Wouldn’t this be the point of the Merchant’s Guild? Perhaps I’m too new to all of this to understand.
EDIT: I have more research to do.
You have merchant’s guild in both cycle and legacy. You’re confusing with offline/online.
I think this is why the PoE model works so well. It all depends on the type of content. If LE devs were to add a new endgame mode - let’s call it Delving for sake argument 
- I would hope and expect it would also be added to legacy. However cycle-specific mechanics which would impact builds and also be transient (such as the S1 special socket gems in D4), are better NOT merged to legacy because the balancing would be problematic (as legacy would accumulate a bunch of build mechanics that had no business co-existing with each other).
I personally would love that because it’s the new endgame Delving that matters to legacy players, not crazy or cycle thematic build-altering mechanics that only last 3 months.
Sure, but you wouldn’t leave, you’d just become a legacy player. You’ll still end up spending the same either way.
I don’t think you’re understanding the difference: EHG has said that every new cycle content gets added AT THE SAME TIME to legacy. Not after 3-4 months like PoE does.
Of course. And so would the vast majority of players. And PoE would end up with 1k players or less each league and would soon quit making leagues.
The main issue here is that there is a small number of people that enjoy the challenge of a fresh start/fresh economy and an even smaller number that cares about leaderboards. Then there is also a small number of people that like the continuity and leisure of an eternal realm. And the majority of players stand in the middle and will go for whatever appeals most.
Poe leagues have a lot of players active (more than in standard) because they give players reasons to join their league, by providing them with things standard players don’t get. If PoE were to get rid of MTX rewards and if they released the league mechanic in standard at the same time, their leagues would be mostly empty because the vast majority of players would rather stay in standard.
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There will be cycle exclusive content, but even the devs don’t know what exactly it will be, and they will be collecting player feedback and experiment.
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Heh. So why have seasons at all then?
Exactly. That was my point. If PoE didn’t give players incentives to play seasons, most wouldn’t and seasons would just end. And new content would start coming just whenever.
One of the main reasons PoE is what it is is the season model they came up with that gives players more incentives to play seasons than standard.
I don’t know what the devs are planning and it seems like they don’t know it yet as well. I’m sure whatever it is it will be fun. But I expect the first few cycles (while they’re just adding core stuff to the game and both realms get the same thing) to be much more empty than they otherwise would.
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Borrowed Power. That’s the ultimate reason for seasons. It’s the same reason MMOs have expansions (specifically WOW) and ARPGs have their leagues. You can increase player power, add new design decisions and build opportunities, add items that create interesting interactions, while keeping everything temporary.
Borrowed Power is a pivotal system for keeping a game active and interesting, and it’s also one of the major opportunities for game developers to introduce monitization methods on their game since the borrowed power invites players.
What you’re advocating for is an increase in player potential cycle over cycle. Adding a new crafting mechanic, new affix slots, a new boss with rare drops. All these things can elevate the total raw power a player can obtain and it can also invalidate older content and rewards within a game. These things are necessary right now in the life cycle of Last Epoch but they won’t be forever. Eventually there will be a tipping point where the developers will need to start introducing power scaling that will fade, especially because of the rate at which new cycles will come out.
Which has totes never happened in the other 2 big arpgs (PoE & D3), like, ever.
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One of the most important thing for cycle to me is challanges and cosmetic rewards for them. Because that keeps me engaged and go out of my way to do different stuff to get those awesome rewards. Which feels fresh because challanges are different each league/cycle. Seeing that F2P game such as PoE does it i hope and believe Last Epoch will do this system in their cycle content. Can’t wait for the future of LE. So exciting!
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Not really. As I tried to differentiate above, it’s endgame activities (like PoE Delve) that I’d hope to see moving to legacy. Transient stuff that is some seasonal mechanic that affects builds (the “power” you are talking about) they can keep to seasons. In fact I’ve said above that trying to regularly add all new “power” mechanics to legacy while keeping it balanced is almost impossible. If I may quote myself:
Plus, as a player, I’d need to keep 20 level 90+ Alts updated to stay relevant with this new power. Even I, as the world’s biggest Altaholic, find that prospect daunting.
I doubt many legacy players would care if that type of build-altering “power” content stayed in seasons - legacy players are NOT interested in transient content that will be taken away from them after a few months - that defeats the entire purpose of legacy (gradual min-maxing and long term attachment to characters). And just look at the reception D4’s seasons are currently getting… it isn’t pretty, and D4 has also lost all of its legacy playerbase as a consequence of their poor seasonal model. Legacy players would care if an end-game activity was kept exclusive to seasons.
I’m in favor of new content there and there at the same time. Let the player himself choose where he wants to develop his character, in the legacy where everything is already there or on the cycle with the new economy and equality.
I think that the very possibility of such a choice is another unique feature of this game.
