[2019] Hi couple of questions from a new player

Hey there!

Thanks for supporting us. :)

To address your questions;

• We've a Developer Blog on trading here. At this point it's over a year old, and does come across as a little more restrictive than our current plans - but we haven't posted an update or new blog on the subject since, so it's likely still the best resource for the subject. It is our intention for trading to initially be more restrictive than we'd like, as it's hard to get these things just right initially, and we think it would be much easier to remove restrictions than to add more later.
• With regards to the pace of combat, we've previously said that we'd like Last Epoch to exist somewhere between Grim Dawn and Path of Exile. This still represents our goal fairly well.
• We plan to work on an in-game build planner, a built-in loot filter, and the aforementioned Bazaar trading outpost. That said, we do like community-created tools for other games - and while we don't want any to feel mandatory, we're excited to see members of the community working on the wiki, other websites, and various other resources for players.

At release Last Epoch will have both offline-only characters played locally (similar to Grim Dawn), and online-only characters played in a server-authorative environment (similar to Path of Exile, Diablo III). It will never be possible to take a character previously played offline to our servers, though we've discussed possibly allowing online characters to be duplicated for offline play. Another thing we'd like to do is offer LAN support for offline characters, however we're unlikely to have the time to get this done in time for launch.