You’ve presented absolutely nothing which would hinder this idea in any way. No one, not even a bunch of people, could cause any real issues with it without getting banned as a result. That pretty much shuts down any shenanigans. What is left is a great way for players to share items between themselves without allowing bots/gold farmers to infiltrate the game.
Win-win.
The issue here is that those same guild banks exist in tandem with a larger economy in most MMOs. They don’t replace the economy they are a supplemental system between friends, which LE much like PoE may even have as part of a guild system.
The game company does have to spend time working on systems related to economies in these cases. Even if they didn’t, alleviating resources in one area of a game doesn’t mean that the overall game will always get more, newer and exciting content version after version as a result.
I would reference WoW’s current LFG tool as an example of something that should be easy to police and ban for unintended behaviors in it. If you check it out literally 70%+ of postings in the dungeon channel can be sales or boosting which they have said is bannable and yet for years they have been unable to properly enforce this policy. Enforcing policies to deal with people abusing the system is harder than just saying ban them and everything will be fine.
This is a more elaborate way of saying some of the stuff I was, along with some great points of your own, so thanks.
Ultimately, even if you could make the system and unabusable (yeah, right), it would still leave LE in an non-competitive state within the genre because there are so many people who do want to trade–they’re just sick of PoE’s horrible system for it. At that point, the best it could hope for is to be talked about the same way that Grim Dawn is: A solid game experience, but lacks the long-term playability that its competitors offer.
Ignoring the points doesn’t make them go away.
There are no points.
Trade with an Economy is a bane on video games, especially ARPGs. The idea proposed here allows trade with no economy. Players who desire an economy can day trade on the stock market or buy Bitcoin. Everyone is happy.
You can’t abuse the system because of limited inventory space. And a tiny code change would add in limitations if someone abuses it.
Furthermore, griefing (in general, not related to trade) has to be handled by EHG. If EHG isn’t going to ban griefers, the game is already dead and we don’t need to even talk about Trade. So it is safe to assume EHG will suspend/ban griefers, and that becomes a non-issue.
All that’s left is a non-economy item sharing system that is far superior to a game “economy”, since people can simply search for items others donated that would be good for their next character.
This reminds me of guild stash in PoE. But that was different in a couple of important ways:
If PoE had a gstash for every player and it had HH/mirror/exalts in it, that would fall apart because of the economy. Even without trading, you’d still have supply and demand. Low supply and high demand would generate the same incentives to snipe valuable items regardless of the UI (trade window/gstash) being used. There’s at least three major holes they’d have to cover just off the top of my head:
a) Who takes stuff out. In a F2P game this is a nightmare because people can just keep making new accounts. But LE makes this much easier being buy-to-play.
b) How much they take out. “Much” depends on how abundant the specific thing is relative to the player population.
c) How much good stuff they take out. “Good” is basically a synonym for “demand”, which is subject to change. For example, low life uniques are good right now, but what if they introduced ward sustain affixes or the equivalent of CI? That could change overnight. Without a traditional market economy you’d need other metrics (e.g. what kind of stuff gets sniped the most/least).
Even solving a-c doesn’t address the fact that it’s like an NPC shop with extra steps. Why not just add better vendors to SSF? You could argue that it’s better social interaction than trade, and I’d agree - for a smaller community where you know who’s helping you out and when they did it. It’s not as personal when you pick up items asynchronously and anonymously (e.g. the guy who dumped it logged out X hours before and you don’t know what X equals or who they are).
I’m sure the legions of gold farmers, bots & the like that plague pay to play games like WoW truely quake in their boots at the thought of having an account banned.
By Blizzard.
Who have the resources to look into that #### as hard as they want.
Unlike EHG who have to be a bit more thoughtful about it.
But I’m not saying your basic idea is a bad one. Just that “but people will be banned & stuff and that’ll stop them!” isn’t going to stop them.
Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.
This premise is simply false. I know it’s the impetus for this concept–indeed, the thread itself–but it simply isn’t true. The sheer volume of players who seek and enjoy in-game economies defies this.
As for telling them to go day trade or something, get real. That’s disingenuous as hell and I think you know it. It’s the same thing as if I tell you, “Hey, Torchlight 1 has no economy. It’s perfect. You should just play that and leave us alone. Everyone is happy.” I don’t think I need to explain why it’s not persuasive or relevant, but it is precisely what you are doing here.
No problem. Just make more characters/account and/or steal accounts if necessary.
The whole point is there’s nothing stopping them from using the system outside of its intended use. This is begging the question.
Items inherently have unequal value, even if the game codifies them to be “similar.” They can trade an item that the game sees as similar and take one that players value as higher. Repeat ad nauseum until you’re left with trash.
Not really. Bots can easily get characters high enough to meet any arbitrary level requirement you place. Accounts can be hacked to bypass this as well.
Others already tackled this one. Don’t know why you think it’s such a sure thing.
All that’s left is a system people don’t want that is inferior to most existing systems and will make players resentful of the game/devs for not just having trade like they said in the kick starter.
The fact that players enjoy economies in games is the problem. No player enjoys a game economy where they play casually, and over 6 years accumulate enough “currency” to get 1 cool item from the trade market, while no-lifers who play 16 hrs a day have dozens of characters decked out in every uber item in the game (repeatedly) and post how uber they are on Youtube.
