Well, I was just writing a post that had the same exact proposal.
I will just post it here, since it has some common points, but also touches on some different issues from the same basic premise.
For instance my version has a separate trading currency, and is designed to also be available in SSF.
PS - I have no intention of highjacking the discussion, if you want I will edit this out.
As prompted by @Moxjet200 in another thread, here’s my trade proposal.
Despite the prompt, I am under no illusion that this will actually be used, this is just to have a bit of fun with the process of game design, and trying my hand at tackling the trade problem.
This would be primarily targeted at players that enjoy trading but do not enjoy party-play, which is something that all proposed solutions I have seen seem to lack.
I will take things very slowly in my discussion, but here’s a TL;DR.
- Make the bazaar a dungeon with a difficult boss fight both for posting and buying items.
- populate the bazaar with both items from players, generated loot, and bazaar specific uniques, so that a SP version of the bazaar is also available to SSF players.
- Classify groups of items in different tiers, common uniques on the easier tiers of the dungeon, rare chase uniques and legendaries on the last tiers.
- Tune the rarity of the dungeon keys to make trading a special and rare experience.
Basically the idea is that you should prove that you don’t need trading to beat the endgame before you are given access to trading.
Back at the beginning.
As a first step, let us discuss what functions a trade system can serve, and the main problems that it carries.
Trading is one of the most deterministic forms of item acquisition in any game it appears. This facilitates the acquisition of any build-enabling unique as well as upgrades.
This has several advantages but also several problems:
- trade can completely destroy character progression, as powerful items can be easily accessible for small prices if there are better alternatives available.
- trade dominates all forms of item acquisition, making it so all gear is acquired by trade
- trade flattens all items to a flat value (how much currency is this worth)
- trade makes the game revolve around currency, and gives a very high importance to farming efficiency
- trade makes items so easy to obtain that it forces devs to nerf drop-rates
- convenient trading is abused by bots, but inconvenient trading is annoying for legitimate players
- trading enables RMT
The proposed solution
The proposed solution involves making a version of the bazaar as a dungeon.
The key to the bazaar would be a very rare drop that can only be acquired from slain enemies.
The bazaar is then a normal dungeon, where the item filters are decided by the dungon modifiers (the options that you get when changing floors).
So an example doors would state
the bazaar only sells unique belts, 150% increased damage....
the bazaar sells 6 additional exalted items with level of skill affixes, 150% increased damage....
Upon defeating the boss, the player enters the bazaar, with a selection of items following the specified requirements and would be able to buy one of them.
Items would come both from players, generated loot, and bazaar specific uniques, so that the bazaar could make sense also for SSF players.
Trading is conducted using a separate currency that is exclusive to trading and is dropped by the monsters and boss in the dungeon.
Players can post a limited number of items for trade from be bazaar.
Items have tier restrictions, common uniques are available at the lower tier of the dungeon, but rarer uniques are only available at the highest tiers.
A good proxy for this is the effective level for legendary potential.
Legendaries and crafted exalted items are only available at the highest tier.
Lore-wise, this could be some form of magical black market, used by spirits/ghosts/whatever that is reached by defeating its guardian.
implications and advantages
Making trading as a dungeon has several implications, most of which I consider to be advantages.
First and foremost, it makes trading incredibly convoluted, but hopefully, it makes it convoluted in a way that is not annoying but rather engaging (because it is attached to more gameplay and not copypasting whispers from your hideout).
This complexity makes it very difficult for bots to engage in the market, as they need to be able to beat the dungeon before being allowed into the bazaar.
The difficulty of the dungeon should be designed so that trading cannot be used as a replacement for item progression, instead, you will be allowed to trade only after you have successfully proven your worth.
The keys of this dungeon should be rare. This ensures that the trading volume is very small, and prevents players for only using trade to itemize their character.
Ideally, this will not force the devs from having to nerf droprates, since the volume of items traded should be fairly small, and using one of the very limited trade keys for an individual item is a very big commitment.
By the same coin, since players trade few items, most items will never see the market, which makes sure that not all items are being considered with respect to their worth in the market.
RMT is also fairly complex in this system, as there is no way of guaranteeing that a posted item will appear in a bazaar and not in others.
Problems with the system
The main issue with the system is kickstarting it.
Low trade volumes imply long times before an item is sold, which makes it look like it is not worth your time to sell your items. Due to long trade times, players will not put their truly valuable items in the market, which would cause the offering of the bazaar to be low quality. This in turn causes players to not value doing the bazaar as an activity, which would in turn further decrease the volume of traded items. This creates a vicious cycle where the economy never starts.
To address the issue, it will probably be necessary to populate the bazaar artificially, at least at the beginning, by generating valuable and rare loot and posting it alongside the postings of other players.
This is a crucial step, as it will prime the prices of the items being sold, and can be used to put an upper-bound on the prices of some uniques.
Populating the bazaar artificially would also have the advantage of the bazaar being available to SSF players as well.
If you arrived at this point, you have my congratulations.
Thank you for reading. ^^