On ARPG economies from a game design perspective

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I think the #1 problem Diablo 3 had was instantaneous trading (the Buyout feature), so saying it wouldn't fix anything is an exaggeration. However, I can agree with you that it won't be this magic cure-all, third-parties are going to have some influence, and D3 isn't out of the economic woods yet. A step in the right direction isn't the whole journey.

You are missing the most important part. The removal of the AHs is not a stand alone thing. It will be done with a complete new direction. Blizzard have realised that the aRPG genre has to change with modern communication, in order to get back closer to where it was.

Change, to remain unchanged as little as possible, at its core. Because the aRPGs we have nowadays are a long shot from the loot-finders they were.

+1

Main problem with D3 was drop rate set in assumption, that you use AH. PoE has exactly the same problem, even without AH. Be purely self-found in both games is just inefficient.

Blizz removes AH, but also refines loot system. And, considering opinions of my friends who tried PS3 version, it seems very promising, you can efficiently play self-found in console version, comparing to drop level of PC version (of course you have to play self found, I meant that it doesn't mean that you character will not be viable, as in PC version).

TL2 has such system from beginning, I know that I can theoretically trade in TL2, but I just don't need, and as I play Synergies, it goes even further.

It's a pity, that GGG spoiled PoE with all those "economy"...

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Another thing to consider: finding rare items which your current character cannot use does not necessarily mean the designers intended you to trade. It could mean they intended you to reroll; instead of having your spellcaster trade away that bow, the designers may have intended you to create a new character to use that bow. However, if that is the case (and I think it is), then it's clearly a flawed design; far too many players prefer a single- (or double-, but not quite multi-) character style, and thus trading away items is circumventing the reroll incentive.

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ggnorekthx wrote:

TL;DR: I want to find more orbs and more items, such that I can at least sustain my characters playing self-found

You should read Section 3 of the OP.

I agree that GGG probably intends for people to play many characters. This is fine with me, except I had noted in my earlier post that I feel playing multiple characters actually decreases net wealth if you plan to play them past early Cruel. GGG themselves have commented that they feel drops are an issue in the later parts of Cruel and maybe Merciless (I know they said in the 40-60 range.) They had said they feel that upgrading and getting 4 links is the big issue, but I feel that, if playing self found or even with some hand-me-downs, the amount of orbs you'll need to use to roll even some modest stats for Act 3 Cruel and Merciless outweigh what you'll find, on average. I probably have 15 characters that are 40+, a few in the 80s. And I stop playing most of mine in the late 40s because that is when it becomes, essentially, "Go Time." Either I really invest in some decent gear, start using chaos orbs to get decent stats, or make a new guy and save my currency. Obviously, I usually choose to reroll, but it is disappointing that most characters can't sustain themselves through the game. This includes Docks and Fellshrine farming in Merciless by the way, I don't expect to just rush to Merc Vaal and kick his ass.

However, in regards to your post about "focus on economy," I don't mean that they spend a lot of time tweaking it, or balancing it even. I don't mean that resources are going into it that could be used in other areas What I mean is, it is a driving factor in their decisions, and it is part of their design philosophy. I mean, hell, half the reason we are stuck with this current map system is because they wanted to limit the access people had to high level items for rolling. They made a comment in an early update about how impressed they were with the high prices people were paying for these high crafting shells. In addition to what DijiGo mentioned, I think we've proven that there is a definite focus on the game's overall economy, a philosophy that they are following that is ultimately becoming very un-fun for a lot of us players.

Again, even in this fantasy world where being completely tied down by the desire for a controlled trading atmosphere, the base requirement is going to be at least enough people playing to provide the items other people need to enjoy the game at prices that are better than crafting. Well, when we all quit because we are sick of never finding any good drops or finding enough orbs to actually make the gear or trade for it, the legs are pulled out from underneath this great trading platform.

Basically, I wanna find more stuff, craft more stuff, and not have to hope there will always be 10,000 people playing so I can trade for what I need.

Necroing this thread because I realized RogueMage was (mostly) right. As I detailed in this post, the primary problem is not searchable items, but searchable pricing.

Path of Exile should have silent auctions. This would allow Australians to easily trade with Americans and so on, making things global. However, it's vitally important to keep these auctions silent, so that no one can search them to correlate an item with a price; the difficulty in evaluating the worth of items should be maintained.

Essentially, you put any item or collection of items up for bidding, and players can submit bids which can also consist of any item or collection of items. No "text box" would be allowed; if such a thing were allowed, players would type things like "b/o 3 Exalt" and we can't allow that. Players could search auctions for particular item stats using an in-game feature. Both buyers and sellers can retract auctions and bids at any time; however, until retraction, the bids/sales are held in escrow (this would limit bid spamming). Bidders will have no method of knowing if their bid is too high or too low; all bids will be invisible to other players. The seller can review bids with strictly inferior bids filtered out; additionally, the seller can filter certain types of items (like Scroll of Wisdom) as irrelevant, so that a bid of 2 Exalt, 1 Scroll of Wisdom would be filtered out as strictly inferior to 3 Exalt. The seller would be able to confirm a bid and sell the item without the buyer needing to be online, and the new item(s) would appear to the buyer in a remove-only stash tab; without this part, cross-timezone trading is impossible.

