Trade Manifesto

Casual player opinion:

I have never killed shaper not even close, im usually ending at around lvl90 red tier maps. Making hundreds of low price trades / league.

Chris, I think you are right about obtaining gear to empower your character shouldn't be easy.

However, I went trough the comments until my post and I think there are some good idea what could make the life of the 90% casual gamers a bit easier and would engage to play the game more.

When casuals usually stop playing is when we dont have the right currency to make trades or run out of map. For example i may have 600 jewelers orbs but its hard to flip to chaos because of too much pain, afkers, price fixers, etc etc...
Or I want to buy something listed for 1 ex, I would give the equivalent amount of C but the sellers dont want to accept it cause they have to change as well..
As casual if you are out of Chaos orb you are trade dead.
Also it takes too much time and pain to trade the map what you are looking for. This is where are usually stop playing the league and since i have casual ppl around me I can tell you im not the only one who suffer because of this.

Obtain the gear via trade by searching for hours contacting with other players, offering, calculating, making hard decisions (eg resists) is fun and it should be stay like this IMO.

But here is a casual opinion:
Make an in game place where ppl can meet each other to exchange in game currency and maps sellers and buyers(eg.: everything what is not related to the character performance), and let players fast trade those items but ONLY those items until they are staying in the area! Lets call it Wraeclast Bank or smth like that. :)
I dont want to go too far but I would even close the trading of those items via API and websites..

With that, majority of casual players would have chance for making progression close to top 10 % but im sure the number of players who can kill shaper would not be more than what it is now. It would just close the gap between the bests and the rest and would make a bit more convenient experience for the majority of players without directly impacting the character development.

This is what we need not an automated system.
I think everyone understand the fear of easy trading and majority of community would agree with this, but you HAVE to understand that there are some aspect of trading which should be more convenient like as is today, because its pain in the ass for most of casuals.

Thanks you for reading my opinion. I hope it was understandable (not native ENG speaker)
Cheers
Syrius Lee


Oh and one more thing:
You made a small but great development in the game not so long ago. Im talking about the desktop warning while you receiving msg in game. If you list the players for AFK who is in desktop but ready to respond quickly it want against your developed feature?
IMO an in game selected option would be better. "Ready for trade"; "Maping may not respond"; "DND"; "Lab" smth like that. Tha in game AFK and DND really not the most precise way to show if the seller if available for trade or not.

I appreciate that you've finally written up an explanation behind your choices regarding trade. While I don't agree with most of your assumptions on trade, the fact that there's finally an official site for trade is great. Shame it took you so long, but better late than never.

P.S. Regarding automation - if you care about economy of your leagues, you need to crack down on bots. It is getting absolutely ridiculous.

Maybe an asynchronous trade method could be added with a limit on trades(buying) per hour to give some convenience for those different time zone transactions that never work out or those constantly afkers and price fixing players that make trading so bad.

Just something to be able to get the currency you need in a reasonable time would be a big improvement. I personally hate spending 30 mins to buy some chroms etc.

Maybe features like this could be switched on to evaluate towards the end of a league to gather data without potentially ruining the league experience at the start.

Thank you for this trade information. Always nice to see the reason behind changes.
I barely ever sell anything, and only trade when necessary, so it's nice that it's easy when I need to.
Though I guess I'm one of the few players that doesn't really care for items as long as I have what I absolutely need.

Chris, you are mostly correct in your assessment, but there is another option between the 2 games. The drop rate doesn't need to be reduced, you simply need a way to reduce the number of items in the game that could find their way on the market.

Other games do this by binding items that the character actually equips and uses, but I don't think that is the GGG way, since you want something different. I would propose a different approach.

Simply encourage player to destroy items for a reward. Maybe a new character/hideout décor that breaks items down and can bestow currency or better yet a new orb shard. I propose a new "Memory Orb" that reduces the death penalty by 20% (so reduce 20% of the 10% penalty would be an 8% penalty) for the next death that occurs. 40 shards could make an Orb. Maybe Memory Orbs could be enhanced by other memory orbs to increase the quality by 1% which would allow a Memory Orb at 20% quality to reduce the penalty by a maximum of 40%.

This would remove items from the market, introduce a new currency, while allowing the trade to be enhanced while not having to adjust the drop rates. You could grant memory shards based on the item rarity broken down:

Unique: 3 shards
Rare: 2 shards
Magical: 1 shards

Maybe certain items that are really powerful could be identified by GGG and the new vendor could offer trades through the market to players with an offer of more shards. This secondary method of offering the shards would give GGG more control and influence or what items are on the market because of a large number of players to avoid some portion of the death penalty.

This is really good and actually obvious perspective from developers POV, for which casual player is a vast majority of their audience.

