I wrote a lot of stuff on the aRPG topic and I always declared ONE big unsolvable problem design wise - the drop chances.
The people who enjoy trading (not for RM profiting) are those that enjoy faster gear progression since trading allows them to artificially raise their drop chances. The SSF players on the other side prefer slower as possible item progression since this prolongs the in-game play time.
Now here comes the unsolvable problem - EVERY SINGLE player has his own ideal vision for the perfect tuning of drop chances aka how fast the item progression should be.
I’ll quote a guy from reddit touching on this topic regarding to D3:
In this game, there's a metric I like to refer to as Mean Time Between Upgrades, or MTBU. When you first hit 70, your MTBU is pretty low, every single legendary is an upgrade, but legendaries don't drop all that often. It stays pretty steady at that low rate for quite awhile: fewer legendaries you get are upgrades, but your difficulty is higher so you're getting more legendaries. Eventually, your MTBU starts to increase: you're getting even more legendaries, but you have all the peices for your build, so you're waiting on ancients or better rolls. The important part is next: each person has a different MTBU threshold where they're no longer engaged enough to continue playing in the same loop. When players meet their MTBU threshold, they will either change builds, change roles, change classes, or change games entirely.
The trick is to make the game engaging enough and tweak that stat so that players, on average, stay long enough before reaching their MTBU threshold to feel satisfied, so they leave the game with a 'ok that was fun' instead of a 'well that was a waste of time'. Because of course it was a waste of time, the whole thing is just a big slot machine feeding endorphines into your brain. And it's awesome.
The MTBU is mainly the result from how the drop chances in the game are set to be (let’s call this S). And if we have X players in the game we’ll have X preferences about S and MTBU, but in a game where all these X players play together we can’t have X number of S/MTBU, we can ONLY HAVE ONE for each mode.
That’s the unsolvable problem in aRPGs - even if we offer different modes with different MTBU values we can’t make it optimal for all players.
Trading as a system allows those players that enjoy faster item progression to achieve it in a mode with intentionally designed slower item progression. On the other side, dedicated grinders want even slower item progression than the one intended.
It’s an unsolvable problem - ultimately players go to the aRPG that offers them their preferred item progression speed.
And although trading may first look as kind of a solution to the above problem for the players wanting faster item progression, it ultimately eventually forces everyone in that type of item progression as long as there is competition involved.
It’s a huge topic and very few people can grasp it fully. My opinion on it is that trading has to go and there should exist different modes with different drop chances and mechanics.
For example, modes like:
- Standard - default drop chances: The place for normal game play and racing competitions.
- Ironman - very low drop chances (kind of a poverty mode): The place for those people enjoying the very long grind. Most SSF players would stay here.
- Competitive - no farming, items granted: The place where those that don’t enjoy the farming game, but enjoy the actual competition (be it PvP or PvE in the form of Challenge Rifts) can practice it all the time.
Trading as a system however has no place in aRPGs - it serves absolutely no purpose except for making those cheating the intended item progression happier and thus increasing their desire to purchase more MTX.