In poe this is not the case, there the player has to start a new league every time otherwise he will not see the new content.
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After seeing some videos in youtube talking about Legacy and Cycle comparisons. I was about to make a question about it, thankfully I’ve seen this thread.
As someone like me who doesn’t want to bother with Cycles and want to keep playing in Standard, I find it very odd if EHG would lock some content behind Cycle characters only. Which also to my surprise that PoE does this but I’ve never seen anyone complain or talk about it but I barely played PoE so I can’t really say much.
And yes, we’ve been in beta for so long already. Having to wait a couple more months before Standard players can get a taste of that sweet new “Cycle-only” content probably wouldn’t feel nice either. Even there are a ton of new content and changes by 1.0, I bet it won’t take even half a month before you can burn through all of it if you’re someone who play a lot, compare that to the wait until 1 Cycle ends.
But yeah, I really hope it stays this way for LE where Cycle content is immediately available for Legacy/Standard without any changes or nerfs for those new content and mechanics.
Would be happy to see content and mechanics that are actually part of the entire game no matter how much time has passed rather some temporary power creep mechanic that’s only available for 1 Cycle and does nothing or doesn’t carry over once moved to Standard.
Still very early to say but I’d also like to hear about it from EHG themselves.
It’s also an extremely useful development tool to determine the necessary changes that would have to be made to make a given system or mechanic healthy for the base game, too. By adopting a borrowed power approach EHG doesn’t have to worry about permanently introducing a new system or mechanic in an unhealthy state then figuring out how to fix it without screwing up all characters that rely on that system or mechanic, since those characters are temporary to begin with.
And PoE has been trying to avoid that ever since Harvest was added to the base game. GGG had to burn a huge chunk of community goodwill to reign Harvest in because the crafting options it offered were obscenely powerful without the gardening minigame to balance them out. Ritual, the league they introduced Harvest as a base game league mechanic, was one of the few leagues where people were literally making borderline perfect, mirror-tier items on the regular, because Harvest’s crafting options were that powerful. GGG panicked and swung the nerf hammer multiple times over because of how much Harvest broke the game in their eyes, which is why they haven’t been so quick with adding league mechanics to the base game, instead choosing to keep them out for 2-3 leagues so that they can rebalance them.
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GGG also backed themselves into a corner with system bloat in the core game and obscene D3 levels of both power creep and speed. This is ultimately why they decided to make POE2 an actual separate game and not an upgrade for POE1. Keeping cycle content separate in the long term is not only healthy for the core game, but necessary for the cycles to remain populated. Anyone hoping for the two modes to remain identical is seriously kidding themselves.
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As does D3 & D4. In fact, I think you’ll find that almost all games that have seasonal content generally restrict it to new characters created specifically for that content. LE pushing it out to everyone is the unusual one.
As someone who has never played Leagues/Seasons on other games, I was surprised to learn this just a while ago. I really thought it’s only about “fresh start and economy” but not having standard get cut-off content.
If LE will do the same then that’s just a huge deal breaker for me. I just want to play the game and try the new content and mechanics without being rushed. Well, about time LE change this permanently imo, though I can only hope.
I don’t think there’s a single ARPG out there with seasons that doesn’t have exclusive content for the season. It’s what draws players to play seasons in the first place. Leaderboards and fresh start aren’t enough in themselves to attract more than just a few players.
And seasons are an important development tool that massively contribute to the longevity of a game. Without seasons there isn’t a need to come up with new stuff every few months.
The first few seasons will be like this because they are adding stuff that is core to the game, like the new masteries and whatever comes for 1.1 and 1.2. After that, they’re thinking about new ideas about making cycles appealing but also fresh (so it won’t just be a copy/paste of what others do).
If you look at PoE, most of the stuff they release in leagues gets added to the game, even if it’s a modified version. So standard players still get to play with that a few months later.
If it’s a deal breaker for you, then maybe live service ARPGs aren’t for you, because they all do that. And I expect LE will also do that in the future, one way or another. Ultimately, you need to give players a reason to play cycles instead of standard for the model/game to survive.
is 3-4 months to short of a time? you have plenty of time to play seasons especially since most of the time they are well played/known/complete after even a week or so. its not like these are entire expansions for an MMO you need to do in 3 months.
Take for example the content we got recently, the imprisoned mages, and the caches. These mirror similar content PoE got as seasonal content. Essences(imprisoned mages) and Strongboxes(Caches) obviously there is a little nuance, but for the most part seasons have not always been as grandiose as some that GGG has done. Most of D3 seasons were pretty simple for example.
So I think if you are truly the target audience for legacy, you would be okay giving up the “click on thing in mono to get small reward” content that leagues most likely will entail for the first few years.
I feel like many standard/legacy players do have the time to try out the content, but get freaked out about for no real reason.