Developer Q&A - Answers Part 2

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With all the talk of trade improvements over the years but very little concrete to show for it, it's clear that GGG wants to take steps, but is being held up by various concerns. What actual goals and restrictions are you guys working with in your efforts toward improving trade? Are there concerns that these goals are even attainable?

Being able to trade items is critical to the success of an Action RPG. This is why Path of Exile has no item binding and why SSF items can become regular items with the click of a button.

Given that we want trade, the next question is how easy the trade should be. It seems obvious to jump to the answer of "as easy as possible, of course!" but more care needs to be taken. The easier that trade is, the more trades that traders can perform, increasing the utility that items provide to them. This has a few consequences:

The gap between traders and non-traders widens. This gap is apparent when you see feedback that the game is too hard for some people and too easy for others. Most of the time, that is proportionate to how much they have traded.
Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable. If you have ever felt that it's going to take too many 1-alch sales to finally save up for that 80 exalt item you want, then this is the reason.
Progression is trivialised. While trading for an item to get a leg up on difficult content is of course fine, being able to trivially and cheaply quadruple your clear speed on a whim isn't something that should be expected on your first character in a league. In addition, the fewer item upgrades you make on a character before capping out your items, the lower chance you have of sticking around for a decent portion of the league. Upgrading items more times (in smaller steps) is more fun than jumping right to the perfect gear.


The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

I know this explanation doesn't mention any solutions, but the things we're experimenting with aren't ready yet. Thanks for your patience.

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The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

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This is discussed occasionally but there are no plans to change it in 3.0.0. We're worried about the slippery slope of players wanting the rewards from a system without engaging in that system (although we do understand that Ascendancy classes have been so successful that they are no longer considered rewards but instead intrinsic parts of your character). I am sure we will continue to discuss this and related topics.

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D3adGh0st wrote:

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The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

You already opened the Pandora's box a long time ago. Your game would be unplayable without trading, except for a handful of die hards that like to waste their time in SSF with very niche builds. Stop pretending this isn't so and start doing something about it. Either completely remove trading and up the drops, or improve the current trading scheme. There are people like me who played PoE for years and never got a single exalt drop or top tier unique. I rely on trading for my builds. I despise the current trading, with AFKs, players in different leagues who are to lazy to switch, scammers and such.

Trading in Poe was something that developed naturally, and you want to place artificial barriers around it. Stop with this nonsense, pls.

Also, no answer to the total imbalance of Life and ES? No? Ok. Wake me up when people won't be able to have characters with literally dozens of ES and kill Shaper on EZMODE, while i struggle with my ant life build, with everything but the kitchen sink in terms of items and tree wizardry in order to have a chance at surviving endgame.

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fwd wrote:

On Labirinth.

I like it as it is. I like it a lot. It's beautiful thing, so cool and challenging. When I beat Izaro for the first time I felt satisfaction. When I first time beat Uber Izaro - S_A_T_I_S_F_A_C_T_I_O_N. Just think about it, Labirinth is like an adventure you can start at any moment with big challenges and big rewards. You don't need to collect sacrifice fragments first as for Atziri vizit, for example, just offering, and here we go.

And having Ascendancy behind Labirinth is very fair. You should prove that you deserve it first. Anyone could make FOTM build reading it on the forum and clear zones by right-clicking. By contrary, Labirinth is rare challenging content in the game you can't complete without using brain at all. If you say that your build is unable to do UberLab/UberIzaro, how are you going to kill The Guardians and The Shaper then?

It's only four times, and it's not story-locking, so if you're not able to do it at all you can always come into low level labs with 20-30 overlevels. And hire the carry for Uber Lab, it's very easy nowadays. And an ascension is not even mandatory at all, to be honest.

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Chris wrote:

"Are Kitava and the Beast the same entity? The Karui appear to be pretty sure that they're the same, but some things, like the Pantheon image, seem to imply otherwise."

They are not the same entity.

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RedundantLogic wrote:

This is some juicy info regarding the upcoming lore. I eagerly await more.