Trade Feedback and Suggestion

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j33bus wrote:

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vio wrote:

i think that's what they're afraid of: more people trading and not playing the game to get their items.

and yes, my post was maybe over the top a bit :)

The thing though is that this is a very weird way to deal with this fear, they already balance item acquisition around trading, so they've already strongly incentivized people to trade for items. Similarly, they are encouraging people to play the game more by making trades take longer thus making people spend more time trading. Also they've said that their solution to allowing people to engage in content they want is basically trade for the scarabs. They've already done a lot to encourage people to trade and trade a lot. The typical experience is once you buy gear once you're probably never going to find gear better than that without trading. I think the problem of wanting people to find improvements and content without trading is a lot more binary than GGG thinks. I think they've already created all of the problems they're worried about, they've just reduced to population who is willing to deal with trading at all. Not from the perspective of the people who just want to play self found because they like the idea and more from the perspective of "this really sucks I'm just not going to engage with this part of the game"

From the item acquisition and content engagement perspective, it's weird to me how anyone could feel like you're not supposed to be trading constantly. If you want to engage in any past league content, that requires a significant amount of trading, you at the very least need sustain a very large pool of maps which requires obtaining lots and lots of sextants, or trading for the maps outright. If you want to do more content you can either buy scarabs or the content itself. To do the Elder you need lots of specific maps prepared, which requires a similarly large pool of maps.

You have to trade a lot in the game, just to sustain a high end map pool, that or you have to be consistently grinding low level content for the necessary currency to sustain a pool like that, and that's a similarly weird feeling, that you are not supposed to be challenging yourself or pushing your character, you're supposed to be doing content that you have out leveled, and are getting an experience point penalty for.

So if this were a game where content was just provided on a completion basis I'd be right there, we don't need to trade all the time for upgrades, trade would be fine, hell I'd disagree with GGG that trading was an important part of the game, I'd say it would be minor at best, I certainly never bothered in other games. The thing is though as the game is now trading is just necessary to not be doing the content that is provided to you. Trading is necessary to not be grinding content that you're penalized for playing.