That is how it is now to desincentivize switching. That’s not how you propose it to be, though.
In fact, with your idea you can simply have a character for MG that buys all the stuff for your CoF characters. You play it every once in a while to farm favour, then when you make a new character you buy all the low/mid/end level gear, put it in the chest, then create the character as CoF which now has better drops and once he levels he can simply gear up the BiS gear you bought as MG.
Except you can bypass those downsides easily as I just mentioned above.
It’s the same reason someone is “punished” for respecing skills. And like respeccing skills, you usually make up for lost time a lot faster at endgame.
After all, you could apply that same argument to skill respec and even to mastery respec.
MG/CoF is part of character identity. If you want to change the identity you should either not be allowed at all or you should be penalized for it.
It should be the same as “Eh, I don’t feel like playing Runemaster anymore. I would rather go Necro”. You want to change, make a new character.
Again, that argument could also be applied to mastery respec. There is no difference between the 2. So it’s a design/flavor/identity choice.
If I have the gold what hinders me to make a new character, outfit it completely in MG when I’m max rank there… play it up and switch to CoF right away?
Beginner gear costs literally nothing after all. There’s tons available since MG is treated as a garbage dumb of worthless items to progress.
How does that actually limit me from already abusing it this way? I don’t care about 30 minutes playtime to get enough favor for a single item back when switching. So why have it in the first place?
You’re talking about ‘endgame issues’, those are the ones which automatically solve themselves anyway by circumventing it simply.
So they have no purpose.
The end-result is one way or the other… I need to invest time to get gear to progress, after my first character - which won’t be able to double-dip because of the rank of the factions limiting it - I don’t have those limitations anymore.
So the current limitations hinder non-existent double-dipping for the first character and for the second character they… well… they don’t exist simply as you circumvent them anyway?
I mean… if the whole account would be bound to a single faction and switches around at the same time I could actually to a degree understand the thought process. Like this though? It’s just… baffling how badly it’s handled. It has more flaws, issues and arbitrary non-effective downsides then anything else. It lacks function. It’s badly done.
What hinders me now from doing exactly that? I get tons of early level drops, slap it onto my new character, play up, still have money… use MG.
The only hindrance is that I need to go to another CoF character, slap it full of prophecies to empty out my favor and then switch with the prophecy-less character to MG. I loose nothing, if it’s only my second character - and for some reason I already have ranks - then I can simply slap a few enemies to get some decent enough gear to do monoliths to buy some more decent enough gear to actually be at the top fairly swiftly.
Which is why I’m saying that gold is a mess to use as the medium to buy items, it removes the whole reason for the limitation in the first place. It’s arbitrary again.
You already can… it’s just a useless hassle! It doesn’t uphold for progressing in the first place… and when you’re done progressing you have equip for a secondary character immediately anyway, CoF or MG doesn’t matter. Unless you didn’t have any sort of foresight to actually keep a few cheap uniques for the campaign… which get thrown at you in masses.
But… it has a reason for the respec. It’s so you can’t change builds before a boss. Character identity.
Factions aren’t hinged on that.
Factions don’t allow build switch before bosses as you can only do it in town anyway.
It’s apples to oranges.
You can’t tell me that a faction is part of the ‘character identity’ either. The progression is account wise, the favor is account wise, the access is account wise. It has nothing to do with your personal character, it’s account based. That’s as far away from ‘character identity’ as one can argue.
You can’t use that term willy-nilly as a basic solution to everything, it needs to have meaning.
Yeah, and I do! No problem. 15 classes… I think it was 20 character slots? Nice! Works!
15 classes… 2 factions… 30 character slots… shit! Can’t do that. Big problem. Remove one limitation, character limit or faction change limit.
And that’s fair, hence… give me 35 character slots
We don’t have that, it screws us over, can’t do it.
Remove it until it’s the case, simple solution. Make faction choice permanent then. It isn’t so it’s just a badly designed system. You can argue as much as you want about it but you get the ‘either/or’ there simply. If it’s meant to be part of the identity then don’t allow switching. If it’s not then there’s no reason to enforce us to make 2 characters. And it’s even worse that you’re punished account-wide and not your character if it should be part of it.
