Hear me out,
The reason this is an issue is the 3rd party real money vendors.
Therefore:
Each item has a ‘item value’ stat which enables it to only be traded with items or quantities of currency appropriately reflecting its ‘item value’ (or within an approximate bracket).
Valuable items cannot be traded by being dropped on the ground, they must go through a trade window which verifies the value of the transaction and that it is within the allowable tolerance of value disparity.
Since you can only complete a trade if both parties have agreed on a transaction where both giving and receiving value it would be impossible to sell currency or items without completing a trade of relatively equal value in the game.
This would negate any attempt to sell in game goods for real money as you would have to trade for it in the game anyways and essentially be buying it twice.
Example:
-I want to get a Ber rune.
-I must trade a high rune (or any item with a roughly equal ‘value stat’) in order to be able to click the complete trade button.
Therefore if I bought a ber rune off of a website with real money, I would STILL have to trade for it in game with a rune of my own, making me feel like a total fool and not doing that again.
Problem solved.
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Problem is, it is pretty hard to determine the real value of an item, unless you have a human being doing it, and even then, it is still pretty damn hard. Only made harder when a lot of your items are randomly generated.
Best you can do is stuff like “uniques have the same trade value”. But plenty of uniques will likely be pretty bad, while others are good. And then the whole similar trading value scheme falls apart. Otherwise yeah, it could work well.
Not even for something as simple as runes, can you really determine the value automatically. Can’t go by rank, or rarity, for something less rare might be more valuable/powerful than something more rare.
In any case, yeah, having some cost associated with trading, could go a long way to make it less problematic. Since we cant really determine the value of an item in any sensible way, we could just have a baseline trading fee for different item tiers.
So if you want to buy unique A from someone, no matter what they want in return, both you and the seller might have pay some in-game currencies, like gold, crafting mats, runes etc. Both of you pay this fee, and the fee is then removed from the game. Neither of you get those, you only exchange whatever it is you wanted to exchange.
Make the price high enough, and even if someone want to give the item for free (or real money), as you say, they still have to pay something inside the game too.
(of course, all currencies used to pay these fees can not themselves be tradeable, or if they are tradeable, you would need to pay their own value as a fee, making the trade meaningless. Otherwise, it would be easy to circumvent the whole fee thing)
Not the solution I would go for (not allowing trading still seems like the cleanest and best solution), but it would definitely be a lot better than completely free and unregulated trading.
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I see what you are saying, but the item value stat does not have to be random and it can be generated by a human for the most powerful and thus the only lucrative items which a 3rd party seller would attempt to sell.
It can also be a range, such as an item tier would share the same or similar value range. In other words to complete a trade for an exceedingly rare item you would need the appropriate amount of currency or an exceedingly rare item to trade in return.
The value match may not be perfect and it is NOT intended to be a perfect value match only a strong deterrent and massive inconvenience for anyone seeking to trade items illegally.
I doubt taxing all traded enough would be sufficient to snuff out this behavior without punishing trades to a point of obsolescence.
solution? Nope.
How do you define each item “value” while each patch changes can change any item “value” from low to high, as well as high to low. haha
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Sure.
These two legendary items below might have the same chance to drop in the game. However their value would be very different from one another (even if the game was well-balanced and each of these affixes on their own had equal value). Would be easy to stock up on trash items, for when you need to trade.
+5% crit chance
+25% crit dmg
+2 Fireball skill
+15% fire dmg
+20% cold resist
Legendary affix A
+5% crit chance
+50 Thorns dmg
+2 fireball skill
+15% cold dmg
+40 life per hit
Legendary affix A
Yeah, also this. Value will change over time. Sometimes dramatically so.
its really quite simple, you have value based on a tier list.
as in your example item A may be much more valuable than item B from the same tier list, but maybe item C from the same tier list is comparable value…
Your argument is that you would just hoard less valuable items to use them as tokens to complete illegal trades. But these ‘token’ items would be of the same tier and rarity as the highly in demand items thereby still providing the same hurdle as intended by design.
Just because there may be outcast items in the tier list will not negate the system, not would it negate the inconvenience posed to illegal currency sellers…
How will you determine that value?
Have some intern go through 100000000000 different legendaries, trying to determine which bracket they should be in?
