1.You can wear items from each faction at the same time.
2.Everything that drops that wasn’t affected by CoF is now tradeable. (CoF marked items= untradeable)
3.Commune favor well to choose on what you spend it on.
This would solve:
1.The feeling of missing out when choosing a faction AND not being able to change it as it would reset tens or hundreds of hours of progress.
2.CoF would get the core items necessary for endgame faster and more reliable.
3.MG wouldn’t be OP in the first month for it to become unplayable later with diminishing player counts.
4.MG doesn’t scale with corruption anyway, so now you would have on what to spend favor. (also the prophecy system it’s fun and they miss out on it.)
5.No more bickering between players for where is the grass greener.
I agree your prophecies should be restored on returning to CoF. But FOMO is nonsense. You also miss out on other classes when you pick one class. Missing out is inherent to choice.
And skip a lot of gameplay. We play CoF precisely because we don’t want to skip the fun.
That’s the nature of player economy. If you don’t want that play CoF.
So it scales with gold. CoF players have the vault instead.
Who’s bickering? Just choose what you prefer.
I often play with someone who is a member of the MG so he often cannot use the items I find. So what? We can still play together.
1- You can change it and you won’t reset hundreds of hours. Just spend your favor first and you can freely switch between them. Most legacy players will eventually have both factions at rank 10 (if they don’t have them already).
2- CoF can already get core items fast. In fact, for getting mid-level gear, CoF is faster. It just struggles getting BiS gear, but those are chase items anyway.
3- MG is still OP for getting baseline gear (low-level gear just to get build online) and BiS, even with diminishing player counts. That won’t change. MG is deterministic, so it will always be superior to CoF for most things.
4- Some players like to have multiple characters, so we always have something to spend favour on. I know, we’re crazy.
5- There is no bickering for where the grass is greener. MG’s grass is greener. There’s no bickering there. The bickering is (some) CoF players wanting CoF’s grass a bit more gree.
What you basically want is: give me high drop rates and still let me buy whatever I want. This would lead to a market flooded with items, prices being dirt cheap and getting gear in a couple days and being done with the game in a week. You know, like D3.
MG drop rates are fine as they are. It’s a numbers game and there are enough numbers to make the market worth it.
CoF needs some tuning, especially for boss drops.
Both factions need tuning, especially for rank progression and also some rank rewards and faction switching.
But we don’t need CoF drops + trade. That will kill the game faster. Baseline gear is already extremely easy to get for both factions. Mid-level gear is very easy for CoF and easy for MG. BiS gear is hard for both: MG needs high amounts of gold, CoF needs high amounts of RNG. Which is as it should be.
You don’t need BiS gear. It’s a chase item. The easier you get BiS gear, the sooner you get tired of the game and stop playing. As long as the game easily gives you good enough gear for your build to work, you’re fine.
I think you need to completely split them up. All you need is a separate stash for MG and COF. Then you can switch back and forth freely with no items, gold or crafting mats mixed between the two.
You’ve completely missed the point of having two different factions : it is there to even the ground between trading and non-trading players. Giving some access to benefits of trading to CoF players goes entirely against the reason it is there in the first place.
I hope the developers never cave in to any of the similar demands and stick to the original idea for factions, which was pointed out by previous posters already.
What you currently have is the developers’ current vision of what loot progression should be. It might not be ideal and might be changed in the future, but regardless of what speed it will be, trade + prophecies will be too powerful for the desired pace of loot progression, so they both will be toned down, and it will screw players who don’t want to trade.
How is not being able to equip 3/4LP items that i spent hundreds of hours to get not wasting the hundreds of hours?
2.CoF won’t have an effect on the market if all drops that have been altered by the faction prophecies or ranks wouldn’t be tradeable as I said. The ones that don’t have the CoF mark and only have the ‘cannot be traded’ are the drops that an MG player would get anyway.
MG is superior in gearing speed at least for low-medium tier and boss items, but completing prophecies is fun and I can’t do it because items from different factions aren’t equipable
4.In late game MG literally you can’t drop enough things to finish your favor from corruption. Only way is to spend gold on Lightless Arbor
CoF can be greener if you go a meta build as you don’t have to buy extremely desireable and “overpriced” items and because of that you can farm really high corruption for favor. Also character progression isn’t tied to how many players are playing the game.
I don’t think the gearing speed will be too different as you would be limited by favor. Oh you wanted to sell those exalts, you don’t get to buy prophecies anymore / Oh you wanted to buy that item, but maybe you’ll drop a better one.
Idk If you would get BiS items that much faster. Would also have to level both factions.
Also from the 200k players how many quit because they got perfect best in slot items? 5%? 50% didn’t even finish the campaign (speculating from Mike’s stream)
One more point , everybody would have the same opportunities but right now people are either MG or COF and changing between them after any resonable amount of time is not an option at all.
