True! Obviously it’s not especially pointed out that you can do it at any given time, hence putting emphasis on the freedom of choice in the dev reveal about the factions!
So it wouldn’t be insincere to then implement utterly ridiculous downsides while highlighting the option that you’re able to. It would never happen after all!
Oh shit…
It did…
Well damn I guess?
Emphasizing something being doable to highlight player agency and then implementing it in a way which takes this exact agency away is not a very nice or reasonable thing to do.
Like many many other things related to the factions it’s just another bad design point. The whole damn system needs a massive overhaul and has been a misfire left and right… we don’t need to defend it since it’s fairly obvious with how many oversights, missing functions and basic economic principles have not been heeded. Just another point on the list there, no big issue… the list is already long enough anyway.
Oh sure. It’s another feature that doesn’t seem to have been reviewed by a specialist in child and adolescent behaviour.
With that said, this is not a game that comes with many guardrails. It’s easy to make big mistakes, like when you’re choosing masteries. The game does tell you that you will lose favour and - with CoF - prophecies when you leave. However, faster clicking = better clicking, so many people don’t read that kind of warning.
You DO have freedom of choice. You can choose either one based on your playstyle. What you don’t have is freedom to redo your choice.
Many systems offer freedom of choice and then apply varying degrees of restrictions to changing it.
You have the freedom to buy any TV in a store. Depending on where you’re from, you usually have a decent time frame on returning it and choosing something else.
You can vote in your national elections, but you can’t change your vote at all.
So between one and the other, you have the same freedom of choice, but different restrictions on changing that choice.
I’m not defending the current system, or saying you shouldn’t be able to change it or anything. It’s just a semantic thing. You do have freedom of choice. You just have restrictions on changing it. And that applies to switching factions, choosing mastery or respec. All free choices with varying restrictions for change.
So, to dismantle the argumentation there we need to go into a few points:
First of all the favor-loss.
The question entails at the beginning ‘Why is it needed?’ or rather ‘What function does it have?’
It’s seemingly a function which is supposed to avoid abusing the ability to switch between faction and hence abuse any mechanics between them.
But why do we have Faction tagged items then as well as all items dropped - even if not faction-tagged - being listed as ‘not tradeable’ then? This already takes over that function. So what is the function of this mechanic?
I can’t find one.
Secondly for it, it’s supposed to punish your character for switching, which though is nonsensical in the first place since favor is account tied and not character tied so that’s a second issue there from a design perspective.
Those things alone should make it easy to see that either they haven’t thought it through properly… had a person which actually is no specialist in those things sitting there designing it… or they lacked time and had to do ‘something’ simply.
The argumentation about guardrails and big mistakes.
The sole big choice you get in the game is the mastery. Everything else can be switched out.
It showcases them all as one-time choices, puts emphasis on it that it’s the case and also has safety features installed to not mistakenly choose the wrong one by wrong inputs (albeit that’s a failing measure with controller currently).
The factions don’t have that. They tell you ‘well, you can choose one at a time’ and that’s it. No big presentation about the downsides, no safety checkboxes outside of leaving when you’ve already chosen… no explanation about faction tagged items being non-usable by the other faction.
All of that is basically only in the fine print. Nice it’s existing… but heck, that should be a major point rather.
Which though was highlighted by EHG as being the case! Which is the point if we wanna go down that argumentation.
Doesn’t make the mechanics in how they’re implemented better or worse though, let’s talk about the functionality of them and not the personal opinions of what should and should not be presented in which way.
Oh, that’s actually a great example!
I’ll re-make it to be equivalent to the faction system currently, sorry for ‘abusing’ the poor example there beforehand.
So, you can give a TV back anytime, right? As long as it’s in the timeframe for it.
What happens to the shows and movies you watched on it? Are you allowed to talk about them and share information with others in discussions after giving it back?
You gain access to the entertainment through the functionality.
When you give it back that entertainment has already happened though, it’s not taken away from you. It stays with you.
MG and CoF are the TV.
The items you get are the entertainment derived from it.
But that’s another topic by itself, the original argument was about the presentation from EHG and that was clearly ‘You can switch back and forth whenever you want’ which is… fairly insincere if it has massive limitations which can be character breaking.
And I’m fine with that!
Make it more clear for the player.
Don’t represent it as a ‘free choice anytime’.
It’s fairly simple there.
But also not quite the topic of the thread. It’s solely about favor… which is unnecessary since we already have the usage limitations enforced on us, so let’s get back to it.
If we already can’t use the rewards we gain from the system if we change… why does it necessitate the removal of resources to gain those rewards?
That’s the question here.
Players like to play victims. That’s just how western culture is. Victims can’t be blamed for their behaviour. Players interpret every restriction as a “punishment”.
The devs play games. They know that, given the chance, players will exploit game mechanics. They would switch factions constantly depending on what would benefit their character at a given moment.
Factions are intended to accommodate players’ gameplay preferences, not provide a mechanic that can be exploited. EHG did some kind of survey. The idea was that “Players either prefer trade or they prefer getting their own drops”. Turning them into a mechanism for opportunistic manipulation turns all that on its head and is contrary to how factions were designed and the goal they were meant to accomplish.
But it doesn’t because of the tag-limitations, so there’s no profit in switching anyway, how does your whole comment relate to Favor removal at faction switching while taking into consideration the arguments I made?
