Feedback and Ideas about Grind, Loot, Progression and why Bots and RMT exist

Feedback and Suggestions
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Hello fellow Travellers,

I played more intensively recently after taking a little break and came to notice some…things. I took me a while to consider if I should really make this post - for one because it’ll propably be pretty long and because those a delicate topics where people get - for whatever reason - upset.
I’ll first set the context for my ideas and feedback. I’m happy for any input but please read the full post beforehand, otherwise we propably gonna talk about different things on a different basis. Also, this is based on my opinions and experience. Those don’t need to overlap with anyone elses.

But hey, here it goes. First, there’s a little

Disclaimer

  1. I’m not here to offend anyone. If anyone feels offendes please think twice, sleep a night, maybe think a bit more and reevaluate. I won’t sugarcoat anything but my intension isn’t to step on anyone’s toes.

  2. No, I’m not jealous of anyone. Why should I? Are you jealous because some machine you can rent can do the same “work” as you faster and more effective?

  3. No, I don’t bot, I don’t RMT and I have no positive feelings towards those who do or those who offer it.

  4. I’m not a complete casual, but neither a no-lifer who play only this one game until the end of days. I’m somewhere in between as I got other things to do - alot of them, actually.

  5. No, I don’t want anything “spoonfed” to me. I don’t want “instant gratification”. No, I’m old. I value my time and I want to have quality time, especially while gaming.

So here it goes…
Why do bots and RMT exist?

Well…this question is as trivial as “Why do cleaning robots exist?” or “Why were dish washers developed?”. In the world we live in, there is ALOT to do, fun things, not so fun things, tedious things or interesting things. People tend to value their free time more and more and thus, tend to “outsource” activities that aren’t fun or tedious.
This is true for the “real” world as it is for t he “virtual” world. While there is value in the real world for goods, defined by their scarcity or need of resources, this scarcity is completly artifical in the virtual world (the need of energy aside).

But what does that have to do with Last Epoch?

Taking the text above into consideration, the reason is tediousness. I experienced it myself the last few days. If you want a specific item in LE it’s largely RNG - or trade. The latter meaning you farm gold.
So, after having completed about 20 Monos without finding an upgrade or a boss unique with LP I could use I stopped and decided to think about what really nags me about it and where the problems of the economy are - in my opinion.
So, I could have rent a bot for - I took google for a few rides - 25$ a month to run Monos. Nonstop. Until I get the item I want.
Consider this from another perspective: If you have the choice to wash the dishes yourself for an hour every day or pay someone 25$ a month to do it for you - while you got 3000$ a month to spend - would you do it or not?
What I want to say is, farming monoliths feel like dish washing to me after a while. It’s OK from time to time, even fun. But if you need something specific it gets boring and tedious. This is true for all ARPGs but Last Epoch already does so many things so much better than all the other ARPGs, why stop there?

So much text, but whats the solution?

There are several, but the TL;DR is basicalliy: Increasy availability
This might hurt some peoples’ feelings but this, basically, is it. You wanr RMT and botting to be unprofitable? Make it easier to aquire stuff.
I again “google’d” a bit and take the “Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros” as an example (because it’S widely used): 2LP sell for about 55$, 3LP for about 400$.
IF you EVER want to ruin their business practices, people need to be able to aquire those items in a more deterministic and less tedious way. That said, it’s NOT the monos per se, also not the boss fights. It’s the fact I got to complete the mono over and over again to be able to kill the boss and…get nothing. I “farmed” the THoU - got two, with no LP.

Now for some ideas
The core concept of the ideas is to make loot, especially uniques, matter while still needing to play the game. The ideas are not necessarily exclusive and could be combined.

  1. Crafting
    The basics are there. Introduce a rune to increase LP while needing something else. Like a similar unique or other resources.

  2. Dungeons and fusion
    Either introduce a new dungeon or use, for example, the Temporal Sanctum. For example, you beat it on Tier 1 and can now throw two uniques there to fuse it to one unique with LP1 (e.g. 2 THoU with LP0). If you are on Tier 2, you can do the same with two LP1 and so on - like you do with uniques and exalteds, basically. This would make lower/no LP uniques matter again.

