GGGs reasoning on not making a SFL?

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Spoiler

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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.

Gotta love when GGG apologists have no arguments and have to resort to derailing.

"

ecogen wrote:

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Spoiler

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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.

Gotta love when GGG apologists have no arguments and have to resort to derailing.

Gotta love when GGG haters have no arguments and have to resort to derailing.

"

Worldbreaker wrote:

Gotta love when GGG haters have no arguments and have to resort to derailing.

It's all in the spoiler, and I agree with it. I've written similar posts myself in the past. Feel free to present your case :).

the "it is not advisable to use kaom's heart" made me giggle and stop reading as consequence of the giggles.

What exactly made you giggle there?

"

Phrazz wrote:

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ignarsoll wrote:

Hey, you missed a gem;

"

Mr_Mustasch wrote:

Trading requires effort and skill. A league where players can ignore this part of the game is more casual.

Oh god, were to begin? A real gem it is, indeed.

Tell me, what skills are involved? Value the item? Hit XYZ. Selling the item? Procurement does it for you. Responding "ok" on a PM? Skullfull, indeed. Asking if someone is online? Also skillfull.

If we HAD a barter economy, there MAY have been skills involved. We don't have a barter economy. We have a XYZ-economy, based on B/O's - which is not B/O's, but a price tag. Skills? Give me a break. It DOES require some effort, yes. But the day trading requires 1/100 as much effort as it would take to grind an item, we may be close to a fair balance.

The ability to read the market and determine whether a price is more probable to go up, down or stay as time goes on, constitute the core skill in trading. With it you can identify trades that have high odds of turning out a profit.

E.g. when GGG announced that they would re-balance auras and make some of them percent based the probability for Alpha Howl to increase in value was good. A good trader would invest in Alpha howls, bought at market price (3ex at the time), be patient, and later sell them at 5ex.

Crown of Eyes has recently gone up in value. What do you think about its future value? What are the probabilities? A good trader have an idea about this. Depending on the probabilities and the number of exalts he possess, he may choose to invest into X crown of eyes. Fully aware that there is a risk involved.

A not so skillful trader does not even entertain these thoughts!

"

Mr_Mustasch wrote:

The ability to read the market and determine whether a price is more probable to go up, down or stay as time goes on, constitute the core skill in trading. With it you can identify trades that have high odds of turning out a profit.

E.g. when GGG announced that they would re-balance auras and make some of them percent based the probability for Alpha Howl to increase in value was good. A good trader would invest in Alpha howls, bought at market price (3ex at the time), be patient, and later sell them at 5ex.

What you say is indeed true, skill can be involved in making trading more efficient. Still irrelevant, unless you were "OMFG I'M GONNA TRADE SO MUCH" when you first thought about playing PoE. I might be wrong but I doubt people started playing PoE to take advantage of their trading skills.

The argument "trading takes skill so trading isn't the path of least resistance" is pure bullshit.(In this type of game)

"

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.

Well, I’ll start off by saying that I agree with your aura point. Aura characters are way too strong at the moment. There’s no downside to making a 5 aura character, and this should be looked at.

Your trade analysis makes some good points, but then loses its momentum when you mention Eve, and entirely derails when you wrap up talking about party skills as if they and trade are mutually exclusive.

You are entirely correct that trade tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of the wealthy. The more wealth you have, the more you can leverage. But your point that this is bad for the casual player is entirely wrong. A casual player will have no way to access most of the items in this game if it is not for more dedicated wealthy players. The cost of this is giving up high level crafting for most players.

In Eve online a lot more attention is paid to the economy. However, you see the same thing. The players with the most time, knowledge, and money are able to basically run the game for the other players. The whole system feeds into these top guilds and players.

But let’s talk PoE. What happens if you take out trade here? First, I don’t think item drops change at all. It’s easy enough to crush through content and beat the game with no trading at all. Orb drops can increase some. I’ve never seen an eternal orb drop. It would be nice to. People wouldn’t party any more than they currently do. They would probably party less. I run groups with many people that I met through trading…

The problem in PoE when you take out trading is that gear is so diverse. In order to complete some builds you really have to have a large economy. Trading allows people to swap their ability to craft for a specific item they need. It’s something that synergizes well with a diverse item pool.

So if I separate your points
1. Trading is bad, because sometimes casual players lose at trading.
2. More focus should be made on promoting player interaction.
I fully agree with the second, but the first is weak, and not really a good enough reason when placed against the benefits trading provides.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

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

No. In Path of Exile, it's precisely the opposite: trade decreases the divergence between rich and poor, casual and pro.

