Corruption System Change Request

General
1

First of all, this game is great, and the current corruption difficulty/reward scaling is just fine. However, after grinding to 1000 corruption, I feel there are a few major issues with the current system.

  1. When playing in a party, only the party leader gains corruption – this greatly discourages party play since corruption gain is necessary to progress.
  2. When playing an alt, player must grind the corruption all over again, and this coupled with the short “cycle” or “season” timeframe, discourages players from playing alts. Especially now you can have an alt with starting gear fit for 500+ corruption just from the market.
  3. After you gain 1000 corruption in one timeline, all other timelines stay at 100 corruption – this can be somewhat remedied by the “catch up” system, but still feels tedious to catch up corruption for all other timelines.

I am purposing a new corruption gain system: “Max Account Corruption.”, with this system:

  1. Each player has an account level max corruption value, starting at 100, and any gain of corruption will increase that value, which is applied to all timelines and all characters on the account.
  2. When entering a timeline, player has the option to change corruption value via a slider bar - anything between 100 up to their current max corruption can be freely selected, and this solves issue #2 and #3.
  3. Although corruption value can be freely set, player will only gain Max Account Corruption when playing at their current max value.
  4. When playing in a party, the party leader decides the corruption value, and if that value is higher than or equal to other party members’ Max Account Corruption, they are also eligible to gain max corruption value - this solves issue #1.

I hope if enough people agree with this proposal, the developers can consider implementing it!

15 Likes
2

Maybe I am wrong and you are wrong as well with this but…I like it. All of it.

Especially if you want to grind multiple unique items with higher LP that are mostly obtained from different timelines. Since playing at higher corruption gives you higher chances for higher LP of course you would like to have the corruption as high as your character can manage and grinding the corruption through all of them is more of a chore at that point.

1 Like
3

I don’t have anything to add aside from this being a great post. You voiced your concerns and offered solutions as well. I admire that in people.

1 Like
4

You’ve pretty much summed up all my thoughts on the system. I was just thinking about a slider bar.

1 Like
5

Excellent suggestions.

Corruption grinding is the leading reason why I quit the cycle after a week especially in a CoF party where you’re running your web or you’re just tagging along losing progress on your own. When you do split to progress separately you can finally use those obsidian essences, that is if they actually dropped in any reasonable quantity.

I’m honestly shocked this problem carried forward into the official release after having a year of multiplayer beta feedback to process.

1 Like
6

I really hope someone reads this thread, because similar suggestions have been posted already, on the forum, on the official reddit, on Steam, basically everywhere, and have been ignored.

I hope is not a case of “we implemented it this way, now is too expensive to change”, because for ARPGs the fact that party play is not valuable is already a curse.

They had a chance to do better here, if you think about it, the problem with party play is in every ARPG hack n’ slash, there is no single game that really encourage to play it in party if not with breadcrumbs.

To party should just be easier and better, not “balanced”, I don’t even want the monsters to have more life, makes no sense, we are more, then we are stronger and faster, that’s why you group up.

Let’s hope they will favour the fun and not the genre-dogmas for once, stay safe travellers!

7

While I don’t have any particularly strong feelings against or for OP’s suggestion one thing you said is not really true:

While certain aspects do not encourage party play, party play still is very effective, because you literally multiply the amount of loot.

Realistically this only helps for boss and unique drops, unless all players have simialr filters for all items party members potentially use.

But only the unique and especially boss drop multiplication is insanely strong. So much so that if you want to really want some rare boss drops with 2 or 3 lp you want to run in a party, because it gives you that much more chance to get it.

I also majorly disagree with this.

A party should not be better on average, only if very optimized. Ideally (but not really realistically achiveable it should be alwaysequal).

Having group play be better and easier in everyway would make it the most efficient strategy and this sucks for people who don’t want to engage in multiplayer.

If they do what you say, especially with making groups this would as a whole not make the game more fun for everyone, only for the people who want to engage in MP.

1 Like
8

Great suggestions. The corruption mechanic needs to be streamlined. I hope they do when they introduce other endgame activities. Right now it’s still bearable because there’s not much else to do, but keep it the way it is and it’ll suck when new activities are introduced.

9

Sure, all my considerations are aimed to improve multiplayer, single player is not affected, you can play offline or ssf, or just ignore the fact that others are farming faster than you,.

As you also mentioned, there are already some advantages, just not enough, according to the OP suggestions, and mine, you may not like mine, but I don’t see how these would affect who plays alone anyway.

10

It is, because it’d be objectively worse in every way to grouping up. “Just don’t use it if you don’t like it” isn’t an argument. You feel annoyed that partying isn’t “just easier & better” but that’s what you want to inflict on people who don’t play the same way as you.

I’m all for changing how corruption (& possibly stability) works in a party if the mechanics of it actively disincentivise partying when they shouldn’t. But actively making things worse for one side or the other is a bit harsh.

11

I am sorry to inform you, but this is not how it works.

If there are multiple different ways and strategies to play the game, these will inevitably be compared and measured against each other.

There might be people that play MP for the sake of MP and there might be people that play SP for the sake of SP.

But there is a very large portion that play whatever is best and if the gap between these different strategies is too big and noticeable that is a net negative for the game.

This goes way beyond just MP and affects all kinds of games and systems.

This is very similar to the respec mastery debate. Many people want it and say, if you don’t like it don’t use it. But again, this is not how it works. Things like these are affecting other people even if the thing is something they don’t directly do or like themselves.

