Something must be done about The Forbidden Trove Discord

Pretty sure Trixxar knows 'who' I am. No bigs either way; it doesn't matter in light of the argument being made.

I feel so bad when I read these threads though. The victim blaming is so prevalent and YET I don't think those laying the blame are necessarily to blame either: they're just playing the game the way it's turned out. It's just...a really shitty situation. I've met so many awesome people through PoE, both on here and in real life, and most of them have either quit OR found some way to enjoy the game in their own way separate to what is to me clearly a very toxic, unfriendly culture masquerading as superior. 'It's your fault for not paying attention/for trusting strangers/etc' is true in context but a fallacy when you look at how corrupt that context is. It's their fault for being scammed/suckered/deceived, yes, but it's GGG's fault for not only allowing that but implicitly (or explicitly, if Wilson is now name-dropping TFT) encouraging it.

People liken being cheated in PoE to leaving your door unlocked and then complaining you got robbed. Well, okay -- most of us lock our doors even though we've probably never had a stranger come up and try to open them with the intention of robbing us. BUT for all the moralising, we also know IF we leave the door open and we're robbed blind, the law WILL treat it like a theft. A crime.

And no, let's not make this a discussion of various police forces around the world, because that's irrelevant when the police force in this analogy *doesn't exist*...and yet to some degree they DO exist in virtually every other online game.

So yeah, it's totally victim blaming when someone gets done on PoE because they rightfully expect some measure of security based on what most other games do. You can put all the signs up you want warning people. We know they probably won't read them. Not that I think GGG ever would -- they washed their hands of this issue years ago.

And so it goes like this:

Someone gets scammed/cheated/whatever by someone else working 'outside' the game;

They complain/report it here, for lack of any official options, maybe threaten to stop supporting;

They're factually told it's not GGG's fault (DIRECTLY) so not supporting is punishing the wrong party (!?!??!!);


...And that's it.

That's where the process ends. The aggrieved crawl back into the game a much less happy, more untrusting individual (or they quit, equally unhappy) and whoever perpetrated it will just do it again, with GGG's lack of response tantamount to authority to do so.

That's a seriously fucked up situation.

And I argue anyone who is fine with that either hasn't been hit by it yet or is profiting from it. And maybe they'll never be hit by it because they're perfect and never make mistakes...or never put themselves in a position to be scammed/cheated i.e. play PoE their own way. But anyone in THAT position taking the high ground is basically saying, 'hahaha, you lost, you suck' even though they've never tried to play that game themselves. In short, a very ignorant if not condescending stance indeed.

I do know, I was speaking more broadly to readers, although I suppose it has a second layer here.

"People liken being cheated in PoE to leaving your door unlocked and then complaining you got robbed."

Haha, so true.


Ultimately perhaps I should be more forgiving of GGG. They are making their game the best way they can, and trying not to budge based on third party sites. I think its wrong, but in a practical way, not in some deep moral way.

I agree with Foreverhappychan the worst part is the unaware players who get hurt by it.

Yall want the absolute shit sites like TFT gone?
Yall want an auction house to make trades easier and faster?

Then a single thing needs to be done; When an item is traded, or dropped and picked up, by or to another player it becomes account bound to that player.

This means everything you find can still be traded and given away.

This also means no one can price fix because they can't buy up the bulk of an item to then fix the price.

This also means TFT no longer exists, because you can't hand someone over gear to use what's supposed to be a personal craft on it.

We can argue about things like currency being always tradable. But gear and items need to have a once-traded-bind-on-account.

If this is implemented, then an auction house just makes sense, and the culling of terrible mafia style owned sites like TFT tank.

I do oft wonder what approach Last Epoch will take when it decides to finally implement multiplayer and trade, given their more accessible crafting system.

They seem real hesitant to go ahead on it so far, putting it off more and more.

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Bleu42 wrote:

Yall want the absolute shit sites like TFT gone?
Yall want an auction house to make trades easier and faster?

Then a single thing needs to be done; When an item is traded, or dropped and picked up, by or to another player it becomes account bound to that player.

This means everything you find can still be traded and given away.

This also means no one can price fix because they can't buy up the bulk of an item to then fix the price.

This also means TFT no longer exists, because you can't hand someone over gear to use what's supposed to be a personal craft on it.

We can argue about things like currency being always tradable. But gear and items need to have a once-traded-bind-on-account.

If this is implemented, then an auction house just makes sense, and the culling of terrible mafia style owned sites like TFT tank.

MASSIVE +1

GGG needs to make the damn harvest crafts tradable. This whole TFT shit is so bad. Keep it for the services but shits like harvest crafts and betrayal rewards should ALL be tradable. They made the Alva temples tradable. Why not do the same for harvest and betrayal? This makes no sense.

id rather not have any form of safe trade at all, for anything, than items being account bound

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trixxar wrote:

Ultimately perhaps I should be more forgiving of GGG. They are making their game the best way they can, and trying not to budge based on third party sites. I think its wrong, but in a practical way, not in some deep moral way.

