Add a bribery mechanic to factions

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1

How it works:
Once a player reaches a high level in a faction (like 10, 11 or max), if they want to switch factions, a bribery option will appear, where they can spend a generous amount of favor points (like 300k~500k+) to have their equipped items converted to the new faction. These items will have a trade lock, just like when buying an item from the market.

Motivation:
Once a player has played a lot in their chosen faction, they can try out another without losing their character progress. This aims to keep the player base active in the league for longer and promote experimentation with the game’s mechanics.

Why is it an expensive feature?
To prevent it from being used as a mechanism to transfer items between factions. The goal is simply to allow players to breathe fresh air while keeping the items they worked hard to obtain.

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Hmm… My concern with this wouldn’t be exploits. As you mentioned, friction, such as a gold cost can be introduced to curb that. Rather the potential issue I see here is ‘burden of optimal play.’ Once you have the ability to change factions and keep items, there will be an optimal pattern of when to play what faction for the most advantages.

Because ARPG’s are all about efficiency, even if this isn’t “fun”, it still feels “necessary” in order to play without feeling like you’re handicapping yourself. Many players (including myself), will often optimize the fun out of an ARPG if given the opportunity, because of the instinctual drive to “always succeed more.” In which case, we’d end up in a system where players no longer base their faction choice by preference, but instead by following a guide and lose that interaction with the game. In other words, players would prioritize success over fun, which is perhaps fine in life, but we want the purpose of our game to be ‘fun’ as much as possible.

Burden of optimal play is something we have to constantly consider, and is one of the most common factors that unfortunately prevents a lot of otherwise fun ideas.

4 Likes
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Gold cost would only be a friction for CoF players though. I kinda like the concept of a bribery mechanic to let you keep using the gear.

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For people like me (guys who play 10 hours a day) I would definitely abuse this especially if it had no limit on swaps. I can grind out 300-500k in a few hours or less so if I was geared up really nicely but couldn’t get something for my min-max as CoF just swap over, buy it, swap back lol

I do understand this from season 2 when I started as CoF, had no clue how things worked and got to level 70ish after waking up at 2am Aus time. I really struggled and no ones in a helping mood that early because they’re all levelling away so I got frustrated and restarted as MG. Honestly I only ever see on very rare occassions people in global asking “if I swap will I lose…” - Maybe they could just add a verterans set like the WoW levelling items that level up with you where if you swapped factions you get access to boots, gloves, armor etc that has move speed etc so you can level in a few hours vs a brand new guy which might take you a day and a half depending on what you roll?

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It’s not so simple to abuse the mechanics if we start from the point that, to change factions, you need to have them at the maximum level. If a player who has reached the maximum level in CoF wants to change factions just to try to more easily obtain an item from the market and then return to CoF, they would need to level up the market faction to the maximum level before switching back, in addition to farming favor. So in the first rotation, they would need to spend at least 1 million favor plus a few days just leveling up the second faction. How much more efficiency can this bring compared to simply spending favor on the faction you want, whether buying items or getting prophecies?

Generally, those who tend to seek maximum efficiency are more hardcore players, like our friend here who plays 10 hours a day, and who usually play CoF because, by following a strategy, they get insane drops like 3T7, etc. I don’t see why someone like that would try to gain a little more efficiency (if it would even be more efficient) by switching factions to obtain market items, which are generally more common, while having to level up the entire faction they don’t like before returning to CoF. These people might be able to extract some extra efficiency from what they already do, but is the difference really that significant for them?

I think we should also consider the people who would like to switch just to experience something different and extend the fun. People who crave 1% more efficiency will continue to do much more than average regardless of the method.

Let’s start with a hypothetical scenario where a player plays for fun for a few hours a day:

There’s the type of player who likes trading, either because they enjoy selling items and accumulating gold, or because they prefer a more deterministic route to obtain equipment for their build, even if it’s not top tier. So they play for 1 or 2 weeks and complete the build, which was their main objective. Often, they stop there. But if they had the opportunity to return to the game later and play CoF without such a big penalty, they might stay engaged with the game for a while longer to try to maximize their build.

On the other hand, a player who plays CoF and follows all the strategies to maximize a build might simply reach a point of exhaustion and decide to test the market instead, either to try out different builds by buying items or simply to use the super-strong character they created to farm items and make gold.