This would be more economically favorable than the current forum trading. The key reason is the inability for users of the in-game system to attach buyouts to sales; this behavior is destructive to the joy of loot-finding.

The one place where I diverge from RogueMage greatest is: I don't believe buyer and seller should be able to communicate at all; auctions should use the strictest anonymity. This is because of information-collecting bots that make sites like poetradechat.com possible; it would just be a matter of time before third-parties figure out how to assign buyouts to auctions. Forbidding this is therefore required to totally shut out searchable pricing, and force players to take risks in the marketplace.

You guys are forgetting one thing that actually helped make d2 trading more dynamic.

Gold was worthless.

Yea....I said it.

Gold being worthless actually HELPED D2.

Now, some players went on to use SoJ as a type of currency. SoJ was a pretty universally useful ring.

Even still, people had to trade ITEMS for ITEMS. This kept trade hugely dynamic, because evaluating a rare chest verses a rare helm is way more difficult than evaluating a rare chest against currency.

Path of exile has a better currency because the currency has alternate uses, but lets face it, it is still currency for the vast majority of the player base.

What if players could only trade armor and weapons? There is no universally useful unique in poe to be the SoJ, and even if there was there is no duping to make it common enough to be used as currency.

Not that such an approach is without flaws. Without a currency trading becomes less fluid, making it more difficult to get players to agree on a trade because they probably dont have exactly what each other wants......but isn't that what you are asking for?

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Gravethought wrote:

Spoiler

You guys are forgetting one thing that actually helped make d2 trading more dynamic.

Gold was worthless.

Yea....I said it.

Gold being worthless actually HELPED D2.

Now, some players went on to use SoJ as a type of currency. SoJ was a pretty universally useful ring.

Even still, people had to trade ITEMS for ITEMS. This kept trade hugely dynamic, because evaluating a rare chest verses a rare helm is way more difficult than evaluating a rare chest against currency.

Path of exile has a better currency because the currency has alternate uses, but lets face it, it is still currency for the vast majority of the player base.

What if players could only trade armor and weapons? There is no universally useful unique in poe to be the SoJ, and even if there was there is no duping to make it common enough to be used as currency.

Not that such an approach is without flaws.

Without a currency trading becomes less fluid, making it more difficult to get players to agree on a trade because they probably dont have exactly what each other wants......but isn't that what you are asking for?

Indeed it is. In my view, a perfect trading system would embrace modern trends towards searchability for quick and convenient trades, while making the objects being traded as difficult to value as possible, to increase the skill required.

There is such a thing as too much of a skill barrier, and a true lack of any established currency would come close. But that's the thing about players — they're crafty. If gold is worthless in D2, they use Stones of Jordan or high runes. As a designer, you don't really need to worry about giving the players a currency, because they will deign one. You just need to worry about the currency being too efficient of a currency.

I am worried that orbs might indeed be too efficient at their jobs.

However, a good question to ask is: If orbs weren't tradeable in Path of Exile, what would players likely use instead? White maps are fairly homogeneous; they'd probably use those, perhaps trading currency indirectly by giving the map some good affixes. This system, however, would likely be just as bad as the orb system, if not worse. The players who used to QQ that they couldn't craft anything would now QQ that they cannot progress, rerollers are economically moot while rerolling... and there would be some point to their complaints.

So then the next change would be to make maps less homogeneous; you'd add implicit mods to maps, so that each map leans towards one build or another (the "Monsters have x% increased accuracy" implicit subpar for evasion, the "burning damage over time" implicit subpar for ES, et cetera), and make the map affix system a little more build-specific too (less Labyrinthine). Maps would be less of a primary currency and more of a plain tradeable.

And that's about as good as that system gets.

Unfortunately, some big problems still remain. Rerollers still only get low-level items, untradeable currency, and no maps or Chisels during their reroll time; players who find an Exalt might be a lot less overjoyed finding one, knowing that it's bound and that it could be a very long time before they get their hands on anything Exalt-worthy. It doesn't really solve the core problem of increasing the joy of loot-finding; if anything, it detracts from possibilities to experience that joy at low levels.

Thus, I think keeping currency where they are now is in the best interest of the game. Instead of focusing on that, the better area to focus on is making it hard to evaluate items in terms of orbs. After all, the typical trade is item for orbs; you don't have to go overboard on making the orbs hard to evaluate, if you do a decent job of making the items hard to evaluate. More diverse, more balanced, and just plain more rare affixes, combined with unique item balance, is the way to go here.

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Gravethought wrote:

You guys are forgetting one thing that actually helped make d2 trading more dynamic.

Gold was worthless.

Now, some players went on to use SoJ as a type of currency. SoJ was a pretty universally useful ring.

