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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.