No matter how you twist and turn it at one corner you just… get stuck with it. It makes no sense either way despite being understandable where you come from there.
Personally, I really enjoyed playing my first Amazon in Diablo 2 online and having a random guy pop into my game and dropping off his “trash loot” which were major upgrades from a higher difficulty I wouldn’t reach for quite some time.
I also enjoy this benefit via Bazaar in LE.
I think you keep forgetting that every item you can buy was in fact farmed by an MG player.
I don’t see you posting screenshots of the Bazaar showing zero results of 2 LP uniques, so maybe take your own advice first.
So you’re not used to compete for the good stuff. That explains some of it.
Now go back to the time before PoE had Premium Tabs, or to the time when they had Premium Tabs, but didn’t have first-party OR third-party item search functionality. I wonder what your experience will be like.
Suddenly the “hot mess” looks much more favorable, eh?
200 000 gold. Took about a minute.
Again, missing filter options and clunky UI are two different things. We were discussing clunky UI and I agreed with you that it sucks, I just cited a different reason.
I don’t know why are you asking me to search for an example of missing filter option, but I’m not particularly interested in searching for price differences between lowest and highest roll on a specific idol, so you can search for the comparison part yourself.
Yeah, this could essentially be done the exact same way that a character moves from Cycle to Legacy.
If I have a Cycle Faction state of 10 when on the current cycle and my legacy is 8, when the cycle ends and my characters are added to Legacy, my legacy faction is now a 10.
The fact that as CoF you can’t use MG gear. That’s what’s stopping you right now. That’s the design that doesn’t allow you to abuse the mechanics and force everyone to trade.
As for gold, the meta would simply be to take the most broken character that can do high corruption, get a lot of gold that way and with selling gear that drops. You would need to play about 1/10th of the time you play with your CoF character to fully equip it with BiS gear.
Again, gear restrictions are what currently stop you from abusing this. And it’s what you want to remove, which would actually make this happen.
You can’t.
They are, though. Even more important, it’s linked to player/game identity. It’s why some players prefer CoF even though MG is easier to get BiS. Because they have a clear path without trading and without too significant downsides for their playstyle.
It’s also why many players left PoE, because there was no alternative to having to trade without feeling completely screwed over, because SSF in PoE is a joke.
I don’t disagree with this.
So, to recap: having no restriction on wearing gear will lead to having an op character in MG to quickly farm favour and sell stuff (and remember that gold is account wide, so your CoF characters are also contributing to your funds). This character could then simply buy all gear you need for your new CoF character that never even joins MG.
Whereas currently you can’t do that because you can’t equip the MG gear.
Go ahead and tell how to progress your rank without spending favor Double the time investment? Sure, just the dumbest solution possible.
First of all, you can stick your sass where the sun doesn’t shine.
Secondly, D2 ‘trading’ was barely a in-built mechanic, derived from a time when game development wasn’t as advanced as it is nowadays, developers stumbling around partially blind still as online play wasn’t established heavily, especially not in that genre.
So the take itself is nonsensical.
Obviously you don’t want to let players skip progression as a in-built mechanic in the game. Manual trading is just tolerated, they could as well limit that and it would be a viable and acceptable thing.
But allowing it with a in-built mechanic is idiotism when it’s realized and not handled. It reduces overall engagement time with the game, progression rate is one of the most important aspects of the genre.
Yes, with 1/7th the rate of CoF. Hence while commonly a Wraithlord Arbor drops for a CoF player every 200 or so hours as a LP 2 item the baseline - without taking into consideration LP increase - for a MG player is every 1400 hours. That’s a chase-item level drop-rate.
When taking the upgrade for LP into the equation we reach beyond 2000 hours.
How long are we discussing? Didn’t get the notion that you can personally check it in 2 minutes? How many times could you’ve done it yourself since I gave the exact items even?
So don’t come along like this. I know the pressure of proof is on the initial poster but I’m not going around to wipe your ass for you. It’s not like a google search were the answer is somewhere bundled 5 layers deep in the search results.
