Trading! or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bazaar!

Developer Blog
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Hey there party people, it’s me Kyle Melberg, Narrative Director for Eleventh Hour Games and I’m here to talk to you all about one of the most riveting aspects of a high fantasy, monster slaying, dungeon delving, loot hoarding video game…. THE ECONOMY!

Player economy is one of the most enjoyable aspects of this genre for many players and we want to do it justice In your hub city, a floating remnant of your old home that now rests in the darkness outside of time, other travelers like you have set up a place to trade and barter between themselves: The Bazaar! The Bazaar allows players to anonymously buy and sell items from other players using the gold they’ve found while on their adventures through time and Eterra and its various aspects will address three main concerns that have plagued the genre for years:

  1. Giving players the tools they need to trade effectively without having to rely on third party sites by supplying adequate search and filter tools and enforcing a standard currency in gold.
  2. Keeping gold meaningful by ensuring it has an important use as the standard currency while at the same time draining it from the economy and making it difficult to trade hands in unsanctioned ways.
  3. Deter Real Money Traders from both plaguing the community with spammers and giving players a way to buy power rather than earn it by rendering the “best” gear untradeable and designing the Bazaar to make coordinated trading difficult to accomplish.
As a seller, you may have up to 5 listings on the Bazaar at a time and once a starting price and closing time have been set you will be unable to prematurely remove the listing. Other players will then be able to bid on your listings and once the bidding window is up the winner will receive your item and you will receive the gold they bid on it. While you will have to be physically at the Bazaar to list new auctions, you will be able to track your current items at any time through a special UI window.

As a buyer, you will be able to search through all of the items within the Bazaar using an extensive filtering system to narrow down your options and help you find the exact item you want. Once you’ve bid on an item, the gold you’ve bid will be removed from your inventory and if someone outbids you this gold will be returned to you. If you have the current highest bid on an item once the auction closes, congratulations! You won the item! Be wary to not get too caught up in bidding wars though, the Bazaar charges a fee on your transaction based on a percentage of the gold you’ve bid if you win, and this percentage increases as the listing’s closing time draws near.

We are designing this system very carefully to ensure that while the Bazaar can be a fantastic way to find certain items, it will never overshadow the rewards of engaging with the world yourself. In the world of Eterra certain items will be untradeable, such as particularly powerful uniques known as legendaries, gear crafted using rare and potent materials, and relics to name a few. We want playing the game to be the core focus of Last Epoch, not maximizing your trade skills, even if skillful trading can help fill holes in your build.

Fear not, friends will be able to freely gift items between each other as long as they have been friends for a reasonable amount of time and both own the full game. The definition of “reasonable amount of time” will be a function of the level of items you are attempting to trade and the length of time you have been on each other’s friend list. In addition to this, gold will not be giftable to other players.

As a final caveat, we are still in Pre-Alpha and as part of that, plans like these could very possibly change if we discover dire flaws or other issues with the system, in fact, feel free to comment below so we can hear as many thoughts on the matter as possible! We are all gamers, we want to hear what you all think!

Thank you all for reading this thrilling economics blog, for now though, adios Travelers!

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the bazaar :slight_smile: reminds me of good ole Everquest, just please don’t make us have to stay online for the bazaar to function lol. I’m assuming their will be some kind of mail system as well for this. Just how much is the fee? I’ve never been a fan of taxes in games but… oh well.

Why the limit of five items? Seems very low in comparison to what we can hold in our shared stash. Will the bazaar access and/or pull up the shared stash or will the player have to carry the item(s) on them to the bazaar to list for sale?

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I like the direction for trading here, my concerns are:

5 listings maximum will be problematic for players who play a lot

The “FEE” being charged to buyers makes no sense, the seller should always incur the fee of the item

the inability to trade legendary items (what sounds like the best of items) quite frankly turns me off of this game entirely - maybe i am not your demographic anymore but the economy should be an open one with everything having a market value (this is where WOW and post AH D3 failed IMO, bind on account items are not fun)

 

Closing thoughts, i get it that you dont want RMT happening but with these games it is bound to happen whether you police it or not… what seems to be the strategy of 11th Hour is to restrict the best items from being traded to “deter” RMT while this is all fine and good trading might end up being a very small part of the game and only helpful in the early stages making some of us looking for a serious game to sink our teeth into with an economy, not this one…

p.s. i hope you have a good plan on how to use “gold” other than trading, so that currency is consumed as well

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best in slot items should not be freely available. it’s not just real money traders/ botters, etc that a company would want to discourage from flourishing in a game such as this, but it’s also important not to diminish the purpose/ reward of a loot based game. If anyone here played “vanilla” D3. You will recall that the endgame for D3 became the auction house and I don’t think any of us who bought D3 had that in mind… even if it was profitable lol!

