Oh yeah, it’s time for another round of “Give me the best loot easier”, brought to you by Modern Gamers, Inc. Get your bingo sheets out folks.
They could only apply the CoF tag when it’s the extra CoF probability that causes the items to have those properties. Sure, this requires a little bit of extra coding to distinguish that, but it’s not information that is impossible to get. Plus, it would help players envision how much CoF helps them to get the items they want.
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This time with a “being able to wear both MG and CoF gear doesn’t mean getting benefits of both factions” mental gymnastics course!
That is the key issue though. If the formula simply applies multiple consecutive rolls, it’s easy to find out. If it doesn’t and is simply a full formula with those modifiers in between (which is more likely) then wether or not it was the multipliers that made the exalt or not is much harder to find.
And considering the huge number of drops that are always happening all the time, separating that single check into 4 different checks (since there are 3 ranks that separately affect rare/exalted items) isn’t negligible.
Yes, it would be nice to have clear gear if it was a “natural” drop, non-tradable if it’s CoF ranks and CoF tag if it’s the prophecies, but I expect it’s too much effort for too little benefit, since the majority of players simply won’t care about it.
I think I can agree with you there.
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This is a non-answer with my arguments before that.
I want to know the distinct function it has in a realistic example, not a generic non-answer.
-Which situation would you profit from faction hopping currently?
-Why would you need to be hindered to switch factions in the current situation?
You’ve got one major misconception here going on.
First of all there’s a misconception between base resources, benefits and rewards.
Base resources are things like gold and affixes. They stay with you no matter the faction. You’ve gotten them and you keep them. Hence you could theoretically play CoF currently, farm up gold and sigils/glyphs/affixes there before emptying out your favor before switching over to buy exalted and LP uniques with the gold, craft them up to the end and then make legendaries out of them.
That’s what you already can do and that’s an issue. Glyphs/sigils/affixes and gold should never be influenced by either mechanic directly, which is also why special ‘tokens’ to use MG for paying would’ve been better rather then gold.
The second point is ‘mixing and matching’.
You get distinct benefits from each faction.
The benefit of CoF are the prophecy mechanic and the baseline drop-increase during general gameplay.
The benefits from MG are access to items which can be sold on the market.
So, those things are what you change when switching.
Distinctly different are the rewards from them.
If you put 60 hours into CoF to get a ‘Wraithlord Arbor’ with 2 LP from prophecies you’ve invested 60 hours of time by using the benefits which derives the reward for you.
If you put in 60 hours into MG you get 60 hours worth of baseline items which can be listed, from which you get the resources to buy your reward.
So that already should show you where the issue is.
The benefit is detached from the reward, removing the benefit automatically derives the rewards which is a intrinsic design to remove any potential for double-dipping already.
To get items in CoF you need to invest time to then maybe get a reward fitting for you which can’t be used in MG (since market usage is the benefit of MG)
To get items from MG you need to use gold (a base resource, which is a problem!) to then derive the reward (a bought item) from it. We can argue that the necessary amount of gold value can nigh only be achieved for end-game items by engaging in listing and selling items.
So in neither case is the need there to deprive you your rewards, you can’t realistically gain access to them anyway given you’ve invested enough time… which hence removes the option to get them from the other mechanic. So faction hopping itself doesn’t need to be limited.
Only if you manage to somehow dupe/suddenly materialize massive quantities of gold into your LE wallet.
Yes, after skipping several steps and necessities to do that it’s ‘just like that’. It doesn’t take into consideration time investment needs and the lack of ability to use the respective benefits of the other faction… as obviously they shouldn’t be possible to be used when using the other.
The gear is identical between both factions. There are no unique affixes or uniques available.
So no, that doesn’t hold true.
If you remove an arbitrary mechanic which doesn’t hinder any upsides you don’t need to put in any downsides for removing them.
Before you get 100% loot… after you get 100% loot… where’s the need for a nerf?
Removing the usage of gold and instead making a different currency use the system (tokens, platinum coins, whatever).
Taxation.
Scaling favor costs with selling price.
Need any more ‘hard to do nerfs’? Actually they’re rather positive reworks.
So hours ~15 of the gameplay. By that definition we reach end-game by hour 20 (empowered) and absolute end-game by hour 25 (300 corruption) at which the game is ‘a done deal’.
In that case it’s even worse since usage of Rank 8 is possible around hour 40 which is 15 hours after absolute end-game. Makes it a bit nonsensical I would say.