Right now item value that you have found yourself is meaningfull to casual player. if there would be THAT ease optainable much better items on one click... this item-finding game will lose any sence after a single lore run!

"

Mischief67 wrote:

3. Items drop are abysmally bad to the point were I want "gold" (currency, whatever, it's still gold) over items any day. I then buy the items I need / want (because let's get real I won't get them from playing which is really sad) or craft through essences (because rng bad mods are so many).

crafted and dropped and are BIS for the build I've... bought a second kaoms, but dropped enough cards

Nonsense! When will this stubbornness end?

A player probably just quits seeing that all items that drop are garbage and trading is just too painful to go through, possibly a lot of players don't even know the trading tools exist and all they saw was the trade chat that has next to zero usefulness while being one of most horrifying experiences you could find in all games I can think of. The remaining players are those who enjoy SSF experience at game's current state, those who know of the tools and are willing to go through all the trade nonsense.. and those few unfortunate souls who still live unaware of trading tools and have incredibly great patience to deal with trade chat.
For majority of players it doesn't matter when some other player is able to kill Shaper and people who race are also probably using trade. The disparity argument makes no sense.
At the same time average player it is helpful there are more advanced players that fill the market with items for them without which they might just quit.

Reducing drop rate argument is complete nonsense. Where did you pull that one out of?
More difficult trade -> need more item drops. That is true. But implication is one way operation.
Reducing drops increases grind, not challenge. Grind is not a challenge. It is a patience filter.

I can see how easier trade would have me upgrade items more times since the exchange of items would be more alive, I would not hold out until I can't progress before I upgrade gear. I could reasonable buy gear for various stages of progression.
Overall easier trade would add more life in economy.

Automation argument? Complete bollocks!
How about have a 1 minute purchase cooldown in automated Trade House?
This should be equivalent to how much time going to someone's hideout and performing a purchase takes for a bot before going to next one they probably have queued up. Bots didn't become faster buyers, but all annoyance to players is gone, no dealing with offline/afk, no interaction with loading screens. No more problem.
1 min will probably expire while you search for next item.

Overall - reducing quality of user experience is never a good solution.

Chris, install Runescape, go to Grand Exchange, play around a little.


Still.. Thank you for the tiny improvement - seeing afk status.
And thank you for some sense of security that there is now an official trade site.
I don't understand how it took a year to make though. I assume the team you assigned to it was dropping an eye to it for an hour or 2 per week or so? Or does it have deeper integration into game's servers? If it uses regular API feed one with some web development experience could have whipped up a similar site in much shorter time.

I see what Chris is saying when he says trading shouldn't be easy. However, I think the trading gets a bit ridiculous when looking for items like maps, currency, and other lower-cost items that don't directly help your character. Completing the atlas is a fucking CHORE every league, because accumulating the necessary maps becomes difficult to do with the drop algorithm. I feel like currency trading should be easier too. Flipping things like exalted orbs really isn't that hard, but if I've got 150alts and want to flip it for some fusings or something, that can often be very time consuming. Trying to find someone who will jump out of their Shaped Spider Forest for that often takes more than a reasonable time.

I see you guys plan on doing something about AFK/DND people, but maybe put a toggle switch for people who are mapping and don't want to trade? No responses are what make my trading experience such a headache. That's like walking up to a stand at a fair with your wallet out and asking for something on the menu, and they just look at you and continue doing whatever they were doing before you bugged them.

somewhat offtopic

"

Chris wrote:

Items Matter.

Do they?

For me it's sad to see most of the items being worthless or at least lost a lot of value over time. beeing fully geared before even hitting lvl 90 and having nothing to go for but lvl which are realy small increases in terms of power/progression feels terrible.

Since the big incerease in drop rates years ago, prices mostly just went down, gearing is realy easy by now, the game lost a lot of long term motivation for me, there are just a couple chase or big ticket items left which is sad (which only seem to hold there value because they have at least some restrictions in how to get them -headhunter/nemesis mod, skyforce high ilvl requierement).
Removing ilvl restriction at a time where maps were way harder to get and sustain was a good decision at that time (in my opinion), that been said currently where maps are rather easy to get and sustain most of the time, restritions or lower drop rates would make items actualy matter getting a t1 item drop which is selling for 1c to a couple exalteds isnt realy fun or exciting. isnt it more fun to find something rare thats actual valuable, even thought it would happen less often than now?

I'm not asking to reduce the overall droprates or anything like that, i just want items to chase for. i'm totaly fine with ppl who doenst want to spend as much time as i do in the game to get their items especialy the build enabling ones. but isnt it also reasonable to give players who want to spend the time something to aim for?