🌟 the Facts of Trading + D4

General Discussion
1

I decided to give Valor Crusader a shot. Instead of farming Sanctuary for the Valor set, I decided to upgrade to it. Started with 13k Veiled Crystals + almost 3k DB’s from all the Waste-Sage Barb speedfarming. Within 15 minutes and 10k VC’s later I had my

  • full set
  • cubed Darklight
  • ancient 2hander
  • ancient/primal Crimson combo

I’m not quite finished yet, but I’m working on it.

Moral of the story: I completed the majority of my desired build in under 30 minutes all on my own. No gearing partner, no bot, no trade. And I’m not even anything more than a casual, haven’t even cracked GR100 yet in any regions and haven’t ranked anywhere (nor do I care to try).

If I can do it, anyone and their cute fluffy cuddly granny can do it.

In D3 currently, if you want to gear-boost someone, you can. Give them the item/s they need while you’re playing together. The current BOA iteration + the “2-hour trade window with everyone in your party at the time the item dropped” encourages group play for those who like to warm the cockles of their heart by giving higher-quality gear to those who have reached lvl70 but aren’t properly equipped yet.

And at the same time it KILLED item sellers who were illegally making money off D3, it ended the constant spamming of bot messages in the chat channels (I sure remember the nonstop complaints about chat bots), and the upgrades to itemization allowed for easier gearing than ever.

Whereas looking at Diablo 2 + console D3, where BOA does not exist: they are both cesspools of cheaters, scammers, hackers + dupers, with rampant illegal profiteering.

THAT :point_up: :point_up_2: is what the same 2-3 people’s incessant thread spamming is all about. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONAY!!! No sane, logical person would be this obsessed with trading in a video game unless it involves money.

:money_mouth_face: :money_with_wings: :moneybag: Money is the root of ALL evil in the world. :money_mouth_face: :money_with_wings: :moneybag:

We shall never forget D3’s precious Real Money Auction House that plagued this poor game for the first 2 years of its life. Drop rates and drop quality were driven right into the ground to make sure top-end items STAYED top-end and keep having the highest price attached to them. The larger the price tag, the bigger Blizzard’s cut was. 15% flat fee off each transaction.

I saw a rare amulet go for almost $3k. 15% of $3k is $450. That is pure insanity, but that was the reality at the time. D3 was nothing more than an online casino, and plenty people walked away with much fatter purses when the abomination known as the RMAH was finally taken down for good.

And when that happened, when BOA was introduced and people lost their income supplement (eeeeeezy monay!!!), they flipped their lid. Their constant complaint of “WAAAAAAAAAH we can no longer trade items with our friends” was clearly a load of pooies because you can still trade with your friends WHILE you’re playing with them at the same time! Voila!

BOA brought people together!!! How neat is that??

And it is exactly what Diablo 4 needs in order to wash away the RMAH stain and have a far greater reputation than D3 could ever have. I want to be able to gear myself without relying on a slot machine that swaps $$$ for loot, or being stuck farming the exact same areas over and over again in hopes of seeing an upgrade more than once in a blue moon.

But the credit card warriors of old don’t care about that. They don’t care about the franchise of Diablo. All they care about is making easy money. That’s why you have the same 2-3 people spamming thread after thread, begging for open trade in D4 - and in the same breath complaining that gearing in D3 is too easy “ZOMG LEG DROP RATES TOO HIGH!!!” “ZOMG HAEDRIG’S GIFT!!!”

All the while they’re completely incapable of providing a SOLID, VALID, IRREFUTABLE reason why open trade should return. Their entire argument for open trading consists of “I WANT I WANT I WANT”. And then they flip their lid and go spam their forum flags when people completely demolish their weak arguments with facts. Which I have done all over this thread.

What are facts? Facts are pieces of information set in stone and are not subject to scrutiny or subjective interpretation.

:fire: Fact: Diablo 2 is a cesspool of cheaters, botters, hackers, dupers.
:fire: Fact: Diablo 3 on console is a cesspool of cheaters, hackers, dupers.
:fire: Fact: Diablo 3 leaderboards are full of botters who ranked this high solely because their bots endlessly farmed gear, mats, XP + gold for them.

:zap:FACT: Diablo 4 will be a cesspool of cheaters, hackers, dupers + botters if it has open trade.

How do we know that? Because that is exactly what happened to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 with unchecked trading. It’s called a pattern.

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2

I have to agree completely on that.
But you focus on sellers a bit too much, and I want to once again stress that the biggest problem here is subverting the reward system and main gameplay loop to go through the auction.

It also dilutes the main gameplay (killing demons) by requiring and incentivising players to spend a good chunk of their time browsing and managing the trade system rather than playing

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3

Get rid of trading altogether or copy/paste BOA + 2hr trade window into D4 to keep sellers from making third party auction houses.

Open trading —> sellers —> auction house.

Working backwards to the root of the problem = open trading.

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4

Imagine going to a flee marked but you are only allowed to sell and buy stuff from the friends you brought with you :v

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5

If this is commentary on D3s trading it misses the mark since there is no flea market in D3 to begin with.

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So botters are still rampant on D3 despite there being no open trade. Meaning even should they remove trade from D4 you can still expect bots to be there. Why? Because ARPGs fit bots perfectly.

Granted you are not very clever but obviously hacking/duping being possible has nothing to do with trading.

Sure they can. It’s fun to trade. Somehow in the midst of all this you forget the single most important reason for wanting anything implemented in a game.

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7

And there are no items worth trading anyway.

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8

That’s true.
But it’s MORE fun to kill monsters and loot.

The problem here is not that trading isn’t fun or engaging at all - but that it circumvents and replaces an even MORE fun and engaging mechanic.

