Trade (Merchant Guild) needs to be completely overhauled and here's how.

[Partyrock]

First off, the game is amazing, and I'm having a blast with it. Congrats on the future success of this game, devs. I truly mean it. This is a contender for best ARPG right now, easily. And imo, it is the best.

One thing that needs to be addressed is the trade system in the merchant's guild.

The trade via the merchants guild makes trade kind of pointless. All the high end stuff you can sell is locked behind high ranks. I spent 12 hours grinding level 100 empowered monoliths yesterday and the bar barely moved within 5->6. I'm still only like halfway through 5. And I need rank 8 to get anything I can use for just starter BiS (not even legendary) stuff.

This means that by the time I grind to rank 8 where I can get these basic components, I will have already SSF them multiple times, more than likely. This eliminates the purpose and fun of trade, and makes it simply a theme park right to gearing. Even if I can't SSF the gear by rank 8, grinding to rank 8 just means "ok time to go to the bazaar and get all my gear". Where's the dopamine in that?

Trade needs to be completely overhauled and here's how.

Trade should only deal in favor. Get rid of the gold component completely. The Mountain Beneath is a good enough gold sink, and you can work on even more gold sinks later on.

Have an NPC that buys things from you for favor -- but only things that actual traders would want to get. Rank 6 (early on) affix items, and Rank 7, for instance. Maybe the NPC gives you 25 favor for 6s and 100 for 7s. This way, if you find something REALLY cool early on, you can reap the reward that trade normally gives you: you can deck out your character quickly. I.e., you find a Red Ring of Atlaria and the NPC gives you 100,000 favor or something.

People can list things for a high amount of favor right off the bat, i.e. listing Red Ring of Atlaria for 1,000,000 favor, but most people won't be able to afford these nice things unless they actually found some really nice things themselves that they turned into the NPC. The NPC will always give basic value of favor, but the actual booth listing -- you can get more favor by having players buy them. That's what creates the market. The NPC gets the economy going with basic favor to use.

As it stands right now, since no one has had the time required to rank up to buy lots of basic endgame gear slots, these pieces of gear are being offered for 0 gold in many cases. They're just piling up in stalls with nowhere to go. If not there, then taking up inventory space, waiting for everyone's theme park ride grind to ding over to 8 or 9. At which point there will be an oversupply, and a billion of these bought up just to vendor.