Furthermore, I don’t think most players prioritize efficiency that much. If that were the case, most people would try to learn mechanics like skipping the campaign with dungeons. Most players simply go with the flow, opening monolith maps without much strategy. Even streamers who spend hours playing the game, even if it’s only for 1 or 2 weeks, don’t calculate everything to be more efficient. Of course, everyone seeks some efficiency, but if the process to achieve that efficiency isn’t enjoyable, most people simply won’t do it.

I believe this is a major dilemma for ARPGs on the market today: creating barriers to contain the 5% of players obsessed with efficiency and maximization versus making the game less fun for more casual players. I might be wrong about the percentages, but I highly doubt it’s very different from that.

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On my warpath char right now I can get 1 million favour in about 4-5 hours of farming high corruption. My rings are 7/5 and 7/6 and if I could switch to buy some craftable 77s and then switch back to min/max my char I would do it in a heart beat as I could switch, play a few hours, buy the items, play a few more hours then switch back. The whole process even needing 2 million favour doable in a day of playing (I’m online from 6amish my time most of the day until 10pmish). In terms of favour my friend who can do 40k and is also a min/maxer can achieve max favour in under hour easily, lol.

I am just saying. It would make more sense to create a set you could buy with favour like WoW did where the items are very strong and level up with you so you can speed through the campaign and thus experience both factions. If you chose.

In the past when I have wanted an MG char to go with my CoF guys I usually just farm some non tagged stuff to twink him out with and with move speed it only takes 3-4 hours to run campaign or get a friend to power level.

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Except legacy is a thing and there are lots of players that already have both factions at max level. So there’s no time loss there.

There isn’t much incentive to return as CoF to a build that is already “finished”. It’s far more likely to return with a new build instead, in which case they can join CoF from the start.

In that case, they can even join CoF in the first town and start leveling and getting drops during the campaign.

This is the problem though. CoF was created for those players that don’t want to trade. Ever. They don’t like it and don’t want to be forced into it.

If you allow switching, then the optimal play is to, for example, get a Shattered Worlds via MG (because they can’t get one with CoF unless they follow some meta build) and then swith to CoF. Meaning that players that don’t want to trade either feel left behind or forced to do the same thing (the burden of optimal play that Kain was referring to).

And if you make a new character, that is again the optimal play, because Shattered Worlds is an incredibly powerful item that only a few builds can get.

It’s not just players that are obsessed with efficiency, though. It affects most players. People don’t like to feel like they’re wasting time. They don’t mind if things are somewhat similar, but not if one route is vastly more optimal.

It’s like campaign and adventure mode in D3/D4. There are plenty of people that like doing the campaign. But when doing the campaign gets you to max level in 10h and adventure mode gets you to max level in 1h, that just makes you feel like you’re playing the game in a way the game doesn’t want you to. And that you’re wasting your time.

In this case, there are items that are hard to get as CoF. If you don’t want to use a meta build (like many don’t and actively avoid them), then you won’t get those items. Which is fine if that is the limitation, since they’re not build enabling, they’re just BiS. But if there’s a way to be CoF, play your non-meta build and still get those items by switching to MG, then players feel forced to it. Or they feel like they’re missing out because they won’t trade.

Not only that, but the moment that this becomes an option the game will start to be balanced around that. So people that don’t want to trade and people that only want to trade will be left behind as a consequence.

I guess the best way to explain this is this: imagine you have an option at character creation that lets you become level 90 with decent items for your build right away. A few players that like the leveling experience a lot will still level their characters, but most players, even if they like the leveling experience, won’t be spending 20h leveling up when they can just click a button instead. Especially on their 3rd, 4th, 5th characters onwards. Which will eventually simply lead to them leaving because the game is actively discouraging them from playing the game the way they want to, so it’s not a game for them.

3 Likes
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So, the most ‘efficient’ way to get Shattered Worlds is to level up your faction to the maximum level, wait for someone to drop the item, farm money for a good while (since it’s an expensive item), then gather favor, switch factions, and level up the new faction from scratch, just to get that item. Is that the most efficient way? To me, it seems quite pointless, but anyway, it’s your opinion.

Regarding Legacy, sorry, but for me, it shouldn’t be part of the equation. Those who play Legacy should live in their own world with their shelf of rare items. Depreciating the league because of Legacy is shooting yourself in the foot.