‘Compete’ for the good stuff? What do you mean ‘compete’?
If waiting in front of the bazaar for a random listing popping up your example of ‘competition’ then you’ve simply lost your mind.
Get out there with that fucked up notion, that’s even beyond something that should be recognized in the first place.
It’s not like those pop up every 5 minutes to be gone right away, you see them every few days coming in at, best. What do you expect people to do, sit 72 hours in front of a screen no-living? No matter who, if a person does that and deem it ‘competition’ or a worthwhile endeavor of any kind they need some dire help.
First of all… premium tabs came with the API, which meant the time between it and poe.trade coming into existence wasn’t even half a year if I remember right.
Secondly, if you try to compare standards from 10 years ago to today then you can also go back to saying ‘D2 is peak gaming today’ and people would laugh at you. It’s dated, it’s missing proper design-aspects which have become common knowledge and it’s a failing product if released nowadays without adjustments.
It’s comparing a mute movie to a modern cinematic movie and saying ‘but that was fine then, why not now?’
So no… the ‘hot mess’ does still look like shit, because by today’s standard… it ‘is’ shit. Simple as that. Don’t try to sell me your car from 1920 as a prime product of fitting standards.
Well, if I only do the first third of a task then I can also boast it to be quick, also you seemingly looked in cycle, where the lower price tag makes sense. Legacy it’s 600k, but the two other parts for a proper price check and hence pricing are important.
And we’re talking about a well used item which sells a lot, dropping decently well though too and hence having at least 7 pages of listings.
Now imagine doing a price-check with 20+ pages of items fitting, good luck. That’s simply crap unless you want to underprice, which makes it not worthwhile to list most items in the first place.
Ok, let’s go from the top instead again to make my point clear.
We have a mechanic intended to hinder double-dipping between factions, right?
That’s the intended function for it.
So, to not double-dip I’m never allowed to have access to both factions freely, right?
Ok… now I got 2 characters. One played up in coF, one played up in MG.
Where exactly is the difference between one character switching between both?
My singular character switching between both will only face downsides by design.
My dual characters will not only profit from their own faction but also from the cross-effects counted as double-dipping at any moment.
Find a untagged good item in CoF? My MG character immediately takes it.
Got enough gold to outfit my CoF character fully in MG? Just switch it over, no downside.
Find a full set of gear in CoF? Switch the MG character over, also no downside.
I can already circumvent it. I have no reason to switch with a single character anyway… so there is no meaning to the hindrances in the first place.
The only thing gear restriction does is wasting your time with a singular character. You wouldn’t gain any profit from switching from a ranked faction to a unranked one.
And if both are ranked then you have 2 characters anyway. So you only do it when it happens naturally through some way. You already double into it. It’s just tedium before that… which doesn’t happen before ranking up to at Least Rank 8 in MG anyway where it becomes nonsensical for CoF to MG changes anyway.
Which I was 100% sure to uphold itself during the beginning of 1.0.
Half-way through I realized that they’re equivalent since MG is badly set up and CoF only needed some adjustments to remove the missing aspects. Like boss-drops. Which we got in 1.1
CoF has the same standing as MG, actually… some items are easier obtainable in Legacy through CoF then MG.
Actually nah, not anymore, that’s a goner since juicing maps has so much variety because of the Atlas passive-tree and the scarab rework that you can literally target farm nigh everything.
And for really rare items you wait until the surprisingly common ‘Sightless Seer’ scarab which guarantees a T0 unique every single time.
SSF in PoE has become a thing which can be done without being a full-scale masochist.
Well, who says I need that though? The issue was that ‘trading feels mandatory’ is the aspect, right? So what upside do I have as a already established CoF character to switch over to MG? Sure… I can target buy… but the majority of higher items aren’t available there. Actually… CoF has clear-cut ways to target farm rare uniques in a way that a 2 LP rare unique is a possible goal. MG doesn’t have that reliably since the rare uniques with 2 LP are extremely rare and hence the demand outpaces supply, leading to ‘0’ listings.
