Trade Manifesto
The sad thing is that only real posibility to aquire upgrade or build-defining item is via trading. This is still big problem for me, when i play arpg game based on items hunting.
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" I disagree with that. If I could trade, I would find an upgrade, could progress in the game and find many more. If I can´t trade, my char is stuck as seen in the past two leagues, where a key item just didn´t drop. The journey you speak of, could only be there, if we actually had a fair chance to find loot on our own. Sadly, the drop rates are so low, that these drops like six link, baron, shav just never happen. I play since Parendus and not once did I find a six link :( " Quite the opposite. Right now, streamers like ZiggyD who trade all day, are on top of the game. Players who don´t trade, are at the bottom. Trading is already the reason, why some are on top and others not. If you would make trading easier, than everyone could be on the top. D3 proved that well with the AH there, everyone was able to get somewhere. " Doesn´t seem like a problem in other games though? Besides that, you could make trading at an AH limited and for currency. Make that currency bound to the char and no bot could abuse anything here. There are ways to fix your fears ;) " I don´t care what others think about me in a video game, therefore I don´t have to prove that I did something. SSF for me, was all about actually having a fair chance to get somewhere in this game, without trading. I did expect better drop rates, a better XP gain, improved crafting odds and the like. I play SSF with or without that mode, I do so as I find todays gamers super toxic and unfun to interact with. That's why I play SSF, not because I want to feel superior to someone else :D Still, I thank you for the post. It was well written and clear. There is no doubt about it, that you have a philosophy about your game and that you stick with it. I sadly, can´t agree with it, but that´s not important anyways. An AH or improved trade / SSF experience, seems very unlikely now, but I respect your view and have to keep looking for a game that is just more friendly for a casual heart like mine. Still will try 3.1 :D | |
" Don't care about the ladders, you can remove those for all I care... But otherwise I totaly agree! Yeah, I was seeing SSF as "adjusted" in regards of currency/crafting cost... but no... Just doing gradiual upgrades taxes the currency I got to the max... trying to 6L? forget it! So if you really worry about trading... take another look at SSF and do some adjustments (and yes remove the migration to non-SSF) Last edited by Dharall on Nov 6, 2017, 7:04:54 AM
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Honestly, I like the idea of a boycott until offline and/or auction house functionality is integrated. But that would mean I would never play the game again. I guess I will have to neuter my supporter tendency... somehow.
I want to play an ARPG, not a trading sim. |
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Firstly, thank you for continuing to work on the game. Sadly, I have been really busy with work so haven't had a lot of time to play recent leagues, but continue to support the game, and hope I get to play more soon.
I always see loot as a means to an end, not the reason to play. I think trading helps enjoy the experience because you can often not find in-game things you need and your progression can get stuck unless you find items you need to get you through the next phase of content. I think with the speed of the game, characters and their items have lost the meaningful impact they once had, a lot of people went years without even getting one 6L item, you can how churn out many of them in a single league. I think the game is far from where the vision of the game was at inception, however, you have held on to the same thoughts about trading even though PoE has altered radically over that period of time. " I think it is more important that items are desirable. There are still hard to get items in D3 now, with no trading, that people get great enjoyment in finding, even though they can't trade/sell it. A big problem ARPGs have is once you start progressing through the levels and you have many tiers of stats within a single affix, you end up with lottery-like probability in terms of finding a useful item to anyone let alone an upgrade. The game becomes a junk generator. There is a significant issue when players filter out almost anything other than more valuable currencies/items. D3 went from a similar system to PoE re affixes, they had many more tiers for their items though, and they went from an AH system with numerous tiers, to a non-AH system where the stats were tailored to the character/class you were playing and gear had very little in terms of a randomness to stat values. It made the game less interesting, even though it mostly produced items with good stat combinations that were useful. I don't believe we need extreme systems. Most players play in temporary leagues and most players who play for any period of time will play a number of different characters within a league. There is a definite advantage to generating currency, particularly early on and you can manipulate the market giving yourself a competitive edge, however, how long does the competitive edge of new leagues last? A week? Two weeks? After a while people are just trying out different builds. This game doesn't have the far reaching implications due to the short lifespan leagues. " I think people want to trade because they are not getting what they need in-game. I'd play SSF, however, it would just put a line through any character that had a very specific gear requirement. I'd like to meet a SSF golem build character for example, would probably be 99% of the time playing with different minions. I think you have created a trap, one you could resolve. You could alter the loot drop algorithm so that it was increasingly more likely to have affix tiers more closer to the player or gave incrementally better stat bands than the gear they already have, Dungeon Defenders II uses a similar stat tiering system so you are guaranteed to find upgrades, periodically. The problem with PoE is that there is no subtly