D4 trading - why it needs to be limited or not at all

[Ehpic-11306]

i posted this in another thread but figured i’d start my own… my honest opinion, i’d rather not have trading or I would prefer that it be very limited (Only leveling and low level items are tradeable, max level gear is not).

I honestly prefer playing the game and knowing that i’ll eventually get the drop i need, i feel this is something current Diablo 3 has gotten very right, you can piece together the build relatively-fast while working towards perfect gear over time…Now i can agree the initial gearing up needs to take a bit more time in d3 but thats a nob that can be turned.

I’d prefer not getting a random drop that i then have to either find someone who has what i want and trade for(assuming they want the item i have), or convert it into a standard currency and use that currency to buy the item i want (IE i will get 10 soj for this item, the item i want costs 10 soj… cool).

I think trading can have a place(Being able to drop leveling gear on a friend for example to kit them out and give them a head start) but my worry is that, with trading, drop rates of items will be reduced meaning the best way to kit your character out is to play the market and flip currency until you can buy your item. Or find a specific thing you can farm fast, convert that to currency, then buy your gear…

I don’t understand the logic right now the cycle is
a. Kill things > get loot you need relatively soon > minmax it over time by playing the game and getting more drops.

with trading the cycle is
b. Kill things > get some items you don’t need > Trade those items for items you need (OR trade those items for currency > Trade that currency for an item you need, likely save up and buy the best one on the market board as soon as you can > Not have any room to improve your character because you bought the best item you could > sit around in town bored waiting for stuff of yours to sell on the market so you can buy your thing since it’s more efficient to do that rather than farm the item yourself.

I’m really hoping we don’t get to B as that’s what early D3 was like, that’s also what D2 was like. D2 was constantly farming Baal, Mephisto and Pindel for that clutch drop you could trade for 20-40 SOJ, you then bought the item you wanted with those SOJ’s.

Similarly in PoE > you get insane drops to trade for chaos orbs or exalted orbs, you then buy the gear you want with those orbs.

I prefer the d3 style of if you just play the game eventually you will find the item(s) you need to make yoru build. Either through killing things, spam crafting or gambling. the d3 system is much better and keeps you playing the game not a marketboard.

[StuRedman-2654]

@Ehpic-11306

the d3 system is much better and keeps you playing the game not a marketboard.

Precisely. They fixed D3 with ROS by removing AH and buffing drop rates. I don’t understand why they would go back in the wrong direction.
Trading only benefits flippers and Chinese prison farming.
Leave it like it is in D3 (bound to party), it is perfect as it is.

[StrikerJolt-1840]

@StuRedman-2654

Trading only benefits flippers and Chinese prison farming

This is highly ignorant and not even remotely true. Should we also not have stores? After all stores get robbed and robbers exist.

Give me a break.

@StuRedman-2654

Precisely. They fixed D3 with ROS by removing AH and buffing drop rates. I don’t understand why they would go back in the wrong direction.

Don’t use trading as an escape goat for the poor decision of the Diablo 3 development team with the auction house. Thank you.

@StuRedman-2654

Leave it like it is in D3 (bound to party), it is perfect as it is.

Yeaaah, no.

[ARTPOP-1598]

No thanks. Keep playing Diablo 3 then. Many of us don’t want 100 legendary items dropping every hour. In D3, it’s great finding a primal that is useless to you and you can’t trade it to a friend unless they were in your game when it dropped huh? Now imagine that with Mythics. So fun. It can just sit in my stash so I can look at it whenever I want.

[StrikerJolt-1840]

@Ehpic-11306

I’m really hoping we don’t get to B as that’s what early D3 was like, that’s also what D2 was like. D2 was constantly farming Baal, Mephisto and Pindel for that clutch drop you could trade for 20-40 SOJ, you then bought the item you wanted with those SOJ’s.

What does this have to do with trading? This was the games design, it was a poor design have only a select few monsters drop good items but hindsight is always 2020.

Look at Diablo 2 enrich mod for example: It puts unique bosses in every zone of the game so you don’t have to do that. So you can actually play other parts of the game.