On the contrary… with how the LP upgrades are handled I’ll likely get a rare unique through CoF which isn’t CoF tagged as the upgrade mechanics don’t tag, only the creation ones. So I could simply switch over to MG with full gear on a secondary character and ignore the gear limitations through those means. Doesn’t sound very balanced to me.
And by the time I have two characters, each in one Faction It mostly focuses on what happens first, depending entirely on playtime put into the respective Faction… will I first get a full set for another character through CoF targeted drops or will I first find some ‘lucky listings’ pop up in MG? That’s where I would then go in such a case.
Which leads down to the aspect that if you focus on a single Faction you’ll always have a superior experience then switching anyway, the fringe cases are small. So I don’t see the reasoning for the - severe - limitations for changing in the first place as I can circumvent them the second I have both types of character anyway. And with CoF I can already circumvent the progression from MG as well. It makes MG the inferior choice actually. It even hinders people switching from MG to CoF and not the other way around.
Ah, but it does have a downside: now it no longer has CoF drops. If there were no gear restrictions like you’re proposing, I wouldn’t need to switch to MG, I would stay CoF all the time and use full MG gear.
It still is. You get the base drops traders get and you don’t get the benefits. Because non-SSF can do the exact same target farming you can, probably better because they can just buy materials if they run out, and they can still simply buy whatever they need.
If you can have a single MG character that immediately buys the stuff you need, rather than rely on RNG (no matter how better than RNG is, it’s still RNG), it will feel mandatory. Because with CoF there is always the chance that you won’t find your item. You can farm a boss 50 times and those shackles still won’t drop, even with the rank bonus in 1.1.
So obviously players that don’t trade are immediately severely handicapped vs players that do. Because players that trade can get both the full MG gear and the full CoF bonuses. Thus, double dipping. Thus, you can’t wear the other faction gear to prevent this.
As we saw in 1.0, pretty much all items end up in trade. And the effort to collect them with MG is lower than with CoF.
Yes, but if you don’t place restrictions, you can simply focus on CoF, only occasionally going to your MG character to farm a little more favour and gold, because you’re already max rank in both.
From just these opening words, it’s clear you didn’t read what I wrote. Go back and read it again.
Now we split that estimated 2k hours between 10000+ MG players and … voila!
Glad we are on the same page.
Firstly, it’s called auction sniping.
Secondly, if anyone needs to get out, it’s you, because this whole MG talk is off-topic here.
Finally, sniping stuff isn’t the only way to compete with another player via in-game economy systems.
I’m sure that D2:Ressurected and the private servers running for years are all examples of a failing product. Oh wait…
That’s easy. When some rando on the internet says his opinion, provides no proof for his arguments, then tells everyone else to go check it for him, surprise surprise, people are not going to jump as the rando whistles
Plus, I already told you that using Legacy post Cycle 1.0 as the basis for pricing is silly.
Nah, that’s just a style change. I switch out CoF bonus drops for drops able to be sold in MG. One isn’t inherently superior or inferior to the other there.
How would you get the needed favor then? Or the gold since your CoF drops would outperform the cheap ones, leaving upgrades to be in the 5+ mil section? You can’t sell after all.
Ah! Take into consideration… non-scuffed implementation, hence scaling favor costs. It doesn’t work otherwise. It’s back to comparing a non-broken mechanic with another non-broken mechanic. Limiting because something is broken rather the fixing it is a bandaid, hence detrimental long-term.
Which ones? People have mostly gone over to not picking up gear, in SSF you simply pick up only gear aligned for specifically you and you actually use the mechanics which provide you upgrades rather then simply going for currency and bartering that.
You don’t run out with a triple Atlas rotation anymore, which you have unlocked when it becomes the point to use it. You can perma-sustain fully juiced content nowadays without fail.
Well, my starting character only needs mediocre gear anyway, I burst down stuff one way or the other, not even slower feeling wise.
By the time I reach the content which actively would hinder me to progress without much time investment we’re once again in million gold ranges per item.
Yeah, because you’re literally forced to put them in for favor usage and hence progression. Which… as mentioned… should be a goner.
It would make things a ton easier of you’re not reliant on enforced listings to progress realistically. Because every listed item is a potential sale, and every sale is a bit closer to a buy.