Speed progression could be limited by FAVOR=time
You either spend it on selling and buying items or on prophecies and drops.
If you put half your time in COF and half in MG you would’ve still spent the same amount of favor=time to progress.
If it would be actually faster, then they could nerf the rate by 10% or how much gain it would give.
But items not being equipable is the same thing as being faction locked which feels bad to me…
You would have the option of using your favor on trade but that’s not simply a benefitn because you would have less Favor to spend on prophecies.
So yeah, not engaging in trade, even with this minimaly merged variant, would have the advantage of getting more prohecies than the people that would use their favor 50-50.
It’s not a waste of hundreds of hours much like creating a new character isn’t a waste of hundreds of hours.
This is incorrect. Everything a CoF player drops is marked as untradable because CoF ranks also affect drops. Even without prophecies CoF has much better drops than MG.
That would be your filter. I have plenty of stuff that are only waiting for me to have enough favour so I can sell them.
It will never be greener because MG is deterministic. Despite all the boosts, CoF will always have RNG, meaning there’s always a chance you will never find the item you want.
You mean except the people that don’t like trade, or don’t want to? Or the people that have to play offline?
As has been pointed out before, what you’re proposing would force people to trade, even when they don’t want to. Which is the exact opposite of what CoF was created for.
For example one of the core ideas of Last Epoch was to easily respec passive points and skill points so your decisions won’t hurt you too much like in POE. So why couldn’t this be also applied to the faction system and not punish you when you want to change from one to another.
If the commune favor and sellable items that are not affected by CoF are too much… I’d at least like that the items to be equipable irrespective of faction. As it stands right now changing between factions it’s not an option in any case.
That’s an absurd train of thought. Baseline CoF, and then the option to dip in MG whenever it’s convenient on top of that is strictly better than just baseline CoF, even if the resources you spend on MG are not spent on CoF too.
There is probably a reasonable argument to be made to offer solutions to transition more easily from one faction to the other, but clearly suggestions that allow you to have full use of one, and on top of that partial (or full) benefits of the other are a huge leap in the wrong direction.
I’d rather look into ways to allow characters to remain in one faction’s gear while acquiring the reputation and gear on the other one (but not acquiring the first faction’s gear and reputation anymore), and then when the player feels ready, the player swaps gear in one go, no mixing allowed. With possible caveats to avoid abuses.
That’s much more in line with the intended design, and helps proper transition for players that find out that they don’t actually like the faction they’re in.
Having items ur not using on ur character makes since they would be faction locked. Or not tradable as in the case with CoF. What i mean is only equipped gear should be allowed to use. Anything in stash is locked out if faction tagged
However i do agree losing equipped gear progression when switching to MG is bad.
Iv suggested a few ways flip flopping factions can be prevented without needing to destroy ones progression with gear they have equipped. The point of it is to stop this flip flopping of factions.
I agree with preventing constant flip flopping but as i said there are much better ways to do this than ruin a persons gear progression. Equipped gear that is.
Creating the same character with the exact same items It is totally different from creating a new one because you don’t experience anything new, you won’t get happy dropping the exact same item you already have but are not allowed to use it … How is this even an argument.
All items that have been altered by COF have the COF logo on them even if they aren’t from prophecies, like the ones from rank 7-8… The ones that ‘cannot be traded’ didn’t roll any cof bonus.
The favor for MG it just means you didn’t get to a point in corruption where that is the case. With double corruption than what you have you would drop 10% more items and have 100% more favor
MG is deterministic but accumulating 500k at a time for T7 exalts and trying to buy a 1bil to 1.5bil items just because they are used in META builds has arguments to be harder than just getting 400k favor per hour and dropping 50 at a time. So imo COF has an advantage AT LEAST for META and For high corruption farming
It’s not like being able to do COF and MG like in poe because you are locked by favor. For each favor point you will have to decide between spending it on MG /OR/ on COF, not both.
If you are playing cof and don’t wanna trade at all great, nothing changes, you would still be able to use all you favor on prophecies!
You seem to be missing the point entirely.
EHG added trade and a global drop rate nerf to balance it out.
Then, they “looked” at PoE (metaphorically speaking) where those that don’t want to trade are basically screwed. So they thought “What can we add that will help those players not get screwed?”. And they came up with CoF.
CoF isn’t meant to be used together with MG. CoF is simply a “consolation prize” for players that don’t want trade. It’s not as strong as MG nor will it ever be.
Yes, in MG you have to grind a lot of gold for meta gear. But you are certain of getting it. You’re also certain of getting that exalted with exactly the mods you want.
In CoF you have tool to reduce RNG but it is still always RNG. There is always a chance that you won’t get the item you want. Even if some item has a 99.99% chance, that just means that for every 10k that play, 1 one won’t get it ever, on average.