@Ehpic-11306

I don’t understand the logic right now the cycle is

Maybe because you don’t have friends? (This is a joke.)

Having the community interact with each other on a daily basis for a joint reason is healthy for the games longevity.

@Ehpic-11306

i feel this is something current Diablo 3 has gotten very right

Well, I’m glad I don’t care about your feelings and only care about your argument and reasoning. Which… don’t hold up at all and seems very limited, little foresight, and zero self criticism.

@Ehpic-11306

you get insane drops to trade for chaos orbs or exalted orbs, you then buy the gear you want with those orbs.

You can choose to do that. You don’t have to. You are not required, if you want to be self found. Then be self found. The problem is that when developers make the mistake making gear mandatory rather than a plus/boon is where this is a problem.

In Diablo 1 and 2 - you can beat all difficulties without a single runeword or unique and that’s the way it should remain.

[Zeddicuus-1141]

Personally I feel they boosted drop rates too much. To me, legendary items didn’t feel legendary if I could have a couple dozen drop within an hour. It felt even worse when almost all of those were useless given the ‘crap stats’ since only a small handful of stats actually matter.

I enjoy games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, D2 where the drop rates are lower, but the itemization makes a lot more stats relevant and useful so none of them ever feel useless. I can always pop into a game or two and trade off what I won’t use for something I will, or may even be inspired to a new build.

D3 almost shunned people leveling up new characters unless they were a different class. At least, that’s how it felt to me.

[Ehpic-11306]

@ARTPOP-1598

Keep playing Diablo 3 then.

I plan on it, i play every season and have thousands of hours in this game. Thanks

@StrikerJolt-1840

Having the community interact with each other on a daily basis for a joint reason is healthy for the games longevity.

how is trading ‘community interaction’? Take PoE for example, trading is finding the item you want on a 3rd party website, copy/pasting a /tell and hoping that person isn’t afk. The guy invites you to his hideout and you trade, you then leave his hideout. I don’t recall the last time i ever talked to someone i was trading. Why even have that step? it would be more rewarding to just get the item from playing the game.

I could argue there’s more player interaction in D3 than there is in PoE with speed farming metas and the like, you need a good clan or communities to find high farming groups, you build friendships and add htose players to your friendlist over time so you can get groups faster. In POE i rarely talk to people, i solo everything and just farm orbs to buy the gear i want.

IE the last time i played poe for a league i just shaped my atlas to farm shaped maps that were selling well, basically shaped it to get the maps i saw alkhaizer running since i knew so many people would just copy his atlas and buy the shaped maps he was running. Made a tonne of currency and bought all the gear i wanted. I got bored since, once i got the gear, there was no room for me to actually improve my gear.

Where-as, in D3, i can get a set rolling pretty fast but by no means is it as efficient as it could possibly be, heck i’ve gone an entire season before without rolling a perfect quad glove for a build. But thats fine, my build still works and i have a carrot to chase.

[MissCheetah-1661]

@StrikerJolt-1840

escape goat

@StrikerJolt-1840

This is highly ignorant and not even remotely true. Should we also not have stores? After all stores get robbed and robbers exist.

While the statement you are countering is a bit incorrect, (of course trading has other benefits besides flippers and foreign criminals), your argument is kind of silly though because it conflates the existence of real life stores with a game system. Just because stores exist in real life, does not make them a good fit for a specific game.

The real question for me is, “does open trading have enough benefits in a Diablo game to offset the negatives that open trading brings (third party sites making real life money off the game which results in account compromises, spam, even more bots, and pay to win)?”. Also, how would full open trading impact the gear acquisition curve? Would they lower in-game drop rates again so that gear is rare in order to avoid gearing up too fast and the game being “done”?

Personally I am good with the D3 system, or something similar to it.

[StuRedman-2654]

@StrikerJolt-1840

poor decision of the Diablo 3 development team with the auction house

What poor decision? AH was the perfect trading implementation, so if people had to trade they could do it without 3rd party sites or forums.
Trade in style or not at all. The latter is the better of course.

@ARTPOP-1598

In D3, it’s great finding a primal that is useless to you and you can’t trade it to a friend unless they were in your game when it dropped huh?