Ok, that there is the first actual well argument. Hence… Kudos. That makes sense. But… also only works for a secondary character, not the first. And does it matter for the second in a meaningful way? You’re already established after all by then so you can’t afford MG upgrades through pure CoF gold drops.
And… why the loss of prophecies and favor besides the usage limitation? That one I still don’t understand.
Which doesn’t help you progressing into the market though. Why would you buy random garbage that 98% of the time turns into anything else but a T7 exalted item? Especially at that price-tag.
Also a random listing without care can still lead to a sale, you’ve just likely undercut all the actual listings then… but gotten nonetheless closer to a buy which you won’t be able to afford from raw gold farming in any reasonable time.
Yes, and now we reduce it by demand and get as an end-result how likely they stay on the listing
Voila!
Auction sniping is usually done on larger scale auction sites with specific live-searches. We’re not in 2005 where people stared the whole day at ebay. And trust me… I know that all too well since my father made a lifetime worth of money from doing exactly that for years as a hobby outside of his job.
Also the rate of listings was despite far less usage then nowadays far higher then what the slim amount of possible upgrades one can have after 60 hours playtime, hence you didn’t have to wait for days.
True, but you can only compete over existing things. Hard to fight over wishes and dreams.
Nostalgia mostly, not because of it being peak gaming design and quality. Core players stay loyal to a product since they are emotionally connected to it, a new player has a miniscule chance of touching that unless brought in by one of those and hence forming a personal connection through that as well. It happens very little.
Diablo 2 is not - not anymore at least - for the genre what Supreme Commander is for RTS.
I provided proof during posts which went in a 5-10 minute ratio. The exact base + affix search. Sorry that I wasn’t precise enough to fulfill your desires of going the extra mile out of the blue for something I deemed so easy to check by simply having the client open that I didn’t even deem it worthwhile.
I simply expected nobody could be so lazy as to not use that minute to check out of simple curiosity. Guess I was wrong.
It was no different during mid-cycle in Legacy… and Legacy with the influx of items should’ve overall more listings rather then less. Seems paradoxical with more items there, potential people which might play in it in the future but go back to the cycle not setting up a few items to make some gold on the side while they’re away.
You keep missing the point. Right now, if you want to fully gear with MG gear, you have to switch to MG and have MG drops.
What you’re proposing means that I can have full MG gear AND STILL HAVE CoF DROPS! I can have both. Nothing in your system prevents this. It’s double-dipping. And it’s even worse for legacy where most people will already have both factions with full rank at cycle start.
I would have one of the stronger characters as MG and I would play it once a week or every 2 weeks. That would be more than enough to get loads of favour and gold.
You keep missing the point. I have a level 100 character that does, let’s say 800 corruption, so we don’t even get into the ultra broken stuff. I play for one day and I get a huge amount of favour, such that it isn’t relevant anymore for buying/selling costs. I also get a bunch of decent gear to sell in the meantime.
Now I buy a full set of leveling gear for my new level 1 character. And I buy a full set of mid-level gear for my level 1 character. And I buy a full set of endgame gear for my level 1 character.
Then I log to my level 1 character, I choose CoF, I have 100% uptime on CoF benefits, and once I start leveling up I simply equip MG stuff.
There’s nothing in your system that prevents this.
I was talking about BiS gear, including 4LP red rings.
That is what I’ve been saying from the start. You just kept missing my point.
And yes, it only works for alts. But in legacy every new character is an alt.
You don’t need to. You just need to log back to your OP MG character and farm for a while.
The loss of prophecies I do understand because it probably makes a mess having prophecies lying around which you have to ignore. So it’s probably easier to simply delete them. It’s not like you’ll need them anyway, those aren’t account wide, they’re just for that character and can be considered part of the penalty.
As for the favour loss, I agree with you, there’s no need for it.
Yeah, true.
I’m still not perfectly on board, after all… to achieve that MG gear you would’ve needed to first acquire the favor and Gold.
Which I agree… in the current state it wouldn’t be a good thing.
But once again, take it like this.
Remove Gold, instead use a currency only dropped while aligned with MG. So you can’t buy MG items without being absolutely aligned with them.
