The answer to this problem is not that complicated actually. Just make trading impact the loot hunt.
Like, each time I trade, I get a limit to the min-max looting activity (keyed dungeons, bounties, GR… whatever it is) I can do for a week. And vice versa. Same for crafting.
Add Bound on Trade and limited number of items you can put on sales, that should be a good starting point.
That is not a good solution imo.
More like the devs encouraging you down the wrong path, instead of “saving” you.
By literally taking away your ability to play the game. Doubling down on the problem - since trading already discourages you from playing the game.
Now, high transaction costs for trading might help, discouraging you from trading, or even making it useless to trade.
Still seems much easier to just not allow it, than to introduce different elements to discourage it.
The goal with discouragement is to limit behavior that we cant prevent. But trading is something that can be prevented entirely.
I used to play PoE just for the trading. I’m legit more interested in the market dynamics of the game than in “loot hunting”. The game would never appeal to me if it didn’t have trading.
It’s ultimately the devs. They create the game.
If players are being guilty of something, I’d say is some players supporting nonsensical design decisions and drowning out the voices of reasonable players to the point, that the game no longer appeals to it’s original player base…
Take WoW for instance. There would be two types of feedback:
The devs would continuously side with the second type, try to expand for monetary gain, while at the same time they alienated their core players.
The fans of the classic version of the game (Vanilla/TBC/WotLK) moved on to play on private servers and only came back after Blizzard gave them what they wanted – official Classic WoW servers.
In the case of Diablo you have a situation, where players can go and play D2 if they like it better, but if you’ve played something for many years it can become boring though no fault of it’s own… and you have a situation where players flock to competitors (PoE and others).
Luis Barriga hinted back at BlizzCon, that they wanna keep the atmosphere dark… and that includes gameplay and characters. He basically said, that if they create over the top characters, that would undermine the whole thing:
xxhttps://youtu.be/F7UsescTKec?t=483
I hope he sticks to that and doesn’t allow for the game to be full of power creep, while at the same time also remember, that it’s also Diablo and we should have some AoE capabilities. It’s a fine balance.
The idea is not to discourage trading but balancing it so that 100% looting is about as efficient. Players that favour trading could still make runs, just not the best ones. It could also be a base MF bonus that you loose each time you trade.
And I agree that high fees should also come in the equation, anything that helps reduce the overwhelming power of trading.
But for some, trading IS playing the game, and you still have to loot to have something to trade anyway.
And?
I mean, I find it rather ironic, that usually people cried out their eyes, claimed that it’s almost impossible to gear up in D2 unless you participate in trading on third party sites for real money…
but usually no one brings up the fact, that there were players, who were giving items away for free.
So, what’s the problem with someone giving you free items? It’s one of the things that gave a sense of community. I have been given free stuff, I in turn have given free stuff.
Wanna know the only time I remember, when I was given stuff for free in D3? Patch 1.07 when they added the brawling area. I killed this guy several times, then he got pissed off, literally threw his gear on the ground and left (presumably quit the game). Selling his entire gear enabled me to buy 1 slight upgrade from the AH.
So yeah, that still doesn’t mean that trading is bad.
Funnily enough, I have played Diablo 2 offline for years and never had a problem gearing up. Even when I started playing on battle.net, I didn’t have much issue and I was mostly a solo self found type player at that time. It wasn’t until my much later years of playing Diablo 2 that I had got into trading, and that was because of pvp. Outside of pvp, I didn’t need to trade in order to progress through the game.
That sadly was a different case with Diablo 3 vanilla, I needed to trade or use the Auction House in order to progress into the next acts, because I couldn’t find upgrades via normal gameplay of killing demons.
So yeah, my stance on trading is still the same, in which as long as it’s not practically mandatory to do just to progress throughout the game, then I don’t mind it.
Just pointing out that you don’t need something to trade?
