About "we don't want trading too easy" in the last PODCAST

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BorgsFury wrote:

Spoiler

More accessible trade via a decent UI that facilitates trade (including with people who are currently offline) has far more positives than negatives. It eliminates a lot of scamming that takes place in every in person trading system in every game in existence (including this game). It gives trade as an option to people like me who currently have to either play self-found (which sucks in this game) or not at all given the only other altthinkive is something we refuse to do. It makes it much easier to gauge the value of items. Many people claim the grind is what’s fun about the game, yet in every ARPG since and including D2 that has had trade, many people choose to circumvent that grind in one way or another whenever possible. This indicates that for many, the grind for gear is not fun, they want to get the gear and then do something with the gear. Accessible trade means people can circumvent the grind if they hate it, but don’t have to if they like it. Trade is always optional.

The only real negative is player perception as there are hordes of ignorant anti-AH types ever since D3 that spew their asinine rhetoric in every gaming forum on the planet now. They tell us how everything will become worthless, typically insisting that everything will be worth 1 of whatever that games particular currency is called. They do this ignoring all facts and reason that prove it is not the case. It wasn’t even the case in D3v.

In Diablo 3 Vanilla there were hundreds of lower tier items being sold all the time. Not just for a couple million gold or some insignificant price. There were low priced items selling, mid-tier priced items selling. It may have seemed like only high-end items were selling to the people that didn’t know what they were doing who were posting useless items that never sold, but items in all price ranges were selling. I know this for a fact because I primarily sold low-mid priced items and made hundreds of millions of gold and hundreds of dollars just using the D3 AH casually (IE: I didn’t spend hours on the AH a day, I spent minutes. You didn’t have to scour the AH for deals to make use of it, you just had to know what was valuable).

Note that in D3 Vanilla, there was infinite re-tradability and no ladder system. That meant that the economy was NEVER reset as it would be every league in POE. Despite the ever increasing supply, items still maintained value up until the closing of the AH. So how in the hell are you expecting to convince me that every item in POE will suddenly sell for 1c in a temporary league when it didn’t even happen in the D3 AH that was never reset? Yea, really common items drop in value compared to the past where you may have been able to sell them laughably overpriced when trade had far fewer participants, but that doesn’t mean the world is falling apart and everything is becoming worthless. Lower quality items should be worth less. The fact that you could sell them for a lot in the past was a result of extremely limited trade accessibility and was not a good thing.

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We have actual data of what happens when you trivialize trading in an arpg by making the market too fluid and on the other end trivialize gear acquisition to remove trading altogether. Both options lead to a shallower experience that sort circuit many of the features that made d2 so great.

No you don’t. You’re likely referencing D3 and convincing yourself that the AH ruined D3v, which wasn’t the case. You’re assuming it’s some kind of irrefutable fact that the AH was a bad thing. It wasn’t. The game could have been perfectly fine with an AH (or tradepost). The reasons D3v sucked had NOTHING to do with the AH, it was just a scapegoat that Blizzard clung too in an attempt to pretend all the real issues weren’t the real cause of their failure. D3v sucked because of:

1) Campaign/story mode being the only mode. Worst design choice in ARPG history, by far.

2) Boring items with no interesting affixes

3) Drop rates that they balanced around the idea that you’d be playing the same characters for YEARS. They even admitted this. It wasn’t just the AH that led to low drop rates, it was the fact that they wanted people to still occasionally find upgrades over that long a period of time.

4) Limited build diversity and customization (most runes were garbage, nothing was balanced)


Now in RoS we have NO TRADE at all, but people STILL hate D3. They hate D3 now because there’s nothing to do in D3 besides farm endless progression and Grifts (removing trade removed one of the few things there is to do once you have a decent set of gear). They also hate it because you have no ability to design any interesting builds, they are dictated to you by set bonuses. Lack of customization was a huge failing in D3v and is still a huge failing of D3 overall and is one of the major issues of the game and was never impacted in anyway by the existence of trade or the AH.

First off, when I think of vanilla D3's failures, here's about how I break it down...

1. Itemization: boring affixes, boring legendaries, same gear for everyone

2. Inflation: massive botting brought on by widespread acceptance of third-party RMT, combined with weak currency design and artificially forcing said currency on the marketplace

3. Inferno: gear needed to beat A2 reliably only drops in A3, essentially worthless farming prior to A3

Now, the gold AH certainly had some role in the economic collapses, but I kinda agree with you that that role has been greatly misrepresented. Really, the "gold" part was more at fault than the "AH" part; because players had no choice whatsoever in which items to use as currency and the only relevant sink was trade itself, the fiat currency was exploited on a massive scale by botting.

