'Trading Orb': The One Currency to Fix Trade

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1eyedking wrote:

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It'd make bartering be a thing again, and collaterally it would force players into actually using more...

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

This might actually be the only "trade improvement" idea I've ever seen which is WORSE than an instant buyout system. I don't want to be too harsh, but it's clear to me that you really haven't put any thought into what this would be like in practice, because what you're proposing doesn't even make sense.

Problems off the top of my head:

1 - What's to stop players from just dropping items for each other and circumventing the entire trade orb system? Fear of getting ripped off, I guess, until you realize that this is how services already work in this game... which is something the community figured out how to resolve several years ago. Your trade orb makes 3rd party groups like TFT mandatory for all players not willing to play "SSF-until-a-mirror-drops" mode, and puts an unprecedented amount of power into the hands of large organized guilds.

2 - Speaking of Guilds... the Guild stash? Surely you didn't forget that the guild stash exists when you were spending one third of a second coming up with this idea... right?

3 - If (somehow) problem 1 were avoided via instanced loot etc, you have still made NOTHING below the value of an Apothecary card tradeable, which means 100% of drops found by anyone except the top 0.01% of players have literally zero value unless it happens to be an immediate, direct gear upgrade for the build they are currently playing. You say that things like heist contracts need to be run by the people who drop them, but... why would anyone do that? What is the reward they are hoping to get at the end of the heist, if those items also can't be traded to other players? Do you honestly think people who ALREADY aren't running Heist are suddenly going to start after you make the rewards LESS valuable? Because that is the assumption your entire concept is built upon, whether you realize it or not.

4 - How do you even expect these trade orb trades to work? Like, I want to hear you explain it, just to see if the version in your own head even makes sense. Because if stacks of currency can't be traded, it means all items have to be swapped directly for other items. But as we've already established, making the trade orb rarer than div/ex means there's a VERY small number of possible items which even could exist in that tradeable range because you've essentially removed all trades below 15-20 divs from the game. Want to buy someone's mageblood? Better hope you get these three exact specific things which add up to roughly equal value and which the mageblood seller happens to want. Then you'd better have three trade orbs to use on them, and after all of that you have to hope that the seller doesn't change their mind or find a better deal somewhere else.

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1eyedking wrote:

Trading is currently way, way too powerful, frictionless, and defeats the achievement of players progressing by themselves, which is the heart and soul of any RPG—action or not.

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1eyedking wrote:

Trading is currently way, way too powerful, frictionless, and defeats the achievement of players progressing by themselves, which is the heart and soul of any RPG—action or not.

Thus, let me introduce the holy grail of Orbs, the fix-it-all band-aid this game needs, the Trading Orb! An item that from now on players would require to apply on their items or stacks to be able to trade them.

Ingenious, huh?

This extremely infrequent currency orb could be made to drop only during yellow/red maps (thus forcing the campaign and early mapping to be strictly SSF), and it'd make players behave much more strategically when it comes to trading and pricing items.

It'd make bartering be a thing again, and collaterally it would force players into actually using more of their crafting currency on their own items since they wouldn't be able to do bulk trades.
Players'd also have to start running their own content again instead of easily dumping things like Heists, Logbooks and Maps into the market, since the Trading Orb would be limited to few, key strategic trades which would be wasted on these kinds of items.
We'd have to, you know, actually *play* the damn game again for once.

It should be rarer than an Exalt/Divine, and not affected by IIQ/R.

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SilverWF wrote:

As I said in other thread, in the MMO world

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SilverWF wrote:

this is called GOLD (or silver or whatever tugriks), but ONE, SINGLE currency, used for everything.

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SilverWF wrote:

TLDR: 157% support the idea of single common currency, but it shouldn't be rare - opposite, it should be COMMON!
Rare currencies are favors nolifers, nerds and bots only, and punish regular players, which are majority here.