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Considering that if you don’t do that you won’t get one at all, yes. Most players don’t chase a Shattered Worlds because they know they won’t get one. Their build just won’t make it and they don’t want to play a broken meta build. So they make their plans without considering one.

With this change, Shattered Worlds is now an option while still using their fun underpowered meme build. So it weighs in that they should do this so that their build becomes a lot better by simply doing this.

Not to mention that you said this is meant to keep players longer. So they’ll have plenty of time to level everything up. And going MG will even give them more gold for stash tabs, so win-win.

EDIT: Also, if it’s not worth all the effort, then it’s also not worth all the exact same effort of leveling up CoF so you return, so your original point is also moot.

Either there is a benefit to being able to switch, in which case we fall into the burden of optimal play, or there isn’t a benefit to being able to switch, in which case why do it at all?

There is no difference between season and legacy. At all. Nothing in the gameplay is different. And because of that, I’d say that more than half the players in LE play in legacy and not season. Certainly the over 2k players that stick around play it.

So disregarding legacy when your most loyal players are a part of it is shooting yourself in the foot a lot more.

The only reasons to play season currently is if you want to experience a fresh start, a fresh economy (although season MG is dead already) or if you want to participate in the leaderboards. Since only a small percentage of the playerbase actually cares about either of those, there is no reason not to play legacy in LE.

1 Like
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It’s not a matter of disrespecting the passionate fanbase. Certainly, those who play Legacy and participate in forums are among the most committed players in the game. They are also the least malleable and the most difficult to deal with. A player who plays Legacy shouldn’t need to compare themselves to others in terms of falling behind or not. If the game stopped having leagues and simply started updating Legacy directly, what do you think would happen?

But my point isn’t about efficiency; it’s about giving freedom to those who want to have fun. I don’t think it’s efficient to level up one faction and switch to another just to try to get an item. If someone is willing to do that with a meme build, it would still be more efficient to just do it in their preferred faction with a meta build to get the item faster.

“Oh, but I don’t want to use a meta build.” Okay, but nothing prevents you from doing so. In the same way, nothing forces you to use the faction switching system I mentioned either.

If the goal is simply to get items, there are already more efficient ways to do it, so I don’t see how this functionality would negatively impact anything.

One of the main complaints in every ARPG is replaying the campaign; many people prefer to play only one character and stop when they get tired. Being able to switch factions could revitalize the experience and give the game a new flow — it’s a matter of fun, not efficiency

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Other than the people that like to participate in leaderboards? Not much different from now, really.

We know that there will be people leaving if they start doing seasonal exclusive stuff. We also know that there will be people leaving (or not returning) if there are no seasons. So it seems like the best bet would be to keep having both realms be the same.

If you add a button that creates characters at level 90 with decent gear immediately, nothing forces you to use it. And yet players that prefer the leveling experience would still leave.

The whole “you don’t have to use it” isn’t a valid argument. If it’s there and it’s either so much better or it gives you something you can’t get otherwise, players feel forced to use it.

If all you want is to keep playing/having fun, then you can already switch factions. Just farm for a bit so you can pick up some non-MG gear (which is everything you haven’t bought) so you have a baseline and then switch. It’s not much different (and is likely a lot more lenient) than spending a bunch of time to pay for a “bribe”.

Being able to be in CoF with MG gear will always lead to double dipping and having a more efficient strategy. And even players that don’t care that much about efficiency will still feel compelled to do it because no one likes to feel like they’re wasting time.

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The point they were making - which is included in the sentence you quoted - isn’t that it doesn’t affect lower-level players, but rather that the dilemma is, knowing that it affects all players, how do you address it in a way that limits the top-tier players without nerfing lower-tier players. Beyond that, I think you’re both saying the same thing: It’s a fun idea, but it suffers from the same balancing dilemma as many other parts of the game.

I think the problem is more clearly highlighted by looking at it slightly differently. Instead of paying a bribe to switch factions I’d say it would make more sense for players to retain their factions and just pay each individual vendor a bribe for every item they want to buy that doesn’t match their faction. (You’d need someone you could bribe to purchase favor with that faction, that way MG players could bribe to access lenses and prophecies.)

