trade in poe2 - TL;DR - DEVS TAKE NOTE!!!

hello,

i just posted a long message about how to improve trade in poe2, but it may be a grind to read it all, so here's what i think is the best idea from it:

trading is bad because once an item is found it can be traded indefinitely, meaning players will always get better results from trading than from battling monsters and crafting.

but if you slightly nerf each item when it gets traded, it will get progressively worse, and will soon drop out of the game's ecosystem (i.e. an "item sink").

all you need is to lose an affix, or just slightly lower the tier of one or more affixes, then the player who receives it will still get a decent item, but after a few trades it will drop out of the system, thus opening the way to increase loot drop rates and/or improve the crafting system.

i want the best loot to come from battling monsters and crafting, rather than trading, and i think this simple suggestion may help move the game in that direction.

thanks.
-az

p.s. i claim no copyright over this idea, so please use it if it helps make the game better.

This has got to be the worst suggestion i've read in a long time..

This game has economy resets every few months due to a new league start.
It also has items that you literally cannot target farm due to how extremely rare their mod combinations are, since you would end up farming it for the whole league to get it.

Also wrong, best items come from crafting, now its only the difference of whether you crafted it yourself, or bought it from someone else that crafted that specific item since you don't know how to craft it yourself.

If you want to stop trading, play ssf.

hello UndeadMaster101#5317

with this suggestion they wouldn't need to reset the economy all the time. other games have various "item sinks" and "money sinks" for this very reason.

i know it would bother players who currently benefit from trading, but a lot of comments and youtube videos about poe2 seem to complain about the poor loot drops, and this would be a way to allow the developers to increase loot drops without wrecking the game's economy. this was a specific worry the developers had, as per their comments in the youtube video i linked in my previous (long) post.

and while it's nice to know that someone crafted the item, if you got it through trading then it wasn't you who crafted it. this means instead of engaging with the game by battling monsters and crafting, you're just alt-tabbing out of the game to go shopping on a third-party website. this breaks the game's immersion and promotes things like bots, scammers, and real-money-trading.

also, i played all 6 classes in ssf, but since it's possible to migrate ssf characters into standard league, the developers had to balance loot drops based on what trading players would get in standard league. this left my characters with vastly under-levelled equipment across the board, despite stacking "increased rarity of loot" affixes on all my items.

thanks.
-az

First of all, economy resets kinda have to stay, as they make the game live for years and years, especially with the way "expansions" are added. It's not reset ONLY because it gets saturated, its reset because people enjoy playing in FRESH economy, where everyone starts at the same time from the beginning. This is why games like poe1 & 2, dark and darker, World of Warcraft etc.. get new servers with fresh economies every so often.

Second, i don't understand one of your points:

"i want the best loot to come from crafting"
"i don't want to learn how to craft and since i'm buying gear from others that DO craft, crafting sucks and trading is the only way to get best gear"

This is how your comment sounds to others.

Third, i DO AGREE with the fact that being forced to alt tab onto a website to trade breaks immersion. Hopefully one day they will add an auction house, or something similar, to the game.
I also AGREE that there are too many useless drops that appear, which ends up requiring a loot filter even early on. It is a band-aid to a problem that the devs still haven't found a solution to.

Forth, your gear sucked in ssf since you don't know how to craft. It's really that simple. Chasing gear from drops(aside from uniques) is just terribly inefficient, due to the amount of possible mod combinations in the game.

"

Liondrawing#0797 wrote:

but if you slightly nerf each item when it gets traded, it will get progressively worse, and will soon drop out of the game's ecosystem (i.e. an "item sink").

This destroys trading. Like, kills it. Someone gunna pay 20 divines for a god tier belt that loses a random affix on trade? Or what, they get it traded to them, then instead of 20d, they give whatever they feel is the new price?

OOH, maybe trading currency has a chance to destroy it too!

Or just make divines turn into exalts after trades 10% of the time.

Oh man, imagine how much love TRADING RNG would get from the thousands of posts about hating RNG.

"

UndeadMaster101#5317 wrote:

This has got to be the worst suggestion i've read in a long time..

I might go as far as to say "ever" but "a long time" works well enough. :D

hello UndeadMaster101#5317,

this game has NO crafting. it's just plain gambling.

i collected all the currencies, and purchased vendor trash to salvage for more currencies, but was still limited by exalted orbs. at least in poe1, the regal orbs often added more than just 1 affix when you used one to upgrade an item to rare, but in poe2 you only ever get 1 affix, which means every attempt to get a 6-affix item requires you to collect 3 exalted orbs. multiply this by the number of different equipment items you wear, and multiply it again by the low chance you get to not brick an item with bad affixes, and you end up needing hundreds of exalted orbs every time you want to upgrade your equipment.

and during the campaign, i only ever found maybe 1 or 2 exalted orbs per character level. these numbers just don't add up.

and don't even mention essences, as they only ever apply to the very first affix, which means they're only useful if you can then get 5 good RNG rolls in a row straight after using them. and as a youtuber pointed out, you tend to get essences randomly, but you tend to build your character around a single damage type, which means you're constantly getting essences you don't need and not getting the 1 essence type that you actually do need.