That said, I personally don't think AH is good gameplay. I don't mean this in a crazy D3-is-teh-devil sky-is-falling way, but in a more rational, measured way.

1. Trade vs farm balance is relevant. If trading is more rewarding per unit time than farming, then players will feel the game is "telling them" to trade; the stronger the contrast, the stronger the push. This is how it actually works, it's not "easy trade means fast trade," it's "easy trade means trading all the time," unless some arbitrary restriction is imposed.

D3 had such a restriction; you couldn't have more than ten active auctions as a seller (which also limited your purchasing opportunities, because items you might want weren't listed because they were Priority #11 for another player). Because of this, although the easy trade was by far the most efficient use of time in the game, you normally searched for good buys, put ten auctions up, and then moved on to the second most time-efficient thing you could do: farm. And you did this until someone bought something, then managed trade, then went back to farming, etc.

What this means is that the restriction on trade time, and thus the strength of the push to trade, was dependent on one factor: how easily your items sold while you were online. Playing early in the game's life cycle when it had a huge community meant more push to trade. Playing during peak hours (for instance, because one has a life outside the game) meant more push to trade. Selling your items below market price had this very odd addiction quality of both cutting into your profit per unit time AND increasing the amount of time you'd spend trading, as your auctions would resolve quickly (the net proceeds would still best farming in efficiency). Etc.

Now, if you were playing during odd hours and selling an item valuable enough that you weren't paranoid about whether it would sell or not, then the system felt a lot more natural. You'd put stuff up, then farm. Simple. The push wasn't as bad.

It's also worth noting the other side of the trade vs farm balance coin: more difficult farming means a bigger push to trade. If PoE is going to be difficult farming (self-described hardcore etc), then trade would logically need to be more difficult as well if it hopes to balance that.

The point is: easier trade means bigger push to trade instead of farm. Whether that's bad or good is somewhat up to individual taste (if you live trade, no problem there). I file it under bad, though. As a result, I look for ways to make trade difficult.

2. There are two core kinds of difficulty: challenge and tedium. Challenge is making things hard by incorporating knowledge and skill; tedium is making things hard by forcing additional time commitment, reducing efficiency regardless of skill.

I've already a post in this thread on skill. The TL;DR is: flipping is good, people getting ripped off is good, market manipulation is good, because these all add risk - not mere tedium - to what would otherwise be easy money. Savvy PoE players approach fellow traders much the way they approach rare monsters - with optimistic caution.

This would mostly go away if sellers could leave automatic buyouts so buyers could purchase from offline sellers. It's just a little too transparent of a market. Don't get me wrong, I also see significant tedium reduction as well, and to the extent tedium is reduced that would be a good thing. However, overall I'm still very wary of such suggestions... and if the cost of eliminating all tedium-based difficulty from trade is removing all skill-based difficulty as well, that's simply not a good game design decision to make.

Not because they'd ruin the economy, mind you; I feel PoE is a long, long way from being famous enough to attract even a fraction of the botting attention D3 unfortunately received. Economy would be effected, of course, but in a pros/cons manner. I'm citing gameplay reasons instead.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I've already a post in this thread on skill. The TL;DR is: flipping is good, people getting ripped off is good, market manipulation is good, because these all add risk - not mere tedium - to what would otherwise be easy money. Savvy PoE players approach fellow traders much the way they approach rare monsters - with optimistic caution.

This would mostly go away if sellers could leave automatic buyouts so buyers could purchase from offline sellers. It's just a little too transparent of a market. Don't get me wrong, I also see significant tedium reduction as well, and to the extent tedium is reduced that would be a good thing. However, overall I'm still very wary of such suggestions... and if the cost of eliminating all tedium-based difficulty from trade is removing all skill-based difficulty as well, that's simply not a good game design decision to make.

I don't want to have to play the players as if they were Act bosses. That isn't fun to me in the slightest; rather, it's a literal headache. I just want to play the game, and to be able to buy shit when I need it.

Why is it not a good design decision to make trading something you just *do*? Why is "skill" (which I put in quotes because I believe it is not skill at all, but rather wasting a LOT of time) of trading so important to the experience?

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The point is: easier trade means bigger push to trade instead of farm. Whether that's bad or good is somewhat up to individual taste (if you live trade, no problem there). I file it under bad, though. As a result, I look for ways to make trade difficult.