to the loot system, there is just pure RNG, it has only been things you have added to the game and the significant increase in clearing speed that has altered the experience. If you wanted, you could tweak how loot was generated and how useful it would be. That would mitigate the desire to trade. Ultimately, the problem is players advance far quicker than their gear does and the probability of finding an improvement declines dramatically the longer you play. I don't think any of this is linked to easy trading. By the time people have hit level 80, the "power players" have filtered out almost everything that drops from the game other than more valuable currency or very specific items of value. It is a product of probability. It has been proven time and again that you progress faster if you don't participate in the spirit of the game. You will get more currency if you don't spend any time picking up or identifying the tsunami of garbage that is generated, it is more efficient to just pick up currency and buy what you want from people who do not know enough about the game that have picked up the shit that you need and have gone through the process of finding the lottery item you are after. All the current trade system does is make it a bit less convenient to get an item, it is not a barrier, it is just an inconvenience. I agree with you that it would be far more desirable to get everything you need from the game loot system, but it is generally not my experience. I would say on a lucky run, the items a particular character has in terms of good items for the build and not just level gear, I would be lucky to acquire more than 2 or 3 items myself per character when I used to stop and identify every yellow item in the game. Now it is usually zero, the amount of time and effort you save just killing stuff and picking up currency is just the path of least resistance. The game is not in sync between level/clear speed, character development speed and loot upgrade speed. The bottleneck is loot and thus people look for ways around the bottleneck. The issue is that you are holding the vast majority of players at ransom, enforcing a horrible trade system in an attempt to slow down the minority of the players who have broken the game and don't play it in the spirit you desire. The reality is it is not slowing them down much at all. I assume the other game reference is referring to D3 during the AH. It was easier to get something from the AH than get it yourself, similar probability issues that PoE has, although D3 had far more affix tiers than PoE does. The AH wasn't the issue, poor balance was combined with horrific game balance and poor probability. The content wasn't very easy to do so access to the pool of higher tier items wasn't trivial, in PoE terms, most classes/builds needed red map items to be able to even consider doing red maps, you had only two builds that could realistically farm the gear, however, you could do moronic things like farm gold fairly easily just stacking on gold find gear. This lead most people to farm gold, and eventually flip AH items, then buy gear good enough for their crappy builds to play content they couldn't do themselves. It was a spiral of unsatisfying gameplay and the path of least resistance was to play the AH. PoE still has issues. Level speed is far too high compared to the probability of finding stat improvement on yellow gear. Clear speed is far too quick. We basically have the same loot probability ratios back when we were groundslamming mobs and taking forever to kill one pack but everything else has sped up to light speed. Currency is flowing in by the wheelbarrow and we are trying to stop the tide with the bucket of inconvenience. Far better solutions would be to look at why people filter out almost everything that drops in the game and provide better quality loot. I've only played Grim Dawn a few times, they seem to have a system which generates interesting stats for gear and a variety of different builds, there is an incentive to find your own stuff in that game. The lack of an AH isn't going to fix the problems or gloss over why people want to trade instead of pick stuff up off the ground themselves, but it is an issue far more revealing than how accessible you make trading. Irrespective what is done with trading, I think if you have the "upgrading" desire that you have claimed in this post then you should probably overhaul the loot system. I rarely find my own upgrades past level 40-50 or so, it is far easier to buy something and add something to it with master crafting and that will tide me over until I trade for an end-game item, that is it for my itemisation for most characters. The game just does not generate a constant supply of upgrades. Last edited by Zvim on Nov 6, 2017, 8:27:15 AM
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" the post I was responding to was making claims about "masses catching up with the elites", so it doesnt rly matter what you or I think about comparative views on players, the point was made and I responded to it. " you cant stop flipping, you dont even want to, flipping is part of the game, its part of an economy, buy and sell. I dont flip items personally, but I still dont even see it as a goal to stop such practices, you just need to keep an eye on how easy you are making flipping, how much its effecting players who dont flip and what methods people are using, are they open to everyone? You cant have fees in a game with orbs rather than gold that have constantly changing comparative values both in terms of markets and in terms of what the buyer wants to pay and the seller wants to receive, you cant just have 5% of the gold is now a fee. When it comes to bots flipping items, that is another thing entirely. If you think GGG will have the ability to completely police trade in an accurate and fair manner with this many players and transactions in a free to play game were people can endlessly create new accounts then I think youre living in a dream world. Maybe with 10x the staff they have now they could attempt it. bots are here yes, and in the current system a bot has to copy paste a whisper, get the player to invite them to party, go to their hideout, make the trade, come back again. It might take 30 