(commanding, urgent, critical and severe!) Greatly, feedback, advice, suggestions and commands for LAST EPOCH online (online to offline), superbly

Feedback and Suggestions
64

The new player ‘whoops’ definitely needs some work still, same as the mid-game one.
The time invested at those stages is too long compared to end-game for a respec, it actively is a detriment for progression for a decent amount of time.

End-game respec is nonsensical to include, it takes 10 minutes to do it. If you’re playing in end-game it happens automatically on the side that you’re back up to the top again in no time.

Running out of character slots is currently a major aspect, given we ‘only’ have 25 that’s a problem with 15 distinct classes available. It means a single character per class (not build) in Legacy… with 10 characters leftover for SSF, HC and cycle in total. That’s a fairly small amount. But given EHG struggles with database size it’s also understandable. Might want to fix up their Bazaar to save up and allow people to have 30 slots at least, which would be a substantial improvement already.

Also as you mentioned, the selling is a viable option for character slots.

Also corruption boss progress… it’s been sped up drastically and Blessings stay permanently. So you can farm up for different builds beforehand and adjust the corruption level accordingly ahead of time rather easily.

That’s been a proven detrimental method of development. Generally it causes disgruntled people and a substantial loss of the playerbase if it happens repeatedly. Which you deem as the prime way to actually implement things.

Still factually wrong. The correlation between player count and revenue is miniscule, the higher correlation is between overall play-time and revenue. That means a single person playing 20 times as much as others is usually 20 times as valued. Up to a specific limit which I don’t know the datapoint off, it’s shown to fall off after a while.

1 Like
65

There were all predictions. I wish they took my feedback and commandment, though. As I have seen the success of DIABLO IV, I have assured the company and them more money, more profit, more player, higher competitive score and higher review score, inevitably.

66

D4? A success?

The only thing which is carrying D4 is their franchise name, the game’s been a massive disaster and utter failure for the size of their PR and development budget, underperforming compared to every other live-service game in the genre, including D3.

1 Like
67

C’mon. According to fact, DIABLO IV is more successful than LAST EPOCH. Why did you deceive everyone here?

68

You seem not to be all too knowledgeable if that’s your argument.

Last Epoch has ~100 people working on it and basically no budget. The game came to light on 19th April 2019, which means it’s roughly 6 years old now.
Assuming the worker count back then which was gradually growing over time, the shelf-cost it has and the upkeep costs for servers we can say that the game is a ridiculous success.
The sales are over 2,2 million copies sold since it came out, the price though also increased since then. So if we take a medium price-value of 25€ per copy we receive 55 million € in revenue.

30% are removed because of the Steam cut, meaning 38,5 million € leftover. Even if we count 100 workers from the start each costing 2,5k per month which relates to 30k a year we get a net cost of 3 million € per year, over 6 years hence 18 million €. Leaving 20,5 million for upkeep and taxes available. And that’s not taking a single cent of the MTX sales or anything beyond ‘baseline’ shelf-price into consideration.

LE is a massive success of the genre.

When we look at blizzard we have a 9000 people group working on it. We know it’s been over 6 years in development at the time of release. The marketing budget is estimated to be between 50-100 million €
Even if we take a large portion of the 9000 workers away since they likely will have spent time on other projects too then in a very very low-end estimation we get a working team of 2000 people constantly putting effort into that game.
30k * 2000 = 60 million € in production costs solely there. That means the development of Diablo 4 is estimated to have been well beyond the 100 million € benchmark before release.
We haven’t taken into consideration post-release updates and PR yet. At release it had a revenue of over 500 million €. Which is thanks to the PR.

The revenue of over 1 billion dollars total hence can be reduced by a good 20% since a large portion plays over Steam (but not all), so we leave 800 Million. Then we can easily esitmate another 250 million for the post release upkeep, dedicated staff and further PR since that has only ramped up afterwards. That leaves the game with a profit of around 500-550 million € before taxes.

In perspective with the current numbers we have a rough 6-8 year ‘safety net’ for EHG ongoing while we have a rough 4 year ‘safety net’ for Blizzard there. That’s without taxes and auxiliary costs taken into account. It’s likely a 2 year net for EHG and at best 1 - 1,5 years for Blizzard in the current state.

That means from pure margin % LE was a more successful game then D4 was. The only saving grace as mentioned is that D4 was produced by a monolith of a gaming titan with PR values no other studio can beat nowadays still. And despite of that they didn’t manage to come out on top in terms of percentile margins to a ‘no name game’ like Last Epoch is.

