true in the end i’m not particularly set on running with my ideas but I really would be disappointed if trading gets handled like it was in D3 where it went from unregulated wild trade to absolutely no trading at all. Neither isn’t good and I just want to try to get people to brainstorm ideas that may help influence D4 or rather inspire D4 developers.
Fixed that for you.
There is no idea that can make open trading safe. The moment “bartering” in any form exists is the moment cheaters appear.
Welcome to the forum!
I like the idea that they have for D4. I think that it has the potential to be the best of both worlds. Where you still have trading, even though it is limited.
Trading where some items have no limits on how many times you trade them. Then some items are tradable only once. I call them bind on trade (BoT). Then the last group is bind on account (BoA). The last group no doubt will be for the strongest items in the game and maybe some crafted items.
It’s not a developers idea however since it heavily favors the whales (and that’s the intention of the marketing team). I don’t have anything against it as long as there is an SSF mode as an alternative to it. If this doesn’t happen many players like me would just go to other games. And the aRPG genre in 21/22 would boom, so there would be much choice.
I know we are spinning in circles, but:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/banwave-request-please/233/911
The only form of “trading” that still exists in D3 is giving friends an item which you don’t need and which just dropped, while you were playing together with them.
Yet the game is still bot infested.
It’s items/levels/character progression and any kind of competitive elements that causes cheating and the only way to prevent it, is to either remove ALL these elements from the game, or to put some effort into the games cheat protection.
Let’s say that each (legendary) item had a set minimum cost.
Legendary A - minimum cost
- 3.000 Legendary Crafting Materials (LCM)
- 1.000 Elite Crafting Materials (ECM)
- 40.000.000 Gold
The Buyer pays 3k LCM, 1k ECM and 40m Gold.
The Seller gets 300 LCM, 100 ECM and 0 Gold (zero).
Gold could only be used to interact with NPC’s to buy things like
- Potions,
- Transmogs (like from a Mystic),
- Sockets from a Black Smith,
- Repair Costs,
- forging Gems,
- upgrading stuff,
- putting a 60 minute duration Enchantment on your weapon that increases damage, life or gives life per attack
- Gambling
- etc
While LCM and ECM would be used for
- Crafting items in the Cube and from a Blacksmith, etc
- also upgrading some stuff,
- maybe forging higher level gems
- etc.
So the idea would be that Gold can not be traded with other players and also the Seller would not get gold from selling an item, but he would get some LCM and ECM, which still are very useful for crafting and other stuff, however, 90% of the ECM and LCM would be taken out of the economic cycle.
The seller still makes a profit, but the buyer may wants to decide on whether he want to buy the item for so much (which he might wanna do if he really wants it) or if he continues to play the game and waits for that thing to drop.
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The problem with even insinuating that the devs could set a fair minimum price flies out the window the moment items within a given tier have a varied demand. What qualifies that demand can mean it makes a given build OP/meta, or if it’s a more general item, justifies a spot in a number of builds. Overall, it’d be like trying to say the Ravenfrost and SoJ in D2 are worth the same because they’re both unique rings when we both know the SoJ had a lot more demand and usefulness. Since you’ll never have an SoJ vendor that lets you buy them for 3 RFs, it would again fall back to players who would further capitalize on that demand gap and subsequently demand something absurd like 50 RFs of currency for one SoJ.
The moment this otherwise shifts into crafting potential, I can honestly just ask, what is even the point of having trading assuming some sort of mandatory exchange that can’t be cheesed by RMT and the like? Just have a robust crafting and augmenting system to help compensate for bad RNG, period. No drama in being scammed. No having to trust third-party sites/info for true value. No trying to haggle people into a deal. You want something, you put in the work in to make it. Concerns about botting/exploiting are always valid, but again, also falls into actually focusing on detection methods and meting out appropriate bans.
Earn your power by playing the game, not the market.
There could be various Tiers of Legendaries and Minimum Costs
Let’s say 10 Tiers of Minimum Costs
Tier 1-2 Legendaries drop often and do not have much of a use
Tier 3-4 Legendaries drop medium often and only have a medium use
Tier 5-6 Legendaries drop a lot more rarely and have some decent endgame use
Tier 7-8 Legendaries drop very rarely and have a good endgame use
Tier 9-10 Legendaries are like the #1, #2, #3 and maybe #4 BiS items. Maybe they are even their own tier of items that have individual costs
It also could just be 5 Tiers or 15 Tiers or whatever.
So the Minimum Cost would rather be designed around Tiers than each Legendary having a unique cost (maybe a few, but not all), and all of them would be over Market Value regardless.
Sure, it could be artificial to a certain degree, but that is not too much of an issues.
People wanna have the feeling that they are interacting with a real, larger social system. Just Crafting with ND does not fulfill that.
Many things lead to cheating. Open trading is in top 3.
I would be in favor of a similar value item only trade system. No currency, no mats, no horde of lesser items, and no freebies. If you find a mythic axe of 4 really cool Barb abilities on your Sorc, you can trade it for a mythic stave of 4 really cool Sorc abilities, and so on. How it would work on an AH is the sell puts up an item. Buyers put up qualified trade offers, the seller then chooses what they want to trade for before the auction is over. There could be a buyout option for a specific item the seller wants.
