Trade development update - Introducing merchants guild and circle of fortune factions

Let’s ease up a bit of them here eh? It’s ok to be critical of the system too.

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Will we be able to see the progress we are making towards enabling resonances with a specific friend, like a bar in our friends list?

If we end up resonating with several dozen friends and a resonance drops, does it roll its compatibility between all resonance-enabled friends, or is the resonance friend-agnostic? In other words, does a resonance drop and then I can assign it to any friend I resonate with, or is a friend more likely to be able to receive the item if I have fewer players to split the odds between?

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Maybe, we’re still deciding on that, I can see the appeal for it but it’s not necessarily something we want to expose.

The second question is tougher to answer so I’ll answer something else instead that should clear this up. You can only gain progress towards and drop a resonance for people that are currently in your party and zone. Getting one to drop that is associated with one person in your party doesn’t affect them dropping for other people.

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Nice to see that EHG took a more dynamic path. Good on ya.

I believe I’m misinterpreting how resonances work, or maybe their purpose. :slight_smile:
I thought they would drop even if your friend was offline, so that you could give them an item when they got back on, as the current gifting system seems to already fulfill the ability to give a friend an item while you are partying together.

The resonance items themselves only drop while you are playing with people.

Resonance can be used on equipment items to make that equipment behave as though that person was with you when the equipment dropped.

So you’re playing with your friend Bill and you find a resonance. Later Bill logs off but you keep playing and the perfect item for Bill’s build drops.

The next day, you’re playing with Bill and you apply the resonance to the item then you gift the item to Bill.

This allows you to share items that you find with people that you frequently play with.

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I see! That’s very interesting, and fulfills the function I was hoping for!
Thank you for taking the time to patiently answer questions. You are appreciated! I love how EHG is always putting its own spin on traditional systems.

Will players in CoF also be able to wander through the bazaar area? If not, will CoF players also have a mini zone to congregate in? I admit that being able to have a character exclusively go into either Aldor Rise or Scryer’s Tier in Shattrath City gave a feeling of character identity to me. I look forward to trying out some characters as CoF and some as MG to have different play experiences.

It’s still undecided, the CoF area wouldn’t serve much of a purpose but it could be cool.

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I’m so proud of this team I could cry thanks EHG

Having this information makes it more important for Resonance to be acquired at a reasonable rate and with the ability to be applied to any item type (generic/universal).

This is the same info in the initial post so I’m not quite sure what’s different.

The purpose of resonance is to allow you to gift the really stand out items that really hurt when they drop alone to the people you play with most frequently. It’s not for creating an open gifting environment with your friends list.

We don’t know what the minimum duration that this will be yet.

It’s a lot easier for us to reduce the duration that extend it so we will likely start with it slightly on the high side. I’m not talking anything ridiculous like 24 hours of playtime for one but it needs to be significant.

This timer is one of the key elements that keeps RMT at bay.

It should hopefully feel very natural.

It also doesn’t matter what order the item and the resonance drop in, so if you are short, just play together and you can eventually give it over.

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Not true, this is the only information presented regarding resonance from the initial post.

  • Resonance can be used to gift items between friends regardless of whether the item has been dropped when playing together

  • Resonance drops require time investment with players.

How this reads: After playing with a friend for “a very extended period of time”, players will start to receive Resonance drops.

However, you have now mentioned that:

Meaning that there is now a further requirement that the players must be together to consistently get Resonance.

This Resonance system does not seem to really resolve the issues I had with how restrictive the gifting system is. If this was a system where you had to play for several hours with a friend, then you started getting Resonance drops (even when not playing together) it would be a better system.

I am going to be honest, this system does not seem to really resolve any of the issues that have been discussed.

I was going to bicker about what it actually says but that doesn’t matter.

If we were to implement the system which you are recommending, it would enable full open trade for CoF. This is something we aren’t prepared to do.

I’m sorry but if you’re looking for more open trading among friends than the resonance system offers, you’ll need to play as MG.

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Great ideas! I’m excited for the two faction idea. I will be making a video on this announcement for my channel soon, and I think my viewers will be excited for this announcement as well.

I thought that was kinda obvious.

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Yeah. It’s directly addressing the concern that we’ve been bringing up for play between friends with no nerfed drop rates: that one build-enabling item that drops while your friend is offline.

Honestly I’m glad there wont be 1k post about “why trade should be in the game” everywhere but, honestly I’m extremely disappointed with the total 180 as it pertains to the Trade issue. Lets keep it real this is just SSF with a different coat of paint. Which means a measly % buff toward Runes and Affixes or even double legendary potential isn’t nearly close enough to get people to even consider playing this in this faction for more then a few hours out of novelty. on top of that the balancing act of drop rates and the capitalisms simulator will drastically sap resources.
In the Initial post you guys made on trade I was hopeful this would be a game about playing the game and you’d get to interact with other players and do things under that ideology but, this is the first massive step away from that.
I know that’s just me but, I was really forward to an ARPG where I wouldn’t have to play by myself because I didn’t want to run 4 tabs and disable all chat aside from PMs to play the economy simulator.

Edited due to massive oversight that caused confusion

I’m sorry if this isn’t the case but I think we might not quite have communicated the details of the system properly. Have you read through the FAQ section at the bottom of the initial post yet?

I’d also like to avoid calling CoF, SSF. While it will work on SSF, it’s designed to be exactly what you’re looking for I think.

The rewards listed for both are examples, each goes up to rank 10 and CoF will also have access to prophecies which will be a favor sink similar to how the bazaar is the favor sink for MG.

and hey, it might just not be what you’re looking for.

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For me any my experience if CoF can deliver the same or better rewards as it is currently I will be happy. It will be a matter if tuning so that MG and CoF are similar power levels but I think the Idea and goal is solid.

In terms of sapping resources, also consider that a large player base means more people supporting the devs and does provide resources for the team to grow. If LE was a game made specifically to my tastes, I would do any trade but this is definitely the best solution I’ve seen anyone offer that can make many people happy (if executed well)

Which, as Mike said, is what resonances are for. Not as a general free trade mechanic for your friends list (assuming you play enough with them, but for those rare (as in, infrequently dropped, not item quality) drops that happen when your friend isn’t around. The scenario that a lot of people who didn’t like gifting brought up as a reason for trade.

It’s not a 180, as was brought up many times in all the other screeching threads about gifting, the devs have wanted some form of trade in the game since the beginning, it’s even in the kickstarter.

Apart from, you know, the bit where you can trade if you want. With other people via an AH. 'Cause that’s always a key part of SSF in my experience.

We don’t know what the buffs will be or how much, so I’m surprised you’ve been able to discren them from such a (deliberately) detail-light post.

And if that is what floats your boat, CoF is for you.

From what Mike has been saying, that’s the plan. The drop rates start off a bit worse than current (how worse we don’t know) but then as you rank up in CoF they attain parity with the current drop rates then get better at max rank. Plus prophecies (however they’ll affect it).

And if trade is your preference then you can use the AH to mitigate the lower drop rates.

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