GGGs reasoning on not making a SFL?

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ExiledRenor wrote:

I have a thought about trade I want to share. This has not come up yet I think and if people come up with pros and cons, this is never mentioned. Maybe people do not have a problem with it because they are used to this behaviour in the real world, but I as I see it its problematic:

Trade increases the divergence between rich and poor or in PoE between casuals and pros.

Basically all the "interesting and nice" items are found by EVERYONE, but only those people who are involved very much in the game will accumulate them. Nice items will work their way up the pyramid while all the trash goes down.
You may think that this is perfectly fine, because both sides(rich and poor) benefit from trade, but as I see it trade also leads to an EXCLUSION OF CONTENT.

If a casual player finds for instance a Kaoms Heart its not adviseable for him to use it and build around it but rather sell it for an amount of wealth which allows him to fit 20 chars with equipment which represents his time investment.
The example where you see it the best are exalted orbs. "nobody" is using them, because its not worth to use them, but it LIES IN THE NATURE OF ORB to get used. So only the top elite(top 0,1% probably)is entitled to use orbs like exalteds and eternals CONSISTANTLY.

So basically trade leads to the situation where crafting material become unuseable for crafting because the top player throw down all the midgearcrap which is still godlike for the casuals while taking high tier orbs in return.

This is the situation. You may find advantages and disadvantages in it. Of course playing the pyramid game can be satisfying for the individual player in a video game, but also it is restricting.


Another thing to mention is the snowballball effect of "skill"(or rather call it "dedication")
The more time you spend in PoE the "more more" wealth you accumulate. The reason is the effectiveness of knowledge.

A dedicated gamer who spends 4h a day will gather wealth 3 times as fast as a casual who spends 2h a day. The dedicated gamer can use his knowledge for playing more efficiently and has better understanding of item value(thus beeing more successful in trade and having a "positve net exploitation" out of trade)

Imo a snowballeffect like this is a FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IN GAME DESIGN, actually it needs to be the other way round to keep games interesting for the majority of players.
Trade is fueling this snowballeffect.

I can tell you why it is bad to keep the playerbase on a huge "variance of progress": It hurts the community as playing together will be more cumbersome.
Maybe this effect is not so harmful in PoE but I am talking about this in general.
It should be in the interest of everybody(the players and the game designers) to keep the playerbase at a SIMILAR level of progress.
But reality is: A proplayer who spent 20x time than a normalplayer will have 200+x more items. And this could be unhealthy for a game. Not 100% sure about this but I think this increases frustration.

Yea, and trade is contributing to all of this and the "socialeconomic" effect is not considered in any way.
But alltogether some people lose and some people win. In most cases the casuals will lose.

So I am AGAINST trade in an ARPG like PoE, but not only because of the thoughts I mentioned but also because an ARPG like PoE and D3 are not suited for trade.

I played EVE Online some time ago. Not long because of the trash passive skillsystem, but there I saw how economics in games SHOULD work.
Even though I dont consider EVE Onlines economy perfect it seems the right way. There MUST be an itemsink to make trade balanced.

Imo those requirements need to be fulfilled to have trade:

-itemsink. Most important, but not existant in PoE
-complex crafting system. Complexity of crafting is fine in PoE
-closed crafting cycle. Is decent in PoE
-loottables and farm area diversity. you cant farm for a specific orb in PoE
-crafting specialisaion. 1 Person must not be able to do "everything". There must be different professions which exclude themselves (not even EVE Online hat this LOL - because of the garbage skillsystem)
-time gated crafting (not 1 click and produce 1000 items). However, RL time progression is also horrible. The best thing is to tie productiontime to playtime. For instance: For every 10 Rare monster you kill, you can craft 1 item X

This is my understanding of what a game needs to have for a consistent trade system.
And then trade needs to be COMFORTABLE. Spamming tradechat and forum is just NOTHING.

Personally I would like to see in PoE:

-highly reduced economical interaction between players. Trade needs to be optional.
-higher interaction in party

There should be better opportunities to make dedicated support builds. Currently you can go 100% DPS while having 8(?) auras? The aurasystem is in a bad place imo. Mana reservasion as a concept is an error.
There should be more of a "dedicated single aura" build or skills you can ACTIVLY use on teammembers to enhance them.

THIS is community. Not trade. Abandon trade and introduce more partyskills.