Not necessarily, because if people farm less, prices will all go up, meaning people will farm more. All it would do is make the actual trade something we can actually do with a few clicks, and then move on to actually playing the game. D3's RMAH system was very different, and I don't think the two can be so easily compared.

I don't want to be an online stock broker. I've haggled over a price for several hours once. I ended up wishing I never even attempted it, and did whatever, anything else instead. It's just not worth the hassle. People saying this somehow makes the game better confuses the crap out of me.


-VG-

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VideoGeemer wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Spoiler

I've already a post in this thread on skill. The TL;DR is: flipping is good, people getting ripped off is good, market manipulation is good, because these all add risk - not mere tedium - to what would otherwise be easy money. Savvy PoE players approach fellow traders much the way they approach rare monsters - with optimistic caution.

This would mostly go away if sellers could leave automatic buyouts so buyers could purchase from offline sellers. It's just a little too transparent of a market. Don't get me wrong, I also see significant tedium reduction as well, and to the extent tedium is reduced that would be a good thing. However, overall I'm still very wary of such suggestions... and if the cost of eliminating all tedium-based difficulty from trade is removing all skill-based difficulty as well, that's simply not a good game design decision to make.

I don't want to have to play the players as if they were Act bosses. That isn't fun to me in the slightest; rather, it's a literal headache. I just want to play the game, and to be able to buy shit when I need it.

Why is it not a good design decision to make trading something you just *do*? Why is "skill" (which I put in quotes because I believe it is not skill at all, but rather wasting a LOT of time) of trading so important to the experience?

I covered that in the trade vs farm balance section, but to elaborate...

Because your claim to instant gratification trading should be no more valid than your claim to instant gratification farming.

Note that this sentence is NOT "your claim to instant gratification is invalid." I believe hyper easy trade fits well in a game with hyper easy farming (although it does become somewhat redundant there). I'm not trying to say everything should be this huge grind and/or challenge. I'm saying that unless you want trading to be (even more) ridiculously OP, and farming is already a huge grind and/or challenge, then some of that difficulty needs to be mirrored in trading as well.

Alternatively, farming could be made easier. But I don't feel that's the right path for PoE.

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VideoGeemer wrote:

Not necessarily, because if people farm less, prices will all go up, meaning people will farm more.

You're assuming currency drops when you farm, but usable gear doesn't. This is a very poor assumption. All traded gear was at some point farmed and/or crafted with currency which was at some point farmed.

When there is zero farming, prices remain relatively static. I don't know how you could get more "farm less" than zero farming.

What is accurate to say is: because players have limited equipment slots, as they farm more, the pool of items which could be considered upgrades shrinks; therefore, as they farm less, the pool of items which could be considered upgrades shrinks less. However, unless gear is actually being sunk (by gear sinks) faster than it's being farmed, this pool will not broaden.

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VideoGeemer wrote:

All it would do is make the actual trade something we can actually do with a few clicks, and then move on to actually playing the game. D3's RMAH system was very different, and I don't think the two can be so easily compared.

The key word there is "can." I'm not arguing whether players could or couldn't; I'm arguing whether players would or wouldn't. Powerful trade would encourage players to stay and continue trading instead of returning to "actually playing the game." (Trading doesn't count as playing the game apparently /sarcasm.) The experience is largely what a game "tells" you to do, not just what it forces you to do.

And for fucks sake, RMAH has zero to do with what I said. Zero.

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VideoGeemer wrote:

I don't want to be an online stock broker. I've haggled over a price for several hours once. I ended up wishing I never even attempted it, and did whatever, anything else instead. It's just not worth the hassle. People saying this somehow makes the game better confuses the crap out of me.

That's odd, I've haggled for about 15 minutes before and that felt like quite a long time to me. I don't think your experience was typical. I mean, if someone told me they spent hours trying to overcome Malachai and they wish they had that time back, I would probably just, you know, tell them to git gud.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

That said, I personally don't think AH is good gameplay. I don't mean this in a crazy D3-is-teh-devil sky-is-falling way, but in a more rational, measured way.

1. Trade vs farm balance is relevant. If trading is more rewarding per unit time than farming, then players will feel the game is "telling them" to trade; the stronger the contrast, the stronger the push. This is how it actually works, it's not "easy trade means fast trade," it's "easy trade means trading all the time," unless some arbitrary restriction is imposed.