If we had the mechanic work this way then the question becomes how much of a bribe should a player have to pay for a given item? In order to properly restrict top-tier players from abusing this system you’d have to make their bribe cost far higher than lower-tier players. Having a bribe of say 40mil gold to buy a perfectly-rolled idol might take a lower-tier CoF player a week to achieve (because they may only play an hour every other day), but a higher-tier CoF player could generate that in a few hours … and while that’s just one item, the advantage would continue to compound across multiple items. (And the reverse would be true for top-tier MG players too - they’d be able to bribe their way to more prophecies faster than lower-tier MG players.)

You couldn’t combat this even by character-locking items because a top tier player could create a new character, buy the item with that character (with shared stash/gold), and even though they’d be starting the character from level 1 the time sink of leveling to 100 could still be below the time sink of the higher bribe cost of their already top tier character.

And to be clear, you’d also have to find a way to align the bribe with something other than character level, because there are lots of lower-tier players who have lvl 100 characters just from grinding.

But as we’ve said, this balancing dilemma already exists in the game in other ways, and EHG’s no different than any other RPG in struggling with it across multiple mechanics.

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We’re not talking about the same thing. Anything you add to the game will always benefit top-tier players more simply because they play more.

My issue isn’t the top-tier players. My issue is the people that don’t want to trade. At all. At the time the poll was made, it was about 50% of the players. If you implement a system where trade is accessible and it becomes an optimal way of getting an item (like Uby items), then they will feel forced to trade, which isn’t something they want.

Much like there are lots of players in PoE that don’t like trade but feel forced to do it. Because once something is available, the game will be balanced around it, much like PoE is balanced around trade.

So people that dislike trade will either feel left behind and eventually leave, like they did in PoE, or feel forced to trade and enjoy the game that much less.

The only issue I have with the suggestion is that EHG found a way to make players that don’t want to trade at all to feel somewhat equal to players that want to. It’s something that only happens in LE. And any system that allows players to use both will once again make non-traders feel left behind.

1 Like
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That statement is predicated on there not being any mechanism to balance the game for top-tier players versus lower-tier players. I don’t actually know whether or not there are any mechanisms already in place, but there might be. And even if there aren’t, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that EHG could implement some later. In fact, I hope they do. EHG has already addressed a number of gaps in current RPG MMOs, it would be great if they could find a way to address the balance gap between top-tier players and lower-tier players too.

IMO trade is just a proxy for determinism, which is why I love LE’s crafting and their implementation of prophecies. (Personally I wish they’d gone further and implemented prophecies in such a way that the odds of a drop ramp up until you get the item, at which point they can adjust the upper cap of that ramp instead of leaving it pure RNG, but that’s a conversation for another thread.) IMO it’s not so much that trade is optimal, but rather that each individual player has an internal metric of how much effort they think an item is worth, and if RNGesus isn’t giving it to them at a reasonable “cost” then the player is going to want some way of making it more deterministic. Of course the problem is that everyone’s internal metric is different, so people are always complaining about their opinions of the actual metrics being too high or low compared with their personal opinions. But that’s also a conversation for another thread.

I mean … I’ve always felt left behind. I don’t have the time or the desire to min-max nearly as hard as the top-tier players, which means I can never keep up with price inflation in MG, so I switched to CoF, and then decided to switch to offline play because if I’m playing CoF then there’s no real reason for me to play online, and at least in theory playing offline is supposed to mean I can keep playing when servers go offline. (That hasn’t been the case - even with everything set to fully offline I still can’t play when servers are offline, but again that’s also a conversation for another thread.)

Anyway, since, as I said above, for me trade is just a proxy for determinism, and the game’s ‘cost’ for each item needs to be balanced across both top-tier and lower-tier players, I do think the trade issue really comes back to cost, determinism, and balance. I can appreciate that you might disagree though.

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That would be because you’re using “false offline”, not “true offline”. Go to LE’s properties on steam and you should see an option on how to launch it between online and true offline.

The false offline client still uses the servers and has chat available. The true offline has no internet connection (so no chat) and is always available (as long as steam is open, even if it’s in offline mode).

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Yeah, I’ve already done that. And reinstalled the game.

And I have no chat, therefore I am true offline. But I still can’t play when the servers are down. But like I said, that’s for another thread. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like there aren’t a million other things I should be doing with my time anyway.

