Trade and crafting - a new look

Hello everyone,

Personally I have a feeling, that some issues were copied from PoE and implemented blindly to PoE 2. One of them is trade experience.

Having in mind some old trade manifesto and arguments of not having a dedicated trade market in game because of so called "player interaction" I would lkike to propose a way o improving the feeling.

At current state of the game We have several issues which are ineracting with each other, namely:

1. Trading itself feels terrible! There is no interaction between players while trading, each trade requires spending a lot of time not in the actual game, but seatching in off-game platforms (www) for the items We need. Than na immensely huige amuont of time on sending trade requests, which mostly go to fake accounts. And lastly - becouse of the trade system flawly design - it creates an opportunity of abusive practices (scaming and price influence).

2. The crafting system, which in its current state is not rewarding at all comparing to saving currency and spending it on trading. Crafting is only RNG right now, there is no reliable mean of craft or actually "work on" an item to be actually good and usable in a stable, player friendly way.

Having that in mind I would like to give under consideration some changes, all of them can be implemented together or just one at a time to allow observation of the outcome:

1. The obvious - market in the game. It will alow of player trading while offline and also will stop misuse of the pricing scaming with no room for artificial price inflation. Yet for purpose of keeping the ability to trade with high valuable items between players and have some way of player interaction in trade, let the market run only in coins, and not in orbs. That is a middle ground solution, but it will allow trade of popular items in low price range, which at the end is helping players by players. At the same time the mid-range items in some way will be treadeable in the market and can be bought by coins (player decision to put or not an item in the market, which not exclude other stash tabs working as today). I suppose high value items will be traded between players just as they are now - at the end the market will regulate itself (Adam Smith invisible hand? again!).

As an example of such change - look at currency market - automatic but still player made (Adam Smith strikes again!) but without the risk of being scammed and much more player friendly!

2. Introduce a new orb - an upgrade orb. The orb will randomly chose an affix of an item (doesn't matter if is it a prefix or a suffix) and change it to the same affix but one tier higher. The idea behind the orb is to give players a steady and player friendly way (not poe 1 crafting mechanics with tons of RNG which helped only the top 1%) of improving the gear they are using. In this way the items, which are just potentially useful can be changed to be actually very good or even godlike! Drop rate of the orb should be quite common - to actually be usable, not rare to be kept as trading currency because they become valuable. Doing so will influence the market on the yellow-tier items. They will become much more common, which will deflate the prices. And the uniques will be uniques!

3. Changing the drop rate of crafting orbs to be more common. By doing so, and at the same time spending coins on trade - the orbs will not be inflated in value and then will start to be used be every player on every step of the journey. That step may be a difficult one, to still keep the feeling of looting something exceptional, but in its current state, everything is exceptional and uses as trading because of its value.

4. To keep the feeling of reward and also a hope for the future for ordinary plyers, the above mechanics will allow of not going poe 1 way of having too much loot which very often was trash at the end. By having those changes the current loot drop rate could be maintained or maybe even slightly reduced. That would keep the balance between all those changes.

As a summary - GGG You are doing great work! Keep it up! I hope those loose thoughts will help on navigating the discussion on topic which definitely needs adressing.