It’s like saying that having a candy is great but forgetting that you have to chose that candy over a much bigger and more delicious cake.

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9

Now I’m not advocating for trading, but that was only possible with Kanai’s cube, an object whose ability may or mayn’t return for Diablo 4. Personally, I doubt it, as there would be no need of it, of course that is assuming that items/gear in Diablo 4 doesn’t make up 90% or more of the character’s power and/or protection as it does in Diablo 3.

Also, keep in mind that not everyone who enjoyed trading did so with the intentions of utilizing 3rd party sites; some either simply enjoyed the social interaction that trading could create and/or helping other folks to get the gear they needed.

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It’s more fun to do both. I liked after having grinded the entire day to sit back and look for some interesting items to trade. It offers an alternative to the grind which is absoluteley necessary. Even a fat person need to take a break from eating that delicious cake every now and then.

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11

Not true and you know it. Like you’ve never see someone post an ancient primal version of something you have a normal version of. But then your comment was just to bash on D3.

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12

It’s commentary on the reality of the trade-thread-spammers + why trading should be restricted big time in D4. Pay attention, missy!

That can still be done with BOA + 2 hour trade window. I don’t have my sections numbered, but I did cover that and pointed out that BOA in fact encourages group play. Not hoarding stuff in your stash to sell later.

You can give someone most of the stuff that drops for you while you’re playing together, even Rama gifts. As long as you don’t enchant anything first.

It’s a trading thread, not a bot thread. As long as there’s XP to be gained and gold/mats to be collected, there will be bots. Apples and oranges. Try harder next time.

Oh the irony, since I literally gotta spell it out for ya.

Just like there are still bots with BOA in place, there would still be hacked/duped stuff in D2 (you can thank Open Bnet for that). Open trading didn’t cause duping & hacking, but it makes worse because hacked items are being sold. Supply & demand factor is bloated.

Somehow in the midst of all your mouth-frothing crusade to give D4 cancer, you forget that you can trade just fine with anyone in your party for 2 hours from when every single item dropped. That’s all the trading D4 needs. BOA + 2 hour trade window.

BOA encourages players to play with other players. But ya’ll are frothing at the mouth because you can’t sell anymore.

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13

Right, so let’s make game easy and boring so the cheaters cannot cheat, even that the purpose of “games” is to be fun and engaging, and that’s what we’re trying to sell, but okay.

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14

And the flee marked is what people are asking for in an open trading system like D2
Because its fun

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15

Yes, you don’t need to repeat my point for me. Your botting point is moot because they are still running rampant in a game without trading.

And duping & hacking has absolutely nothing to do with trading. PoE does not have a problem with rampant duping & hacking and they are an indie dev. The little early problems they had they fixed already. As such this is another moot point.

What you replied with has literally nothing to do with open trading and is just yet another garbage argument.

This aggressive wiseguy style you’re trying to pull off doesn’t really work my man. Your arguments cannot be sewer lvl quality if you want to pull it off.

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16

My interpretation - The game is broken.

What’s your logic here? D2 has trading and a lot of cheaters, D3 has very limited trading and a lot of cheaters, therefore if D4 has no trading there won’t be cheaters? What point are you making with these statements? D3 is full of bots too even though you can’t trade.

Why do you say D3 leaderboards are full of botters but you fail to say D3 is full of cheaters? They are getting those sweet gears that you aren’t while botting that gives them an unfair advantage. This is literally the same thing that’s happening in D2 and you call that game full of cheaters.

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17

Not everyone that participates in trading does it for real money. Sure some will do so illegally, but not all. There are a lot of those that have honestly traded items in D2 as well as other games like this one.

Money is just a tool, a tool that can be used for good or bad. Actually it is the love of money that people have that causes the problems. When they reach out for the money they love to have more of is when the trouble begins.

Games have to be released within a given time frame. There is no such thing as unlimited money. Each game is no doubt given a budget to work with, much like movies, if they go over budget then there are gonna be problems if they cannot meet and increased amount of profits to offset the cost. That is the downside of the fact that gaming companies are there to make money, because they are a for profit business after all. They are not non profit organizations that do it all for free.

I highly doubt that Blizz made a killing with that AH. I even doubt that more than 30% of the player base actually used that AH.

Besides IIRC didn’t the RMAH have a limit of $250 on it. So there is no way that they could’ve had a price tag as high as you are mentioning. Now if it was some third party selling then yeah you have a point.

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18

I do not see the correlation of trade=cheating.
There is cheating in tons of games that do not have trade.
I want cheating out of diablo as much as the next person, I don’t think trade has anything to do with it either way.
Good try though.

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19

I have D3 on switch.
How is it possible to communicate therein?
How is it possible to hack and dupe?
How does one ‘profiteer’ if no communication can be had therein?

I see action button, move button, menu button, but certainly no button to open a chat window or anything necessary to communicate with another. I don’t see a button to transfer your items onto a 3rd party website…

I am PC/tech illiterate.
To me, personally, you make no sense.

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That’s all well and fine if you are 16 years old and have nothing better to do in your life besides playing games and sitting on your hand. Things change when you grow up and want to go at it more strategically.

For instance, while you farmed those 3,000ish DBs you probably came across a few legendaries, probably around 2,000 actually. Have you considered how many of those you kept? My guess is none, cause really D3 is overflooded with items to an extent where items are worthless. Mostly because as you point out yourself, every item can be claimed within 30 minutes.

That is not interesting, or engaging mechanics. It’s an unrewarding gameplay which offers very little satisfaction of rarity and the main source of the many problems of D3.

If Diablo 2 has open trading and those problems, and Diablo 3 does not have open trading but the same problems. Then how can Diablo 3 have the exact same problems as Diablo 2?

Your facts prove you wrong. There’s no correlation between Open Trade and the issue of cheaters.

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