There are a few things here that might come to haunt the game in the future and I’m sure EHG is doing it on purpose to force people into what they wanted originally, that is, not having trade.
EHG is trying to give the impression that the game right now has a very generous drop system but in my experience that is not the case. It takes several monoliths for me to see a drop, even if I’m merely retricting the filter to 2 affixes out of the possible 4, and a specific item base, it will take me at least 5 runs before even 1 item drops that may or may not be worth crafting. Even assuming there is trading, if this is lowered then trade will have nothing to sell because no one is droping anything.
Further, the whole rank system is yet another artificial form to deny access to the trade. If it was simply a case of not allowing easy swap between then removing that option entirely would be a simple solution and one that would be easily accepted by most players, they just pick where they want to play and that’s that.
Even more funny is how monsters are being buffed to combat the “increase” in player power and yet CoF will mostly remain the same with some small buffs that are only relevant very late into the game (and the monster buffs are relevant for the entirety of the game) and as for the MG players, well pretty much the same is true, except with nerfed drop rates it may even be harder to get gear.
Let me clear with this EHG. Your players who want trade, they want it because they do not consider the game easy. They want it because they do not consider the current state of the game to allow them to gear up in a satisfactory way and therefore need trade as a solution to the bad drop rates that already exists (coupled with the low odds of actually crafting items to an acceptable level).
You doing this the way you are doing it is nothing but a veiled way to tell us to play without trade and even then it will be harder because the monsters are going to be buffed. So please, reconsider once again what you are doing or player interest in the game is going to disapear once more and they are just going to go back to whatever they were playing before.