seconds, other players will also be messaging the player during all this for the same item. In an instant buyout situation a bot can buy an item in under a second and be on to its next transaction before a human competitor can react. If a player wants to mess with a market, for example buy every lightning coil listed for 1c to 19c then relist them all for 20c, thats a nightmare. To get everyone to respond, to go around to every guy and buy the items, to get them all with none slipping through your fingers, its near impossible. In an instant buyout environment that entire move takes probably as much time as buying 1 coil through the current system. If you think vastly easier trade solves problems you are dreaming, if you cant see how open to abuse an autobuyout system is, how much that will skew trade towards people with bots and people who only flip items all day then I dunno what to say mate. No harm or offense intended but I think youre underestimating the situation and overestimating gggs ability to control it. If you really want to combat current flipping/bot problems then a big deal is private indexers and thats really where you guys should be focusing imo. First step to solving that is to have a GGG owned indexer. " you think that with easier trade everyone would trade? Trust me many players will never trade, ever, you can take that statement to the bank. " no Im not, but I do acknowledge the fact that there will always be large amounts of those who dont trade so whatever the % either way the negative effects of that shift remain. " im quite correct with this statement, if you will never use a shavs and have no interest in the item then its value to you is that of either a skin or whatever the vendor will give you for it, unless you bring in trade in which case it may be massively valuable to you because it might gain you more orbs that you actually highly value than youve found in days. What I have said is obviously correct its insane to even attempt to refute it. You have 3000 chroms and 6 alterations, you need alts for crafting, you find a chrom, if that chrom is worth an alt in trade its more valuable to you than if you cant trade it and its just a chrom. " it doesnt follow that the trader will reach the cliff either. Theres probably less than 50 trading players who have managed to reach the cliff and have only done so in standard league out of literally millions of people who have played this game. " Its extremely relevant. The game is balanced around the power of the players, the larger the divide in player power between these 2 camps the more imbalanced the game becomes for one or both of the camps. " I dont think thats true, that maximises the enjoyment of the mechanical trade experience for at least 1 trade, but it doesnt follow that it filters through to the game as a whole for these players long term. It has massive knock on effects for longevity of their play experience, longevity of their gearing, the value of gear they find, how effective they are as a trader (as in, that might go down in an instant buyout environment ruled by flipbots), how much they interact with other players, the friends they make. Only an extremely short sighted trader or a very rare person who only wishes to exploit trade 24/7 thinks that easier trading will be a straight up QOL buff for their overall poe experience. For players who want to get to lvl100 and get the best possible items do you maximise their enjoyment by instantly giving them a lvl100 character with bis items? No, not at all. The game is the journey there, the feeling of value these rewards have is tied to the effort taken to get them, just because a players goal is to get from A to B in the most efficient manner possible it does not follow that the maximum enjoyment they will have is for the game to make it as efficient as possible for them to get to B. They might get the most enjoyment from the game making it actually impossible to get to B, that is actually more likely the case than having a big button on startup that you press and instantly you are at B. " Chris pointed out that most players dont trade, and that very few regularly trade, and then said if ur reading this ur likely one of the 10% who engages in advanced systems. Its not a solid 10% of players are regular traders, but were ballparking. This does not lead to the conclusion the game is a massive failure. Its a f2p game, its likely that 50% of players or more dont even make it past act2. Trading is mostly and endgame activity, no one I play with trades before endgame, what % of players you think ever make it to endgame? Its a game built around a trade economy, yes, its also an endgame grind game, and most people do not make it to endgame. That doesnt mean its a failure, or that the bit pre endgame is not a valuable part of the game that the devs are happy with players enjoying and never reaching endgame, never trading. I think youre starting with a conclusion you wish to draw and looking for a way to point to it with data. I think youre smarter than that, if you were not so invested in your agenda you would see a lot of what Im saying without me needing to say it. Its built around a trade economy, its also a gear grinding game from grinding gear games thats built around a trade economy, grinding for gear is also important. Its a balancing act between the 2 and while trade requires grind to have something to trade with the 2 systems can potentially overshadow each other. The mechanism at the heart of that balance is how easy it is to trade for what u want. If you buff item drops then you buff the items available in trade, it boils down to the ease of getting those items from the trade side. If you look at the game, arguably trade is already too powerful compared to looting and that means trade is too easy currently, so making trade easier would be an awful direction to take. This thread is full of people who both think looting items should be better and are arguing for easier trade, but cannot see the hard contradiction in their 2 viewpoints without bringing in other systems like bind on account item drops. " Im not sure they do, and Im certain that the game being functional and enjoyable without trading is a goal that they put a massive amount of effort into achieving. I