I don’t think we can compare the willful, deliberate use of known dishonest play and violation of game rules to the use of legitimate tactics employed to achieve efficiency. Cheating is cheating, regardless of what mental gymnastics are used to justify it. I actually just got done arguing against a player who managed to invalidate an entire server via exploiting glitched pirate ships through a boarding bug in another game, and I don’t really want to get into it again here.
People who cheat know exactly what they’re doing, and exactly why they’re doing it. It absolutely has nothing to do with efficient or clever play. It is simply the desire to acquire unfair advantage by moving outside the rules. For these people…you didn’t win; the exploit won.
Neither did i… and, in some ways MFing is easier on Single Player due to /players 8.
The only thing, which is more difficult on Single Player is finding runes…
And even then, if you really wanna test with a specific runeword right this second – you can cheat.
Also, ladder only runwords on Single Player only work with plugy mod.
I rarely trade before I beat Hell, so you don’t need trading at all to progress though the game.
What specific items did your build require for PvP? I’m asking, cause I usually played stupid casters and those were quite generic. Haven’t done much PvP.
Because there was an artificial gap between the rewards from act 1 and 2 and those form 3 and 4.
The first ones who beat Belial and went to 3 and 4 were doing with with exploits, they would farm up the better quality gear and put it on the AH.
I remember, that I once got Act 4 WP from a public game, from a player who had beaten Belial before me, so I got to farm Act4 before I reached there and got nice items (still killed the monsters myself, no exploits)…
But yes, you are correct when you’re saying, that trading was forced and unavoidable in D3, and that’s mostly because characters lacked inherent power, cause their skills don’t do flat dmg increased by gear, but instead did (and still do) damage based on your weapon.
Same here. From what I saw, D4 skills will have inherent dmg, which will be increased from gear (with weapon granting the most attack stat). We’ll see how they balance it.
Oh, you mean the argument of
“trading is bad, because you can flip and not play the game to progress”
vs
“you still need to farm for items in order to have what to trade with”…
And you’re saying:
“Aha! See, because there were people giving out items for free, that means, that you can trade without initially farming!”
And I gotta say, this is rather nonsensical. Most of what you could get for free is not endgame gear, but rather very basic useful pieces, but nothing that will cost an expensive rune.
And also, there was no real flipping in D2 (not the way you understand it based on D3 AH), because the prices of items in terms of currency (runes) were pretty much set in stone. So chances are, you wont be able to flip and just profiteer from flipping.
Say you’re trying to sell an item for an Um rune (which is worth 2 Pul, because it’s assembled from 2 Pul) which is worth merely 1 Pul rune, so you wanna get double the price. By the time you find someone, you most likely you’ll find something else worth a Pul…
Flipping on D2 was rather pointless…
Maybe the only real issue with trading is when you have a noob being scrammed, when the trading is the equivalent of chicken=horse… And you’ll learn pretty quickly anyways.
Well, we didn’t have to…but looks like you helped. Could have just left it sit there baking in the sun…but no, had to poke it.
Quite a bit actually, for example I needed skill charms with 20+ life modifiers on them, small charms with 15-20 life and 3-5 all resistance (quite expensive to get actually). Those were pretty much what I needed for most of my pvp characters.
Build and class specific on the other hand:
Lightning es Sorc: I needed Ormus Robe that gave skill points to Energy Shield so I could precast, then I also needed a 4 socketed staff that also gave 2 skill points to Energy Shield, so I could turn it into the Memory runeword, which gave even more points to Energy Shield (about 3 points). This was all done so I could spend less actual skill points on Energy Shield and instead spend it on other skills.
V/T smiter: I needed a 5 socketed Paladin scepter with skill points to fist of heaven, that way, I could turn it into a CTA runeword that boosted FoH. This was useful against necromancers, hammerdins, and Barbarians who usually tried to go off screen, as not only does the FoH do noticeable damage, but it usually gets my opponents to try to attack me up close, in which I switch back to smite and deal even more damage.
