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:
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!)
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!)
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!!!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
In case any of the developers did not read my message as blatant sarcasm: I do not think you’re apathetic or unable to balance your game. I am in favor of adding trade with the expectation that you will be able to achieve a great balance because you have a good track record of doing so.
Mind to provide some proof? As in accordance to any civil Law, the burden to proof something is lay with the accuser.
The only time it was proven that there is nationality tied to bot farmers is in the case of Old Runescape, where venezuelans who did it to put the bread on their table since theirs is a fail government.
In the case of China and Taiwan where the population are majority is chinese, none of them are poor country in fact both China and Taiwan have great GDP compare to the rest of the world and in case of China is the 2nd biggest economy in the world. So your argument of them being poor is just pathetic argument and you don’t have proof. So stop fucking accuse other nationality or race for being one. Fact is you don’t know what you are talking about and you just accused them for being one because its either you are xenophobic or you have no idea what you are talking about and accusing China for everything that’s wrong with the world is cool these days.