If you were ever able to get CoF and MG at once, there would be another global drop rate nerf of about 90% to balance. Because getting decent gear is already very very easy in either, getting good gear is already easy in either and BiS gear isn’t meant to be easy.
But it will never happen (hopefully) because EHG cares about the community and there’s a very large portion of players that simply don’t want to trade. And, unlike you, they value them and want them to have a close footing with those that trade.
Both factions need tweaks and balances. I expect we’ll get them in 1.1 now that they analysed the data. But they definitely don’t need to be merged.
Ok, so the double-dipping into using numbers to count the parts is a bit problematic, 1,2,3 and then a,b,c would’ve been better
But anyways. Major point 1: Yes, agreed fully.
Major point 2: No, all items dropped during CoF shouldn’t be traded, removes the option to double-dip at any point of time, which is a primary concern.
Major point 3: I don’t know what point doesn’t communicate it well for spending, a simple tooltip to state ‘2 Rep is gained on gaining 1 Favor, 2 rep is gained on spending 1 Favor’ is what’s needed, easily visible all the time simply, that solves everything related to that.
Now the sub-points:
1.) FOMO is a ridiculous notion there, has nothing to do with FOMO, the reset though is more then understandable.
2.) No, but they have the option at least to very how to play whenever wanted, which is a major player-agency aspect and should be upheld as much as possible.
3.) We don’t know that yet, but the Rank-System of MG is utter nonsense. With the duping issues though we have no idea about the market-changes in reality yet.
4.) It does scale through more loot and more favor gain. This is a factually wrong statement.
5.) Yes, would hold true.
It’s not, it’s a lack of understanding how economy works. Also ignores all the side-issues which have accrued through both their implementation (the Rank System is atrocious, no taxation for buyers is a major mistake for creating a gold sink, no re-listing option is ridiculous) as well as the exploits that have been going around.
Gold is a resource, not content. You can’t put content and resources in an equivalency status, it’s apples and oranges.
Nonetheless a issue for group play, it causes frustration, frustration is negative retention-time. Hence needless frustation (there’s a good one too and can be used to enhance the experience of players) hence leads to a net negative outcome.
It’s an access issue though, early cycle MG is utter garbage, nobody can sell LP items, nobody can sell exalted items, supply being high while demand is 0. This leads to falsifying the actual value of listings and hence a de-valuation of the whole mechanic at those times.
Also it’s a problem for progression state, your first character gets basically nothing from MG during progression. By the time you can buy core uniques with LP you’re close to level 100. CoF has in the meanwhile dropped 10 of them and complains not being able to get 2 LP items. It’s a disaprity which shouldn’t exist in such a major manner… you can’t even compare the factions since both are utterly bottlenecked in different nonsensical ways, MG far more then CoF as they solely have boss-drop and determinism issues.
Yes, we don’t need that. We need to option to switch to whatever playstyle we want without our already achieved rewards being taken away. Benefits being taken away is normal, rewards being taken away is atrocious and basically never done for a good reason.
Impossible for MG until you’re through the game completely. So that doesn’t hold true.
And here I screwed up and pressed ‘post’ so everything beyond is the addition and edit:
Agreed! Taking away everything you have because you decide ‘from now on I don’t wanna trade’ or ‘from now on I wanna relay on trading’ on the other hand is nonsensical.
Exactly, they’re the reward from the benefits of CoF while the bought items are the Reward from the benefits of MG.
Take away the benefits when switching. I put effort into getting my rewards though. Take that away and it’s just a pile of shit system, and that’s the nicest way I’ll call that mechanic. Give me a single other game which removes your rewards after the fact you’ve gotten them.
That holds only true because the oversight of boss-drop uniques is there. Something which shouldn’t be there.
Hence outside of that neither exalted nor unique items can be easier acquired in MG, it’s vastly harder. To take it into perspective: Mid-tier is a 1 LP boss unique or a 2 LP common unique, also 1 LP rare unique.
And since you can’t acquire LP with MG before investing a ton of time it doesn’t hold true there.
Yes, which is a inherent downside with the choice left to the player. Which is also why market access handled through ranks is nonsensical. Taxation and listing amount should be handled through ranks, or buying slots per day, something of those measures makes sense. Access? That’s not smart as it messes with supply/demand inherently.
Exactly! Finally someone who gets it! We can still keep it separate, favor is after all the currency allowing you to get the benefits of the faction, so choosing which benefits to access more is player-agency as well.
Now adjust MG according to sensical favor usage and it’s no issue at all, like… scaling favor costs with higher gold prices, like it should’ve been from the start as acquiring ridiculously rare items only becomes possible through the faction and hence to even be allowed to access their ‘high value trades’ you’ll need to do something for em.
It is, I still have my character but I can’t use my items.
