With D2 having non-BOA free trade and D3 having BoA very restrictive trade, the D4 team seems to recognize these polar opposite camps and is trying to find something for both. They don’t want to alienate one of these camps if possible.
Probably holes but following is the gist. (D3 item names are used throughout even though we’re talking D4).
Items dropped in the game would be BoA. The game’s keeping track of how many times a specific item has dropped game-wide. The first day after launch there might be 10,000 Furnaces in circulation game-wide. Something else like a common blue dagger might have qty 2,000,000 by comparison.
In addition to real in-game drop quantities they will have the coded drop rates of every item in their tables or code. With furnace it may be 1-in-8,000 drop rate or something and blue dagger might be 1-in-40 or something.
This would be two sources of item drop information - the real in-game drop quantities and the drop tables themselves.
To enable free trade with BoA items, couldn’t they just use a tiering system with a trade window? 2 Players would place their BoA items into the window - the game would have a tiering system that would require an item in the same tier (same approximate rarity interpolated from both dropped quantity and drop rate) to be traded to get an item of that same rarity. You have to give something good to get something good.
So for example, if I wanted a 1-in-8000 Furnace, I would need to already have my own 1-in-8000 drop rate item and it could be something like an In-Geom just as example, that I don’t want. So because In-Geom is in the same high tier as Furnace for sake of argument, 2 players could trade them. Once they’re done trading in the window, the BoA changes ownership but BoA is still in effect - just different owners.
Wouldn’t this deter botting and RMT? I couldn’t just hop onto a site and pay $10 to get a Furnace. I’d have to already have a similarly rare item to trade for it.
A drawback would be if a top tier item was unpopular because they didn’t spec it right or it’s relatively crap. Then there’s incentive to go on a website and pay $10 to get someone to give you their popular good 1-in-8,000 item for your unpopular crap 1-in-8,000 item.
So why couldn’t their balance team “rate” or change item tiers based on the in-game usefulness or power of the item? Thus even if 2 items have the same rarity, they may be adjusted and placed in different tiers.
At this point, they would have 3 metrics - the real in-game drop qty, the drop rate, and some rating from the balance-team that could adjust it’s tier.
The whole gist is just to look at using BoA as a start, use a trade window that keeps BoA in effect just changing owners, and uses a tiering or rating that is a combination of many factors to ensure that items of roughly the same rarity are needed in order to get an item of roughly the same rarity.
Very specific small example would be if they had 50 items in the game, 10 items in 5 major tiers. Tiers ranked from 5 lowest to 1 highest. You get a drop that’s in tier 1 you can trade for another in tier 1 but not for any other item in any other tier. If something in tier 1 is unpopular or underperforms, balance team might drop it to tier 2. They would most likely also want to slightly adjust drop rates if they are changing tiers as well - lower-tier items tending to drop more frequently. In practice, in D4, they might have 100’s of tiers.
I like free trade. But I also don’t like all the RMT nonsense that it brings. This seems like a middle ground that also allows for community-based non-RMT trading websites - list the item, what you want for it, and so on.