It's also worth noting the other side of the trade vs farm balance coin: more difficult farming means a bigger push to trade. If PoE is going to be difficult farming (self-described hardcore etc), then trade would logically need to be more difficult as well if it hopes to balance that.

The point is: easier trade means bigger push to trade instead of farm. Whether that's bad or good is somewhat up to individual taste (if you live trade, no problem there). I file it under bad, though. As a result, I look for ways to make trade difficult.

I've already a post in this thread on skill. The TL;DR is: flipping is good, people getting ripped off is good, market manipulation is good, because these all add risk - not mere tedium - to what would otherwise be easy money. Savvy PoE players approach fellow traders much the way they approach rare monsters - with optimistic caution.

There is no balance to be made between trading and loot drop because the former can't exist without the second but the opposite isnt true. Also, people farm xp and sell the loot that has worth. The vast majority of people will never farm items, they farm xp, the loot is the cherry on top that they can exchange for another kind of cherry. In this kind of game where millions of thing coexist, skills, gems, affix, suffix, unique, you can forget about farming item because it's like playing lottery with hundreds of numbers rather than 6 or 7. You will never get what you need exactly but hopefuly someone else has and is wiling to trade it to you.

You will always need loot, loot is independent of trading where trading is 100% dependant of killing mobs. No ammount of improvement to trading can change that. Double loot now and trading will be much better ofcourse but the opposite, making trading more complex will never change

Ofcourse it would be best if we could convince the herd that they dont have to all play the same build their streamin heroes play and then profiteering would go down because you would need to be smarter in your sniping rather than specific. Hey! we could add the proverbial skills to trading/sniping, wouldnt it be cool? because right now there is none required.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

3. Inferno: gear needed to beat A2 reliably only drops in A3, essentially worthless farming prior to A3

I wish people would stop saying this. It never was true, ever.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

3. Inferno: gear needed to beat A2 reliably only drops in A3, essentially worthless farming prior to A3

I wish people would stop saying this. It never was true, ever.

I was stuck at A2I for days. Of course, I did eventually get through, but there was definitely luck involved. "Reliably" is a key word.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

3. Inferno: gear needed to beat A2 reliably only drops in A3, essentially worthless farming prior to A3

I wish people would stop saying this. It never was true, ever.

I was stuck at A2I for days. Of course, I did eventually get through, but there was definitely luck involved. "Reliably" is a key word.

It was end game, you were supposed to be there for a lot longer than days. It was reliable in that you slowly got better gear and progressed, if your stats could get less, it wouldn't be reliable, but they couldn't.

The thing was, progression wasn't based on slowly getting better gear, because I didn't. It's been a few years, but what I remember was trying and dying over and over and over again, until through some combination of luck and timing I finally made it to the next waypoint... and then the same process, all over again. Death was the rule, progress the exception. More Super Meat Boy than ARPG.

When I made it to A3, I was still dying rather frequently, but it was more like you describe: an upgrade here or there, gradual progression. Progression you couldn't find in A2I (literally same drops as A1I at the time).

And then, the day after I finally cleared it, they patch it to make it easier. Then, a couple patches after that, they introduce MP0 easy mode.

Okay, okay, I'll admit I was taking more about release month D3 than what people typically think of as "D3 vanilla." But on the other hand you said "never true ever." It was, at least briefly.

This is kinda off topic though, don't you think?

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DAYLEET wrote:

If then the maker of the game decide to balance the game furter based on people who are actively trying to become stronger and break the game then the fault is with the maker. Let people do their things.

I think this is the fundamental point of disagreement between yourself and I, and probably with GGG too. They want to make a hard game, I want to play a hard game, right now the game is too easy and they know it. People want to trade and have that community, economy style play, that doesnt mean none of them want a challenge. Theres a lot of people who want to do their thing, but want it to be difficult and rewarding, not just a walk in the park.

If GGG are going to push aside any part of the community and not cater to it, its probably the part that just wants the game to be utter faceroll without balance to keep power creeping in check. Thats the impression I get anyway and thats part of why I love these game devs. Im not saying thats your position, or that you are that extreme about it, youre just essentially saying "let people have their fun", and I can get along with that to some extent. But I think the devs are a lot more concerned with power creep and keeping the game challenging for trading players than yourself.

Honestly if anyones been shafted over the years its self found, I think its a positive thing that chris has these considerations on a high priority.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

They want to make a hard game, I want to play a hard game, right now the game is too easy and they know it.

Quote of the day.