Chris and his D3 Interview

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Miská wrote:

Trading is part of the game. Congratulations, you have found out this game is balanced around trading. Still not sure what you are arguing here. The argument is wether you can play PoE, and with minimal trading get anywhere. And the answer is YES!.

Do you need to be trading heavily to become wealthy? Nop. The game actually offers you a choice. Yes trading will get you more wealth faster, but it's not so unbalanced that it is trading or you are screwed. You can easily farm anything you want in PoE without to much effort. Wich is the whole freaking point. Poe.trade is convenient, probably even more convenient then GGG ever wanted PoE to have. But it still has enough barriers (Whisper people takes time) to not screw the balance towards mapping vs trading to much.

You can also make it through the game without a 6l but where is the fun in that? Saying you can make it somewhere without trading is like saying you can beat the game on a 2l, and while its possible the fun in that is limited to a specific niche of people. You are going to need to trade for a good weapon. A 6l. Various build-defining uniques. Can you play some bland cheap build and make it? You probably can but that limits 90% of the fun in the game. Trading is far more required than you think.

Yes, you need to trade to become wealthy. The only people who don't believe this are people who either don't trade that much, or people who don't know others who DO trade that much. Honestly, I play PoE more like you. I don't really trade a ton. However my friends do. I have a power trading friend who will amass more currency in 1 league than I can in 5 maybe 10 leagues. Its the same people who would argue with me about D2 and RMT when I had a friend who made a living selling duped runes. A living. He also made a living botting D3. He's since moved onto doing it in real life on Amazon, but you get the point. People would argue with me without any knowledge of the actual inner workings of D2 when I sit and watch this guy buy and sell thousands of dollars worth of runes all the time. If I didn't have that right in my face, I would have been as naive as everyone else in believing that RMT/dupes/etc was not a big deal. Same with trading. You dont realize exactly how far behind the curve you are just playing the game compared to watching someone play PoE.Trade. When you are sitting there wondering what you have to do to get up enough exalts to buy an Atziri and your friend is buying a Mirror, you realize that yes, if you want to be wealthy in this game you need to learn to abuse PoE.Trade.

All people want is a more regulated PoE.Trade. I fail to see how that is somehow detrimental to the game. People are tired of competing with private indexers. Live searches(basically d3 AH bots). Price fixers/scammers/etc. You are telling me there is no way GGG could implement a system that could combat those issues and not make the game worse? I don't believe that for one second. There isn't a whole lot they have to do to combat those and make it better for the average playerbase which is who should be focused anyways. Just having PoE.Trade built into the game automatically removes private indexers and 15+ live searches. And I have enough confidence that they could figure out a way to eliminate price fixers/scammers/etc without negatively affecting the game.

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Miská wrote:

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Do you need to be trading heavily to become wealthy? Nop. The game actually offers you a choice. Yes trading will get you more wealth faster, but it's not so unbalanced that it is trading or you are screwed. You can easily farm anything you want in PoE without to much effort. ...

In my experience time invested into trading vs into farming is uncomparable, respectively ten hours of playing can bring lets say 2ex while ten hours of trading brings 20ex even more, while farming is rather constant income. Without trading I get always stucked in the beginning of atlas or around level cca 85. Shaper or Uber Atziri no chance without trading.. I would like to know ur way of getting currency. PM pls.

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Rexeos wrote:

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Miská wrote:

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Do you need to be trading heavily to become wealthy? Nop. The game actually offers you a choice. Yes trading will get you more wealth faster, but it's not so unbalanced that it is trading or you are screwed. You can easily farm anything you want in PoE without to much effort. ...

In my experience time invested into trading vs into farming is uncomparable, respectively ten hours of playing can bring lets say 2ex while ten hours of trading brings 20ex even more, while farming is rather constant income. Without trading I get always stucked in the beginning of atlas or around level cca 85. Shaper or Uber Atziri no chance without trading.. I would like to know ur way of getting currency. PM pls.

I think at this point we both know that the vast majority of these people ARE traders who abuse PoE.Trade's shortcomings for wealth. Nothing would hurt more than for it to be implemented into the game in some form or fashion, and therefore you end up arguing with these people who want to keep the status quo.

Because I find it hard to believe this many people are that naive. They aren't. They like the current system because its pretty easy to amass wealth with and they want to keep it.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

3 of the 120hr+ leagues I played in, I never even saw an exalted orb drop. Nor a piece of equipment with an estimated value of 1ex+.

So I've been forced to be a 'budget meta' type player.

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If you suck at trading and theorycrafting both, that's an impossible hurdle to overcome in PoE.

well, its not really that youre forced to be a budget meta type player because of your drops, its the second thing, you become one by not being decent at theorycrafting and trading. You dont have to be great at them but being competent and active, not sucking at them, you wouldnt be in that position regardless of the drops. The theory of the game is what the entire thing revolves around so its not rly the trade system or the drop rates, its not getting to grips with the core game systems.