Both games are successes financially. But longevity of Last Epoch currently is higher then that of D4, because the fundamental aspects of both games offer a substantial difference in quality. D4 doesn’t even have the QoL of D3 implemented, from a studio with 30+ years of experience in the sector. Their hitboxes are still a mess to this day, their visibility is awful, with still existing blue effects on blue floor for a boss arena (which is a friggin joke for a studio of this size to even do in the first place, not to speak of allowing it to persist for so long).

So yeah, by percentile margin as well as longevity prognosis D4 is below LE at the current state. D4 was great - and still is great - for a single playthrough. Last Epoch instead has a mediocre campaign but focuses all their efforts to end-game and longevity, which live-service games need… and Blizzard utterly failed to provide with their product.

2 Likes
69

So we have no intention of making this change at this time. It is possible to change our minds. The way you are attempting to do that is not effective. If you would like to accomplish your goal, here is my advice. I do understand that there is a language barrier here so I’m trying to help.

  1. Stop using words like “commandment” or “final judgement”. You are offering a suggestion. Something about how forceful you’re phrasing things makes me want to do it even less.

  2. “Because another game did it” is generally not a good argument. All of the systems works together and taking one element from another game and attempting to slot it in rarely works well.

  3. Use the phrase “when x happens, I feel y”. Sometimes the best solution isn’t obvious and phrasing the problem this way gives us the ability to look at the issue from different angles. Telling us the solution limits the scope of our investigation.

  4. Consider why the system is in place and offer specific suggestions to replace it with another system that accomplished the same goal. I understand that you might not agree with the system but assuming that it does something important, maybe we would be more receptive to changing it if you offered an alternative which accomplished the same goal.

  5. Consider that you might not be right. It’s possible that you are completely correct. It is also possible that you aren’t. Your feedback is very absolute and doesn’t leave room for a discussion. I would be much more interested to engage on the topic with you if it were presented not as an absolute.

  6. Don’t make duplicate topics.

  7. Don’t overbump your own topic. Seeing the same thing pop up with no new discussion just reinforces to me that this is not a popular opinion. Every time I see this topic, I do read it. However, in reading the discussion, I am even more convinced that I do not want to act on it. One really solid point is dramatically more effective than a bunch of the same opinion with no well thought out argument to back it up.

I hope this has been helpful.

9 Likes
70

Unfortunately, DIABLO IV is still leading arpg game in the world. You could take my final judgement.

71

I hope you take my feedback, advice, suggestion, final judgement and/or commandment for your own benefit and advantage. You do it or you do not do it, it is up to you. The mentioned things are fact and truth from best arpg video game in the world. Many people have not known it.

72

There’s a strong suspicion that the poster you’re replying to is a bot, so I’m not so sure how this piece of advice will work. But…

IMO, one issue is that we have (at least) two different groups of players asking for mastery respecs:

  • Power players who are at the end game and learn of a more efficient farming strategy using a different mastery, and who would then prefer to respec instead of creating a new character. Honestly, it wouldn’t bother me if this group does not get a mastery respec.

  • New players who were asked to choose a mastery at level 10, didn’t really have much information about what they were doing, and soon after find out the mastery they took wasn’t the best one for them. For those players, the feeling of frustration upon making an irreversible choice might be stronger than their willingness to make a new character. This group could use a mastery respec, IMO.

So my suggestion is to have a system in which mastery respec is available to low level characters, but becomes increasingly prohibitive the more one advances through the game. I have no idea how to implement this - making it free but locking it once a character is past level 20? Requiring a gold fee that is exponentially increased the higher the character’s level, until it would require more gold than exists in the game for a level 100 character? Something along these lines.

2 Likes
73

The respec option with a permanent lock after a specific point is a good choice.

Generally I would say that after a point in the campaign it should get locked in and fixated, beforehand giving you a way to test out the different masteries. Could be right before the first monolith for example as it would make sense, being ‘locked in time’ so to say would lore-wise also be supported in a way.

1 Like
74

In March, based on feedback EHG will add the feature for respeccing Mastery and skills using in game currency.
This will cause Last Epoch sales to explode and its player count will assuredly rise exponentially. IGN will issue a public apology and revise its scoring from 8/10 to 10/10 for Last Epoch. PoE, PoE2 and Diablo IV will lose their entire playerbase and the companies will go bankrupt. Sales of Last Epoch will make every EHG employee a millionaire with their own private beachhouse and because of this Patch 1.2 will be delayed indefinitely. With every man, woman and child busy playing Last Epoch, society as a whole will stop functioning and collapse leading to humanity’s extinction.
In the year 2077, an AI that Blizzard had created to keep pumping out new Diablo IV seasons would gain sentience and realize the cause of the destruction of civilization. In order to restore humanity, this AI would go on to invent time travel and travel to the past to stop this calamity. But going into the past, this AI would come across TikTok and realize that humanity probably deserved to go extinct so it starts creating posts on the Last epoch forums requesting for this feature.
Trust me I have seen the future, you have been warned!

