasing major content patches periodically (Like PoE). The difference is that getting lucky in PoE is ACTUALLY like winning the lottery because no matter what system you interact with, your chances of success are infinitesimal (especially after the ridiculous nerf to deterministic mechanics).

Agree to disagree. Trade adds more depth to that competitiveness IMO.

Honestly, this is the ideal experience, and still 100% possible in a trade economy among friends and guilds. I would hope that the way EHG implements trade ENCOURAGES this playstyle. I think my original post came off a little bit like I wanted a PoE-style economy where it’s run by these mafia-style guilds who keep secrets and exploit stuff for profit. Part of the reason PoE is so exploitable and enticing to those types of players is that the economy basically resembles a stock market. There is always some deep pocket of the market to corner and since an absolutely ridiculous amount of items drop in juiced maps it inflates the worth of all of the various currencies because they are what is used to create the best items. Crafted items rule the market, not found ones. That’s a huge problem.

I guess I am partially playing devil’s advocate for people who will want to be extremely economy-focused because I actually do believe that part of what has kept PoE around for so long is that the economy and league starts are SO COMPETITIVE and a huge reason for that is trade. If PoE were SSF or party trade only, I don’t think it would be as popular as it is today, especially because of all the problems. Part of what makes the game so addicting is that your best drops are raw currency, so it’s kind of like pulling a slot machine lever each time you run a map. I strongly believe that GGG have designed their game to be as addicting as humanly possible to keep people around, and it’s taken to such an extreme level. My only desire is for EHG to BE ABLE TO COMPETE with PoE, because it will make both games and any future competitors better. Honestly LE is my only hope for a PoE competitor in the next few years, and I strongly feel that it’s much more of an uphill battle without trade, maybe even impossible.

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Your definitions are incorrect. Economic transactions occur when two groups or parties agree to the value or price of the transacted good or service, commonly expressed in a certain currency. Trade is based on an exchange of currency which is the definition of an economy.

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With the way LE is set upright now, I don’t see a fundamental difference between item bases and affix shards as forms of currency outside of perhaps some added complexity in describing them. The only items I don’t really see this way are uniques/sets because they’re unalterable from the beginning. They presumably have some value associated with them, but what separates them from regular bases is crafting.

If we had trade today, I imagine jewelry with perfectly rolled implicits would be traded frequently–regardless of any affixes they may or may not also have. If exalted items were tradable, even on wrong bases, they would basically just be “containers” for shards in a way, so still essentially currency.

I know the devs said that they ideally want gold to be the standard currency, but again, if we had trade today, gold would have very little value because there are hardly any sinks or useful purposes for it.

Anyway, Zaodon’s proposed system for “trade” without an economy is something like a public lost and found with no direct transactions. Everyone can deposit items in and take items out (presumably with some limitations in place). I don’t think it’s a realistic option for the game, and it has its own issues, but I do understand what he’s going for. That all said, I do want a fun in-game economy, but this game has quite a ways to go before trade is really very relevant beyond speculations and wish-listing.

Let’s agree to disagree on this one, I felt like his arguments were very inconsistent, which was what I highlighted.

And if I’m going to get falsely accused of taking someone out of context for pointing it out, you bet that I’ll go the extra mile to actually take them out of context.

At least I was able to back up my interpretations of your posts with quotes (even though that’s apparently taking you out of context), but if you were to do so I guess you wouldn’t be able to make such an obviously disingenuous reply.

Time, skill, knowledge and dedication should be the barriers deciding how far one can go. You want to devalue those aspect by letting people easily acquire things with rl money or because people are simping them.

Take a deep breath, I sense a lot of hostility in your post.

The illusion of “playstyle choices” you mentioned doesn’t mean anything if you can’t properly balance them to be relatively equal in terms of “time = reward”.
People will feel forced into doing what’s most efficient in order to either stay on top or catch up. And casual players will often not be an exception, since by default, they’ll be even further behind than everyone else.

You seem to think that balancing a multifaceted system like this is simple. The only thing that’s simple here, is you.

Combating it? Oh, you mean that thing that according to you is not possible? Right.

The thought is appreciated, though I can’t help but feel as if you’re being insincere.

There is one thing everyone forgets. If someone grinded enough currency to buy an item it’s fair game for everyone because the buying player did his in aquirering the item.
I#m a bit older and played a lot of games where “soulbound” wasn’t a thing or trading was restricted. The whole trade restrictions were installed to artificaly increase the playtime of people and that’s it.

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Can you just leave this thread? You’re contributing literally nothing and just trying to antagonize me for no reason other than that you disagreed with my original post. It’s obviously pointless to debate with you, if you were actually interested in a civil discussion your first post wouldn’t have been bursting at the seams with sarcasm and condescension, baiting me out to do the same thing. You are misinterpreting everything I say and using snippets that arent even contradictory to serve your argument.

I never said that balancing the system would be simple, I never advocated for people using IRL money to progress in a game, I never said that it’s impossible to fight gold sellers so might as well not try, “investing in ways to combat it and keep things as legit as possible” and “outside of having an ultra-aggressive anti-cheat, there’s not much EHG can do.” are not contradictory. To combat something means to take action to reduce or prevent it, which may include an aggressive anti-cheat or other tactics that I myself as a non-developer might not know of (aka, not MUCH they can do).

Enough with the low-effort strawman arguments.

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First of all if you try to accused chinese for being a bot farmer, let me tell you one thing. Chinese have its own fucking internet and can’t play in the same server as we all are since it’s literally restricted to them. Second of all, it’s one thing for being an ass about something but trying to accuse the chineses for being a bot farmers where they literally can’t even play on the server is just pathetic at best and i take offence in that since i’m an Asian. If you don’t know what you are talking about stop accusing any nationality or race when you have no proof.