I plan to primarily play with my existing characters in legacy, as opposed to cycles. I’ll say CoF sounds more fun, but I’ll probably ultimately settle for what allows me to min max further. I’d value any opinions on this as I want to pick a faction and roll with it on 1.0.
Merchants guild has the potential to let me save up for a 3 LP that I couldn’t reasonably farm, but the bonuses for CoF seem to go a long way toward making me doubt that. This also depends on how active the trading community in legacy is.
If you plan to stay in legacy, you know you can switch between factions. You can only equip from your current faction, but you can go CoF and then, if you realize MG is better for BiS, switch to that instead. You can even switch back and forth at will, though you’ll need full sets of gear for each.
Personally, I’m going MG. I’d rather have the possibility to just dump gold/favor every once in a while to improve my gear, since I don’t really care about min-max.
In your case, I would probably advise to start CoF and seeing how trade evolves.
To me, the biggest advantage of MG is getting that exact item you’re looking for, as long as you have gold/favor and someone’s selling.
But CoF will, in theory, have much better drops which you can use for multiple characters without bothering with MG, but it’s still a gamble. Even with the bonuses you might still not get what you want.
So neither should, in theory, be inherently superior to the other. One would be more deterministic but in smaller quantities, the other would have more RNG but in larger quantities.
Personally? MG will allow for the highest form of minmax given infinite time.
like lets say you want 4LP of some item, well yes CoF has a higher chance of getting that, but CoF is just one person farming for themselves. MG will eventually have one, and you may be the one to purchase it.
CoF is limited by your own playtime, item options increase forever in MG. Time is MG greatest asset.
MG, from a theoretical point of view with all we know currently, might have a few issues:
Since improved, target-farming drop rates are limited to CoF, there might be a strong disadvantage especially for new characters when going MG (low supply)
This may carry over into the later part of the cycle
I think that for most gamers, having to trade actually is more like a “ok, I have to get better gear, since I can’t find it, I will bite the bullet and trade” instead of “aaaaah, trading, lets do that” - I may be wrong here, but from PoE I get this impression
The few players who will actually go MG will see extremely inflated item prices because of low supply and very low returns on the actually viable / interesting items
Issue 4. will actually exarcerbate issue 1. and 2.
We will have to see what really happens but my best guess currently is that MG is dead on arrival. Would love to be proven wrong, but I really see no economic model on the horizon that could make MG better in any aspect (besides the “trading” in itself) than CoF.
It’s an interesting experiment in gaming-sociology, though… the question this may answer is “do gamers REALLY like multiplayer or do they just bite the bullet”. For a large portion of the playerbase I guess it’s the latter.
There’s two schools of thought on that. If you’re an ardent trader (& they do exist, just like the ardent anti-traders) then you can’t imagine how trade isn’t ridiculously OP because, in part, you are assuming a large supply for any given item (though obviously the higher end the item the lower the supply/higher the price). If you don’t enjoy trade then you see the benefits of CoF & go all gooey inside.
So really, one’s viewpoint on how it’ll pan out is far more corellated to one’s preferences on trade/CoF.
I fully agree. My concern is mostly that there will be a “chicken and egg” problem with MG - empty market because of trade restrictions → players saying “oh, well,… thanks, but no thanks…”.
Things like that.
An interesting adjustment could be later to offer MG earlier, much earlier, than CoF. Maybe when you enter Maj’elka in the “wrong” timeline for the first time or something. Would probably ease a lot of the problems I mentioned.
Yes, maybe even in the first hub you encounter. Would not be the worst idea, because this would allow for a very intense “faction based” gameplay.
Since people can switch later anyway this wouldn’t be too confusing either.
But my guess is that Maj’elka was chosen to motivate people to play the story to the end, the current +1 to all attributes is a bit too weak as a motivator.
1.0 will start with an empty market. But since you need to sell/buy stuff to increase the ranks, I expect it will slowly be filled with good items. Over time, I expect you’ll end up with a big market and MG will be better than CoF. However, at launch, CoF might have an advantage.
The real issue here is the rate at which new items will be sold. But over time, even if the rate is a bit slow, it should fill up anyway.
Not to mention, it’s Legacy we are talking about here. There are people with huge stockpiles of items they don’t want. Just waiting for the market to open.