think theyre realists, they know a large amount of people will never trade, i dont think its about what they want removed from the reality of what is, i doubt they even waste time thinking much in those terms, they deal with the inescapable reality and making the game function within that. This is why we have this manifesto and as far as I can see a lot of the people complaining about it are not basing their ideas in the reality of the situation. Its a game ith builds, you have a passive tree and you make your char, thats a big part of it. Yet there are build guides to circumvent this system, do GGG hate build guides? They post build of the weeks for people to follow, of course not. I think they are very happy that their game is not restricted to 1 particular type of player, that there are aspects one can take part in or avoid and hence a very wide amount of players can enjoy the game. Im sure they want to encourage this or that, but I dont think theyre looking at significant amounts of players not taking part as necessarily bad. words disconnected from any conversation with particular posters... If using a trade indexer to search for an item you want and then making the trade with the seller is too hard for you, if throwing items in a trade tab and setting a buyout, then trading them with a player who wispers you is too hard, if these systems are so difficult that you feel you want to trade but cant then my goodness, up your effort game from non existent to minimal and start trading. Come on ppl, ur better than this, youre human beings who can use computers and play complex rpg games, you got this, people arnt buying the idea that trade is currently too hard for you to engage with. Youre underestimating yourselves, I have confidence that you guys are all smart enough to make easy work of this trade game. Last edited by Snorkle_uk on Nov 6, 2017, 11:35:30 AM
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" True, but let's be real, you can't compare the best online game ever made with PoE. SWG had an ingame AH system too, but it took a % of the sales to make up for the convenience. When you were a high-end produer (Master Weaponsmith/Chef here), that takes a huge chunk out of profits, so of course you want to set up your own merchants. It's really really basic, give people options, but incentivize one over the other. (I seriously love SWG, there's a reason I still hang around the emu scene. I am the worst at walking into a mall and not buying things, whether I need them or not hah) | |
I rlly dont get why ppl need to wrote whole page of bs.
Why Snorkle_uk u need whole wall of text what dont have any point? Yes it is rlly hard to trade in this game and one of thing what I personally hate how is done, primitive and time consuming. For example I enjoyed this summer few months in wildstar, was playing game enjoying in every aspect, going into AH posting loot, money was coming into mailbox, perfect, and almost every online game have soem sort of automatic (EASY) trade, EVE Online, ofc perfect trade in-game system from where GGG can learn a lot, now they can take free accounts also and check their market and for god sake chat system because PoE chat is joke. Also cant avoid example of Black Desert online, where they had some crazy features what I used in party play, automatic send all drop on AH for sale, because there was for every item bound value (from - to (changes with market)), and then split money equally and resend to every party member via mail, crazy cool and makes party play desirable with SUPER EASY TRADE. Only here in PoE whare Trade is not intended to be done like Chris said, but first stuff what they added to every premium tab was post option, and what happened? rocket sale over night for premium tabs (imo p2w), was that option as public to share with my friends? No it was for primitive TRADE ad-don so TRADE is intended, desirable and needed in PoE, especially when you play leagues only. As I see many of us just want EASY TRADE and enjoy in game, we dont want to waste time on no response/afk/dnd, dont want to run 5 application in background to sale stuff and value it, we are humans (answer ony our question, yes we are) and rlly we dont want PoE as job. Also need to mention when selling worst thing is when I am in full party and then I need to leave party to do that bloody trade, same with when I run labyrinth for some enchant (pain in ...) miss most of trades because some ppl cant wait and I cant trade from lab, makes game play rlly unpleasant and actual trade system makes me to not play game anymore. Trade is big aspect of game if you want progress because of so awful loot system what PoE have. I am soo bored arguing with ppl who know what is better for me, i just want enjoy in my free time and play game, my state is EASY TRADE = YES and I will not spend penny till that will not be done, who knows will I play it at all, I came to see that Turmoil/Mayhem news and saw that "Manifesto" what makes me to lose interest. Last edited by Coolmer on Nov 6, 2017, 2:31:57 PM
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no matter what trade you make ... it is useless cause what you buy the team balance destroy it sooner or later..
i dont trade cause ist not trade ist market and forcing. guys flipping for fun geting rich and the community is geting splited into rich and por .. yeah we Need shit like this.. if the world is not enough greedy so we Need it here too. facepalm if you want make fair trades make it for more not just the rich guys .. i heate spliting People in two categorys. ggg has to decide Prices .. not rolls -.- so stupid thats why i dont use trades.. and if the game start fuck up i quit .. so i stoped Support for a reason.. it is up to you if i hit the button again or not. but for now i nerfed my lust .. cause my fun was nerfed too If you not affraid of the Devil.. then you dont need a GOD ! Last edited by ONE_OF_A_MILLION on Nov 6, 2017, 2:38:59 PM
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" my post was all responding to people who had made posts to me, and was all points all the way down. you just dont want to digest them because they dont agree with your take on things and you cant debate them. |
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