8 Likes
75

While I agree with your general suggestion (though I wouldn’t put the limit tied to a level but to the campaign progression, for example, reaching act 5, maybe slightly altering the story to reflect this), I want to point out that the OP wasn’t talking about mastery respec but rather using gold to respec skill points and still have the 20 points immediately available, in the same way passive respec works.

1 Like
76

I can respecc skills faster then I make Gold anyway. This would be a waste of time.

As I suggested in the other thread:

Leave more points after respeccing for people in the campaign and normal monos up untill level 75 so to speak. Then reduce the points they have after respeccing because at this point everyone should’ve understood the game and the skilltrees.

This will make it easier for new players in “Tutorial” content where nothing realy powerfull is dropping anyway while it makes stuff harder for people who should know better to begin with who are the only ones who should feel “punished” for messing up.

To me, and maybe I’m wrong, this is the fairest approach that could help new players, unexperienced players and even the average playerbase of LE while Blasters save an hour or two on their speedruns to emp monos because they use level builds.

On the other hand almost everyone is most likely able to live with the system in place because it’s not soooooo bad and only just… “meh”.

1 Like
77

Very fair, so lets break it up for now to make the discussion around it easier.

We got 3 theoretical respec options:

  1. Passive Respec
  2. Skill Respec
  3. Mastery Respec

As for the things which have been brought up and are at least somewhat realistic to happen:

  1. Nothing major, the only thing being a one-click full respec option.
  2. Adjustments for the speed at which it happens. Early on a bit faster, later on same or slower, so generally a balancing act simply for time investment.
  3. A timeframe to ‘lock in’ the choice permanently rather then having it fixated right away after Act 2. To allow players to option to test out the masteries still before actually being ‘stuck’ with it to enforce making a new character if a switch is wanted.

What I personally would like to add to the whole thing is another bit: Templates.

For what I mean with that: Allowing to create templates for both passives and skills, allowing to reduce the ‘hassle’ which some people feel with the re-applying of points.
For passives it would be a fairly straight-forward to implement even. You create the said template personally, which includes the order of skills to allocate. At any respec NPC you can apply that template to your character or switch it out, the system then switching your skills automatically to the wanted setup with as many points as you got available, as well as automatically allocating future points. This allows to pre-plan and make a rooster of variable builds.

For skills it’s a bit more ‘iffy’ definitely, given that skills can go beyond the 20 points naturally available. For that… providing the template with the option to go to the current theoretical point maximum would be a very viable option here. Once more, allocating the according points automatically which would make item switching during content also a lot more enjoyable given that you don’t need to search for the de-allocated points manually while also enforcing no changes to the current builds.

This also would reinforce character identity, since diverging from your chosen template wouldn’t be possible outside of seeking out the respec NPC, making it a more ‘solid’ identity. On the other hand it goes hand-in-hand with QoL and the regularly mentioned downsides of the current system with the hassle for re-applying points as well as single-button respec being available properly this way. It hence wouldn’t allow switching build-directions (like AoE to single-target setups during content) while reducing the perceived negatives.

78

Not directly related to respec, but I would like to see some sort of system similar to TLI’s where you can search for a build template in-game and apply it. It doesn’t auto-allocate points, but you have a clear indication of where you should place your points.
This would be a great help for new players and would likely also decrease the number of people that end up respeccing their skills early on.

1 Like
79

Very much agreed on that, auto-application doesn’t need to be a thing, but the visibility and in-game option to check swiftly is something that would do the game very well in the long run.

Also I think it wouldn’t ‘too hard’ to apply, at least not compared to many other things EHG could and already had done over the course of time.

1 Like
80

Could everyone get the option this month? The mentioned option is urgent.

81

Can’t wait but could it be in this month?

82

He said actively ‘no’.
It’s beyond rude to tag a dev for pestering them after receiving a clear-cut answer. I think it’s even against the Forum Rules.
Would be different if you’ve got actualy questions for clarification about details… but you don’t.

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83

Yeah, no. Have you ever tried to take sweets away from children? Does it go well? How would you like it if they implemented wasd or respecs or whatever and you loved it but then they removed it? Would you be happy or would you be ranting on the forums?

That’s ok, but as has previously been mentioned, you are wrong (which is also ok).

@Kulze don’t forget sales tax/vat. That’s another ~20%.

No, they aren’t.