D4 - How should trading work?

General Discussion
1

In this thread I want to tell you about my imagination how trading could work in D4.

First of all I want to say sorry for my bad English, Its not the country where I was born or live and im still visiting the school to learn it.

So before I start, I’m sure we all have heard that blizzard want to implement a trading system in D4.
As many other fans of diablo, I think this is a good idea because in my opinion a way of trading has to be in any RPG / ARPG.
When the Game industry wasn’t that big as it is these days, we all had fun using this feature and the one or two guys of us appreciated getting some money for an item they had to grind for hours or days.
But all of us should have also already mentioned, that with the grow of the game industry, the industry of cheating, RMT and Bots has grown too, which is to be honest the most awfull thing I had to experience in any kind of game.
With that being said, I want to respect both type of aspects of players and try to help the developers with my individual solution to this problem.

:x: Real money should be completely taken out of the game
:x: Auction House(s) should be completely taken out of the game
:x: You should not be able to trade with everyone you want to

In my opinion how D3 was in the last years of its hype was not bad.

:white_check_mark: You should be able to trade any item you want to, to people you’re playing with in this moment / in this lobby for at least 2-3 hours

Well, I know this is no NEW solution to the problem because it’s just imitating D3.
But it’s actually the best way to avoid the most dramatic problems which ruined the most RPG’s like Bots and RMT Sites, Spams etc.

So here are some ideas which could be included or used if D4 trading system should work different to D3:

:white_check_mark: You should be able to trade any Item you want to all of your Guild members atleast for 24 hours.
:arrow_right: To avoid people joining different guilds to trade up the best loot, I recommend to set a timer for joining/leaving guilds. As example: If I leave my current Guild, I will have to wait 7 days before I join a new one. Until this happens, the people won’t be able to sell/trade me the items I came for.
“Well what about people joining their first clan?” Set a 24h trade block for them too.
:arrow_right: To avoid people joining with different new created Characters or accounts, I also recommend to set a minimum needed Lv. (should be a high Lv. maybe up to Paragon 100 or smth.) for joining or creating guilds, or maybe account overtaking guilds, so all characters are automatically in the same guild when you join one.
:arrow_right: Guilds should have a maximum of 20-30 players. We all want to have a guild with some real life or gaming friends we already know for years, and that’s I think also the reason why we want to have trading in the game. But if we are honest. NO ONE in this world has more than 30 friends hes playing the same game with. Even back in the days when I was playing WoW for years I only managed to get 10 maybe maximum 15 of people I know to play that game with me. And also this time is highly rare content in my memories and was especially about guild wars.

:white_check_mark: Another idea I was thinking about is, that craft materials or any similar items which aren’t really equipment you can use to fight or equip, shouldnt be able to trade. In my opinion these are items you drop anyways in a certain time of grinding.
:arrow_right: Also this will avoid people to ask their mates for simple things because they don’t want to teleport to a region/dungeon and go farm for it. In this option they will have to.
:arrow_right: If we think back to D3 where you can equip you Armor/Weapon with some magic Stones which gave you some bonus stats. You will now have to grind yourself for these bonus of DMG or whatever you decide to attach to your Build, instead of 3 mates giving you all their Stones they don’t need for their character. Maybe this will somehow avoid getting instantly the “best” equipment by trading because you will still have to finish the items yourself if this is somehow understandable. And I’m not only talking about those Stones in D3. I’m talking about any non equip able items and misc, like keys, dungeon tickets, heal pots, etc.

:white_check_mark: Specific crafted equipment like the hell fire ring in D3 where you need 3 essentials from bosses/dungeon runs should also NOT be able to traded. Items like this should be bound to the account in my opinion.
It is important you have equipment you can’t trade, but it should be equipment you have to craft, not drop.
So people will play the game and grind for their gear too.

:question: I was also thinking about denying people the option to trade Gold. But I think this depends on how important gold will be in D4 and for what features it can be used. I guess in this point we all know not enough about the actual upcoming game.

:warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning:
Guys if you arrived at this point of my thread I want to thank you for reading all of it and I want you to comment your opinion on that.
I know we all have different views about the trading system but blizzard already confirmed D4 will have one.
I started my day by googling if D4 will have an RMAH because I was hyped to have one again.
After I read several threads to this I decided this option isn’t helping me in my game experience or the game either.
So I spent the last 2 hours thinking about solutions.
I also mentioned a lot different solutions from other fans, but I found some gray areas where Bots and RMS will trick out the system and D4 will crash like D3.

If you found such ones in my type of ideas or solutions tell me! So we can work together on them as a community.
D4 isn’t released yet and it will take its time I guess.