1 Like
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There aren’t. If there were, such as loot dropping off after X hours of gameplay a week (so that people who play >>>X hours don’t get much more/better loot than those who play X or <X hours), everyone who played more than X hours a week would rightly complain about “their time not being respected”.

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I can only assume there might be other ways to balance the spectrum that don’t involve reducing loot drops, but that’ll be for EHG to figure out I guess.

The only one that comes to mind for me would be for the difficulty modifier for higher corruption levels to increase at a higher rate than they currently do. I think I saw someone comment about how the top tier players are pushing something like 20,000 corruption, or maybe it was 40,000. I don’t know how those compare with the drop percentages of items with different LP, but if EHG intended for some 4LP items to be once-in-a-lifetime things and some people are getting them weekly then IMO rebalancing that isn’t “disrespecting” anyone’s time, it’s more that you were never intended to have been able to do that in the first place.

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Current corruption ladder shows one player at 100k and a few over 40k.

The difference in drops between 1k and 40k is almost negligible, tbh.

You mean like nerfing imprints and everyone crying out that the game is ruined? To the point where they have to say that they over-nerfed it?

They already said this season that a 2xT7 should be a prize item, not a common occurrence, let alone a 4xT7. And yet players expect 2xT7 items to drop like candy and EHG is caving in (yet again).

There is never a way to balance things for top-tier players, nor should there be. I’m not a grinder, but if they play 10h a day, they should be rewarded for it. The game doesn’t need to penalize players for playing well and playing longer. The game just needs to balance things so that semi-casual players can still have access to the same things eventually.

But with any RNG mechanic it becomes a numbers game. The more you do it the more likely you are to succeed. So top-tier players will always succeed more than casuals or semi-casuals. We see this in every game in the genre and there’s no getting away from that. Nor should it change, imo.

After all, that is the base of the genre: you do things, you get rewarded for them. Some sort of balancing mechanic to affect top-tier players would always mean they would get less rewarded for doing the same things.

The diminishing returns formula for corruption already does that, where the difference between farming 5k or 50k is minimal for drops but massive for difficulty.

1 Like
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The difference being that this change basically made imprinting completely nonfunctional for people playing 100c. That wasn’t a change that only affected players playing 20,000c. Maybe EHG never intended for imprinting to be what it was, maybe they over-nerfed it, maybe they should change it to scale the imprint benefits along corruption levels so it doesn’t nerf lower-tier players (who could probably use the help, honestly) to the same degree as higher-tier players, but I never minded them tweaking it, what I minded was that they basically made it completely nonfunctional. At least that’s how it feels for me.

On that topic, it might be useful if they had some sort of onscreen visual to let players know when the imprinting was triggered so we could see it when it is happening. There may be times when it’s being triggered that players don’t even realize. For example, I have a 3LP Relic imprint but I have 0LP versions of that item hidden. If the imprint’s causing 0LP versions to be triggered and there was some onscreen display then at least I’d know it’s being triggered, even if it’s not giving me the higher-LP versions I’m hoping for.

I don’t have a horse in that race. I’m happy with a T7 and a T6. I know anything past that is supposed to be very rare, just like most 4LP items. What’s annoyed me more than anything is how the nerfing’s affected Woven Riches and Loomed Riches. As far as I can tell, they’re completely nonfunctional right now.

Sure, I don’t have any problem with that, as long as those rewards are in line with what EHG wants. What pisses me off is when those players complain that the game is too easy, that they’re seeing too many drops, and calling for the game to be harder or for drops to be nerfed without caring if (or how) their requests hurt other players unequally.

Well, if they’re the ones complaining about how the game is too easy, then they’re the ones who ought to get the nerfs. But honestly, I think most MMOs are going to need to move to a mutli-server format where you pick your difficulty level like old single-player games. There’s just too much breadth/variability in the different types of players out there, trying to balance to make everyone happy just doesn’t make sense to me when it would probably just be easier to have separate servers for players who want to beat the game in Ruthless Mode, or God Mode, etc. Let the sadomasochists have their own place to self-flagellate and give them special badges so they can tell themselves they’re more important than the rest of the world, and let the people who work 40+ hours and can only put a few hours a week into the game have their own server where they can enjoy the game without having to put up with the conflict. Etc.