Trade? No thx - why my mind has changed in 180 degrees!

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Ok, before I´m starting with the trade topic I want to contextualize myself into the player base/community. I´m 40y old, was born and live in Germany and have a small family. I´m working as an IT inhouse consultant (SAP) on a 9-5 basis. So, my playtime is mostly in the evenings when the “normal day” has been dealt with. Ok, due to corona my main workplace has shifted to home office and it happens that I can’t resist the call for loot in the course of a working day – please don’t tell anybody :blush:.

I do play ARPG the most (the last 5 years more or less exclusively). In Last Epoch I spent now 800h in total where 40h fall into the new multiplayer beta. Here I have created two chars (Fire-Necro (lev. 87) and a Totem Shaman (levl. 81) - the other clocks show 2200h for POE, 400h in the new TL:I, 400h in Wolcen and similar numbers for D3 and D2 back in my youth and my ARPG experience started ofc with D1).
Why do I play ARPGs? What keeps me engaged and motivated and what keeps me interested and want to come back? I think I´m not special here – its ofc the hunt for loot and the feeling when you have nice drops. The small dopamine rush when you hover over an item and it shows the values you are looking for or when you find some tools to upgrade your char. The continues progression of getting stronger and more powerful – yes, I like damage numbers on the enemies and no shame here in admitting the bigger the numbers the bigger my balls :blush:.
This is ofc nothing new and I assume that most of us share exactly those feelings – so why I´m so detailed about it? Because this is the foundation for my following arguments.

In the last years my main experience was gathered with POE – here I got the first time more serious about character and endgame progression. I started to learn all the general math and mechanics and learned to really understand how things work together and should be built to be successful. Ofc, I used countless guides and third-party tools to plan out and follow the progression. I really got sucked into the game and was pulled in deeper and deeper into optimization….and exactly here all the problems started!
The more I understood it the more I wanted to have it – I wanted builds capable of one-shooting map bosses, I wanted chars as fast as all the streamers had…and what do you need for it? Currency, currency, currency! So, my playstyle shifted from things I enjoyed to things that are the most efficient. I wouldn’t believe to not be able to farm x amount of Exalts/Divs per hour/day. I tried so many things that were advertised on YouTube channels but was never ever the same efficient like described (because I just can’t spend that much time per day and more importantly, I can’t repeat the same things over and over again countless times…). And that demotivated me big time. Playing started to feel like work. As I finally realized that I only played to gather wealth it was to late – I was sitting on a big pile of currency but was burned out for the season and quitted. And why did I only play for currency? Because the item progression in POE is busted like hell – in my 2200h of game play I approximately picked up….3, maybe 4 items that were useful for my char…everything I picked up was either raw currency or was to sell to get more currency – which then was used to buy items in trade. Buying items was my only way of progression (I don’t talk about the busted crafting in POE – never liked it, never understood it, never ever used it in a meaningful way)

Ok, why I´m taking such a big swing to give feedback for Last Epoch? Because in Last Epoch so many things are different…in a much better way!
I had almost one full year of a break in Last Epoch (no meaningful updates) before I came back for the new beta testing. And when I started playing again I realized very quickly why I love Last Epoch so much.

Attention please, ATTENTION! – this is the main argument of the hole essay!

  • In Last Epoch you progress you char through actually playing the game!!!

Coming back to this game after such a long time and after playing many other trade and economy driven ARPGs it was and is so refreshing. I was just playing the game and my char and was supplied with everything I needed for it. In the beginning I really assumed that EHG have increased the drop rates for the beta testing drastically :blush: – but its just how the game works.

  1. You find affix shards for gradually updating your items (thx so much for this accessible crafting system!!!)
  2. You have identified item drops and a super nice loot filter doing all the tedious work for you.
  3. You find so many nice unique items that you already want to create a new char despite being level 30 only.
  4. In empowered Monos the “exalted item” drop rate is crazy (in a good way :blush:)
  5. The “LP” on unique items is one of the nicest mechanics I know – every single unique drop is in a way exciting due to LP potential.
  6. You find so many nice items for possible alts that you spend all your gold for stash tabs only!