AT THE END OF THIS I WANT TO MENTION ONE LAST THING!!!
OFCOURSE WE NEED A WORKING TRADING SYSTEM.
BUT WE ALSO NEED A MUCH BETTER ANTI CHEATING AND BOTTING SOFTWARE!!!
THIS IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO ME!!!
:warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning::warning:

1 Like
2

NO TRADING! Why? because trading only benefits bots. How? simple, a player has a bot account and a regular account. The bot farms the gear and gives it to the regular account. Bot account gets banned, who cares as all the benefits are given to the legit account. The only people that want trading are those that bot, and YES, there will be bots in D4…

6 Likes
3

RMAH is the way to go as…

thats just not diablo.

an in game tool to trade with others is better than get scammed bc you used a third party website or in game chat.

4

Agree.
Nobody can’t stop trading/selling/buying Items. But it matters a lot when that option is give ingame or not. Ingame real money trade will destroy the game for many players, because some business-mans will begin to make money. No hobby-fun play - just work and make money about selling items - create bots and other cheats and controll the market prices. We saw that in d3.

Of course, in d2 was also botters and cheaters. But the trade systeme was not managed ingame. Trade was just about the chat that still works.

So i think, most second important is not to set excites to earn real money ingame insteed of enjoying just playing. And most important is to create a rly safe system against cheaters in all forms (duper, botter, and so on).

But i don’t like ur idea just to trade with group or clan members.
I hink many ppl dont want to play in a group or in a clan. But what are they doing when they find a good unique which they dont need?

In the german Diablo Forum we spoke about trading too.

I think a trade system like in the game ,Silkroad’ would be my favorite.
It would be something new for the diablo games, because it was never there. But in silkroad it worked well and i liked it.

Like OP said
Pls dont create an auction house and pls dont integrate real money for ingame trades. Fight the cheaters - everybody knows a cheater has a small … :wink:

Hell is coming brother :wink:

5

Will happen but with small exchange restrictions at high grade item trades. You can trade any item but you can’t flip high grade items freely to profit off from them. High grade items only can be traded away once to three times to secure an end user, while lower grade items can exchange hands without limits.

You can’t completely cut out the money from an active digital trading platform. In practice it never works, you can come up with small ideas but there’s always a work around when you allow trading for highly soared items.
There are tons of ways to pay someone online. When you allow practical trading without strict limits, then there will be digital payments from other third party sites and you’d be delusional if you ever thought you can control all of it.

If you don’t like real money then best action is implementing the account bound system of D3 with improved crafting system or restricting any high grade item trading like D:I did but then, there aren’t any trade interaction to talk about. This game supposed to be social and there’s no practical way to control third party digital payment platforms outside of the game.

Bots gonna abuse this. With no real restriction and allowing 24 hours trading, you’re not really alleviating or preventing anything. Third party services will have multiple bots and each of them could be used for item trading as long as you have money; which you can never control among players.

I don’t quite remember but these supposed to be account bound I believe, else bots will have a huge advantage. In Diablo Immortal you can trade those I think but you can not trade legendary items. That’s how D:I dealt with trading part of the problem.

1 Like
6

SSF benefits bots too as they put in more hours. Bots aren’t a valid reason to eliminate Trading. Especially when it’s Blizzard that decides when they want to catch em.

7

Sorry i did not read this.
Just enable trading as D2 has it…

3 Likes
8

It depends on itemization, drop rates, equipment binding and such. I think they should design the game with free trading in mind. I also feel that it’s better to have items bind on transfer to another player(with some limitations such as if you trade it to a party member right after finding it.) Some slots always dropping as Bind on Acquire makes sense as well. Binding gets rid of flipping BS, but hurts players when they find an upgrade and want to trade their old item.

There should definitely be no Auction House, but in game quality of life features would probably be needed to try and reduce the reliance people will have on that D2 trading site.

9

If you want real money taken out of the game, obviously you mean annin game system but without some AH or from of blind trading system, there will be non official real money trading sites set up.

With that out of the way, it should be like D3 free trade within party only. But that’s not going to happen.

The best thing they could do is do two seperate loot modes. Trade and self found. Trade has an abysmally low drop rate like D2. Self found has a higher drop rate, something like vD3 maybe a little lower. Since loot is personal, and the rate would be tied to the mode, all players can group if wanted.

10

Best trading system possible.

If not, then at least make all uniques, legendaries, rares, gold, and crafting materials untradeable.

2 Likes
11

No trading is the best option. Or at least “no trade” characters in their own no-trade realm. If trading is unavoidable, then it should be as restricted as possible in all possible ways, so it would not be profitable to run a bot or use JSP and other trade forums.

D2R will be a joke again, just like D2 now with full hi-end-geared characters on the 1st day of the season. There is a slight hope D4 won’t follow that route.

12

Oh look, another 0-poster who wants trading…as if it’s so hard to create a guild of botters and item sellers.

1 Like
13

Developing a D4 trading system such that high quality items could be traded while heavily disincentivizing RMT is very complex but possible.

I’m not sure Blizzard would be willing to commit development staff with enough AI Machine Learning expertise to pull if off. They might need to develop an RL Agent offline system that constantly evaluates item values based on what’s actually dropped in-game and accurately assigns a ranking value based on real game power or utility with the RL Agent playing the game itself.

