Path of Exile Developer Q&A Part 2

The second part of the Path of Exile developer Q&A is now up on the Grinding Gear Games’ forums. There are a lot of interesting tidbits there. The stand out ones are the questions regarding trading and the studio’s future plans. Here they are:

With all the talk of trade improvements over the years but very little concrete to show for it, it’s clear that GGG wants to take steps, but is being held up by various concerns. What actual goals and restrictions are you guys working with in your efforts toward improving trade? Are there concerns that these goals are even attainable?

Being able to trade items is critical to the success of an Action RPG. This is why Path of Exile has no item binding and why SSF[solo self-found] items can become regular items with the click of a button.

Given that we want trade, the next question is how easy the trade should be. It seems obvious to jump to the answer of “as easy as possible, of course!” but more care needs to be taken. The easier that trade is, the more trades that traders can perform, increasing the utility that items provide to them. This has a few consequences:

• The gap between traders and non-traders widens. This gap is apparent when you see feedback that the game is too hard for some people and too easy for others. Most of the time, that is proportionate to how much they have traded.
• Item pricing becomes more skewed towards only very-cheap and very-expensive. Items either become trivially cheap or unaffordable. If you have ever felt that it’s going to take too many 1-alch sales to finally save up for that 80 exalt item you want, then this is the reason.
• Progression is trivialised. While trading for an item to get a leg up on difficult content is of course fine, being able to trivially and cheaply quadruple your clear speed on a whim isn’t something that should be expected on your first character in a league. In addition, the fewer item upgrades you make on a character before capping out your items, the lower chance you have of sticking around for a decent portion of the league. Upgrading items more times (in smaller steps) is more fun than jumping right to the perfect gear.

The existing community tools (combined with our public stash tab API) already put us pretty far down this spectrum, compared to the old days of trade chat. We already view this as a crisis. That is why we are hesitant to add more convenience features.

I know this explanation doesn’t mention any solutions, but the things we’re experimenting with aren’t ready yet. Thanks for your patience.

Do you have plans on releasing more acts after the expansion or do you guys wanna focus on something else for the future?

There are a lot more expansions coming, and they’ll likely cover many types of content. Only one of our five expansions released so far includes a new act for example! We’ll likely continue to make more new acts in the future.

Can’t say that I share the developers’ dissatisfaction with their trading system. For my taste, the hassle of using an internal resource to buy and sell items is far outweighed by the involved feeling of finding a good deal, haggling, and visiting all the various player Hideouts. And, you can almost always buy whatever you need exactly when you need it.