While no one likes restrictions they do serve a noble purpose. If the crafting system that 11th hour has in mind allows the player(s) to craft a powerful endgame item then there can be a place/ need for the bazaar to exist alongside BoE items. I’m hoping the upcoming crafting system will create/give the same experience I get with the current skill system that allows me to feel like I am actually “creating” something useful.

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I understand prometheus’ point for sure, and this is where the true divide comes into play with ARPG loot based games and their players.

Let’s pretend that these legendaries are not build enabling and let us also pretend these legendaries are not gated behind thousands of hours of RNG to acquire them if you are unlucky, simply restricting these legendaries from being able to be traded in the bazaar might encourage more grinding BUT if the craftable items are close to equivalent and can be bought and sold, legendary BOA items just turn into flashy MTX’s people can brag about but provide little in terms of gameplay experience improvements or build optimization

 

that is why BOA items turn me off so quickly, if the crafting system was truly a good system why have legendaries in the first place if they can be sub’ed out for well crafted items- making them BOA just seems like a half measure if this were the case

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Hi, the 5 listing maximum is to keep up the price of low to medium tier items. In Path of Exile there are plenty of good and usable unique items that end up costing just one chaos. Even though they’re good it doesn’t feel great when you find them because you could have just bought them for one chaos. If the more wealthy players are too focused on selling more expensive items to worry about about these uniques, then fewer people will be selling them, their price will be higher and it will feel more exciting to find one.

The fee is incurred to buyers because the size of the fee depends on when the buyer bids and is designed to try to encourage people to bid earlier (and incur a smaller fee) rather than always waiting until the last second to bid on an item.

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@EHG i understand your position on the listing limit as it relates to keeping certain items at certain pricing points… IMO changing the rarity of said items is a better step than restricting market availability. POE failed in this regard because those “T1” items that are worthless often are just as common as those worth several exalts because items were never drop-weighted appropriately by GGG

 

on the point of the listing fee being appropriated to buyers, whether someone bids early or late, i interpreted the “fee” as a % of the total amount, maybe i am nitpicking at this point but expecting buyers to account for a “tax or fee” when purchasing items sucks… i can’t think of any game that charged this amount to the buyer

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any form of trading in an ARPG is a difficult system to balance, but at the same time we all want it. How big will the audience/ economy get and just what will become “must have(s)” will always be a fluid situation based on the current state of the game.

@vancouverisland great posts / input there

hope to see some more thoughts here once the system goes live to test.

still can’t wrap my head around the five item post limit. I don’t see how that will maintain a “minimum price” of any item as people will just naturally undercut the price of whatever the lowest price item is and continue so forth as long as there is a growing market/ economy. Such limits just encourage players to create multiple accounts.

@EHG thanks for the quick reply and insight.

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I’m not keen on trading in RPGs - for example I’m playing PoE as SSF - so I’m not really the best target of your economy, but I like the direction you’ve taken so far, and the reasons behind it. Looks good!

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What about limiting the number of times an item can be traded to 1 ?
If you found this item yourself, you can sell it or give it to a friend.Once traded it become “bound on account” and can never be traded again to other accounts (But it can be salavaged, or whatever other use for crafting).
This prevent players to create multiple accounts to bypass the 5 item limit.
It also prevent players flipping items for money.

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I disagree at all with the untradeable items part, this imo will put the game in the worthless state of Diablo 3. I can’t understand how drop worthless items is better than drop low value items. Casual can’t buy BiS, Hardcore players can’t sell it, who’s happy?

[color color=#ffffff]Mod edit:[/color] [color color=#1e90ff]MiRaMore, it appears that your browser has an extension called Ciuvo which is injecting code into your posts. This is likely to agitate the spam filters we have in place. Try updating or re-installing the extension to see if that helps.[/color]

EDIT: Thanks Sarno, i’ve tried to edit yesterday but for some reason that code always turns out, now seems gone.

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The 5 items policy should be for every rarity of items the game has.Also trading more than 2-3 time and item should BOA that item also if you modify that item trough crafting should BOA if is alredy bought from Bazar.

Items doped you can modify to get better and sell them on bazar but they will become BoA after they are bought.

That 5 items was my suggestion for D3 AH and the best solution for that.Closing the AH has kill the game.

RM Bazar can be a nice for you if is only for low gear has no impact on game.(maybe im wrong here)

Auctions for Mirroring BOA can be a solution for high end gear.

 

 

 

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Going a little off topic; but from a player who loves solo play, I like to craft. I’m older and have a family and career. So I’ve given up on having a friends list. I play solo mostly except when I feel as though joining a pick up group might be beneficial to me. But I’m still playing with strangers and trading in PUG’s is pretty rare. I’m not sure how guilds are going to play out.