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Destructodave wrote:

You dont make it in this game unless you are capable of using PoE.Trade. You just don't.

people are lvl100 with 6L awesome gear in solo self found temp hardcore leagues, having killed shaper and uber. So what you said here is factually incorrect, plain as day anyone who cares to look at the situation can see that is not true.

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Destructodave wrote:

You dont realize exactly how far behind the curve you are just playing the game compared to watching someone play PoE.Trade. When you are sitting there wondering what you have to do to get up enough exalts to buy an Atziri and your friend is buying a Mirror, you realize that yes, if you want to be wealthy in this game you need to learn to abuse PoE.Trade.

I played harbinger for about 4 weeks, I dropped 1 exalt I think, didnt find any high tier uniques, didnt find a mirror or a mirror shard, didnt flip any items. Spent my time playing mostly tier 2 maps with mostly self found gear, self linked 5L armour, occasionally played some t6 and t7 maps. Put stuff I found playing the game in public sale tabs and sold them to people who messaged me, is that abusing poe.trade?




could I have got twice that by also flipping items? Sure. I could have got quadruple that by rushing restricted drop bosses with a meta killer build and farming them all day instead of t2 maps. But bottom line is you can just stroll to endgame fairly casually with a shit tier, mostly self found build, farm shitball white tier maps, throw items in a public stash tab and make a mirror. So if you want to be wealth you CAN abuse poe.trade, you CAN play poe.trade all day, but you dont NEED to, you can just play trash maps with a trash build and trash gear, stopping to respond to trade pms as they come along.





The thing is with all this, if people want GGG to listen to them then basing the argument for change on things GGG know are not true, making incorrect statements and misrepresenting quotes from the devs to sell the point just weakens the point being made, maybe even completely sinks it.

Id like to see poe.trade brought into the game, shut down the public api streams, remove the whoops, start to throttle searches a bit if excessive amounts of them are being made by an account all day every day.

I feel like an automated AH purely for currency/essence/fragment trades could be great. I wouldnt make item trading any easier though, perhaps cross instance trading, perhaps not. Id get rid of whoops and actually make it less powerful, just bring it in game and get the private indexers/3rd party stuffs out of the situation. Youre not getting any more functionality than you are now for item trades by doing this though, its the same or less functionality than you have now and if you lot are under the impression youre gonna suddenly become better off as a result of doing this sort of thing then think again.

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Frankenberry wrote:

Chris Wilsons main point wasn't that 99% of the gear he got in D3 was through the action house. His point was the cost of doing business on the action house was so low it the only viable way to play the game (besides buying items for real money).

Transaction costs in PoE are time and effort. You need to have these at a certain level or the game will erode into a mass trade simulator just like D3 did. And no - it's not a trade simulator at the moment despite what forum trolls are trying to tell you. Currently it's actually possible to make 100+C per hour with the right build (not necessarily an expensive one) and Atlas setup. Just look at the numerous "I cleared 1000 x T10 dunes - here are the profit in excel sheet"-type of threads on reddit.

If the transaction cost from trading goes close to 0 (which was the case in D3) it basically means you aren't killing stuff anymore to gain currency and loot (mainly to sell to others). You end up flipping instead.

yeah pretty much.



I think chris is generally pretty spot on. I even watch tv while playing, I watch tv while playing any farming game. Theres the questing, theres the big pressure endgame boss runs, but then theres lots of mindless endgame grinding and when ur grinding u kind of go into a reflex action sort of mindset. I like audio books, I think you can almost completely pay attention to an audio book and grind a grinding game at the same time, theres very little crossover there in the mental functions. Currently listening to Sword of the Lictor, first time Ive given this series a bash, pretty fking weird tbh, a somewhat aimless tumble through fairly random events has been in progress for the best part of 3 books in a row now.

Its pretty good tho in its own way, after spending my 20s with shulgin and lynch my minds been cast adrift on stranger seas than these, Ive developed a knack for enjoying a scenic road to nowhere.

The way PoE's trade is set up means you're forced to actually interact with the game and the players to do trades. Diablo 3's auction house let the system do it for you overnight. That's all I care about, I want flippers to have to spend as much time logged in as I do not flipping.

I don't get why people say things like... "But when you get the loot so easily, then what will you do?"

I'll play the fucking game!

Like... What-... Where's the hesitation coming from?

I don't kill monsters so that I can collect perfect loot and jerk off to my open inventory screen in town.

I collect loot so that I can go kill monsters.

GGG seems to have this backwards. No ARPG should be called a "loot game" by its developers. It should be called an action game. The sooner the itemization happens, the sooner a person can get back to the action.

Besides. Like I already said before. Just because there's an AH doesn't mean players get free items, or something. You still have to buy things with currency you collect/earn. You still have to reasonably price your sales if you want buyers. You still have to do the same EXACT things you currently do in PoE.

This community is so backwards.