1 Like
12

All these people complaining about how hard it is to raise corruption past 1,000 will be so pleased when their builds get nerfed and they don’t have to do it anymore.

3 Likes
13

Everyone can play with other people, and the game should encourage that, there should be options to encourage parties to form (starting by fixing the UI and multiplayer issues and adding some sort of matchmaking or posts for parties ala PoE).

The single players have to accept that there is a gap, because this is how life works, not just games, in the end is your choice to play alone.

By your reasoning, you want the opposite which is still a variant of what technically you don’t want (to influence only one side), well atm the MP guys are not having fun, and what matter more the SP or the MP? The MP, because is way behind, and because is way more wanted.

It’s 2024, look what happens to SP games without coop, they die young (apart SP made genres: Adventures, puzzles, etc).

I don’t want to inflict anything on anyone, my proposal doesn’t change anything for SP, and obviously it will never be considered, because clearly LE devs have a different philosophy, they don’t seem to prioritize* MP at all.

You think* that it would be a bad thing apparently, but you didn’t explain why either, and as we have no data, I’m sorry, not only I can’t see your point. but I can’t even believe it, sounds illogical to me.

Also, thanks for your feedback, but honestly I was not asking for any feedback, I was giving mine instead, but thanks, appreciated that you spent some time reading it.

14

First, devs already said there will be no content that needs a party to complete, so they obviously care about solo players, as is also evidenced by the fact that they provided a truly offline client that will always have everything the online version has.

Second, for many people it’s not a choice. There are people that have poor or no internet connection. There are people that have social phobias. There are many reasons for playing solo without it being a choice.

Solo and MP should be balanced. There shouldn’t be a big difference in progress between them.

1 Like
15

Yeah, that’s a given IMO, party play (the mechanics of it, at least) needs to work better.

There are already some non-trivial benefits to playing in a party though:

  • You get more loot
    Assuming there isn’t competition between part mumbers for the same items & they are willing to check with the others whether something is wanted. It’s also a strict multiplier to tje changece to get boss drops, if all 4 of you are eligible for the drop but only 1 of you wants it then they have four times the chance for it to drop v SP (well, 4 rolls, but probably close enough).
  • It’s safer
    If things are getting too hot for you then you can run away & your party members can pick up the slack while you heal to full and make them pay. There’s also the chance that your party members have useful buffs like HH or other heals/etc.
  • It’s quicker
    I’ve not checked the per-member mob buffs, but I don’t think they increase the hp by x1 per member (so a party of 4 would be facing mobs with 4x or more hp), but I could be wrong.

And yet you’re advocating for more.

It does relative to MP though. SP is already at a quantitative disadvantage.

2 Likes
16

My main issue is the waste of time to push corruption from 100 to 1000. It’s a boring slog and takes forever. So people just stop pushing not because of difficulty but because it’s a wasteful time sink. Which goes against what corruption is supposed to be about in testing the strength of your build and player skill.

We need to get people to higher corruption 10 times faster.

  • Gaze of orobyss needs to be 25 corruption per stack first 2.
  • The 3rd stack currently is worth less it should be worth double. 50 corruption for a 3rd stack and then double after. So that’s right 4th Gaze alone is worth 100 corruption.

With the above changes it’s very possible in an hour to push a couple 100 corruption in just 1 reset and Orobyss kill. That’s how it should be.

This way we can push and actually push corruption it’s so boring to have a build and you have to spend weeks pushing corruption before you finally get to where you should be at. This boring slog makes you just want to log off.

PS - Fix Arena too. Key of Memory should put you within 25 waves of your last attempt. I’m not regrinding 100’s of waves again. It’s pointless and should be about competitive pushing not wasting players time.

2 Likes
17

This is an issue and should be addressed. But this is also an issue because you weren’t supposed to reach 1k. That’s not the balance goal they set out to. So they screwed up on that. If they managed to balance things between 300-600 like they intended to, this would be a much smaller issue (that would still need to be addressed, just not as important as it is right now).
Let’s see what they come up with for 1.1.

1 Like
18

Yes the life of mobs doesn’t scale 1x per player, like you said, and that’s good already, but there is no reason for which it should scale at all to start with.

I’m advocating for everything the OP said, plus, going even more toward MP in respect to other games of the same genre overall, because, just like me, you can find many more people online (reddit, YT, or just into discord communities), that want more MP features and QoL than people that don’t, apart that fact that all the threads are ignored.

Honestly I find silly that we can look to so many examples of games that have a better retention and more CCU at the same time, and more importantly are more fun to play, because indeed they invested more into coop, but games of this genre (ARPG h’n’s) still don’t get it (Blizzard got it, but they delivered an atrocity based on what potentially may have been a good recipe for the MP part at least).

I hope it will be a natural evolution of the genre like it happened for others, what I’m advocating for, is already implemented in tons of games, nothing new really.

19

Wow, so not only is the 2-4x the amount of drops enough but you want it to be 2x-4x faster as well! You really do hate those dirty SP scrubs…

The hp of mobs “needs” to increase per player present because with 2-4 players you have 2-4 times the dps (assuming broadly similar dps by player) & the devs want players to not feel “forced” to party up because it’s objectively better (& your suggestion would be a fairly significant amount better).

Features & QoL are fine.

1 Like
20

In my Corruption climb, I fought the same boss 50x. Some of the bosses in the other timelines, I’ve fought maybe once or twice.

The current system does not facilitate a varied experience. It’s the same thing over and over.

Among other improvements that have already been suggested, it would be nice if the system had us fighting a variety of bosses and possibly more frequently too.

1 Like