Conclusion: You just don’t need trade! Just play the game!!!

When the hole discussion of item gifting and trade not coming to the game started, I was like many, many others – this will be the death sentence for this game – problem here – I was used to and spoiled of a trade and economy driven (and item scarcity-) playstyle – with this mindset it may be even true…but now, after playing only 40h, I changed my mind in 180 degrees! I never ever had the feeling of being in the need for trade – I just find all I need for my char…and more! My char progression is a super smooth and a linear curve. Yes, there will be builds where I need a very specific and rare unique and maybe I won’t find it but while farming for it many other possibilities will come true.
And when the game is live in its final form and we all play MP together I bet there will be “farming groups” where you just name your desired unique and group up with others who need other uniques coming all from the same drop pool/Monos and you gift back and forth. So, looking forward to it!

I really hope that EHG stands up for its vision – which makes this game unique in my point of view!
An absolute downer would be lowering the drop rates. Going back to “work” to be able to progress my chars through trade…I don’t want to imagine… please!!!

I know that I don’t tell anything new here and that many arguments have been given already but I just want to confirm and emphasize again that this is what an ARPG should be like (at least IMHO)!

Ok, this is the end of my story – thx to all who made it this far! I hope I could open up some minds when it comes to the desire of trade – but most importantly – play to enjoy!!!

EHG, thx for your nice work and this great game!

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No, they’ve increased the drop rates a bunch for the beta, you’re right. Are they gonna stay like that, god i hope not, but who knows. But yeah, compared to before this, if you took a 1 year gap, theres higher drop rates than what you last played with.

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if you said you’ve been playing poe for 2.2k hours and in all that time you’ve only dropped 4 items for your build? idk maybe you play 100 hours per league or something but PLAYING poe (not grind meta farm with sextant, winged scarab, 8 mod map and some MF builds) you already get 10- 20+ ex / divine orbs up to lvl 90 (only in 3.19 they broke the divine drop), and this is more than enough to make a build that can do all game content (maybe without UBER-UBER bosses)
Of course if you want a morrir tier build - you have to farm more and GRIND currency, but if you want to play and kill bosses because you love it you don’t need to trade items 24/7.

Also you say that all your currency comes from item trading, after which you buy items for your build. So if you only got 4 items for your build in 2.2k hours, imagine what happens to your builds without a trade (from which you get all your currency), your logic says that you need more than 5k hours to get 10 items for your build? Yes? and this is what you want in arpg? spend years to do something in between? it seems that you still do not understand whether you need to trade or not. because you contradict yourself :upside_down_face:

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Not in my experience. 3.20 has been my “best” league where i had ~900c and about 3-4 div (the divs were drops the chaos from a mix of the vendor recipe and some items sold. This is from 1 character up into the 70s (ish, maybe the 80s) and another (SRS, much more successful) to 92. But most certainly not 10-20 divines.

I’d certainly agree that I get the vast majority of gear from trading. I very rarely find myself looking at a drop and thinking that, yeah, this might actually be useful for my build. I would, however, caveat that by saying that I’m probably doing it wrong.

True, but one can counter that with the assertion (?) that if trade weren’t a thing then they could improve the drop rate significantly.

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i’ve played and I’ve NEVER seen that much currency at 90, not even close.

exactly…

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And that example is the biggest problem. How many times have I been in the “Unique X would be nice for my build?” place and everything droped but unique X. Later on in the build I thought “Unique Y would help a lot right now!” and unique y has never been seen. In the end I was in the “Unique Z won’t drop anyway and I didn’t get item upgrades since lvl 80 wow nice!”.

Meanwhile I vendor trashed a lot of stuff I don’t want because I don’t play said classes or I don’t want to use “The Slab”.

When comes to getting the items I need LE is in my experience almost as bad as PoE.

