Summary: The hub world we go to between echoes when doing monoliths is essentially our version of a Path of Exile hideout. Make ways to customize it and add skins, furniture, trophies, etc. We go back to it after each echo and it’s a huge area of untapped potential that people like me would absolutely love and prefer to buy over equipment skins.
Specific ideas:
Add a node for this zone to the map so we can travel there directly.
Let us put seasonal vendors there (Masque, Skarven, future ones).
Customizable polyhedron thing we interact with to select echoes like the map device in PoE. Some could have timers like the PoE map timers, kill counters, etc to display your stats from the echo you run.
Trophies, statues, furniture, other decor (Diablo 2 hellforge skin for the forge, throne, bed, Capybara statue, beekeeping stuff, loot lizard pen).
Jukebox or musician NPCs that let us change the theme music in the zone.
Minigames or fun things to interact with that do cute stuff (Capybara racing, basketball hoop, test dummies).
Rollercoasters that go off the edge of the zone over the abyss.
Ways to expand the zone to fit more stuff. I’m thinking mtx to add a new island to your hubworld connected by a bridge like the monoliths are connected to each other.
Anything else that they offer in PoE that you think fits Last Epoch.
I know it’s easier said than done, but I think working on getting the ground work for a customizable hideout/hubworld will pay huge dividends going forward. Once you have the systems in place, you can continually add new mtx for that zone and I know I will continue to buy it as I’m sure others will too.
i think there are a bunch of easy low hanging fruit ideas EHG could use to monetize more… they failed to follow the golden rule of “let your customers give you the money”, by having not enough relevant stuff to buy. THeir principled approach to bank tabs and stuff might be honorable, but it was not necessary. I would have gladly spent more on LE if there was more useful stuff to buy. (and clunky boroque asthetic packs are just not my thing)
But don’t worry, now that they sold the company, their corporate overlords will teach them to do all the things they should have done when they were independent. (and hopefully not too many more)
Almost none of what you listed are “low hanging fruits”. They all require a lot of work and can’t just be slapped into the game without some effort and testing.
Maybe “Low hanging fruit” was a poor choice of words. What I meant was that I believe the idea to be somewhat obvious and sure to make money not that it would be easy.
The main difficulty of this is that in PoE players are visiting hideouts all the time to trade. So players do have an incentive to buy hideout MTX to show off.
In LE, if you were to do the same thing in the echo of a world and turn it into a hideout, the only people that would see it would be people you party with. So there’s much less opportunities to show off and thus less incentive to spend on those MTX.
And changing MG so that you visit hideouts to buy stuff would be a much more massive change entirely. Not to mention it would annoy the hell out of many players which now have to go through 2 loading screens to buy anything.
If you’re buying full gear, that’s over 20 loading screens just going back and forth.
That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that aspect of it. Personally I like setting up my hideout just for my own enjoyment, but a huge part of it for other players is the show off aspect.