Your whole argument is talking empty, there’s nothing related to my comments and reasonings.
What are you going towards?
What are you trying to tell me there?
Well, obviously there were some tactics where players were joining CoF to use Arena keys prophecies to farm gold before switching to MG to buy stuff, which is why they lowered the key sell value. So this already happened, even with the favour loss.
Personally, I don’t see how that would be more efficient than just selling idols and other stuff, but it’s evident that it happened as evidenced by the need to nerf it.
Now… does that also mean we only can align to one faction per account?
Currently it’s per player. What stops them from using one character to abuse the system before using the rewards derived from it on the other?
Ah yes, nothing changed in terms of favor loss before and after.
It isn’t, but people use all sorts of weird ways that seem more optimal despite them not being so.
All of that could still be done and is utterly non-reliant on favor-loss for changing factions. It can be done with 2 characters on an account. Either there need to be stop-gaps for that in the first place to derive a necessity from it or there simply is no dire necessity and it’s an arbitrary system with no function.
The later is the current state.
Edit:
Also, the problem is the availability of keys at CoF and not the ability to switch there. Why are they even available in the first place? It’s a disparity in functionality between the MG and CoF systems in the first place and unreasonable, same as the extra availability of glyphs or any other non-tradeable crafting materials.
I agree with you. I was just pointing out that there were ways to abuse the situation. True, you can abuse them even without the favour loss.
Anyway, I expect that there will be changes to both factions with 1.1. As I pointed out before, these types of systems require data from a very large pool of players to actually balance out. You can test it with 100 people or even with 1000 and it will pan out differently when exposed to the full playerbase.
I feel like the rank system was made with legacy in mind and not really a short cycle span. But we’ll see what EHG does about this.
Either they have a really bad economic specialist sitting there… or none at all. I expect the later to be the case, otherwise it calls for one ass-kicking after all, failing at the ‘one’ job they have wouldn’t be acceptable.
Specifically since it’s economy 101 we’re talking about here.
The cross-faction abuse obviously needs to be non-existent or so minimal that it doesn’t reward you for switching around.
Which also means that the faction tagging system is useless suddenly… since it does nothing in avoiding exploits but solely hinders usage of already derived rewards from the systems. You don’t gain ‘extra’ you just gain ‘different’ since the systems are different.
The sole place where it currently could be abused is through gold-usage gained from MG at lightless arbour while running CoF. That can be averted by not allowing the treasure from lightless arbour to be effected by CoF related systems though.
Also if you go CoF first and then MG (with the expectation given that rank-based access is handled properly and not like now) you would lack the funds to use MG.
If you go MG first and then CoF you also would lack rank to profit from CoF.
So there’s also no reason for that also provided that the tagging system is handled accordingly and not right now
It’s just badly done and needs major revisits in 1.1, which ones it will get? Well… we’ll see… but it’s a big ‘make or break’ thing for LE. A in-game economy which functions and doesn’t stifle players or utterly de-values item acquisition is one of the modern core concepts of a well-made diablo-clone.
Most games failed. LE has the basic premise to make it function splendidly as the main issues are properly accounted for.
The execution currently is just the issue and not the main premise behind it.
I don’t know if it’s a make or break thing, though. Many players will be fine with whatever. Personally, I’m playing MG where I barely buy anything. Usually just some rares for baseline gear. I don’t really like trade that much and I would have defaulted to CoF if it weren’t for the prophecy mechanic which I profoundly dislike.
All this to say that no matter how they change this, there will still be players that will play the game as long as the rest is fun to play. As evidenced by PoE where trade is a clusterf*** and SSF is an even bigger one, and yet people still play because the rest of the game mechanics are fun.
Still, currently the faction system has a lot of friction to it, so it should be adjusted regardless.
Surprisingly PoE actually does it right, how much we hate it for doing so.
Sure, trade creates ridiculous amounts of friction… but it does the job it’s supposed to do.
The friction is intentional and their stop-gap mechanic which in LE is taken over by the favor cost tying items to a time-investment.
The problem in LE is that through the miniscule costs for high-value items in terms of favor cost that part falls through, so the second the prices plummet too far… the acquisition rate becomes ridiculous, which - actually luckily in that case, but disastrous long-term - has been alleviated from players quitting before it came to pass fully, dumping the mechanic as it took too long to unlock, leading to extreme scarcity rather then abundance.
But should the system actually function for a single cycle… well… then acquisition rate goes to D3 levels nearly, which is clearly a ‘break’ situation for the game. Being able to achieve the end-result through buying your way into it for basically nothing would then cause even more influx from CoF players seeing that through different channels and making it even worse, that would be a disaster.
Sure, the game will survive! Easily so. But the current numbers they showed from the release which entirely hinged on the faction system and hence the trade/ssf-style implementation? That would go down heavily I imagine, very likely so even.
Which is why I deem it such an important topic, beyond balancing even… albeit that’s also quite high on the list.
I hate saying things that make me sound and feel like an Old Man Yelling At Clouds, but this modern entitled gamer shtick of demanding the ability to undo and change anything at any time with no friction is endlessly obnoxious. I’m not particularly nostalgic for the Good Ole Days of having no ability to change anything ever but at least we didn’t have the climate of constant whinging about it.