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Loot is POE is bad, it’s true. Funny thing is, that an easy way to fix it was found (recombinators), but then removed.

That’s the fastest way to burn out. I would like to share some advices, that worked for me. Being 100% efficient is a trap. Better find a decent way to farm currency, that you enjoy. Combine different methods, to not get bored. Don’t focus on div/h, focus on gameplay. Only play build that you like (don’t make trapper for bossing if you hate traps and bossing, just because some streamer told you).

That would be true, if there was a filter for LP. I feel that 99% of uniques are worthless, because trash uniques without LP cannot be filtered. For now the only way to filter uniques is by item base, but that way you lose opportunity to find high LP on otherwise weak item.

I don’t need other possibilities. I’ve tried a lot of builds, found a few that I really enjoy, but as for everything else, I don’t care. Builds I want to play either require specific rare unique items to even play (that I didn’t found after hundreds of hours of farming), or high LP and highly specific exalteds to progress. Farming for those specific pieces eventually lead to my burnout in LE. Getting those during a season will be a joke unless you are a full-time streamer, so I probably won’t even try, just play some full rare build and quit as soon as I need to farm something specific.

Here you describe POE, but for me this is LE problem. I have to farm same mono over and over to get uniques I want. It became boring very quickly, and it’s the only way I could progress my char. And other activities didn’t give a sense of progression. While in POE I have more or less completed build, but still just play mostly for fun. I don’t know what I will do with gathered currency, but can simply decide later. Can’t do that in LE, unless collecting literally everything.

I don’t see anyone farming mono for different shield other that Bastion of Honour, or gifting me one instead of leaving for himself. And I don’t want to constantly track what other random party members need.

Exactly opposite for me, I want trade to progress my char, because I cant progress by myself within reasonable amount of time. There could be another ways instead of trade, new deterministic loot systems would be fine (for example rune of ascendance analogue to make exalteds, or something like divination cards), as soon as I don’t have to farm same content for hundreds of hours to get one item that I want.
But still I see trade as an ultimate solution for a lot of problems. Not only that, it brings so much new possibilities into the game. And I don’t see, how loot can be ruined because of limited controlled trade system. But even with ruined loot I will still play more, than without build progression.

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Using POE as an example of why trade is bad in every game is dishonest. POE was literally designed around a massive player economy, and the currency/crafting item concept was built around that model…and continues to be.

It’s as bad as using NASCAR as an example of why car ownership is bad because of “the dangerous speeds they drive, and the seriousness of the accidents they get into” while racing.

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Using POE as an example of why trade should be in every ARPG is dishonest. POE was literally designed around a massive player economy, and the currency/crafting item concept was built around that model…and continues to be. While other games in the genre have not been designed around or currently have the wide open trade of POE, and would require extensive changes to do so. That is like saying one of the first ARPGs D1 had non personal loot that was visible to everyone(mainly because there was no focus yet on such things), so every modern ARPG should have that too.

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And remember the games where crafting was with a 100% predictable result, and not this casino, which is now called crafting)
And trading was through exchange, without any auctions, bazaars and third-party applications.

When you received a blueprint or a fragment needed for crafting, you jumped to the ceiling, knowing that this was another step towards your goal.

When one inventory tab was enough to fit everything you need for crafting for your character (blueprint, 3-4 main fragments and 4-6 types of material).

Now we are glad that we can buy an infinite number of inventory tabs for in-game money and not real ones, and put an infinite number of random items there in order to use runes of random change of stats on them at some point, in the hope that we will get the right item.

When “online” meant that you would have to cooperate with other players in order for the whole team to reach the right place, in order for the whole team to get 1 out of 4 fragments you need, for crafting 1 out of 10 items you need.
And now there are 3-5 minute sessions and in the future there is no opportunity to share something with a friend.

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You might want to read Mike’s posts in the trade survey thread.

