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

Developer Blog
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Generally liking this design so far. I enjoy these kind of trade-off decisions, and giving a boost to non-traders as the opportunity cost to pro-traders feels good, and both options have a place. If I want to try a niche build or a potentially faster start, I can go MG. If I want to chase the higher ceiling or grind deeper into end game, I can go CoF.

With these two options somewhere on the spectrum between “fully open trade” and “ssf for everyone,” I’d like to think that there are indeed other cool ideas that sit far enough away from them to be interesting without treading to close to either extreme. I personally quite like the complexity introduced here, and I think I want more, as long as it doesn’t turn into MMO style class/gear swapping meta. Also, more options means less chance of Red vs. Blue elitism. Probably gonna need me some faction t-shirts anyway, though…

The presence of SSF+MG as a selectable option I think would appear clunky and unfinished. Despite the potential for silliness, I’d vote for that not sticking around for 1.0.

Resonance is an interesting solution. I suspect that will get significant rebalance some time after 1.0 lands and we see how frequent party players are really obtaining or making use of it. I think I’m likely among those referred to by “you can’t please everyone,” because my scenario is often that my friends and I are not online at the same time, but we’d still like to be able to hunt for each other’s gear and pass it guild-stash style. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll be able to live vicariously through Empy and team gloriously demolishing trade-league.

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This is a super cool way to address Trade vs Non-Trade choices.

  • One question (I’m sorry if answered before): Is “base” drop rates reduced for BOTH factions and is the expectation that when at Max Faction level the game will feel >= to current solo drop rates?

Really the premise of this question: Is the initial hurdle to find build defining uniques for example harder when first starting a cycle, then much later in the cycle when your faction level is increased. There could be argument to be made that you need a “cycle starter” character that farms fast with no uniques to farm for uniques you need for your second build.

EDIT: IGNORE devs, i saw in the FAQ. Thanks for the work!

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Please dont be shy regarding the amount of ladders!

The more the better, as it would allow more space for different kind of competitors. Make a Solo rank, Party rank, Solo CoF, Party MG, Cycle Solo rank, Cycle Party rank, Off-Cycle Solo, Off-Cycle Party, Off-Cycle Solo CoF, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Same with class and mastery specific rankings. Competition is one of the best driving motors who keep people invested into the game for long. The other important motivations are collection and acchievements.

This is the motivational trinity (IMO): Competition/Collection/Achievements

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To clarify, I want free full open trade. The idea of there being a penalty on loot with that was completely made up by the people against open trade. It was never real and nobody asked for it. You can’t use delusion as an argument against something.

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This is an interesting and creative compromise

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Replying to myself for the answer found on Discord in case anyone else is wondering:

I think we are going with them being optional but this could change. Some people might want the extra added challenge of “no faction” or something.

Source: Discord

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I will also be #TeamMG more of a D2 feel for me

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Can we also get something like we have Deathless but shows you never switched your faction?

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I just wanted to say Great Work EHG! You continue to impress me with your ability to stay true to your objective while simultaneously making great pivots! I love the solution you came up with.

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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.

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No, they will not be available in 0.9.0

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Robot will have to be leveled until MG is unlocked, and somehow farm favor/gold and interact with Bazaar. Pretty complex for a robot, but doable. Pretty doable for a human.
Anti-measures can be taken, like detecting bot behavior or going to RMT site and banning involved accounts. I would even do that to get “RMT hunter” badge on forums lol. Make RMT as complicated and costly as possible, to the point it’s not worth the time and efforts.
I’m glad EHG listens, so we can defend LE from RMT together. Meanwhile GGG did not react to recent TFT drama, even though they definetly could ay least make mirror service possible without TFT through in-game UI, that alone would hit RMT hard.

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I would hope so, however for a lot of people the decision will be is trade vibrant enough to compensate for the massive potency of the other faction. As someone who thought to be entirely in the trade camp, now I am not so sure. Those are some hefty numbers to consider.