Never happens because I play all classes. And D3 has no stupid non respecable skill trees so I can actually integrate the primal into a build.

@StrikerJolt-1840

if you want to be self found. Then be self found.

The traders’ favorite lie. You can’t be self found with abysmal drop rates the traders cry for so they can make profit.

@Ehpic-11306

I plan on it, i play every season and have thousands of hours in this game. Thanks

Me too

@Ehpic-11306

Where-as, in D3, i can get a set rolling pretty fast but by no means is it as efficient as it could possibly be, heck i’ve gone an entire season before without rolling a perfect quad glove for a build. But thats fine, my build still works and i have a carrot to chase.

Precisely.

@MissCheetah-1661

Would they lower in-game drop rates again so that gear is rare in order to avoid gearing up too fast and the game being “done”?

Yeah, this. The better solution to keep the game interesting is of course to keep pushing new and better content, like it currently happens in D3.

[StrikerJolt-1840]

Thank you for making me laugh.

I wouldn’t say it’s incorrect, but I understand what you mean… but what I am really getting at is just because some people cheat the system, doesn’t mean the system should not be created.

If we take the approach of… “Bad people exist, therefor we can’t do x” we wouldn’t have things like the internet or many things that we take for granted like social media.

People are always going to figure out a way to cheat the system. If you don’t want people to cheat the system get better security. Locks, cameras, bullet proof doors, etc.

@MissCheetah-1661

Personally I am good with the D3 system, or something similar to it.

I’m not, it basically forced players to have to join communities using the interface.
“Barbshare”
“Wizardshare”

What do these communities really offer to the game outside of saying, “Hey, I need 4 other barbarians to farm barbarian gear.” get a group and then just start doing and nobody is really interacting with each other.

I don’t feel like complicating a system and forcing players to use needless interfaces to get the items that they want is not a good thing.

[StrikerJolt-1840]

@StuRedman-2654

The traders’ favorite lie. You can’t be self found with abysmal drop rates the traders cry for so they can make profit.

I’m just gonna quote myself from another thread.

[Shrewify-1223]

No thanks. Trading was a main staple in the diablo genre.
Going back to d2 ways is not going in the opposite direction.

D3s loot system of finding ur own crap and mever trading isnt fun.
The grinding for items isnt fun the d3 way. At all.

[Ehpic-11306]

@Shrewify-1223

The grinding for items isnt fun the d3 way. At all.

then what do you play an ARPG for if not for grinding loot, maybe i’m missing something. And that’s not a troll question, i’m honestly curious.

[Shrewify-1223]

I dont play d3, so i cant answer that question. I inow im d2 it was nice to have great stuff to trade for other great stuff to help my character be gosu and destroy ppl in pvp outside town.

That was mine, and many others end games.

[StrikerJolt-1840]

@StuRedman-2654

The traders’ favorite lie. You can’t be self found with abysmal drop rates the traders cry for so they can make profit.

@StrikerJolt-1840

This is why Diablo 2 was unaffected by trading. They didn’t design the game around trading, they designed the game and added in trading as an extra feature.

They didn’t intend for trading to be that big and that much of successful and to think otherwise would give them WAY too much credit.

Again, build a game first then we discuss whether or not to add trading, but if the game itself is designed without trading then trading is added as an extra feature. Then trading itself didn’t effect the game.

As for the drop rate discussion. The reason why Diablo and Classic was as popular and successful is because they didn’t shower you with loot and they didn’t make loot a mandatory thing.

You don’t need full epic gear to do raiding in Classic WoW. You could beat the raid without the perfect gear. The perfect gear only made it easier.

This called “Gear checking” where you do need gear to pass content and I don’t like that.

@StrikerJolt-1840

But again, and I’m gonna really hone in on this point.

To make the assumptions that the Diablo developers while designing knew the exact out come, predicted, designed, on purpose the trading and expected the out come on which happened is insane.

They had no idea that trading in Diablo 2 would be a massive hit. They just put into the game because thought it would be cool.

To act as if the developers mastermind the entire trading community frenzy that was Diablo 2 is sheer fantasy and delusional.