Just a thought but it could eliminate many of the issues people against trade have with trade. You will always have bots, but, I haven’t had my coffee yet, I don’t see how real money can play into this if you can only trade items for items of similar value(set by Blizzard).
The goal isn’t really to set a fair minimum price for all items. It is to set a price high enough that people probably couldn’t get mid-tier items through trading in an easier way that finding the item themselves.
The whole point is that you might actually never trade Ravenfrost, because nobody would want to pay that minimum cost - which protects the game experience of finding your own mid-tier items.
And even for SoJ, a high-end item, the minimum cost should be so high that it might not really be worth to buy it for many players, unless you were unlucky with drops.
Essentially making it so people mostly trade for high-end items, finding everything below themselves, and even then, only trading as a “last resort” against “bad luck”.
I dont think there is a point. Only talking about this as a “compromise” system to allow trading to exist for those who for some reason want it.
I’d still prefer no trading, by far, or two modes with and without trading, and separate droprates & crafting rules.
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But how would the game determine that two items have similar value? It doesnt seem realistic, even though it would be good if it was.
It would be very easy for two people to simply agree on the seller putting up a really good Mythic, in exchange for a useless one.
Or, more complex trading; put of 1 great Mythic + 49 useless ones in exchange for 50 medicore ones etc. A bit annoying to pull off for people, but it would no doubt happen anyway.
As for RMT, without the ability to determine whether two items have similar value, it would likewise be easy for RMT sellers to sella great mythic in exchange for a useless one + $$.
Botting is something they have to stop via enforcement.
However, the only real way to stop 3rd party selling of items and such that I’ve seen is… well, stopping trade entirely.
I don’t see how it will favor whales since Blizz has said they won’t be selling power in the cash shop, that is if they do MTXs. As long as they have alternatives to BiS that are not miles apart then D4 will be just fine. Where the alternative gear will be able to let you beat the hardest content in D4 even though it would be a struggle to do so, but still doable.
And I highly doubt that third party websites would make a bundle off of things that are as common as dirt or almost as common as dirt.
He is talking about a much higher bot population with open trade enabled. That would mean there would probably be, at the very least, 2xs or more botters than exist right now in D3. Do you really want D4 to have a much higher bot population, I know that I don’t want that.
While that can be set up that way, the problem is that the RMTs will bank on the fact that players will want it a lot faster than crafting.
Not everyone likes to play a trading game. The ones that want to find those items or craft them on their own don’t want to play the trading game to get the gear that they need. Plus we don’t want third party sites to be prospering off of D4, and neither does Blizz.
If that is achievable then trading becomes pointless because players will just find the items themselves. With open trading it has to be done in a way where it is much faster to get geared up then finding it yourself.
And if it is used then it would only be there for the top 1% of the players possibly causing the birth of elitist that would feel like they are superior to others because they have items that others will probably never see.
That would be child’s play for me to develop. All it would take would be to make each item have it’s own item score. Any item with an item score within x amount would be tradable based on tier of item. You could even use a Trading House for the trade.
I highly doubt that a lot of third party sites would want to do any RMT in D4 due to the fact that the items that would be sold would be either as common as dirt or almost as common as dirt. Let’s say that D4 has the set items that belong to Arctic Furs (chest armor) that might be a BoT (bind on trade) item. I have found that item in D2 many times and it is a good leveling item.
As far as botting goes though there is something else that is needed to stop it other than enforcement. Don’t design the game in a way that encourages botting. Then do what you can to make sure that the bot population is lower due to the way trading is designed. I do believe that if D4 is shipped with the trading system that they talked about. And there isn’t any reason to bot in D4 seasons due to controlling how much power is gained after reaching level cap then D4 will be just fine and have a much lower bot population than D3.
Gold is tradable resource. Whales buy gold from 3rd parties.
Not sure that’s really possible. We’re talking about ARPGs - a set of games whose core is based around players spending time in game and hunting gear. That encourages botting by itself, even if there’s no other mechanic that does.
That is the goal.
But, there would still be some trading, for high end items that you hadn’t found yourself first.
Would merely be the “bad luck” protection some people want.
Which is what should be avoided at all cost.
Unless there are two separate modes, then trading should be subpar to finding items yourself, for most items, and then for some high end items it would be on par or slightly better.
Now, I think not allowing trading is the much cleaner and easier solution. Just talking hypotheticals.
And how would your item score determine the value?
It would have to be based on each affix on the item. How do you determine the value of each affix, and the value of interactions of affixes?
It is not realistic.
Unless classes and affixes are extremely shallow I guess.
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It would also heavily reduce botting to completely remove items from the game, but in my opinion it isn’t always the easiest solution that turns out to be the best.
Crippling the game and removing stuff from it because of botting instead of increasing the efforts to ban the botters is a lazy and half-assed attempt that will only lead to a crappy game.
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You probably did not read the rest of my post.
I was arguing in favor of a regulated market where legendaries have a Minimum Cost that is way above the market price, to incentivise people to still play the game to find their loot and only pay for a few of these items if they really want or need to.
You will not need 3rd party websites when it is already much better to just farm for stuff instead.