Thoughts on Trading

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i would also like to point out that it was YOU who brought up MMO's -- not me..........

I brought them up soley to hilite some non-desirable properties that nevertheless include a variety of synthetic wedges designers use to attempt to slow down economic transfers and the like. None of that is desired here. It's actually a hard problem. I'm skeptical that this genre can ever really adequately solve it, or even try. Hence one of the links in my sig, which suggests disbanding the economy wholly, and replacing it with better drops. For some users, anyway.

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Courageous wrote:

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i would also like to point out that it was YOU who brought up MMO's -- not me..........

I brought them up soley to hilite some non-desirable properties that nevertheless include a variety of synthetic wedges designers use to attempt to slow down economic transfers and the like. None of that is desired here. It's actually a hard problem. I'm skeptical that this genre can ever really adequately solve it, or even try. Hence one of the links in my sig, which suggests disbanding the economy wholly, and replacing it with better drops. For some users, anyway.

The difference is that I don't see any actual point to slowing down economic transfer.

As far as I am concerned, the idea that players leave once they find destroying content easy to be false.

It has never been proven or substantiated in any ARPG context that people just "uninstall and walk away" once they start being able to destroy content.

An excellent example is Diablo 2 and it's expansion....Have you ever played these games? Sure, trading wasn't facilitated, but people found their own ways to facilitate trading (external websites).

And even not counting this, when the game was mostly figured out, people had an incredibly easy time of destroying content regardless. They didn't need any extra help. People would speedfarm the hardest content in the game and keep playing anyways....

I wonder why? What a mystery. Haha. People continued to play because it was fun.

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The difference is that I don't see any actual point to slowing down economic transfer. As far as I am concerned, the idea that players leave once they find destroying content easy to be false.

You are questioning the assumptions. I'm not sure how I feel about what you are saying. As someone who really knows how to buy stuff, I get really good gear for 3-4 chaos (good for fast kills up til level 80 or so). After that point, gear prices go up astronomically.

My guess is if we were to have facilitated trading, what would happen is the good prices I get would apply to everyone, and quickly, and to a degree, go down. But you know wouldn't change? A Kaom's is still going to be 30+ EX.

So on those grounds, you are probably right.

Don't hold out hope of the devs budging though. I don't think they will.

If the proposed new system (trade tabs in your stash tabs) comes into being, I doubt very much it will involve instantaneous facilitated delivery.

At this stage there is a very thin line between an mmorpg and an arpg, so I think it is accetpable to judge this game by mmo standards.

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hzflank wrote:

At this stage there is a very thin line between an mmorpg and an arpg, so I think it is accetpable to judge this game by mmo standards.

I can't agree with the overly broad range of that particular statement. I can see it if you're talking about economic models in the two genres, but apart from that, the line isn't so thin as you may think.

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tikitaki wrote:

The difference is that I don't see any actual point to slowing down economic transfer. As far as I am concerned, the idea that players leave once they find destroying content easy to be false.

A lot of players leave once their character feels "done." But a lot of players leave after first beating the game on Normal. A lot more leave after beating Merciless. Some leave sometime in the map system. Some make level 100. Others race. Others reroll lots of different characters. The point is that there are lots of different demographics out there, and although you don't want to totally ignore that demographic (thus ensure that it takes a while before feeling "done"), you can't really balance the whole game around it.

What you can balance the whole economy around is that players will utilize third-party websites (like shop indexers) to min/max trading in cases where GGG doesn't; thus fighting trends like these is borderline futile.

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Thaelyn wrote:

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hzflank wrote:

At this stage there is a very thin line between an mmorpg and an arpg, so I think it is accetpable to judge this game by mmo standards.

I can't agree with the overly broad range of that particular statement. I can see it if you're talking about economic models in the two genres, but apart from that, the line isn't so thin as you may think.

This is a symptom of the "market simulator" disease. The more play is focused on farming, the more people see the two as different genres; the more play is focused on trading, the more people see the two as essentially the same.

If you consider vindictus to be an MMORPG, then you must consider path of exile to be an MMO.

Path of exile is an MMORPG. It wasn't in closed beta, but it is now.

Being online, a RPG, and supporting multiplayer does not make a game a MMORPG, because being online and supporting multiplayer does not make a game an MMO. The dividing line is in whether other people are a (virtually) required gameplay element or not.

Thus, as I said, the more the game is about the market and the less it is about farming, the more of an MMO it is.

That's why i say closed beta wasn't really an mmo. Playing solo self found in this game shouldn't be considered a highly difficult challenge run.

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Path of exile is an MMORPG. It wasn't in closed beta, but it is now.

If the first 'M' in massive means 6 players, then I guess so. Otherwise, not really. It's just an SMORG (Small size Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).

Anyway, removing my tongue from my cheek, an MMO is not an MMO unless there is a large open world with everyone in it. Definitionally, I would say.