So we need a baseline, we don’t have one… hence I’ve taken over to declare ‘end-game’ as LP positive uniques since you’re expected to have them by the time you unlock Rank 8 already in quite the amount.
All items are automatically non-tradeable, CoF tagged or not.
There is no functional difference besides allowing someone to use them or not, which is a second mechanic beyond and the one I’m arguing against.
It also influences baseline drops which have been affected by CoF… to a degree. Not everything is because I have definitely a lot more exalted items without CoF tag then I have ever even seen in the same type of content with MG. So something’s awry there with the tagging system. What exactly I can’t say, but it’s a mess.
Also it removes items from your ‘non CoF-tagged pool’ overall because of the upgrades, hence leaving you with vastly less baseline items in the case you decide to switch faction, to a degree where it would ‘brick’ your character completely. In LE the majority of power comes not from levels but from equipment.
Agreed! Hency why I wrote what I wrote above and it all has to be taken in context together and not in pieces.
CoF has the goal to make SSF-style playing not handicapped heavily compared to a trade-style community playing direction.
For that it needs to have deterministic aspects or it can’t work.
It lacks them and hence it fails to provide that in the upper ranges. Expected with how it’s implemented.
I can nigh guarantee that with more casual players the amount of people playing MG and CoF is around 50/50… I also think that next cycle the people which have already done it once and don’t play ‘long’ won’t go MG while many who’ve played ‘long’ will switch from CoF to MG. And why is also fairly obvious.
MG is shit during your first playthrough. CoF is shit when trying to progress in utter and absolute end-game.
I would enjoy to see the differences actually, with proper dev-tools (I don’t think EHG has made them yet) collecting data from their servers we could even see it.
Players having spent up to 20 hours ‘in content’ (hence monoliths, not towns afk) and then showcasing the % of CoF and MG.
Then for players above 20 hours with the same.
I guarantee that the higher the play-time goes the more likely MG will happen, which is not a ‘solution’ but just shifting the issue around.
Then ask yourself ‘why’ that’s needed.
Time investment.
How long is the time investment? Miniscule.
Now go over to faction switching, ‘why’ is it needed?
I can’t see it, a (15k or so) one-time penalty for favor and nothing else would alleviate it, done deal.
How much time is actually lost currently? Depends, a level 100? A good 40 hours progress I would say.
Is this equivalent to respec?
First you have to explain how it is double-dipping in the first place.
I want exact examples which uphold under scrutiny there.
So once again:
Benefit: The functionality of the system
Reward: The outcome derived from the benefits.
If you take away my benefits I can’t get more rewards.
That’s what’s usually done.
If you take away my rewards you take away my effort though, which is not ‘ok’.
I’ll have vastly less then I would’ve gotten without using any of both factions at any time if you take them away, playing faction-less is actually superior to switching a faction later on.
In which relation does that stand to necessity?
Just… you know… have them not trigger when you’re in MG?
Solved?
False equivalency there.
I’m not choosing a challenge, I’m choosing my play-style. SSF is a challenge mechanic which enforces no social aspects. Hence a guaranteed hindrance to progression and outright limiter.
The factions are a choice for ‘play-style’. Do I want to get my gear on my own or do I want to get my gear through community-power?
You get a benefit in drops for picking personal drops.
You get a benefit in sell-able items for picking community-powered access.
I’m not ‘challenging’ myself here, I’m just picking how I enjoy the game at any stage of the moment.
If I don’t enjoy doing it on my own then I can just leave the benefits behind and instead go over to enjoy the benefits of the community-driven aspect… which is utterly fine! But instead EHG decided to come over and rip my character naked for ‘daring’ to do that. Which is not fine.
The other way around is the same. After having the benefit of being able to sell items and hence acquire items I chose not wanting to have the hassle of looking and pricing items. I stop it… hence I won’t acquire any items able to be sold anymore. Why rip my gear off me on top?
Difference between benefit and reward is important!!!
And people always said ‘it feels bad to do that’. So EHG provides a very shitty trading mechanic (it is not good) and a not fully thought through but functional mechanic for other people and now we should overlook the issues with it?
Being content is stagnation, stuff can always be improved. Otherwise we would still shit out the window into our backyards, Gladly we don’t.
And that’s already the case no matter how often or when you switch.
The only exception is acquiring such a ridiculous amount of gold that you can buy items despite only playing CoF beforehand.
Which again… favor scaling for buy-price is a necessity, should be in without easy switching… and solves all the bickering about switching since access is bared by time investment.