Also scaling favor costs, so the better the gear the more it costs as a baseline and the more favor it needs because of the costs.
Wouldn’t this alleviate the whole issue since you can’t cross between the Factions anymore?
This wouldn’t solve anything because your main source of gold is still selling stuff on MG. So you’d just be shifting what you farm.
Farming favour in high corruption is easy, though.
You either increase the costs so much that only the people that play 10h a day can afford to buy it (which, granted, would solve the double dipping, but would alienate most other players) or it’s still accessible to most, meaning nothing really changed.
So, if you don’t pay with gold and don’t get gold from MG you need to hence actively interact with the MG mechanic to acquire the respective currency + trade with others for that respective currency. Also… taxation for a sink.
So, no matter how much gold you make in CoF you wouldn’t be able to use a single piece for gear. It has to 100% come from MG, time input being 100% MG.
Hence… it’s solely cut down to the time-investment, you can’t cut that aspect down, favor is not a limiting factor (despite it being supposed to be) for acquisition of items.
The alternative is specifically adjusted favor costs to item power which is deducted as a background math which aligns with tier levels, item base, unique type, LP, FP… basically anything which is tied to how good of an item it is and can likely become. But that’s harder to implement.
Both enforce that you would need to invest the time, which hence would allow no double-dipping… hence removing the need for the limitation in the first place since using the gear can be fully derived from the interacting with MG itself.
A example of how that would be in another way… imagine playing PoE and putting time into… Devle for example, on the search for a specific drop with a specific affix only available there. Hence it’s a unique outcome you only can get there. You need to invest the time, that investment is substantial enough to warrant the outcome to be used everywhere else. Like in Heist, or the baseline maps of PoE. You don’t need to limit it since it needs the effort to achieve, hence allowing you to use it freely since you’ve properly ‘earned it’.
It would be similar.
If you can buy a 50 million item only by playing 10 hours for a few days then well… yes, sure!
It’s solely about aligning it with the effort of the gold cost, to ensure that the acquired gold is actually acquired through the proper time investment and not by - solely at least, it would help overall - finding that one lucky drop and being immediately mr. rich that’s fully decked out from nothing.
It really doesn’t though. There’s no difference between selling items for 2 billion gold or for 2 billion MGMcGuffin. The only thing this prevents is adding your CoF gold to your MG character, but the gold CoF can farm vs the gold MG can farm is already irrelevant.
So farming for a day or two would still be enough to get the gear, only now you pay with a different name.
You already can’t with gold. The amount of gold you can make with MG is already way superior to the amount you can make with CoF. Getting the occasional double reward on a gold echo doesn’t make up for all the stuff you sell as MG. It’s meaningless.
So the amount of time you need to spend farming with your uber MG character remains the same, you just changed the name.
You can make much more than that, even in a single day. And even more if you luck out on a decent drop, like 2LP shackles or something, which wouldn’t be that impossible to get since you’re farming at high corruption.
Plus, the egg gives way to higher LP gear and you’re bound to get a few as well.
But even without that, you could already make that much in 1.0. You just need to know what to sell and focus entirely on farming to sell. Which, again, is not hard at higher corruptions.
Honestly, I think the way it is now is fine as is, except for losing all your favour. You should lose the character stuff, like prophecies and the ability to use the other faction gear, but the global stuff should remain the same.
Factions are supposed to be a semi-permanent playstyle choice. But if you realize you don’t like that one and want to change, losing favour feels almost as bad as losing a rank.
So either remove the favour loss or just lock the choice like you do with mastery. Either would be fine with me.
But… never take the toys from a kid away basically. It just feels bad to be forced to give up stuff you already earned, double-dipping potential or not.
The better option is generally to circumvent that.
And yeah, the favor stuff is odd, also prophecies vanishing is as well, needing or not. Should I decide to come back they should still be there, simply inactive in the meanwhile. Makes more sense overall.
Yes, that is an alternative, the wishy-washy in-between doesn’t bode well despite having more actual choice and options.
Leads back to not having enough character slots though, so not a solution for the moment.
