Developer Q&A - Answers Part 2

I hope the friends list is extended alongside the ignore list. I've been at the cap for about 2 leagues now and I wanna make new buddies :)

"Have you given serious thought to providing people who don't like Labyrinth-style content options to play the rest of the game without going through the content they do not enjoy? Is there some reason it's not being done? Is there any chance it might happen in the future?"


It SHOULDN'T! No pain, no gain.
Seriously, why people nowadays expect to be rewarded without doing actual work?

So, how does adding a Broker system to the game which allows you to sell items even when you're not online hurt the game? The only major difference I see with it would be that people would have a much harder time price fixing.

"

Re: Trade foo above.

Okay, I'm going to take this one point at a time.

"The gap between traders and non-traders widens." So you're saying that difficulty in the game is proportionate to how much someone has traded. This may well be true, but punishing people who do trade because some people CHOOSE not to is not the way to go about it. Possibly the reason that people don't trade is because of the difficulty involved. Trade chat is a freaking mess given the limited number of lines that you can see at a time and the fact that people will macro, combined with multiple channels -- on top of that, most of what's on there is end-game level gear. Finding something to level with is nearly impossible through that route. Combine this with the fact that due to there not being any in-game trading method other than Trade Chat, people have to go to poe.trade to search for leveling gear (if they don't have friends or a guild to supply them with that gear). This is not a good solution because 1) new players don't necessarily know about poe.trade 2) a number of people don't respond to trade requests for various reasons (idle, AFK, zoning and showing as offline, in maps, in Lab).

"Prices are very low or very high" No, not really. Prices for SOME things are very high and prices for SOME things are very low. It varies though. If I'm looking to level through normal and Cruel and even into Merciless, I can find things fairly easily on poe.trade. The introduction of Premium Tabs has helped with this, although 3rd party apps before these tabs caused the same thing to happen. The only thing Premium Tabs does is make it easier to set up those sales. Giving us an in-game way to trade that doesn't rely on the current methods would make it easier to trade, but shouldn't really impact pricing, as prices rise and fall based on a number of factors -- with the primary one being what's currently broken as discussed by streamers, Reddit and so on. Also? Many people no longer do sales less than 1 chaos after the first week or two of the season. By the time the season is 2/3 done, this changes to people not doing 3c or less sometimes.

"Progression is trivialised". Again, no, not really. This is an ARPG, and ARPGs are all about min-maxing, and have been ever since Diablo (if not earlier). People are ALWAYS going to look for the best gear to make content as trivial as possible -- this is likely why Atziri, Shaper and other fights are largely mechanics-based, so people can't just gear their way through them. As far as 'first characters quadrupling clear speed' -- how many first characters have you run into that can buy multiple exalts worth of gear in the first place to trivialize clear speed? Not many, I'd wager. This is why there are builds on the forums that specifically state 'budget' 'newbie' and why streamers put out videos for EVERY league that say 'league starting'. Because you generally don't -have- the money at that point to buy the best gear. The people who are going to be looking for the best ways to trivialize content are going to be the people that are on their 3rd, 5th, 10th, 100th or 1000th character in PoE. That's why a number of people will make a character at the start of the league specifically to farm currency so that they can build a 2nd character later on and be able to buy all the rare and unique things they need for their chosen build.

So, since I've been arguing each point, let me also offer a solution.

Have an in-game UI similar to what poe.trade has, where you can search for items in your league only based on various criteria. Once you find what you're looking for, you can click on something to the side to send a trade request to the owner. The owner can then click 'accept' and a trade window pops up that allows access to their stash (maybe only Premium tabs? Maybe only 1-2 tabs?) so that they can trade on the go. It makes trade easier without completely trivializing it. It takes the process of searching poe.trade and internalizes it (making it easier for newer players to get a handle on it), makes it easier for sellers (they don't have to leave maps/lab to sell, hopefully cutting down on non-responses) and doesn't really change the current process by much at all.

No change to the lab?
No trading being added?

Sigh... Looks like I'm going to go buy Grim Dawn.

Oh... and adding mercenaries? Fun!
Including durability... wtf?

Can't wait to be able to sort the MXT tabs :D

Round 2 and still GGG avoids the Auction House question, or at least poe.trade functionality in the client. Very lame.

I'm aware of GGG's effort for creating one of the most 'Hardcore' game in PC.
However,this is not what all that reason for not doing further Trading System inside the game.
In your eyes, Trading is an action which must be punished,and in this game,if you do SSF,you can hardly do any late-game content.Thats one of the 'smoothest' Logic I'v ever seen in my life.
Nevertheless,still eager in playing the 3.0 beta.That's what a Masochist like me will do.

"

MarkoszHU wrote:

"Have you given serious thought to providing people who don't like Labyrinth-style content options to play the rest of the game without going through the content they do not enjoy? Is there some reason it's not being done? Is there any chance it might happen in the future?"


It SHOULDN'T! No pain, no gain.
Seriously, why people nowadays expect to be rewarded without doing actual work?

The problem is not the fact that you HAVE to work, the problem is that the Work is COMPLETELY boring and REALLY, REAAAAAAAAAAAAALLY time-consuming. You need to do the labyrinth for EVERY character you do, in EVERY League, on THREE DIFFICULTIES (i know this is changing). Right now, Labyrinth farming is cool, and stuff, but you should not gate a mandatory mechanic like ascendancy behind it.

The reward on labyrinth is its Chests at the end of the Lab. Ascendancies should be something apart from it. Maybe they should add a system that when you do the Labyrinth ONCE with a specific character, let's say the Witch for example, every new Witch you make have all the points you got on the previous one. So the player thinks into making 2 Witch Builds, he needs to do the Labyrinth and Uber Labyrinth with the first one, so the second Witch he makes will get the points afterwards. This applies to every class, so if he decides to make a Templar, his second templar will gain the points, but he'll still need to do the lab with his first templar. I know this doesn't solve the problem much, but it REALLY decreases the stress for doing the Labyrinth for every freaking character.

"

Progression is trivialised. While trading for an item to get a leg up on difficult content is of course fine, being able to trivially and cheaply quadruple your clear speed on a whim isn't something that should be expected on your first character in a league.

So its decided: granting auction house access to player in a league that has character level 80 in hardcore (hc just to remove bots)