This one doesn't get a pass for me if anything we should be less forgiving, I liken it to Bethesda who lean in mod support for practically every release to fix all the holes they inevitably left.

GGG use the community labour as a crutch far too often and we benefit from it because they obviously spend development time on whats next. However some features found outside the game are so critical to how we play it they should be alarmed by how reliant we are.

Sticking to their design mantra is good I agree but at some point they have to realise they've already severely compromised the design on so many fronts by tweaking things to certain levels.

Why is it OK to balance content difficulty on using outside sources to understand the mechanics and build characters for example? Why is this an OK adaptation and they will adjust design for it yet trading crafts that aren't actually intended to be traded gets no adjustments.

I hate bound items i've always slagged it off in every mmo I've played and I started real early before it became common, however the experience GGG are trying to create for us cannot be made for all without binding items its just not possible.

I do think the can be traded X times flag is an interesting halfway house solution but their current one just doesn't work for me. It turns trading into an extremely high risk endeavour however the spawn rates are also set to that high risk value. I know i'm far from the only player who hasn't seen harvest exalts/T4 seeds in multiple leagues. I've not even seen a reforge keeping prefixes/suffixes lol.

I say this as someone who largely doesn't have to use TFT too, one of the only good things about HC is the low risk for interactions and I can hand shit over to have harvest crafts done without having to validate my parking ticket with the cabal.

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Exile009 wrote:

I do oft wonder what approach Last Epoch will take when it decides to finally implement multiplayer and trade, given their more accessible crafting system.

You and absolutely everyone else who's ever played it. It's such a huge, huge question. No doubt the folks at EHG are starkly aware of what happens when the trade situation gets out of hand. I don't NOT like the game but the giant shadow of impending MP and trade always kept me shy regarding really getting into it.

I guess part of why I groove to Wolcen (still! 2.3k hours and counting, baby) is the complete lack of an economy -- it's not balanced around the assumption people can trade for top-tier gear (it's not balanced at all really). You CAN trade, if you happen to play with one of the other hundred or so people still actively playing online. But you get everything you need just playing and taking advantage of the various pseudo-crafting tools in town. Who knows? Maybe that'd be a different story if more of the initial playerbase had stuck around (ie if the game hadn't faceplanted itself to death upon landing) but they didn't so in a way its almost complete failure kept it pure and safe from the attractiveness of being exploited. That and a perfectly fine, arguably superior zero-ping offline mode. Can't have a metagame if you don't have metagamers, heh.

Or many players at all.

So maybe that's the core of it. An old story from Yours Truly: PoE's economy had to take care of itself, to run-stumble-trip-recover-runagain before it really had a chance to be shown how to operate safely. And now it just sort of lurches for a few months between week-long wobbly sprints, like a perfectly functional lifelong alcoholic with an unseen liver screaming for relief. And worse: instead of realising the danger of this, GGG not only didn't make a healthier alternative but COPIED the player-made tool just in case it went down. By that point, the devs knew the cure would be more damaging in the short term (the only term that matters when you're flogging mtxes on the reg) than the disease.

It didn't look like it would end up this way. Drop trade in closed beta was a tolerable stop-gap and the population so small that name and shame for those abusing it actually worked. Then we finally got a trade window (*chorus of angels*) and all seemed well. THEN the existence of the item linking on the forum gave rise to web-based indexers because it became clear GGG weren't going to do shit with it -- and suddenly the 'trade chat' in game, GGG's last real attempt at facilitating player trade themselves, looked hilariously antiquated compared to a player-made mixture of Amazon (buy now button ftw) and Craigslist.

EHG know all this. Whatever they provide, it HAS to be better than anything players can make for themselves. I don't know if they've implemented item indexing on their forum yet or if people have to rely on screenshots to show off their shinies. But it would behove EHG to be very careful when it comes to inadvertently providing clever players with the tools to break their system.

Assuming it doesn't go the way of the Wolcen (and Grim Dawn, and Inquisitor, and Van Helsing, and Victor Vran...) and simply fail to be worth exploiting in that way. I do think there's a sort of sweet spot when it comes to buy-to-play games, some space with a consistent, manageable population happy to buy expansions/dlc who know if they break their toys the devs probably can't fix them.

Naturally, the sweet spot for F2P something else entirely: as many supporters from the playerbase as possible. As long as the game isn't so broken too many people no longer want to support, s'all good man. And when you're riding the inertia as GGG are, that 'too many people' is a whole hell of a lot more than those who, like the OP, find themselves despondent in the face of the game's hilariously apathetic attitude towards malicious players exploiting the unfortunately trusting.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Why is it OK to balance content difficulty on using outside sources to understand the mechanics and build characters for example? Why is this an OK adaptation and they will adjust design for it yet trading crafts that aren't actually intended to be traded gets no adjustments.

I hate bound items i've always slagged it off in every mmo I've played and I started real early before it became common, however the experience GGG are trying to create for us cannot be made for all without binding items its just not possible

Yeap.