It is 100% safe to say no player likes in-game economies except for those uber no-lifer types, as they exploit it at the expense of everyone else.
Its high time that kind of nonsense is shown the door. Per Llama’s quote, it seems the EHG devs do, in fact, have something non-standard in their minds (if you go by his post as a direct quote, which it seems it was) so something like this idea (or even more radically different) might just be in the works. I seriously doubt they would say that in that quote if they had plans for Vanilla Trade/Vanilla Auction House 101.
I’m going to ignore this as it appears to say that players enjoying things is bad.
This will always be a problem/tension between those who have more time to play & those who have less. Other tension points include those between higher skilled players and lower skilled players, but I don’t think you’d countenance removing all the difficult stuff from a game.
It was, which is why I included the link as well so you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
I think you have outdone yourself. I’m not sure I even need to argue against this. Other people can simply read this, see how arrogant, out of touch, and unrealistic it is and see how you defeated your own thread.
If this was supposed to be “The case for trade with no economy,” case settled: It lost.
Nah, you lost because you can’t defend your position at all.
Players are capable of trading items to one another with no economy, its a simple fact. The economics part is totally separate, and a plague for online games due to the bots/RMTs it draws to the game. Its their business to make RL money off your game’s economy, and they don’t give a F if they ruin the game or its “economy” so long as they make real $.
You eliminate that by separating Trade from Economy. Keep the trade, ditch the economy. The idea is super simple, even a cave man can do it (Damn you Geico marketing…)
Again, the people who cannot be uber traders outnumber uber traders 1000 to 1. This is proven time and time again in every game, including PoE. There are, what? 10? 20? Streamers for PoE that are “prolific” and showcase the most uber builds? How many players does PoE have? 200k? 20/200,000 is pretty slim.
Last Epoch doesn’t need those 20 people. Stop making it out like not having an economy will turn “meeelions” of players away from LE. It will turn away 20, tops. Good riddance.
It’s called the “Pareto Principle.”
This is all perfectly natural. It’s not any indication that anything is wrong. Usually it’s quite the opposite.
Also, I’ve defended my position just fine.
Ignoring the arguments doesn’t make them go away.
But sure, keep up your argumentum ad nauseam. I’m sure it’ll work out eventually. 
That’s because PoE went overboard and took the power level to a stupid step.
Awakened gems are insane and most people can only get them through the market. SSF builds as mostly “generic” builds that don’t need four or five “hard to get” uniques.
As long as LE doesn’t make T6 & T7 needed to make the builds work it will be fine.
It’s not and I’m going to tell you why.
Although I like the idea of a share “dump”, because my guild does it in PoE between themselves, it only works because it’s our guild.
Even if you could only withdraw a T6 item if you deposit a T6 item you would be let with the crappy T6 that are useless. Trust me on that. The worst people will always ruin the joy of everyone else, just because they can.
It might seem strange but I like D3 system where you could trade freely with people who you were in a party with. Maybe here we could have a “in your friend list for more than a week” kind of thing. It’s going to be a complicated thing anyway.
Your problem (and really, the problem with others in this thread) is that you are acting small minded.
“People will be bad, so the idea is bad.” (Then you stop thinking)
I mean, I can literally, ad hoc, address anything you throw at me here.
That pretty much addresses everything posted in this thread, I think, but if I missed something, let me know.
*Citation Needed
(As well as a reality check)
You may not like it, but you don’t get to dismiss the huge number of players that do. It’s dishonest and incorrect.
“Oh, hacking’s not going to be a problem, bros. Trust me.”
Riiiiight…
Um, yeah.
The two are definitionally linked.
It’s not a conflation at all.
You have yet to make a good case for this system. You have ignored many points or made poor arguments to address them. The idea would be wildly unpopular because you fundamentally don’t understand (or refuse to believe) that players do enjoy game economies. You also fail to understand that your system would make LE unsustainable and non-competitive in the market.
Seriously, it’s a very poor idea that has been very poorly defended.
Nothing you just posted changes anything. So, I have no need to rebut.
That’s because you still have a self-defeated argument.
Also,
Summary of the entire thread:
Z: Trade idea involving no economy (no profit).
You: Not having an economy would be bad, because then, there would be no economy.
(That’s basically it in a nutshell, but lets continue)
Z: Yes, that’s the point, economies are bad for hard, tangible, measurable, provable reasons: Bots and RMT.
You: You can’t stop bots and RMTs.
Z: Uh, yeah you can, by my idea - no economy. That’s literally its point.
You: People like economies.
Z: No, people like trading, and most games have trading with an economy. The economy part is objectively bad (proven above - bots + RMT).
You: But the 1% who enjoy economies would be sad and quit and it would doom the whole game.
Z: There is no evidence losing the people who really like economies in ARPGs would negatively affect the game overall. Its likely to attract more people than it loses.
You: No, 99% of all players would quit.
Z: Hyperbole much?
You: I made arguments you didn’t refute.
Z: Pretty sure I got them all.
Again, just point out anything I didn’t already shoot down, and I’ll address it. Maybe I missed something?
The surest way to tell that you don’t have an argument is how you straw-man basically everything I (and others) said, trying to put words in my mouth and misrepresenting the counter-arguments.
If you’re going to be that delusional and dishonest about it, sure. Keep digging that hole. You’re just making yourself look the fool. Everyone else can see right through it for exactly what it is.