Why the focus on trading?

Because it's what GGG wants in their game; it's a thing they enjoy.....supposedly when they made POE 1 they wanted a game they wanted to play, so I guess that philosophy got ported over to POE 2. And, seems like they got lucky and many like minded individuals flocked to their game.

Personally, I absolutely despise trading in games (exception being trading sims; which I won't be playing anyway). Trading basically invalidates up to 50% of the game; and the focus always goes to the trading in the detriment of the other systems. I don't know why, maybe it's human nature, but if trade is involved, it'll always become the focus and outshine everything else.

It's a hill GGG will die on, so do not expect anything to change. If you can stomach the slow grind of SSF, good; if not....

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b_ko#7756 wrote:

Trade = instant boredom and loss of interest in ground loot. I think they keep it this way out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe to purposefully dis-engage players until next league where the players think "it will be better this time" (it won't).

Yeah, but there are many other ARPGs on the market that have better trading systems and they don't suffer from this boredom issue. There's always better loot to chase.

I love this game and I love the dev, but I cannot fathom how someone can have fun with gratification of paying for gear.

There's like no dopamine hit in looking at a trade site, having to constantly look for people to agree to a trade, and then just getting the BiS.

That makes so sense to me since POE1 but it is their game and there are many that do enjoy the convenience of trades, which is perfectly fine by me. Not here to tell people what to enjoy in their game.

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AstroShade#7322 wrote:

The game is clearly balanced around trading. They wouldn't have removed all crafting systems from the game while having 99.99999% of drops be completely worthless if trading being the primary method of aquiring items wasn't their intention.

As to why they wanted to go this route instead of the nice dopamine hit that you get from actually gearing up through item drops or crafting an awesome upgrade, who knows.

The second part here is a really good point I'm going to start mentioning. I got a 35D drop from doing Arbiter last night. It's absolutely useless for my build and I don't really want to make the good it's for. So I got a huge dopamine hit for getting a valuable drop, when in SSF it would have been a bit of a disappointment.

I am fairly certain they programmed it the same way activ-blizz did where they purposely drop items for other classes and then roll it very randomly as a gambling thing. By setting the rates, they can control the markets and general prices. The whole idea is to force the trade system which is why you see so many items in the market but nobody can ever find items for them self.

This was the exact program d3 did with the auction house and its also the exact reason people stopped playing and never came back.

D3 fixed their itemization but only after removing the auction house and over a year of patch work. In game trade systems are an ARPG killer but you will never convince GGG of that