Yes, explain to me why the reward has to be removed on top of the benefits. Then we can talk on.
Double-check in that case. ‘Has it been less then needed? Yes → tag No → no tag’ and that’s it.
For that they need to optimize their general roll system beforehand though because it’s currently already lag-inducing.
Will do, in a more collected manner.
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Agreed. When EHG first revealed factions they talked about not wanting non trade players to feel forced to trade. At some point Currently this will come into play. Already has a few times for me this cycle
Currently the gearing up power ceiling for MG is way higher than CoF is. Especially when it comes to BiS.
MG will always be the best way to get gear. However CoF i agree needs to be brought more in line with gear progression MG has
I’m pretty sure you can make a lot more gold with MG than with CoF. And since you can use lightless arbor to farm runes/etc, I’m pretty sure it becomes more optimal to farm those as MG.
Either way, those things aren’t relevant to the faction switch, since you can already do that by using one character in each faction.
I’m pretty sure there are already a bunch of players in legacy that have rank 10 in both factions. Probably even a few as well in cycle.
So you could reasonably get favour and gold with MG, then switch to CoF (and retain your favour, since that’s what you’re suggesting), get a bunch of CoF gear, then switch back to MG (again, retaining favor for both), buy the gear you want and then go back to CoF again. If you didn’t lose favour and weren’t restricted by faction gear, you could hop without any downside to it.
Effectively you’d just have benefits from both without downsides.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree with you that rank progression needs a massive lookover and rework.
What I said was that prophecy drops get the CoF tag. Influenced rank drops simply get non-tradable. I would have assumed (before 1.0 launched) that “natural” drops would get neither, but it’s likely the formula doesn’t let them separate these last 2.
I actually disagree with this. The reason many players don’t like trade isn’t interacting with others (which is even removed with the Bazaar) but simply because they like the slot machine RNG system of random drops. They just like lootsplosions to help with that RNG, but they don’t want the RNG removed.
I’d say MG is for people that just want to farm currency and have the item deterministically, CoF is for people that want the random drops. Most CoF defenders don’t want determinism. The RNG is the biggest part of the dopamine hit.
I also disagree with this. It’s not for time investment. It’s to make choices matter more. In fact, early respec was harsher, it was just community pressure that changed that.
If you spend all your favour prior to switching, you don’t lose any favour.
And, as I suggested, if you switch from a rank 8 CoF to a rank 1 MG, you’d get accelerated XPs for a few ranks, similar to skill respec.
Ultimately, the reward of both CoF and MG is gear. If you have gear from both factions, you’re double dipping, since you’re getting rewards from both. It’s simple.
They only take the rewards if you decide to switch, exactly so you don’t double dip and get rewards from both in the same character.
Or, you know, you’re aware that they go away, finish them first? If you’re switching from CoF to MG you won’t need them anyway.
The system is designed so that MG and CoF are a semi-permanent choice. You choose one or the other. You’re not meant to be hopping around.
They let you switch with a heavy penalty and you think that’s a punishment, when it’s actually a reward, since they didn’t have to let you switch at all. It could be just like with masteries and you’re stuck with your choice.
That is your opinion. Other than the atrocious UI, MG does exactly what I want from a trading system: a glorified vendor shop.
The problem is that your idea of improvement to someone else it’s a degradation and vice versa.
A high corruption build can farm favour very fast.
The benefits of MG is that you can buy and sell gear. The reward is the gear you buy from that benefit.
The benefits of CoF is that you have lootsplosions. The reward is the gear you get from that benefit.
You can’t say that you should be able to retain your rewards when those rewards are a direct result of the benefits. If you remove the benefits, you have to remove the rewards gained from said benefits.
Double checking is increasing the amount of calculations required for every single drop, which is what I said was the thing that might impact performance, due to the huge number of items that drop every second.
Doing abcd > target and changing it to exalt then checking if bcd (the rank bonuses) was the deciding factor is actually more complicated than just rolling a > target changes to exalt (no tag), if not check abcd and tag it.
Either way, this is all speculation since we have no idea how the formula really works. It might be simple, or it might require a lot of change.
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No u dont get the benefits of both faction.
U cant use anything from CoF or even its systems. While in MG
Partly correct. Prophecies yes.