WW Barbarian: I needed a 3 socketed barbarian helm that gave skill points to the warcry skills, then I turned it into a Delirium runeword so It could boost the warcry abilities even more so. I also need small charms that gave a boost to maximum damage and attack rating, as well as small charms that gave 300-400 psn damage (the psn damage was good at shaving opponents life during combat).
There were a few other things I traded for, like 4 socketed shields so I can put saphires and ohm runes in to increase my maximum cold resistance (both my barb and paladin used this against blizzard sorceresses). But yeah, I couldn’t have gotten these items by myself (well actually I did find the scepter, but I needed to trade for the runes in order to make the runeword).
Link on when or where I said that?
And when the devs fix this as it goes against their vision of how the game is to be played, the community riles up about how the devs “nerf fun”.
D3 is different from WoW in terms of things like respecing in that in WoW you respec to beat the encounter. In D3, you keep making new encounters until you find one that works particularly well with your spec, and then you get credit for that on the leader board.
You can fail 1000 times, it only takes that “one good run” to get you on the board, and that’s the one that counts.
I like the spinny Barb and GoD DH as much as the next person. Right click and zoom through the rift, collect phat l00tz at the end.
But at the same time, I think many can appreciate that the gameplay is quite vacant.
Last season I started with a Hammer Barb. It’s fun walking up to big monsters and WHAM WHAM WHAMming them in to paste.
But the build had other issues, things like downtime if they died, speed, etc. And speed is the name of the game, since everything is gained not by playing smartly, but by playing quickly. More runs, more loot, more chances for gear. The determined, slow player loses in this game.
So, I converted from a Hammer Barb to a Spinny Barb. And…oh my word…I mean, the Spinny Barb is just a paintbrush of destruction. Run (RUN!) it through a field or a dungeon, and everything dies just by passing by. It is difficult to play this game “slowly” once you’ve had something like that. Everything else is excruciating and fiddly. This is just sweep and clear. No aiming, no stopping, just blindly mash the keys to keep up, well, everything. Just don’t mash that one key or it drains fury.
Anything I liked about Mr. WHAM WHAM was overtaken by the hose that is the WW Barb. Indeed, why would you play anything else.
When the game is all about speed and clears, it rewards builds like this on every scale. Exciting, fast, monsters exploding in to treasure everywhere, more legs and XP per microsecond, swearing at devs for making you stop to pick things up. “No! No stopping! I must go! Go go go! Gooooooo!!!”
So, sure there are other builds, other classes, but the game rewards these kinds of classes and builds.
Oh yeah. For PvE I run with clean skillers and only life on small charms, much cheaper. Sometimes I have things like strength or hit recovery on skillers, and those are ones that I find, or make myself.
Usually something like Enigma or Infinity are the most expensive things, that I use.
It really depends on the specifics, but I’d say those are The Flash players from my exaggerated example.
Quite vacant indeed. I play it and I completely agree.
Same thing goes for something like Warframe, which from a rather tactical game turned into you holding mouse 1 and the map evaporates with Mesa.
Oh, I completely understand. I used to have half Primal Marauder HD and Half Primal Zuni Darts…
I scrapped them both.
It’s just, that I decided I’m done with trying to be “original” or “skilled” in D3 and decided to play the turn your brain off spec.
I truly hope D4 has more engaging gameplay.
But again, I believe it’s up to the devs to keep power creep from spreading.
Ruins the game for the people receiving the items tbh.
Indeed.
And even when you do, often the items you buy are so cheap they are essentially free.
Sure, a very high transaction cost on all trades (including handouts) could prevent this (like, if you had to pay the game 5000 forgotten souls (or whatever) each time you traded one item (maybe even make both the buyer and seller pay a transaction cost), you probably wouldn’t trade for mediocre items, and handouts would be very limitied.
You certainly can make trade rules that will help somewhat. Though not allowing it in the first place still seems like the easier and better solution to me.
You clearly can trade without initial farming.
And the fact that it might not be expensive endgame gear does not make it any less true.
no it doesn’t
getting free sh*t feels good