Just offering a word of caution about going the same direction they went with Diablo 3.
Trading was always a big part of the Diablo series. Clearly Blizzard think it’s a waste of time to continue further development of Diablo 3 so it can’t have been doing very well for a while now.
I’ve played Blizzard games for over 20 years. But I won’t even bother with Diablo 4 if there’s no trading, meaning no player economy. I enjoy having a broader base of things to do. If it’s just a mindless monster hunter, with no multiplayer economy, it will become stale quickly. I am sure there are many others who feel the same.
I am aware that there are quite a few on this forum, who still play Diablo 3, who will disagree. Well, no point in arguing about it. We’ll find out in the future. If Blizzard goes the route of not having a player economy, games such as path of exile and similar titles will be far greater threats than they otherwise would have been. Riot games is said to be making a competitor to Diablo also. If their game has a player economy and Diablo 4 does not, it could end up being a fk up of epic proportions on Blizzards part.
161 Likes
Having trading adds a few tricky things. One very, very, very, VERY important aspect is that trading must NOT become mandatory to make any sort of progress. All gear must be possible to acquire in 100% solo play with reasonable effort.
74 Likes
Something I’ve learned in my agedness, never say never.
I prefer self found, but I will trade if needed. (in POE)
But really it’s so easy to gear at 70 trading is irrelevant in D3. Hopefully D4 is a bit more challenging.
15 Likes
I agree completely. They screwed up the launch of D3 by balancing the game with such crap drop rates that trading was practically the only way to progress after a while. Then to fix the situation rather than try to balance it they gutted the whole trading system. Perhaps they felt it was the simplest way to do it in a game that was already established.
I just hope they are wise enough to realise when developing Diablo 4 that it’s better to have trading in a balanced manner, than to not have it at all.
20 Likes
As long as trading doesn’t become mandatory in order to gear or even progress, I will have zero issue with it being implemented in future Diablo games.
17 Likes
As everyone else has stated, the only reason to really need trading is if legendaries are very low drop rate, or otherwise difficult to get. Back in the day of the 2 hour pity timer, yeah trading was needed. Now however you’ll get 6+ legs from a 3 minute T16 rift, or 13+ legs from a 5 minute GR 100.
3 Likes
Yes I double your sentiment!
For all the reasons they gave why it’s gone, most of that can be easily fixed.
3 Likes
There will be advanced crafting. It’s the same as trading without the negative aspects of trading.
2 Likes
D3 had full on “item ebay” trading and the most restricted idiotic version of “trading” imaginable. obviously this should be enough to show people that if itemization sucks then the type of trading they go with is irrelevant…
More critically, if they go with trading again the more controversial “legit” die-hard RPG choice, and they are at the same time too dumb to create cool items / stats / and character growth, it wont matter much as it did not matter at all with D3.
A trading system is not a success the moment players can flip boring stupid trash back and forth…
1 Like
I doubt there will be trading simply because of black market selling of Blizzard’s ip. Which the Battlenet EULA prohibits. Other problems will include d2jsp and the incentive to bot and hack.
13 Likes
This could be true. Blizzard could make trading blind and set market values. People might not like it but it could de-incentivize selling real rare items on a black market.
I’m totally for that. Trading on a message board and every trade is moderated by AI and all trades must be item for item of equal value that Blizzard has set the value for. The trade occurs on the board by putting the item in a trade slot in the game, then when two parties comply, the AI switches the items. I also think there needs to be a limit to how often an account can trade per day.
4 Likes
The important thing for me is that items have implicit value and that Chase items exist that take a lot of time or effort to obtain, and I’m not talking about red borders and bigger numbers. The reason being is once you got everything there is to get you rapidly get bored. The secondary reason is if everybody and their aunties’ dog has kridershot (for example) where is the feeling of excitement if it drops for you?
As to trade, I’m not against it but it has its own sea of problems, not least scamming and short circuiting actually playing the game.
My own place in a game like PoE is trade for what I absolutely can’t find myself. But PoE has some stupidly rare items that you could realistically go years not finding and they are fundamental to certain builds. If I’m not playing one of those builds, I go ssf.
I absolutely did NOT play D2 just because there was trading…nope… I am not interested in trading gears. I am interested in having fun, not sit around searching for stuff. I disagree with OP on the fact that trading was a “always a big part of…” Nope, stop right there, and go back and play for the lore…
27 Likes
Scamming people, farm bots, duping, unfair trades, wasting peoples time, spam bots, destroyed economy, cash sites are also a big part of Diablo. At least Diablo 2.
With unshackled trading comes problems. What’s the point of rare drops when everyone and their mother can get Enigma for much cheaper because of how bloated and flooded the economy is?
The only people who really benefit with such a system are not legitimate people.
26 Likes
Trading makes the game more fun! Then you dont have to have a crap loot system where everything that drops is for your class and you get 15 legendaries for killing a boss. Then loot can also be more rewarding for finding a good drop because you can either use it or trade for something you can use. D2LOD did loot perfect as well as a lot of other things, I hope they use a lot of base aspects from that.
17 Likes
Trading would be nice, if blizz could be trusted to police it. Many games with trading have 3rd party sites with numerous hard to get items at dirt cheap prices. If I get inundated with them when surfing the web, after installing/playing a game. The developers know of them. Too many companies do nothing about them. Makes me wonder if they get kickbacks.
2 Likes
Yeah they just need to police 3rd party item selling and be on top of hacking etc then that would be a great system to have. Trading/currency adds a whole big layer of endgame in banking and / or building wealth to make GG characters.
5 Likes
Others have already covered many of the concerns about the negative aspects of trading, but I wanted to address the “pitty” timer thing. I still have a copy pasta explaning it because I had to post it so often to deal with misconceptions.
Clarification the 1st - the “pitty timer” did not exist at the same time as the AH/RMAH in Diablo 3. This is easy to tell, because you could go days with no Legendary items. Besides, they actually posted about it and explained it when it was put in, so we know when it was.
Clarification the 2nd - it came about with RoS (or the pre RoS) patch in 2014 that changed the game mechanics in major ways. It was implemented along with Smart Loot to make sure we got items from the game, seeing as the RMAH/AH was closed.
So, there was no “pity timer” in the days of the very low drop rates and RMAH/AH.
7 Likes