That’s a waste of hours.
Creating a new character isn’t as I’m ‘creating value’ for myself.
A better example would be if your character gets an automatic random tag by chance and if you switch your faction it can’t be accessed anymore. You would call BS for that… and it’s the exact same thing for faction-tagged equipment. You made it, you put the effort into it, the outcome is what you invested your time for. Why should it ever be taken away?
That’s because their tagging system is shit and upgraded items aren’t always tagged. Has nothing to do with baseline drops.
Not holding true. They can trade, but given the adjustments I’ve mentioned above to the core idea presented would make it full personal agency if you wanna go the ‘loot explosion RNG route’ or the ‘deterministic slow procurement route’. Your choice.
Exactly. On point.
Also fully agreed.
Changing factions needs less limitaitons.
Double-dipping from one into the other should never be allowed.
‘Flip flopping’ as you call it has no meaning if it provides no upside. So why limit it then?
If you can’t get anything extra from it there is no reason to limit it.
Exactly, so lets break down what the measures needed to do that are!
-To allow trade baseline drops need to be reduced, as those people have a more powerful option to acquire item
-To allow those without trade to progress in a decent way their drops get increased.
-To not cause issues cross-faction function is limited. Hence no trading items from CoF and no extra loot from MG
Now… where exactly does ‘remove my already achieved rewards’ come into play there?
-What’s the function of the favor removal for faction change?
-What’s the funciton of prophecy removal on faction change?
-What’s the function of gear-locking for tagged items?
Nobody to date has given me answers to those 3 questions there, I’ve asked them over a dozen times by now and got exactly ‘0’ functional answers and only misconceptions about the systems baseline function even
And they can’t even without the ‘flip-flop’ limitations, so they’re nonsense.
You shouldn’t ever and even without the switching limitations currently you wouldn’t. So?
Great TL:DR !
Can you make a separate post with all your points and proposals so it may get more traction than mine that has a heavy emphasis on making them compatible and not easily changing between them?
Maybe the developers will have a higher chance of seeing it and change their perspectives or make a community poll.
To make faction-hopping less viable, prohibitively so, to the point that you only do that if you realized that you don’t like the current faction and want to switch permanently.
So that you don’t get the benefits of both factions. If you could mix and match MG and CoF items, you farm most of your gear in CoF, or just farms whatever gets farmed, then switch to MG, buy everything that is missing, and just like that, you have fully optimal gear.
This is way more powerful than having just MG or CoF gear, so both MG and CoF will face nerfs (probably concentrated on CoF/baseline drop rates, cause it’s kinda hard to nerf MG specifically, unless they introduce like 90% tax so that players only get 10% of what they sell for).
Mid-level is early monos, before empowered. It’s very easy to get level 50-70ish gear in the bazaar that has most of the affixes you need. I’ve done that a couple times.
Rank 4 gives you 50% more likely chance to get exalted affixes. That means that every single exalted you get has been influenced by CoF. So all exalted items are automatically non-tradable.
Rank 6 gives 2x chance for LP uniques. So any LP unique has been influenced, so it’s automatically non-tradable.
Ranks 7 and 8 only compound the exalted issue.
So the only items you would be able to trade, that could be said that weren’t influenced by CoF and 0LP uniques and common/magic/rare.
As for the tag, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I always simply thought that if an item drops due to a prophecy it gets the CoF tag, otherwise it’s non-tradable.
The agency to go lootsplosion or deterministic already exists and it’s CoF/MG.
If you change the system so you can use both and it’s clearly superior to use both, then players will be effectively forced to trade. If it’s not clearly superior and it’s the same using one, the other or both, then there’s no point in changing it.
Respecing skills delevels your skill. You have to level it up again. It’s the same for faction ranks, except you just lose favour instead of ranks.
What you might argue is that switching ranks should have some sort of accelerated XP, which is the similar system.
You say this, but how is being able to wear both CoF and MG gear (which you’re a defender of) not double-dipping?
None, that seems like an oversight and should be changed.
Prophecies are character bound. So that’s to prevent you spamming a lot of prophecies, switch to MG and still get the lootsplosion, I imagine.
To prevent you getting your gear in MG and then switching to CoF. Kind of like you can’t make a normal character, trade for gear, then switch to SSF.
The whole point of the separation of the factions is that you have to chose: do you want trade or do you want lootsplosion. Faction gear is just another enforcement of this separation. You can’t have both.
What people don’t seem to realize is that, in the normal state of things, with any other developer, you’d get MG and nothing else. But EHG decides to do a nice thing to players that don’t like trade and then all the others that do trade are suddenly jealous and want it as well on top of MG.
Both MG and CoF need adjustments. Some quite big. But at no point should a single character have the benefits of both factions. Because at that point might as well just get rid of factions altogether and make both core.
