D4 game director just confirmed it. Almost first thing he mentioned, that trading is in. They know we want it.
But they are looking to make the best gear bind in pick up. Not good.
You won’t appease fans with a half arsed, meaningless trading system. We need to be able to trade end game items. Doesn’t even have to be all items. The main thing is there needs to be meaningful trading right through to end game.
If the trading system sucks, I’m done with franchise, and with Blizzard.
UPDATE:
Here’s how trading should be done:
Diablo 2 drop rates and trading works. That’s what they should be aiming for. Not Diablo 3 vanilla. And definetly not present D3 where drops that are supposed to be rare rain from the sky.
D3 vanilla had drop rates low and most legendary items were crap. That’s not a fun experience. With rates that low, legendary items should have always been good. The opposite was true.
Also it was the RMAH and gold auction house that made them need to have such bad drops. D4 won’t have an auction house. There are stark differences in the the drop rate requirements with an auction house vs trading. Auction house makes buying/selling gear too easy, everyone ends up trading everything they get that’s half decent if you add an auction house.
Therefore, auction house means you need to set drop rates much lower to compensate for the fact that people are going to have a very easy way to buy items through the auction system.
The same doesn’t occur if you have just trading and no auction house. People can’t be bothered to try to trade everything when it takes more time and effort to do it. So most items don’t end up traded, they get hoarded instead, as space allows for. It ends up with people trading just really good items, or, items traded in chance meetings between players.
I’m speaking from experience as both a D2 player and a D3 player. And I’ve spent a lot more hours on vanilla D3.
In D2, I rarely traded. It just didn’t feel worth my time and effort to do it. But I liked that I could do it when I wanted to. I’d only do it when it was with or for an amazing item.
In D3 I traded every half decent item I got. And pretty much all of my gear came from the auction house. Why? Because the auction house made it too easy to buy and sell gear. It would have been a totally different story if D3 never had an auction house and just had basic face to face trading instead. Because I can’t be bothered with trying to trade for drops all the time. I would have just traded when I felt like it mattered most, like in D2.
That’s why I think open trading, perhaps with non tradable gear on a couple of special categories for certain slots should be the best way to go with D4 trading. There needs to be ample room for end game trading. No auction house, because that feature becomes the focus due to how easy the auction house makes it to buy and sell.