  3. Prophecies
    They’re already there. Maybe add a prophecy where you select a specific unique, type of unique or whatever and when it drops it’s (for example) at least LP2.

But what’s that about?

Well, like I said the idea is to offer people more options in a more deterministic way to obtain specific items while still making it worthwhile to farm them. If you farm a unique you can either keep the doubles to craft a better one or you get lucky and find the really rare, high rolled LP3/4 instantly.
People with more time will still be rather far ahead of people with less time, but it’ll offer people that can invest less time with a way to reach their goal eventually while still playing the game!
In the end, botting and RMT will be reduced, maybe even by a great amount because you can get what you want/need easier/more planable. Prices will lower and it won’t be profitable to sell gold, items and the like.
I could be wrong about the last parapgraph - it’s a gamble to a degree. But the fact that you need to play for 1-3 hours with someone to be able to trade an item won’t make a LP3 unique for 5$ profitable by any means.

Final words so far

Thanks for reading, to anyone who managed to do so until the end and didn’t rage-reply :slight_smile: Just kidding. I wish you all happy gaming and lucky farming. Take care!

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I just read another post about someone trying to justify botting and RMT. With a “solution” that would just ruin the genre.
Couldnt finish reading the post coz thats when my eyes started rolling back in my head… still rolling ljdafhsh4hfomowerhpyöfoa8pwerqö5ahoj9oföibanfafm … gl

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The unabashed dishonesty of people who keep trying to pitch “I want to get the best loot easier” as the solution to some grand issue that’s important to the health of the entire game for years to come is as painfully unoriginal as it is tedious.

The absolute best loot should be difficult and time consuming to get, and not guaranteed. If you’re not on board with that, I hear Diablo 4 is about to start puking even more of the best loot at you for even less effort.

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This doesn’t really apply, though. Washing dishes is something you have to do, playing games isn’t. You should only play games if you’re having fun. If you’re not having fun, then don’t play or play something else.

This doesn’t work. Unless you increase availability to D3 levels, at which point most players will leave like they did D3, RMT will always exist as long as there is trade. You can’t have trade and not have RMT. And if you have D3 level drops, then you don’t need trade either. Which, yes, would stop RMT. But would also empty the playerbase. Especially the players EHG wants playing LE.

Even since D2 there have been a quite large amount of players that like the grind to get that ultra-rare item. Most don’t even mind if they don’t get it, because it’s something to chase. It’s the basis of the whole genre and can be seen in multiple iterations all the way to PoE.
Ever since D3, though, there is also a quite large amount of players that don’t like the grind and prefer a more casual approach to grind. Which is fine. It’s why there are multiple options in the market.

Basically, if you’re in the first group, LE is fun for you. If you’re in the second, it isn’t. That’s not LE’s fault. It’s yours for playing a game that doesn’t fit your play preferences. You have options that are a better fit.
Games don’t have to comform to players. Games just have to have their own identity and players that like that will play it. Players that don’t won’t.

To me, D3/D4 is boring. At this point in time, PoE is too grindy/hardcore for me (though there was a time when I enjoyed it). LE fits the bill nicely for my current playstyle. I don’t think D4 needs to change to adapt to my playstyle, nor should PoE. Each is aiming for their own playerbase and I’m not really a part of those.

Likewise, Souls-likes aren’t for me. I don’t think they need to change. They have a loyal fanbase that love their games. Why should I ask them to change so I can play their game (which would cause most of their playbase to leave) when I have literally thousands of games available to me that I would enjoy more?

I don’t think this will ever happen. Not only does EHG not want this (as well as a large enough portion of players), you don’t need LP items. LP items, especially 3-4LP of the strongest uniques, are a chase item for the min-maxxer. For the majority of the playerbase, they might as well not exist. Because you don’t need them.

Just like in PoE you don’t need that double corrupt/high quality/enchanted 6-link. You can do fine with a normal 6-link unique without corruption. And unless you’re playing 8h a day, you shouldn’t expect to get one.