[Shadout-2849]

@Ehpic-11306

I honestly prefer playing the game and knowing that i’ll eventually get the drop i need, i feel this is something current Diablo 3 has gotten very right, you can piece together the build relatively-fast while working towards perfect gear over time…Now i can agree the initial gearing up needs to take a bit more time in d3 but thats a nob that can be turned.

Yes, very much so.

@Ehpic-11306

I think trading can have a place(Being able to drop leveling gear on a friend for example to kit them out and give them a head start)

I really disagree with that, as tempting as it seems. You are putting an axe to their gear progression, and imo, only hurting their fun. Even without trading, you can already boost a friend by carrying them with you on harder content than they otherwise could do.

@Ehpic-11306

I’d prefer not getting a random drop that i then have to either find someone who has what i want and trade for(assuming they want the item i have), or convert it into a standard currency and use that currency to buy the item i want (IE i will get 10 soj for this item, the item i want costs 10 soj… cool).

While I certainly dont disagree about the trading part of this, getting items you dont need is important. It acts as an encouragement to try out new builds and characters.

Overall, trading hurts the basic A-RPG gameplay. Either get rid of it entirely, or have two completely separate, and individually balanced game modes. So those of us who prefer good gameplay over trading tycoon, can pick a mode without trading.

@Ehpic-11306

how is trading ‘community interaction’? Take PoE for example, trading is finding the item you want on a 3rd party website, copy/pasting a /tell and hoping that person isn’t afk. The guy invites you to his hideout and you trade, you then leave his hideout. I don’t recall the last time i ever talked to someone i was trading. Why even have that step? it would be more rewarding to just get the item from playing the game.

Also so so much this.
People have this fantasy about trading, that doesnt correspond with actual games.

[Ehpic-11306]

@Shrewify-1223

I dont play d3, so i cant answer that question. I inow im d2 it was nice to have great stuff to trade for other great stuff to help my character be gosu and destroy ppl in pvp outside town.

i get it, i played a tonne of D2 back in the day, it was fun doing duels outside of tristram, got plenty of ears from that Trading was fun, but i find the d3 system much better… again that’s my opinion.

If you have never played D3 i’d recommend you pop in for a season and give it a try, you may end up liking it.

@Shadout-2849

People have this fantasy about trading, that doesnt correspond with actual games.

exactly. that’s how i see it also.

[MissCheetah-1661]

@StrikerJolt-1840

Having the community interact with each other on a daily basis for a joint reason is healthy for the games longevity.

@StrikerJolt-1840

I’m not, it basically forced players to have to join communities using the interface.
“Barbshare”
“Wizardshare”

What do these communities really offer to the game outside of saying, “Hey, I need 4 other barbarians to farm barbarian gear.” get a group and then just start doing and nobody is really interacting with each other.

You first say trading/loot sharing promotes community (for the purpose of trading) - as a good thing. Then you say trading forces community and social interactions just for trading - as a bad thing.

[ARTPOP-1598]

If trading is so bad, then why are the other ARPGs that allow trading so much better than D3? PoE, Grim Dawn, and D2 are a few examples. If you love D3 and it’s terrible trading design, why not stick with it and forget about D4? Us D2 fans have waited for a proper sequel for years. You guys can keep playing D3.

[Shadout-2849]

@StrikerJolt-1840

I’m not, it basically forced players to have to join communities using the interface.
“Barbshare”
“Wizardshare”

What do these communities really offer to the game outside of saying, “Hey, I need 4 other barbarians to farm barbarian gear.” get a group and then just start doing and nobody is really interacting with each other.

That is because of crappy “Smart drops”. Get rid of that and the problem is somewhat solved.

Sure, 4 people teams have an advantage still, but you can solve that through balancing how fast 1,2,3,4 people clear dungeons (monster HP scaling).

It is actually okay if groups have a slight advantage over solo due to being able to share items.
And that will be the one and only time I ever say that I am fine with groups > solo.

Anyway, I wouldn’t at all be opposed no not having trading between people within a group. However, since everyone in the group participated in killing a monster, it seems fair they all have access to the loot that dropped. They would be able to do that, if all loot was shared from the start too.