The system would require that players give up an item of roughly the same value to get an item of that same value. You would need a powerful useful Mythic to get a powerful useful Mythic. You could never trade a common dagger for a legendary - the items traded need to be very close in value.

I don’t know if there’s a term for the system but I would call it something like an item-equivalency trading solution.

Heavy RMT comes in, for example, when people can just pay $10 and get BiS gear on an RMT site while trading nothing for that BiS gear. With an item-equivalency trading solution, the person wanting to get a BiS item would have to already have a BiS item - for example, a player might have a top-end Sorceress item wanting to trade for a top-end Barbarian item. The item-equivalency system wouldn’t allow unequal trades but it would allow that trade.

The system was never flushed out fully but it’s a given it would involve RL Agent AI software to rank all the items and gear, because there are millions of combinations of gear with all the classes and bossing, non-bossing scenarios in these games. All those combinations far exceed some kind of manual testing or rating of items. An RL Agent would need to be set up where it quite literally takes every class and gear combo through the campaign and endgame to evaluate and rank items accurately.

I think we’d still see RMT and shenanigans of some kind but I think they’d be muted when you need items of the same value when trading - trading would be more to fill out equally powerful builds or sets where your class has something for another class. Or you might have 2 equally powerful playstyles of a class with ranged or melee and trading would allow you to fill out that ranged build if you have melee items more quickly for example.

As far as an auction house, either GAH or RMAH - we have to remember that players played RMAH more than the game itself with D3. Blizz developers thought that RMAH ended up hurting the game:

"we’ve got this really amazing game, but the auction house is having this distorting effect on how some people might perceive it.”

“Some players enjoyed trading, sure—especially the ones who were farming loot and selling it for a healthy profit—but for many, the auction house made Diablo III a significantly worse experience. It reduced the thrill of hunting for gear.”

"Diablo is best experienced when, as a result of slaying monsters, you get better items that allow you to make your character more powerful,” “And if the activity that I do to make my character more powerful does not include killing monsters . . . then that’s not a good place to be.”

Josh M in a meeting: "‘You know what, guys? Maybe we should just kill it.’”

So when they killed RMAH and released RoS, sales and positive reception followed.

Instead, I think they could do some kind of “trading filters” system where you can find people that want your gear and you can find people selling what you want and so on and then just trade in-game - that would kind of limit the amount of trading because they really don’t want Diablo to be about crafting or trading - they want Diablo to be mainly about killing monsters.

Additionally, if they were concerned about people trading too much using an in-game trading window they could require a certain kind of material to trade: you would need 5 of this mat for example to trade, and the mat only comes from killing monsters. That way you’re solving 2 problems: your problem with people trading too much and your problem with people “not killing monsters” - players have to play the game and kill stuff just to get mats and trade.

I do think the current D4 dev idea of only allowing low-tier or common items to be traded isn’t terrible but if any of those low-tier items end up being chainable, rolling up into something valuable or they save significant in-game time to just pay for, then RMT will be in full force imo.

I also don’t mind Cyonan or Skelos’s previous ideas of just silo’ing off ladders and playerbases that want full trading and those kinds of shenanigans with “Whales” or casual players that can’t afford to spend time in the game to achieve BiS, in those separate game modes there would be full global trading - nothing would be account-bound. I hope I’m not butchering their suggestions but I think that was the gist, there would be separate ladders with full trading and ladders like we have now with BoA - they’d be separate.

1 Like
14

BOO!! :stuck_out_tongue:

If I cannot trade items with my friends, I will be severely disappointed.

1 Like
15

I think somekind of Real Money is the best one. You can sell your stuff when you’re ready to leave, other remaining players buy your stuff so it helps them too. More people leave, stronger the rest gets etc.

16

I really hope they consider bringing real money back. Diablo is shallow game, there gotta be a good hook. Sure they can try to make something like Civilization, try to bring more depth or etc.

17

FinCEN is the reason that will never happen.

18

Something has happened since Diablo 3 RMAH? Read some stuff some people made over 10k in Diablo 3.

My idea its harder to turn any profit, as you leave Blizzard close your account, you just cant watch the market 24/7. People are complaining about bad drop rates, it just makes sense we are almost like vultures and buy stuff from other players when they leave. Sure, my idea might bring some toxicity, as other players want you to leave, but I bet Diablo players can handle it.

Also if Blizzard’s fans want trading so much, why not to make Survival Online with full trading and economy and be done with it once for all?

19

Pathetic thinking. So because of the bots, let’s kill one of the best feature Online Games have : Trading.

Trading should be allowed no question asked. Is the Dev’s and Company job to fight RMT, Bots, etc.

If there will be no tradings, then we will have a D3 itemization copy/paste into D4. I don’t want that. I want BiS items to be rare to VERY RARE. When I get one I want to be AMAZED, to feel joy, etc…not handed to me in few days of playing the game.

2 Likes
20

So do I, and you can have that without trading.
Trading is nothing but a disaster, and it goes directly against having rare items, as trading makes it endlessly easier to get those items.