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Here’s the issue with this line of thought : as long as loot remains meaningful and interesting, that is to say it’s not obtained so fast it kills the game, RMT will still happen. If stuff is easier to find, they will simply sell more for cheaper. The only way to remove RMT is to remove trade altogether. And even then, I’m not convinced there won’t be other real money services that will be provided.
And as for bots, they will be used as soon as there is grind of any kind too.

That is not to say there is no debate to be had on how grindy stuff should be, or how to make certain grinds more enjoyable without reducing their length. (Typically, PoE’s Divination Cards are a great way of offering ways to target farm, and of making the path towards the goal more noticeable by having intermediary steps towards it.) Just that the existence of RMT shouldn’t factor into it.

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Congratulations, you totally missed the point.

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Having fun - or rather not having fun - isn’t the problem. Stuff being basically not available in a game with about zero competition is. Or rather how boring and incredibly time consuming it is to aquire it.
It just invalidates the time invested if there’s no progress at all, and that pretty much sums up the last 30 hours I played. Nothing remotely useful obtained.
That said, the forum, or reddit for that matter, still is an echo chamber of people who, for the most part, care for the game enough to communicate instead of silently quitting.
Yet again, your opinion is fine. It’s just not mine on that matter.

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Players in D2 grinded for dozens of hours without a single decent drop just to get that Shako or another good one. It’s fine if you don’t like it, I was just pointing out that there are players that do and which are happy with the way drops work in LE.

My other point was just that making items more accessible doesn’t prevent RMT, unless you make them so accessible that they’re obtainable in a day or 2, like in D3. At which point, trade is useless and so is RMT, but many players will leave.

30h isn’t a long time for an ARPG grind. And if you didn’t find anything remotely useful in that time, then you probably already have decent gear and are just min-maxing. Again, 4LP isn’t necessary for a build. And if you want to min-max and chase a BiS perfect item, 30h is definitely too short a time.

I’ll never understand why players feel like they should get that ultra-rare powerful item in a short time in a loot grinding game. My guess is it’s Blizzard’s fault with D3 and now D4.

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Seriously, 30h IS a long time if you’re searching for a specific item to upgrade. It’s like one week of doing nothing else during the spare time. And it’s only ONE item in that case. If it’s a unique where you want to get a 1LP or 2LP you still need the exalt with the proper stats on it. And then it’s not even close to guaranteed that one of them is on the legendary.
And you got to do the mono over and over and over and over and over again and again.
That’S not engaging, or rewarding, or fun for anyone. Except maybe diehard nolifers with nothing else to do really.
And if you really read my post above it’s not about “getting the best in a day”. But if I dedicate the evenings of two weeks trying to achieve something and RNG just say “nope” then for christs sake there should be an alternative method of obtaining it.

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If you were trying to get a 0LP unique that you need for the build, I would agree with you. If you’re looking for LP uniques, then I don’t. You don’t need LP uniques. At that point you’re min-maxing. It’s like saying that you spent 30h trying to get that good corrupt on a unique in PoE and failed. Which is expected.

LP uniques, like corrupted/double corrupted/enchanted uniques in PoE, should be really hard to get. It’s what keeps the players farming. If you could get even a 2LP rare unique in 30h, that would mean that most hardcore players and streamers would be done with the season in a couple weeks. At which point they’d leave and not return. And even many non-hardcore players like myself.

I have played a total of maybe 50-75h this cycle. I’m not wearing any LP unique nor did I ever feel like I need one. It would be nice to have, as a chase item, but I certainly don’t need it.
Those items should only be accessible to players that grind a lot for them. Which is why I don’t expect to have them anytime soon. I don’t play enough for them.

If I were able to get a 2LP red ring reliably in 30h every cycle, the game wouldn’t be fun for me. Instead of feeling really excited if I ever get one to drop, I’d just go “meh, another one”.

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Funny thing is, I do have several 2LP and 3LP uniques. It’s just they’re useless to me and I don’t know what I should do with them. Same goes for all those double, triple and quadruple what not Uniques that drop. It feels unrewarding.
As I said, it’s about reliability of a reward, not getting it incredibly fast. I got no problem doing stuff if I do see and end and the reward coming. There certainly are people who agree and people who disagree on that, as it’s a personal matter.