And everyone will use item B for their trades when they want a cheap item A or C.
Outcast items will negate the system quite fast tbh. Both when it comes to “legit” traders, and RMT.
good lord.
so much friction from you and its of no use, be constructive.
I don’t feel inclined to break it down for you any further.
Unclear? Read it again.
I was constructive, giving an alternative trading cost solution, that isn’t dependent on trying to figure out an items value 
Actually, I haven’t mentioned illegal trades. I am much more worried about trading/handouts between legit players. The only real way to fight RMT is to ban everyone participating in it.
Not exactly.
In all likelihood, finding one of those trash items will be much easier than finding a good item. Since most randomly generated item combinations will, of course, not be very good.
Items like item B in my example, will be endlessly more common than item A. Even if each individual item is indeed the same rarity. So you can probably hoard hundreds or thousands of item B, before you find an item A.
There are more than one variable for an item to dictate its true estimate value. We’re talking about items with 5-6 random affixes with stat roll ranges which they pull from a very large pool of variables.
You’re not solving anything as the in-game value of item could be considered a bag of potato chips while it actually worths a few ounces of gold in real life. A high grade item can roll a godly combination. Still, if you remove high grade items completely off from the trade circulation, anything low would be used as “token items” as they could be more common or useless compared to higher grades. And there’s nothing you can do to deem their true price.
There’s no way you truly believe this to be any sort of solution or anything close to that.
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Ok heres an example so we dont end up going in circles.
Tier 1: These items can be traded interchangeably.
WF Bow, GF Sword, Hellslayer axe, Schaffers Hammer.
Tier 2: These items can be traded interchangeably.
Shako, Stormshield, Lightsaber, String of ears.
As you can see some of the same items in the same TIER are more or less valuable than others. HOWEVER, they are STILL of the same rarity.
This can be implemented to a LOOSER DEGREE with random stat items by comparing item level or stat budget.
Its not 100% bulletproof but still a step in the right direction.
If anyone can come up with an idea on how to tighten this system up then we are on the right path.
Saying nothing can be done trading is dead is not the right path forward and not helpful.
So if I want a godly Windforce all I need to do is giving away a crudely rolled Hellslayer (which is a token item here) and still make a real life transaction in real life money to make up for it. You’re not preventing anything on the surface.
Fixated affixes must come into play, and still, by the allowed randomization or stat ranges you can never guesstimate the outcome. For your model to work, itemization must be in junction with trade scheme to begin with.
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Nope.
They would be comparable, which is why it would work.
Random items would always be lower tier and not really worth buying with real money.
Anyhow, im done with this.
Good talk.
Honestly the best path forward.
But I did give an alternative solution too.
“Item value” tiers could be done, to some degree, for unique items. Since there will only be a few hundred of them or whatever (and I am assuming they are 100% static, also the affix numbers). Would still be a ton of work for Blizzard though.
And not realistic to do for anything below unique tier items.
Seems like legendaries will be top tier in many cases. If not most cases.
Also, RMT is not the main problem with trading anyway, so a solution need to encompass more than that.
Regardless of what “internal value” each in-game item has, if Player A has something that Player B wants, even if the in-game trading of the item from Player A to Player B relies on Player B giving something comparable to Player A, this won’t stop real money trading because Player A can just say the trade won’t happen until Player B has paid them $25 by PayPal.
As ever, regardless of what in-game currency trading is based on, if open trading is available for highly desired items, it’ll be predicated on out-of-game real money transactions happening before the in-game transactions are carried out.
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We already have a solution, it’s called Bound On Account. It’s working wonders in D3, and will work wonders in D4.
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The solution to trading is to have a trading and no-trading mode, and then to stop trying to micro-manage how players utilize the trading mode. At most if you want to stop third party sellers, simply make items tradable once(wont entirely kill it, but it will cripple them pretty badly).
Trading itself comes with a series of pros and cons. The people who think the cons ruin the game should just not use the trading mode.
My post was more of “If you wanted to do it right”.
I’m under no illusions about how Diablo 4 is not going to make 2 game modes for it, and trading will be so restricted it will be next door to useless in the end game.
Its a nice idea, but there is also the down side of just giving someone in the same group an item that you dont want, or that they can craft with and you cannot, things like that.