90% TRADE 10% DROP

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Frankenberry wrote:

Chris Wilsons main point wasn't that 99% of the gear he got in D3 was through the action house. His point was the cost of doing business on the action house was so low it the only viable way to play the game (besides buying items for real money).

During the period when D3 had the auction house, the game also had some severe balance/progression problems. I went to the auction house, too. I didn't to be uber, I had to just to keep progressing. There was a point where I simply hit a wall - couldn't kill anything and kept dying. So it's not that the auction house was accessible, it's that the game difficulty wasn't balanced for a large chunk of the players.

Removing the auction house and essentially turning D3 into SSF, they had to re-balance the drops, and the difficulty. Besides Loot 2.0, they got rid of the four difficulty levels and made the difficulty scaling user-selectable. Game balance, in general, is basically what Blizzard has been working on in D3 ever since. (Plus The Necro pack, and the rift skinned like the original Diablo last January, but that was for fun.) At this point, I'm fairly confident that if there is a specific build I want to play in a D3 season, I can farm the gear for it. And even if I'm a sucky player who can't hack Torment XIII, I can still see all the content in the game, scaled to an appropriate level (with less reward than players who can play at higher difficulties).

In the closed beta for PoE, I would hit a similar wall around Act 2 Ruthless (there were 4 difficulties back then) - couldn't kill anything and kept dying. There was no poe.trade or even separate trade channels. What to do? Delete the character and start over?

And now, there is a lot of content in PoE that I'll never see. I can't even be arsed to level to 90, so I just bought a couple challenges to get to 24 in Harbinger. (Though I have the orbs, not even doing the "Use Currency Items" challenge.)

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

people are lvl100 with 6L awesome gear in solo self found temp hardcore leagues, having killed shaper and uber. So what you said here is factually incorrect, plain as day anyone who cares to look at the situation can see that is not true.

Yes, and I'm about as interested in playing a game balanced for the top 0.1% of gamers as I'm interested in skiing runs that are set up for the top 0.1% of extreme skiers.

The thing is, that top 0.1% could self-limit to make an easy game more challenging. Everyone else... well, they can go to poe.trade to make things easier.

In Diablo and Diablo 2, the better players I knew would do crazy things to make challenges. For example, in Diablo 1 there was the Iron Man - once the level one character left town, there was no return until Diablo or the character died (and remember, gear would break if not kept in repair). In D2, I knew someone who finished normal difficulty with the level 1 Fireball they started the game with - and no points in starts to equip any gear.

There are times I think PoE would be healthier if the game and/or the drops were scaled to be easier, and GGG had built a culture celebrating people who did self-made challenges, rather than over-powered speed.

And now to quote someone brillant:

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CelticHound wrote:

Here's an odd idea - perhaps the challenge leagues are the problem. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink says that once people are paid for doing something that they might do for their own enjoyment (e.g., drawing), they are less likely to do so without being paid. The challenge leagues are bribing people to play with MTXs and totem poles. So we see people dropping out as the league progresses, and the time between leagues feels pretty dead to me, except for some people cleaning their stashes in standard.

p.s. It seems that Charan had a similar experience with early D3. It's a different game now.


p.p.s. ShadyC - I agree with you.

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Pyrollusion wrote:

He said that trading is difficult and complicated by design and his reason was that when he played vanilla D3 he played the auction house more than the actual game and 99% of his upgrades came from there.

So the remaining 1% actually came from drops/crafting? Well, that's already a big achievement compared to PoE. I'm looking at my current character in Harbinger, and I can't find a single self-found item on him. 100% of the items that RF Jug is wearing came from poe.trade.

The thing is, PoE in its current state is not designed to be SSF-viable. The drop rates just don't support it. You're not expected to find the items you need yourself - you're expected to farm something, then sell it, and then buy whatever you need. I keep hearing this argument that an AH would "ruin the game", and I still don't get it. How the hell can better trading tools ruin the game that's balanced entirely around trading? If you wanna reduce the impact of trading on the game, you have to work in the opposite direction - increase the drop rates, make it so that you can farm specific uniques from specific monsters/areas like it was in D2. Until then, the vast majority of the builds will have to rely on trading, and making it a difficult and frustrating process does not add any value to the game.

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DGTLDaemon wrote:

So the remaining 1% actually came from drops/crafting? Well, that's already a big achievement compared to PoE. I'm looking at my current character in Harbinger, and I can't find a single self-found item on him. 100% of the items that RF Jug is wearing came from poe.trade.

The thing is, PoE in its current state is not designed to be SSF-viable.

It's not about being "SSF-viable" or not. It's about the balance between drops, trade and effort. I would've hated an instant AH just as much as I would've hated not being able to trade. Two evils. Two edges. Far left and far right, like politics, while the middle ground is the best thing for most people.



Not the best items in the world, but all of these are either self made or self found. It is possible, but with the "I don't identify much because I'm OK with trading for everything"-attitude, I can see the problem. If you buy VERY GOOD items the moment you hit level 70 - the chances of finding upgrades becomes low.