If a drop is triggers due to CoF rank it also gets faction tagged its not just Prophecies
Rank 1 is why everything that drops in CoF is tagged not tradable. CoF has 35% increased drop rates. The fact us CoF players dont deal with the 30% global drop rate nerf that MG does is why all items are non tradable tagged in CoF
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You’d still get the benefits of both, just not at once. You’d get the benefits from CoF, then switch and get the benefits from MG, then back again and on and on. You’d get the benefits from both whenever it suited you to change.
Either way it’s not relevant because the gear you get from each faction is the reward from said benefits. So even if you lose the benefits of one when you switch, you still have the gear gained from them.
That’s what the current system prevents you from doing.
Except u cant use faction tagged cof gear in MG ur not double dipping. To do that u woukd need to beable to equip faction tagged gear from both factions at the same time.
Which u cant
Yes, but I was replying to @Kulze who is saying that you should be able to wear both. And that it wouldn’t be double dipping if you could.
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Yes, as mentioned… the current state of both CoF and MG don’t even allow adjsutments
Their implementation to each other is awful, especially MG
If we keep talking about ‘the current state’ then nothing can be done. Which is nonsensical. There’s a billion options to choose from out there. A million half-way functional ones (as we have now) ten thousand fully functional ones (which would be a start) and a thousand ‘great’ options (which we wanna have).
It’s already been discussed dozens of times that without several changes at once the current system isn’t even possible to be salvaged in that regard. Hence why all my suggestions are based on multiple-faceted changes and won’t function with a single one
Hence yes, you’re right! And no, you’re wrong!
At the same time even! 
Depends on if you allow MG to have scaling favor prices with listing prices and already we have solved the double-dipping there.
Time investment needed for MG to get the benefit is not there → create the needed time-investment.
I’m making a massive post to put together everything actually right now which will take around an hour or 2 longer to get done. I’m investing that time to have a thread which is kept up to date, allows discussions and keeps on track with secondary threads as well while being formatted ‘half way decent’ at least. Better then my usual posts at least so far as I manage.
I hope it becomes clear with that one, I’ll link over to it here in another post afterwards and hope the essay there will explain everything and make things more clear.
It’s all chopped up and hard to follow with repetition over repetition and nobody being able to follow anyway.
What this person said is actually what EHG talked about when they revealed factions the first time. Point of it is to give non trade players away to not feel forces to trade.
Keep in mind 1.1 brings in a Pinnacle boss system. Will this be balanced so cof doesnt feel forced to trade in order to defeat it. Over time EHG will have to pick which faction the game is balanced towards theres no way around it
Currently the system of cof doesnt do that at some point. This is why the whole penalty and losing equipped gear progression is getting brought up. Theres other ways to prevent faction swapping becoming a big thing. Other than players being told to go grind ranks go grind out all ur gear again that u just spent 100+ hrs farming up
Losing equipped gear progression shouldnt even be a thing no game has done this for a good reason
U can still have it RNG based with a bit of deterministic things for CoF sprinkled in. Should it be deterministic to the point u know exactly what will drop affix wise no.
There does need some way to say block some stuff like u can do with lenses. Or even prophecies that instead of just 3x exalted bows allows u to say target said affixes. But this prophecy would target say all weapons all boots ect. Just my suggestions for improving the faction system
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Yes, but that’s where we disagree. I think the MG implementation is good. It gives me what I want.
Does it need adjustments? Sure. Rank progression is as awful in MG as in CoF.
Is the UI terrible? Yes. And they will change it.
Is the base MG system with its restrictions bad? Not to me. I like MG exactly because of the restrictions.
Does CoF need adjustments? Definitely. It needs boosts to boss drops and it needs more focused target farming.
Should CoF and MG be switchable? I’d go as far as to say that it should be like mastery. You choose one and you’re stuck with it. The fact that they even let you change at all is already a reward.
You lost me there. I’m not sure what you mean by that.
I agree. I always thought the way CoF was going to work would be to select a sub-set of drops to focus on, effectively reducing the loot table. Sadly this only works for item types. I was expecting something like “Give me drops with critical affixes (all of them)” or “Give me drops with minion affixes (all of them)”. And you’d get way more of those.
Also, and this is just a personal thing, I hate the prophecies mechanic. I hated it in PoE and I hate it here. It breaks gameplay when you have to constantly go back and get new prophecies.
It’s the reason why almost every character I’ve made so far is MG, even though I barely trade. I’d rather have sucky drops than to interact with Navali prophecies.
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Currently there’s not a lot of benefit switching factions, other than farm occasional runes and glyphs in CoF, which you can’t get in MG (never played MG, but didn’t see it in the rank bonuses). And I think runes, glyphs and affix shards should be made tradable for MG characters from rank 1.
