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.
Here’s one