The friends I paly with are already quite frustrated. If there’d be a LAN CoOp mode - as I don’t care about playing with strangers in those kind of games - I wouldn’t even bother posting.

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Yes, this is a fair point. Player’s tolerance for grind varies a lot. But that doesn’t mean the game should change to accomodate your tolerance. The game just has to present its own identity, including the level of grind, and players have to decide if they enjoy it or not.

EHG already made things a lot more achievable with MG and CoF than it was pre-1.0. Both systems still need adjustments, but you can basically get much better items now in a smaller timeframe than you used to. And while I expect that it will still be balanced a few times, I don’t expect that it will ever be much more easily achievable.

And I highly doubt we’ll ever get a fully deterministic system like the one you proposed, since that goes against the game identity EHG has maintained since the start. We already have MG for that, anyway.

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I agree on the factions, yes. That system is cool. Although the market is kind of bonkers and that’s why I kept to CoF.
I don’t know how to explain it. If I want to accomplish things, I rather have a bar to be filled than rolling dice and hope for the best. I don’t know if that’S comprehensible. And yes, LE is way more accessible and easy on time as for example Diablo 2 was.

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No, that’s totally understandable. It’s just not the base loop of the genre. It’s not the system most players look for in these games.

ARPG players are, at its core, gamblers. We get dopamine hits when the RNG gives us something nice. Each player’s tolerance to that RNG grind will vary, from D3 to PoE, which is why some players like one ARPG better than another. But even in D3, it was still rolling dice. You just had better odds than in other games.

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Not necessarily LAN, but any way to use your single player characters in an unprotected multiplayer environment would be good (basically a solution to play multiplayer modded with friends or a larger community without encroaching on the normal multiplayer experience).

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Yeah I’d settle for that too.
Alas, I guess what’S really putting me off to a degree is the fact that I got to do the whole Mono everytime I Want to kill the boss for its loot.
If I want to farm stuff from the Mono I do that. If I want to farm the boss I wanna do this…I’d prefer just doing the boss for an hour or two than slaying my way up the mono for an hour before getting a shot at a really low chance, you know? I hope I put that right so you know where I’m getting at.

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To be frank, even in D3 i had so incredibly bad luck farming it’s an inside joke between me and my friends. While all others were running around in full set armor I was still trying to get a piece :stuck_out_tongue:
And it’s not that I don’t get that dopamine hit. Hell yes I do, but it’s pretty rare lately because of said bad luck. Like I said, some alternative method would be cool. If it doesn’t happen it doesn’t.

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I read your post several times today. I needed to ingest it and let it sink in. You were detailed and informative and so, I tried to give it adequate time to permeate into mah brain.

After MUCH thought.

I reject it. I farm, learn, find that trying to farm some things on low corruption is a no go, find that some things are way too tedious to farm due to RNG. I then settle on “okay, make a build that functions 100% without all these hard to get bait trap items that content regurgitators are pushing.”

OI and I just re-read your post YET AGAIN and you do have some really good points so now I am back to feeling split!

I will say this at least: I hope the devs consider your thoughts. You left your opinion in the feedback section, which is where it should be. Other players seem to love to smash people leaving feedback in the feedback section as if they think they are devs but I DO hope the devs consider your thoughts.

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Hi and thanks for your answer!

Yeah that’s the spirit :slight_smile: Good solutions only come from discussions and at trying to understand the other point of view. My ideas aren’t meant to be the “end-all-be-all”, they’re just…ideas. I tried to set those in context and I know how you feel, i think. I’m kinda split to on those matters and that’s why I posted it here. Hoping for a good discussion and maybe, new point of views.

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While there has been a huge influx of players in the forums, and thus a huge increase in posts created, I expect the devs still read the forums. At least the survey they did seems to indicate it is so. They wouldn’t have felt the need to create one if they weren’t aware of players’ opinions in here.
As for the second part, I think this has been a mostly civil discussion so far.