Other than that, loss of progression serves to emphasise that the factions are not something you can change like socks, but rather are a significant commitment to a certain playstyle (solo play VS trade play).
If that’s the case, it seems like an oversight on the developers part, the legendaries should not be craftable from mixed CoF/MG gear, and should get the MG/CoF tag on the resulting item, based on the item and unique’s tag (if any), so it is consistent with the separate factions system.
As to how having both MG and CoF loot is superior to having only one of those:
You can get decent gear (t6 / some t7) fairly easily in CoF to get to higher corruption. Switch to MG, farm and sell valuable stuff, then buy the remaining upgrades in MG.
The power of CoF is getting showered in good but random loot. You farm whatever is reasonably farmable, probably get a few near-BiS items, and then switch to MG to get the loot that is not reliably obtainable from CoF (mainly boss uniques/legendaries), yes, that would also require farming, but at that point you can get to high corruption, and get gold and valuable items for sale faster.
You can cover one faction’s weak side by another faction’s strong sides. Get strong loot with CoF → perfect it with MG. Not as powerful if all loot that dropped while you were in CoF can’t be traded at all, but still gives you quite the boost in power. EDIT: speed of acquiring power.
As to how to alleviate the loss of power from tagged items, there are two solutions:
1 Let character use their previous faction’s gear after migrating to another faction, but you can’t use new faction’s gear during that period. After you’ve gained good enough replacement gear, you press another button, and lose the ability to use previous faction’s gear, but can now use the new one’s.
2 Totally prevent switching factions, so you don’t have that issue. Make it like leagues in PoE, where the choice is permanent, though in PoE you can migrate to trade, but that’s allowed because they don’t have a dedicated SSF mechanic, in LE probably even this should not be allowed.
I’d prefer the 1st option, as it gives players a chance to change their mind, without leveling a new character from scratch. Although if crafting materials trade is implemented, it would be better to do a 2nd one, otherwise trade players will be forced to switch to CoF to farm valuable materials to then sell them in MG.
The main thing I don’t like the most about your suggestion is that it only benefits genuinely mistaken players once. After that they will stick to the faction they like the most and not need the option anymore.
However, it will further blur the line between factions (which are already not perfectly separated), allowing those who just want more loot faster, to slowly push for even more blurring the line, towards just merging the two factions as the end goal, and with each step, the factions will get more nerfs.
Just leave the factions as they are, and instead fix their bad design decisions (shit interface for prophecies, low impact on boss uniques for CoF, shit Bazaar filter, no tradable glyphs/runes/affix shards, etc.).
You are suggesting to change the fundamental design philosophy (separate bonuses for trade and non-trade, with non-trade getting a compensation in higher loot drops), for what, to give some players who can’t decide which way they want to play a more convenient way to not be able to decide which way they want to play?
CoF isnt SSF u can still party up as well as gift items.
SSF is just that solo self found thats not CoF
Said before and ill say it again. There are better ways to prevent faction swapping WITHOUT having to lose equipped gear progression.
Having to grind for all ur faction tagged items again after u spent 100s of hours crafting yet alone have to rank up the other. Faction. And farming this up is bad no matter how u spin this
This is a very bad restriction to have for swapping. Theres better ways to prevent this. Your equipped gear progression should never be something u lose
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So, first of all the promised Link to my thread where I’ve put everything into order and want to expand on it:
So you’re fine with missing affixes, missing search functionality, missing priority-search functions, bad overview through choosing the ‘detail’ view rather then the ‘list’ view first (or providing customization options to make it comfortable how you wan), the mess of searching for the right traders, missing price-checking, missing re-list option and all the other stuff there?
Yeah, it functions. Much like a loudly grinding, smoking 3-wheeled car which is lopsided. It ‘works’… but definitely does not what a modern car should be expected to do at all.
So ur saying to gate keep players that want to push as far as they can with out trading then switch to MG to finish off there build.
Theres zero reason to gate keep these players. Plenty of players push as far as they can in SSF in poe as a challenge then finish off there builds in trading. Difference in LE is u cant trade any drops from cof.
U can even do thisin diablo 2 then start trading when ur not getting drops to improve ur build
These players are alreadt being gate kept by the swapping penalty i shouldnt be losing equipped gear i spent time geting and crafting up
Whole point of factions is a play style of how u prefer getting ur loot. And some as i said enjoy pushing as far as they can with out trading
to then switch when they arent making gear progress
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