Game should encourage vendor usage in Campaign

So many people don't even use vendors, even for selling magic or rare items for gold. And generally they are the people who complain about lack of currency drops in campaign.

How to encourage using vendors:
- After entering the first town, make it mandatory to open vendor,
- When opening vendor, reward character 1000 gold,
- In campaign vendors, auto highlight equipments with resistances and related weapons. Like if character equips bow, then highlight all bows.
- Make sure all those related items are first in the page, not the last. Including weapons and other equipments.

Vendors are fare more efficient than currencies. Random mod from currency nearly always bad, and won't solve what people complain about.

Every fastrunner I watch always check vendors first when they enter towns. And when they are in town, they spent most of their time for looking vendors, it should tell why vendors are so important in poe2.

Funny.. i never sell to vendors.. always disenchant.. craft great stuff. Playing ssf. 2.5M g in 0.1.. nothing to spend it on but item gambling.

100%

Even if the vendor doesn't have an upgrade for me, I still buy out anything with a socket and/or quality just to get the shards. But that's assuming people are going to pick up everything that's valuable and sell it.

Relying on ground drops for upgrades is borderline futile so you have to utilize every option available. It also shocks me how a lot of people just ignore trade unless they absolutely have to. 90% of the meaningful weapon upgrades I get are from trade.

Like, I get it, the loot is stingy and crafting is just 100% lottery with precious few orbs during the campaign and people feel like they can't progress, but between vendors and trade I'm able to cruise through the campaign relatively easily with an okay-ish build and just a high DPS weapon I trade up to a couple times during each act.

Most weapon upgrades can be had for 1-2 exalts, assuming you haven't wasted them on trying to roll good affixes on your current gear. I don't invest in leveling gear AT ALL except for when I buy it. There aren't enough currency drops to warrant gambling them on gear you'll outpace in 5 - 10 levels.

Even without trade, the SSF peeps seem to get by just fine by being smart about how they gear up.

Vendors are really in a bad shape. Vendors are exactly the same as in Poe1, but in Poe2 vendors are much more important.

Most of people don't even open vendors. GGG fix this please, modernize vendors

I always buy quality and socketed items from vendors and sell/disenchant constantly. Even with all that I still don't have enough regals since crafting frequently bricks items. Exalts are almost non existent in the campaign.

Should be 2 shards minimum for rares.

Trading is such a joke that I avoid it unless absolutely necessary, at which point I'm lucky if I get a response or someone who doesn't raise the price at the last second.

"

ImTiredOfThisShip#7253 wrote:

So many people don't even use vendors, even for selling magic or rare items for gold. And generally they are the people who complain about lack of currency drops in campaign.

How to encourage using vendors:
- After entering the first town, make it mandatory to open vendor,
- When opening vendor, reward character 1000 gold,
- In campaign vendors, auto highlight equipments with resistances and related weapons. Like if character equips bow, then highlight all bows.
- Make sure all those related items are first in the page, not the last. Including weapons and other equipments.

Vendors are fare more efficient than currencies. Random mod from currency nearly always bad, and won't solve what people complain about.

Every fastrunner I watch always check vendors first when they enter towns. And when they are in town, they spent most of their time for looking vendors, it should tell why vendors are so important in poe2.

Are you a mobile game developer?

"

ImTiredOfThisShip#7253 wrote:

So many people don't even use vendors, even for selling magic or rare items for gold. And generally they are the people who complain about lack of currency drops in campaign.

How to encourage using vendors:
- After entering the first town, make it mandatory to open vendor,
- When opening vendor, reward character 1000 gold,
- In campaign vendors, auto highlight equipments with resistances and related weapons. Like if character equips bow, then highlight all bows.
- Make sure all those related items are first in the page, not the last. Including weapons and other equipments.

Vendors are fare more efficient than currencies. Random mod from currency nearly always bad, and won't solve what people complain about.

Every fastrunner I watch always check vendors first when they enter towns. And when they are in town, they spent most of their time for looking vendors, it should tell why vendors are so important in poe2.

Aside from "reward 1000 gold", the rest are good points. Bonus: make them buy a different weapon to their class archetype, teach players to put the normal attack of that on their toolbar, show them how this auto-swaps. Heck, put a "dying merchant" in the first zone before getting into Clearfell town if need be.

If you aren't using vendors how are you progressing at all? Relying on drops? Vendors are the lifeblood of the campaign and always have useful stuff.

Maybe that's why people are complaining about loot and finding it hard.

Edit: I am actually shocked people don't use vendors.

I guess one of the issue here lies in conflicting game design ideas. GGG always underlined how they wanted drops to feel important again, to give that dopamine rush to hopefully find a new item, especially since items where pretty much all "bases for crafting" in PoE1l; loot didn't matter at all in most cases.

So having "encourage to use vendors more" is pretty much the opposite of that original goal for PoE2. Drops are still very rare and far apart, and using vendors just shifts the problem somewhere else.

I'm not saying you are wrong. I just think the game still has a fundamental loot problem in its current state. Personally, I pretty much exclusively upgrade equipment through vendors and disenchanted currency, but honestly: In a loot focused game, that just doesn't really feel all that great...

Literally says on the loading screen to check vendors every level.