Even still, people had to trade ITEMS for ITEMS. This kept trade hugely dynamic, because evaluating a rare chest verses a rare helm is way more difficult than evaluating a rare chest against currency.

Yes, SoJ's became the default currency in D2. But you omitted one crucial factor:

The vast majority of SoJ's in D2 were counterfeit dupes.

The other major currencies in D2 were high-level runes, which were likewise duped. This became so prevalent you could buy complete Enigma armors at RMT sites, already socketed with the requisite runes.

D2's economy was driven by criminals who mass produced currency out of thin air by hacking the system. Though you might consider it a fairly realistic simulation of recent trends in the US economy, I don't think it's a good model for PoE to emulate.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Path of Exile should have silent auctions. This would allow Australians to easily trade with Americans and so on, making things global. However, it's vitally important to keep these auctions silent, so that no one can search them to correlate an item with a price; the difficulty in evaluating the worth of items should be maintained.

Essentially, you put any item or collection of items up for bidding, and players can submit bids which can also consist of any item or collection of items. No "text box" would be allowed... Players could search auctions for particular item stats using an in-game feature. Both buyers and sellers can retract auctions and bids at any time; however, until retraction, the bids/sales are held in escrow (this would limit bid spamming)... The seller can review bids with strictly inferior bids filtered out... The seller would be able to confirm a bid and sell the item without the buyer needing to be online, and the new item(s) would appear to the buyer in a remove-only stash tab; without this part, cross-timezone trading is impossible.

This would be more economically favorable than the current forum trading. The key reason is the inability for users of the in-game system to attach buyouts to sales; this behavior is destructive to the joy of loot-finding.

Good summary and I agree on all points but one: I think holding buyers' bids in escrow would make the system too dependent on prompt responses from sellers. Once a seller receives at least two acceptable bids, he's got a sure sale, and there's nothing to prevent him from deadbeating the auction to see if he can get an even higher bid. (He just waits until one of the two acceptable bids is withdrawn, then immediately accepts the other one.)

IRL, buyers are free to bid on as many auctions as they find attractive, without any escrow requirements. I think this could be seamlessly automated in PoE via a pair of stash mechanisms:

* A bid can only be made using items currently in your stash.
* If any of the items are subsequently removed from your stash, the bid is grayed-out but not cancelled. It's put in an inactive bid list for that auction, which can be viewed by the seller. The seller may then choose to contact the bidder to negotiate a revised bid.

Chris Wilson revealed in a recent interview that GGG is planning on implementing a Trade Tab for your stash, where you post items that others can bid on. The trading system outlined above would fit into those plans quite well.

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RogueMage wrote:

Good summary and I agree on all points but one: I think holding buyers' bids in escrow would make the system too dependent on prompt responses from sellers. Once a seller receives at least two acceptable bids, he's got a sure sale, and there's nothing to prevent him from deadbeating the auction to see if he can get an even higher bid. (He just waits until one of the two acceptable bids is withdrawn, then immediately accepts the other one.)

First, this isn't realistic. Buyers can retract their bids at any time, and although a player might deadbeat an auction for a couple hours as he plays, he's not going to be willing to risk it when he logs off, possibly not even to take a 10-minute break.

Second, although I admit this does make the system much more dependent on responses from sellers, it's much better than the alternative: massive amounts of half-assed offer-spam from players bidding on dozens of items at once.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Second, although I admit this does make the system much more dependent on responses from sellers, it's much better than the alternative: massive amounts of half-assed offer-spam from players bidding on dozens of items at once.

I agree it's debatable, with pitfalls on both sides. Requiring the buyer to actually have the bid in-stash would hopefully eliminate most half-assed bids. My views are based on my experiences with both D3's AH and PoE's current trade forum indexers.

I loathed the D3 AH escrow requirements, enough to shun using it. If PoE bids could be cancelled, however, I'd probably find it tolerable.

With PoE trade indexers, I'll usually find several acceptable items to bid on. But since I can't know which seller may respond first, I'll PM the same bid to all sellers at once, and take the first seller who shows up online. If any other sellers respond later, I'll politely retract the bid. This is the bidding mechanism I think PoE could seamlessly automate by graying out inactive bids, so the other sellers no longer see the bid after I've used up my currency on the item I purchased.

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RogueMage wrote:

Yes, SoJ's became the default currency in D2. But you omitted one crucial factor:

The vast majority of SoJ's in D2 were counterfeit dupes.

The other major currencies in D2 were high-level runes, which were likewise duped. This became so prevalent you could buy complete Enigma armors at RMT sites, already socketed with the requisite runes.

D2's economy was driven by criminals who mass produced currency out of thin air by hacking the system. Though you might consider it a fairly realistic simulation of recent trends in the US economy, I don't think it's a good model for PoE to emulate.

I specifically mentioned the duping.

"There is no universally useful unique in poe to be the SoJ, and even if there was there is no duping to make it common enough to be used as currency."

APOWOGIZE!!