One principle tenet of the SFL crowd, from what I can tell, is the concept that trading makes the game easier... so much easier that it's virtually required behavior. Note that the "required trades" do not take the form of big-ticket items, but more sensible purchases such as Reduced Mana and CWDT gems, and those cheap-but-usable dual-res pieces which allow you to cap your resistances on reaching Act 3 Merciless. Those early trades have by far the best benefit-to-cost ratio, while a Kaom's or a Shav's has a much lower benefit-to-cost-ratio. So when people say "trading is overpowered," they mean it's overpowered for the bottom of the pyramid, to the extent of trivializing the content. (I think it's very powerful but not overpowered, because it decreases in effectiveness as the pyramid is climbed.)

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ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

No. It's precisely the opposite: nice items work their way down the pyramid while currency goes up. The core of trade is a hand-me-down system; as players near the top find more and more items which are nice, but not upgrades for themselves, those nice-but-not-self-usable items move down the pyramid, while currency moves up to the top, where players who can't trade for upgrades can try to make their own upgrades. Big upgrades (ex: Kaom's Heart) almost never move up the pyramid this way, with the exception of players who know they'll never use them (ex: ES devotees); the movement of such items is negligible and can be safely ignored.

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ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

This is stupid advice. Some people do this anyway, most likely with a Kaom's which is found early in a league, but the price of Kaom's would rise over time as more people seriously seek out and bid on BiS gear. Even if you're confident you're going to sell the Kaom's, it gains value as you hold onto it, so getting rid of it faster isn't smart.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

While this is true (thanks to quotation marks), it misses the point. The only reason to use those currencies is because you literally can't trade for upgrades, because they don't exist. It's always cheaper and better to buy an item as a hand-me-down than to make it yourself. So you while you might have good cause to be envious of the gear such players wear, you should not be envious of the method they have to resort to in order to hopefully upgrade.

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ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

Even without trading, it would still be essentially the same situation. The nature of the orb system itself encourages hoarding — that is, nonuse — until you have access to the very highest tiers of affixes. The proper use of orbs is to create mirror-worthy gear... even in self-found situations.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

Exactly the opposite. Two key mechanics mitigate this.

First, trade doesn't fuel the snowball effect; it mitigates it. As I said earlier, the more you are bottom-of-the-pyramid, the more trading benefits you. Trading helps players who play less by giving them cheap (sometimes, virtually free) access to gear found by players who play more than them.

Second, the rarity of upgrades mitigates the snowball effect. If you view wealth generation from farming gains in terms of absolutes, I'll grant you that improving your character improves your killspeed and IIR, and thus increases your gain per unit time. However, as your gear gets better, the gear you're looking for - upgrades - becomes more and more scarce. This system has diminishing returns; a piece of gear which is absolutely perfect is orders of magnitude more difficult to find than one which is only a small handful of points off of perfect. Such a player might find more non-upgrade tradebait, and thus get more currency, but because it's harder to RNG an upgrade, he needs more currency to get an upgrade anyway.

Overall, getting worried about the snowball effect is kind of like getting worried about smallpox. Your argument assumes that the powers-that-be are blind to the issues and haven't implemented symptoms to control the problem. However, they have, almost to the point that, for all intents and purposes, we can proceed as if such a problem doesn't even exist.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

As mentioned earlier, the snowball effect is largely mitigated. I'm not sure about exact item count, but that 20x time player will not be 200x stronger. He won't even be 20x stronger.

But a player who plays 20x longer should be substantially stronger than his 1x counterpart. Very, very substantially. I guess I can understand some of the frustration of being more skilled than someone, but they play much more than you, so someone with half your IQ has better gear. It's a game, dude. Deal with it.

Also, flipping is a skill. (I didn't say trading, I said flipping.) It's a difficult skill because it's a PvP skill. Some players get very far by buying low and selling high, and to those who do, I can't really feel disrespect. They got it by being smart, after all. I guess I'm just not the envious sort.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

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.

ARPGs are collectables games: you go around and collect things, until eventually you have some significant fraction of the entire set with which to create your builds. Saying an ARPG is not suited to trading is like saying Magic the Gathering isn't suited to trading... in other words, it's an idiotic thing to say.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

Imo those requirements need to be fulfilled to have trade:

-itemsink. Most important, but not existant in PoE

Replace "requirement" with "desire" and I can actually get on board for this one. Item sinks are good.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

-loottables and farm area diversity. you cant farm for a specific orb in PoE

I also think being able to farm specific areas for specific items is a good idea; it worked in Diablo 2. Previously, I've only thought of it in terms of gear, such as a farmspot for bows; the orb idea is kind of clever.

"

ExiledRenor wrote:

-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

Horrible ideas, burn them with fire.

A multi player game where you can be in a guild together, chat together, party together but cant trade items... Doesn't sound like a great option for a multi player game.