Floored by the power spike of TRADING. This will ruin the game.

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

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Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index#1288 wrote:

Fine then I need to use cheatcodes to enjoy the game. You are 100% correct - now let me enjoy my game with cheatcodes, I am not gonna force you to use em

am i obstructing you form enjoying the game? we are discussing the impact of trade and balancing the game around it....

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HaxorDoge#8588 wrote:

Just a legit question:

• Isn't this (trading and engagement with other people/economy) the whole point of game having a constant internet connection and online/coop features and quite punishing and indeterministic loot drops in the first place? Otherwise, it could be just turned into an offline game with an optional couch coop mode.


Another things to consider:

• With player crafting effectively being a miniature version of a slot machine, where everything is 99,9% RNG, and there is little to no way to somehow invest time and effort into chasing specifically items relevant for your build (especially before you reach late end-game) - there is effectively no other valid way to gear-up, and time investment and luck required to do anything meaningful in the game will be too punishing for a lot of players.

• Modes like Solo Self-Found exist as an optional gameplay feature to address specifically players, who are willing to engage with such restrictive and challenging environments. And it is important to keep in mind, that not everyone is even actually and physically able to allocate significantly higher amounts of play time, which is the only way to have a sustainable progress with modes like SSF.

• When game has too many punishing mechanics - players will always go the way of least resistance. Experience penalties, progress roll-backs, effective single death system at the end-game activities, very high costs of respec - all these things are creating a situation when players are afraid to make any mistakes or to experiment, because mistakes and experimentation will cost players hours of lost progress and lots of lost currencies/gold.

• Environments, where deliberate and questionable punishment is being used as a way to make game "fun" - they are destined to end-up with meta-gaming, meta-builds, over-optimizations, everyone copying one another, everyone doing everything they can to avoid punishment. This is just a natural human instinct, and this is the reason why in every game there is significantly higher number of regular SC players, when compared to SSF or HC players - far less number of people are willing to deal with it or willing to invest time into it, it is seen by vast majority of people as a just-for-fun thing to do when you don't have anything else on your list.


Important points:

• I totally understand and share the OP's concern that trading is the way of making a character very strong very fast. I totally understand that it removes the excitement of chasing new items, or getting a lucky craft or drop - but there is really no other way around it. And I totally understand that it trivialises a lot of game aspects and mechanics.

• Alternative to trading would be powerful and deterministic crafting system, but for whatever reason this game does not want to focus on crafting at all - this is currently just a mindless slot machine where you can test your luck, but in 9 case out of 10 you will do better just by spending those currencies and mats on trading for actual good items.

• But even if you will have powerful crafting system - it will be exactly 1:1 situation, but the opposite way. Instead of trading for completed items - players will be trading for crafting mats.

• And if you will have both trading and powerful crafting at same time - it will just tremendously trivialize everything.

• The only way of making it without both trading and crafting is the Diablo 3 way. When on launch this game had crazy RNG drops and trading, but later on removed the system completely and buffed gear drops. So in that game 90% of trash items were completely removed from loot tables, all good/relevant items have very high chance to drop, and you just get any build online by simply playing the game for a few hours. Of course, there is still a chase for those better stat rolls, Primal/Ancestral versions of items - but the skeleton of any build can be collected by anyone super easily with no effort. Because when you don't have trading, and you don't have powerful crafting - you have to give players better drop chances and less trash drops in order to keep majority of people engaged with the game.

• And if you will have powerful drops mixed with both or any of two others (trading and crafting) - this will make everything you do in the game even more boring and pointless.


So this is just an endless debate with no correct answer, and every single approach will have downsides. Developers and game designers are running the same hamster wheel over and over again in a search for holy grail - but it is just not there. It is impossible to make a system that will satisfy everyone, that is the reason why the game is divided into SC SSF and HC segments - to give people a freedom of choice, of how they want to approach the game. So rise of complaints that SC players are having an easier time gearing than SSF players - this is just like if HC players would be complaining that SC characters are not completely gone on death. These are just different game modes, and everyone is completely free to choose whatever fits oneself better, and there will never be one-size-fits-all solution, because it is just impossible to do so. And trying to enforce something onto everybody with no choice options left - this will just lead to significant loss of player base.


So without turning it into enforced SSF mode for everyone, there are just three things you can really do:

1. Powerful trading,
2. Powerful crafting,
3. Powerful drops.

So developers are just constantly taking a little bit of each one of those three and trying to shift things around. But when you have trading at all - it just always effectively nullifies other two, because it becomes the most efficient way to do things. So the real question is - how many players would be still playing this game (including PoE 1) if trading was completely removed from the game, or had been significantly cut-down into allowing only very specific and insignificant things to be tradable? - and to answer that question is very easy - you just look into SSF number of players, and that's it - that is your maximum player base. And - would you play this game exclusively in SSF mode every league from now on and onwards for the next 10 years or so? And - how many more players will be burned-out and lost on the long run?

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Cosmic711#3173 wrote:

The biggest problem I see is that a lot of players coming from other genres (MMO games) are conditioned to save their currency to trade with, and so they will nerf themselves early on by not crafting when they should be.

I really think we need a way to craft items in the early game without consuming valuable currency. It feels bad to throw an exalt on an average item when you can instead buy an incredibly overpowered item for the same price instead.

And I don't think most players want to cheese the campaign like that, but they will not understand how easy this currency is to acquire later so they won't want to take any chances.

It's like how every player I introduce to PoE picks up every blue/yellow item through the entire campaign and it's really hard to watch but it's because they don't know what to expect. It then feels really bad for them when they reach end-game and make all the money they were saving through the game in 15 seconds.

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The_Song#4903 wrote:

....It really should not be hard for anyone to understand that the existence of trading is detrimental to anyone who doesn't use it, and that SSF is not a valid solution to disliking it.

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RickyDMMontoya#7961 wrote:

Anyone arguing against it is evil and wrong.

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ReggShanks#0071 wrote:

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RickyDMMontoya#7961 wrote:

Anyone arguing against it is evil and wrong.

It's a bit of a leap to assert that people you disagree with about a video game are evil on the basis of that disagreement.

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Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index#1288 wrote:

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ReggShanks#0071 wrote:

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RickyDMMontoya#7961 wrote:

Anyone arguing against it is evil and wrong.

It's a bit of a leap to assert that people you disagree with about a video game are evil on the basis of that disagreement.

Its not, trading is by choice - enforced not trading is not a choice. I rather chose to play the game I enjoy it rather than being forced to play it in a specific way in which I might not enjoy it, then my choice would be to just not play the game, since I don't enjoy it.