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This explains how Path of Exile were a trouble. This and the lack of performance optimization. And too many one-shot boss mechanics.
I hope LE devs constantly optimize performance, especially for low-end pc gamer.
As i started stopping play PoE due to not running well, even at 2017 pc gamer (gtx 1050ti), and not running at all at integrated graphics like HD 620.
Also i hope LE doesn’t relies on cheap one-shot mechanics as PoE does.

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There are some boss mechanics that are one shot however they are usually pretty well telegraphed.

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POE certainly has issues that could be addressed, but people are definitely overstating the amount of time spent finding and trading for items in POE. It’s definitely less than 5% of your time as you have to grind to accumulate what you need to make the trades.

There is literally no need to trade while doing the story, or really even before yellow maps. From time to time you can easily check what upgrades are available to you with the currency you’ve found.

And so every x amount of hours you use the trade API to find what you need. Sometimes actually getting the item is annoying, but that’s one way to limit the volume of trades.

In the end, it’s far easier for a developer to just let a player economy determine the value of things and adjust drop rates accordingly than it is to create some huge system that let’s you continually upgrade without ever trading. And if they choose the latter and don’t get it right, then they’ve wasted a lot of time and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere.

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And yet there are not one but 2 ARPG development companies putting a focus on items dropping for you by playing the game rather than mindlessly farming for currency to buy your items. How could that be and why? Could it be that mindlessly grinding whatever are the top currency producing areas is stupid and sucks? To say nothing of the other issues balancing an arpg around fully open trade brings.

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For you, perhaps. But it’s also an incredibly frustrating time, for the most part, which may make it seem longer.

For you, others may use trade as a crutch to get around the low drop rates and uncomfortable crafting.

Often. I’m glad you don’t find PoE’s trade too inconvenient, but others do.

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i would also argue that it requires to make efforts constantly along the way “until” being able to make it reach 5% of the time for actual trading.
Sorting inventory, tabs, price (check) everything or accumulate a lot of knowledge, download and install third party tools, deal with filter, “establish” a strategy etc. It’s not as effortless as you make it seems to be.

And of course we’re talking about the average joe playing the game in end game. Not flippers / crafters / bossers etc. For those the trade % of the total time will increase tremendously.

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You need to get some 3rd party stuff and that’s all the effort besides playing because you can automate almost everything arround PoE if you want to.

On top of it there are guides for everything and as long as there won’t be 50 new skillgems from one minute to the other almost everything is done by the 1%. I know 2 people who realy play PoE who don’t use third party sites who don’t care for the meta and who want to experince the game themselfs… all of the sudden ZERO trade need.

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They are the only ones complaining so yeah.

POE is deep so yeah it’s going to take a long time to understand it all. If you aren’t willing to go through a learning process then yeah it’s not for you. It will also be overwhelming if you try to figure it all out in one season.

A lot of the inventory management you do will be the same if you are SSF. And it’s just a single click to get an estimate of the value of an item if you are unsure. POE rewards time invested to learn and that’s a good thing.

In POE you are guaranteed a direct path to upgrades and you are constantly obtaining currency to help you get there. In LE it comes down to pure RNG after a certain point and there is certainly no guarantee that the item will drop, let alone with what you want it to roll.

I’ll take the inconvenience of D2/POE trading over a restrictive trading system any day of the week. But with that said, there’s no reason why LE can’t improve on POE by binding on trade and not allow crafted items to be traded. Also, a big part of POE’s complexity in item valuation is specific to that game due to how deep their itemization is as well as teh number of different builds people use.

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You are saying that, no matter your power level, trade can be used to get an upgrade?

I havent played PoE beyond 20 hours or so, but that doesn’t ring true to me… after all, isn’t PoE loot also RNG-based? Does it incorporate smoothing to ensure you get particular items?

If not, then wouldn’t your ability to get the item depend on factors like:

  • has it dropped for someone in trade environment (more likely with more players, but not guaranteed)?
  • are people in trade environment actively selling it (depends on relative value in the economy, which would change with each reset)?

Are you using the term “guaranteed” here to mean “almost certain” or am I misunderstanding?

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