so no, there is no "crafting" in this game as it currently plays. maybe the developers will fix it later, but in the meantime, i'm not the only person who thinks the current loot system is broken.

thanks.
-az

"

Redthorne82#3177 wrote:

This destroys trading. Like, kills it. Someone gunna pay 20 divines for a god tier belt that loses a random affix on trade? Or what, they get it traded to them, then instead of 20d, they give whatever they feel is the new price?

hello Redthorne82#3177,

if you read my entire original post, you'll see i'm responding to what a developer said in a youtube video.

the developer said that "easy trading" is why they have to nerf loot drops and crafting. there are also PLENTY of user posts stating that loot drops and crafting are bad in poe2. thus, my response was to suggest nerfing trading so the developers can increase loot drops and improve crafting.

like, why would you "pay 20 divines for a god tier belt" when you could play the game and either find a similar item from a loot drop or else craft it yourself? if you still want to buy it you'll probably get it for just 1 divine orb in that kind of economy, and with proper crafting you'll be able to replace the missing affix with maybe something even better. thus, players will spend more time engaging with the game than with the third-party trading systems.

thanks.
-az

IMHO an ARPG can go basically one of two general directions:

1. Some type of "smart loot" system so that drops tend to be REALLY strong -- potentially supplemented by comparatively weak crafting system to smooth over rough patches in RNG. In general there will be far less loot generated but each piece of loot might actually be good.

2. Allow for trading of the comparatively fewer items that happen to be good. Basically a Quantity-over-Quality approach with the idea that there will be "enough" good drops via random chance.


My preference, although I'm not willing to die on that hill, would be for PoE2 to continue allowing trades and adjust loot drop rates & crafting power as appropriate.

Given that good drops will tend to be rare I would want a more robust and thoughtful crafting system to exist to at least smooth over RNG rough patches AND to effectively guarantee a floor on player power so that content can be balanced against said floor.


EDIT: If an ARPG goes the trade route it would be smart to allow players to earn common currency for trade via MANY different avenues. PoE1 seems to have plenty of well developed niches that can be filled by those willing to do so. I don't see as many "obvious and easy" niches in PoE2 but perhaps that's because I prefer to "profit craft" and occasionally "farm" as opposed to doing other things like various forms of flipping.

hello KingAlamar#4071,

you've got some good ideas there, but some issues arise once things start adding up over time.

here's an example of what i mean:

have you ever wondered why a particular item can cost about 1000 gold when you buy it from a vendor, but when you sell it back to them they only give you around 10 gold? seems unfair, right?

but let's consider a "fair" economy, where buy prices are the same as sell prices. you buy an item for 1000 gold, use it to fight monsters, then sell it back for 1000 gold. this means you started with 1000 gold and ended with 1000 gold. once you consider all the gold and equipment you collect from fighting monsters, it means you end up getting wealthier all the time, until the point where gold just has no meaning anymore, because you have too much of it.

that's why most games follow the first example, where buy prices are MUCH higher than sell prices. this is called a "money sink", because over time it means some of your money goes down the drain, and the best way to earn more money again is to go out and fight more monsters. this turns into a feedback loop, where trading with vendors reinforces the need to go out and fight monsters, and fighting monsters gives money and sellable items with which you can return to vendors again.

and this is my main concern with trading items between players. items continue to be traded between players indefinitely, without any "item sinks" to slowly get rid of them. over time, the pool of items that are traded between players just keeps getting better and better, until the point where you are unlikely to find better items yourself by defeating monsters or buying from in-game vendors.

thus, trading between players actually makes you NOT want to go out and fight monsters anymore, other than to collect more currencies to trade with. this REDUCES player engagement with the core gameplay loop, which ends up hurting the game.

in poe1, the developers decided to include regular "resets" to the economy to address this issue. but this means the core gameplay experience will depend on how long ago the last reset occurred. in the first week, all players will feel their gear is under-levelled, but it feels fair because everyone is in the same boat. then for a few weeks the players with the most currency items will buy the best gear and get to brag about it, while most players will still feel under-levelled. then it will reach a point where the player market reaches saturation, and buying items from other players always gets a better result than finding loot by playing the game, and players will enjoy not being under-levelled anymore. but then the market will start collapsing when there are so many good items to trade that they stop being worth anything, and the developers do another "reset" to start the process all over again.

learning from real-world economists, there is a better way to do things. in the real world, "inflation" is used as a "money sink", because if you hold onto your money it'll be worth less in the future, which prompts you to spend it and keep the economy going.

now if a country's leader told this directly to their people, the people will revolt, because it SOUNDS like a bad idea. but it works to keep the economy going, which is arguably a good idea. because without inflation, most economies would likely collapse, and there'd be rioting in the streets.

that's why i expect my suggestion of nerfing trading to be treated harshly by players; especially those who have already invested a lot of time grinding the hard parts to reach a point where they can trade their way to victory.

but in the end it would be good for the game to have some sort of "value sink" in the player trading economy, to give players a reason to go back to basics and start enjoying the game again.

thanks.
-az

tl;dr: current players would hate anything that nerfs the trading system, but nerfing the trading system would allow the developers to improve loot drops and crafting, which would make the game more fun and interesting again.

I agree with the others its a bad idea. This would probably make me quit the game pretty fast so no thanks.