Can I just say, to me, this is the perfect kind of constructive criticism. No over-the-top hyperbole. No personal attacks. Just good examples. Personal experience and clear explanations of those personal experiences.
This is the kind of stuff that a creator can look at and say “okay, there’s a lot going on here, what about our game does or doesn’t provide these kinds of experience and then how much of that do we need, or want, to improve?”
And, as a side of debate, I have similar feelings about that “helping out.” i don’t play a lot of mp, but when I do I like helping out. I do this on wolcen all the time and am waiting for it to get me in trouble with the community because of circumventing what little "economy there is ). And in fairness, with LE, you still can give a player that bad sword for you but great one for them. It’s just limited to here and now (meaning that session find/give.) So it’s not completely missing though it is more limited. And “my gut tells me” EHG will definitely be keeping an eye on that aspect - primarily because I think, from dev vids and past posts - they have similar feelings.
Honestly I think this first iteration “trade” is deliberately over-cautious because they probably decided it’s much easier to relax something as potentially breakable as trade than it will be too reign it back in.
This might be because of the pricing model. The game is developed as an life service game with MTX as the main income. You have to make sure you store your stuff safely and check the validation of people using it.
Also server side management of stuff can be really convenient. EHG could change values server side without people needing to patch and restart and stuff.
And then there’s cheat prevention. It feels different when somebody helps you with a high lvl char that has farmed a lot to become mighty, then somebody helping you because he’s immortal because of a cheat.
Currently there’s a box price. But I’ve seen a lot of games getting rid of the box price and turning into f2p. If player numbers are to low or stagnant, companies switch and generate a lot of new attention. Albion online for example has become very successful after the switch to f2p.
Currently there’s not that much for the player that requires server authoritative gameplay. But it could also limit the possibilities for future features if they don’t create the propper basis.
). And in fairness, with LE, you still can give a player that bad sword for you but great one for them. It’s just limited to here and now (meaning that session find/give.) So it’s not completely missing though it is more limited. And “my gut tells me” EHG will definitely be keeping an eye on that aspect - primarily because I think, from dev vids and past posts - they have similar feelings.