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Good post, personally although the system is not live and only theory currently; it feels more complex than it probably needs to be

Humans have a unique way of tainting things, a player driven economy will trend towards abuse. Even GGG stepped in and added vendor currencies at set rates so players cant even exceed them in value

I can see a case where people want 10 billion gold for a Bastion of Honor in trade, maybe more. The limit was 2.14b in D3 AH so I would imagine a similar number ridiculous meaningless number

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We’ve got a few very specific dials that we can turn to adjust MG’s power or CoF’s power (or both) relative to each other if one turns out to be notably stronger than the other in practice. It is set up to be balanceable with regards to each other. They don’t really have much direct impact on each other. They have the indirect impact that you mentioned above for sure but we’ve worked in the tools to be able to adjust that ourselves if necessary.

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The bazaar gives it a use, as foes the Lightless Arbour. And stash tabs. If you choose to not participate in anything that gives gold value, then yes, it has no value.

That said, if you don’t like gold, choose CoF.

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I’ve had LE since November 2019 and everything EHG have added to the game has been worth the wait. I sat back in the last month or so reading reddit thread after reddit thread from people not wanting trade or only wanting full trade. This is actually an amazing type of implementation which should impress everyone in all camps of trade. Well done EHG and thank you for proving yet again that you listen to the community.

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From what ive seen you can get a inventory full of exalted items from full clearing even the Chronomancer dungeon, so unless they are heavily reworked, it would be better to just buy keys on the AH and spam farm the dungeons

Also the loop then is just farm gold > spend at the Arbor or buy a new stash tab which to me is actually pretty disappointing. Its basically D3 with an outlet to waste vast amounts of money in a single dungeon run, when once again I could take than money on the AH and buy exalted items with it

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You won’t be able to buy keys. TBH, I think we’ll just need to see how it goes. At least they’re trying something a bit different to square the circle.

But those will be rng items, they’ll likely not be what you’re looking for. With the AH/new bazaar/whatever, you’ll be able to search for something specific (like in PoE without having to use an external site or the inexpressible joy of messaging people who don’t actually want to trade for some reason).

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I don’t want to come off as overly negative because I really appreciate that you’re trying to use cleaver game design to solve this conflict between player desires. That said, this seems absurdly difficult to balance.

Trading is the single most powerful item acquisition method in any ARPG short of an item editor. It allows you to take any sufficiently rare drop and convert it into the exact drop you wish it was, combine many lower rarity drops into a single high rarity drop, or do the opposite with a single extremely rare drop. Trading is fully deterministic, you will always get exactly what you want once the total of all the drops you’ve had but don’t need at up to that value.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a randomized system that is equivalent to a deterministic one, at least with the amount of variance and playtime involved in an average ARPG. If you’re going to play the game as if it was a full time job for years than the RNG would average out, but for many players the determinism of trade is almost certainly going to be better than the variance of CoF.

Let’s create a hypothetical example. Suppose for whatever reason, the economy balances out such that Eye of Reen and Herald of the Scurry are worth about the same amount since they are similar rarity. For a prospective Scurry player in MG, they can get their helm if either of these items drop. If the helm drops they just use it, but if the Eye drops they sell it and buy the helm. On the other hand, the CoF player can only get the helm drop, as the other drops are actually worthless to them.

That sounds like you’d need to double the item find rate, but it’s sooooo much worse than that. I just listed two items, but there are way more unique items at that rarity. No matter which of these items drop for the MG player, they can convert them into the helm, while the CoH player has to wait for one specific drop from that pool.

For the two to be truly equivalent, the average CoH player would need to get one of EVERY rare-tier unique item in around the time it takes the MG player to get one of them. This is why PoE’s drop rates are so absurdly low, it’s the only way to prevent total market flood because the game will give players good drops that they can’t use on their build far more often than ones that they can. Alternatively they could have access to target farming that borders on deterministic, but that would boost them well beyond what is being suggested here. At Rank 4 the CoH player would already need access to farming that is far more efficient than what we have now to balance the MG player’s ability to buy uniques, and it would need to scale up even harder to keep up with their ability to buy exalteds and legendaries.

I really do wish you the best of luck on this, but as proposed I would expect your most casual audience to feel forced into trade just because it’s so strong. If that does become the dominant playstyle then the game will need to balance around that and end up being just another PoE.

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