But the point is; it’s nice to be able to buy a set item or legendary that you might need for a certain build to work. This makes the Bazaar worth while. I’m much more interested in the Bazaar for the buying aspect rather then the selling aspect.

But I would rather have the opportunity to be able to craft a lot of my gear/items. I would like to see crafting be very accessible and useful. I don’t want this to turn into a crafting thread, But I don’t like RNG of POE. I like to be much more in control over what I’m crafting.

So I would rather (like Diablo) vendor/salvage most of my loot/gear/items for crafting mats. Allow the players to be in more control over their end build gear.

So from that perspective, I wouldn’t mind having a cap on how many items you could have listed in the bazaar. I think it should be more of just an aid to fill in certain needed set or best in slot items. Rather then a one stop shop to get everything you need as long as you have the currency for it.

In my opinion there has to be a fine line between time spent on grinding for loot/self found gear/currency to that of current item prices. In other words, if it’s easy to earn currency and everything is dirt cheap in the bazaar then players will just grind for currency to buy their gear from the bazaar.

But if items are really expensive in the bazaar then players will be forced to try to earn and craft most of their gear, only to pick up an item or two in the bazaar because of the cost per item. This to me is more fun. Searching and crafting over buying and selling.

But some players really like to just buy and sell. Like in WOW, EQ, Diablo 2 and 3. But of course like it was mentioned above, that creates certain specific problems.

Maybe one good way of solving the problem is only allowing items/gear to be exchanged in the bazaar. Make player to player trading not possible.

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You’ll likely be very happy, then!

Have you read our developer blog on crafting? Here’s a link.

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i’ve seen this posted a couple times so i will echo one of my previous opinions on BOA.

IMO BOA items in any form turn certain players off immediately, if i wanted an RPG with BOA items i would play WOW or D3.
I would like a game to fill the void of D2 and POE. There are people who seem so convinced that auction restriction and item transferability become controlled they don’t realize how much time some ARPG players spend in games such as D2 and POE doing this and manipulating the economy (believe it or not they have fun doing this too).

While not everyone does this, i see this as a potential selling point of last epoch because there are studio games out there that are out of development with polished gameplay that also restrict certain components of RNG dependent item economies.

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I’m definitely one of those players turned off by BoA and trading restrictions.

For me some of the most interesting end-game revolves around item hunting for tradeables and upgrades. It’s nice when you find something valuable that you can’t use to be able to trade it and build wealth like that.
It’s not nice finding something rare and having it be totally worthless because you don’t have a use for it and can’t trade it.

D3 economy is non-existent. I hardly ever play that game.

D2 economy - as broken as it was - was actually fun. It’s gone downhill lately but lasted for many years.

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I’ll add PoE economy, the best because it’s totally free for all items, ruined only by botters/rmt that shouldn’t be a problem here. Can’t see what’s wrong in a PoE-like economy when you don’t have to bother with botters.

“Controlled” economy won’t affect only item prices, but the way you can play the game. IMO force players to farm content they don’t want to (for many reason) is not what a game should do. You don’t need to force challenge for those don’t want it. So as you allow me to choose the difficulty of the game, you should let me choose how to play your game.

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I’m in favor of free trading even if that makes the game interesting for botters. I’m not sure why you think bots won’t be an issue here though? Diablo 2, WoW and other B2P games have bot problems and it’s pretty much inevitable to have to deal with them if your game is popular enough and features free trading.

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Miramore: make no mistake, there are botters on POE

 

There are many ARPG games out there that have the BOA/BOE items and they are very popular, bug free mostly, supported well by the developer etc etc etc the void in ARPG gaming imo is the lack of a suitable modern replacement of D2 … POE came close but the lack of an AH and weighted “T1’s” held it back, not to mention the flood of MTX’s and misappropriation of resources by GGG (ie. Xbox)

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The problem with free tradeable legendary items, or BiS items is that at some point there will be market saturation of them and it will be like vanilla D3 where it was easier to just farm gold and buy the item than try to actually kill mobs to obtain it. I think “Bind of Equip” solves most of these problems, as soon as someone uses it, the item is taken out of the market.

One option could Crafting, let the components be tradeable but the item it makes be bound to the crafter. Then people could farm/sell components to craft the best items, but the outcome and stats would be bound to the crafter and RNG gods of crafting, haha.

I’m not really sure what the best solution is, but I do agree that BOA style like Diablo3 is crap and a real turn-off for me.

I agree with those people who stated there is is no suitable replacement for D2, which somehow managed to balance crazy powerful items, drop rates, rarity of items/stats, and free trade.

I’m so far impressed with Last Epoch, and hope you dev’s can figure out a trade/loot/drop rate system that works.