My point was that you can’t have a go at someone for making a claim without any accompanying statistics then … make a claim without any accompanying statistics. We have a word for that.
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It’s a fair criticism to be sure. My objection wasn’t that the argument was made without statistics, but rather that to my knowledge no statistics support the position. I see it argued all the time (see Kulze) but no one has ever shown me a data point supporting its validity.
@Kulze, you have a lot of text there espousing your opinion, which there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m not going to respond to every point you made, it’d take too long. Most of what you write is just your opinion, and while you refer to studies and talk of live service games;
a) Most of the studying you are talking about are referring to how to make a better skinner box, which isn’t a Desirable trait in a game even if it’s effective
b) This isn’t a live service game with a monthly fee associated with it. Even if they could milk folks for every hour possible (which is what you seem to be advocating) there’s no benefit to doing so.
Now BotD was obviously the wrong example to say the least, it’s been a while and I didn’t look up the runewords first. Silence would be a better example. BotD I’ve crafted it, and while it didn’t take years, it certainly took months. Lots of countess runs to say the least.
Which it’s fine if there’s some items like that, which are extremely rare and difficult to come by. I’m not saying LP4 items should be common or anything like that. But there’s a Huge difference between ‘there are items which are not available easily’ and ‘the systems are designed to prevent you from obtaining the gear you are seeking since we fear the moment you have it you’ll quit’, which is what folks seem to be advocating for and which I oppose.
LP0 Uniques have been repeatedly compared to non-optimal versions of BiS items, but that isn’t a fair comparison. After all, non-optimal versions of BiS items typically include all of their affixes, just not perfect versions of them. A Runeword with a suboptimal roll is akin to a LP4 Unique with poor inherents more than it’s equivalent to a LP0 Unique.
And that’s exactly the issue - a Harbinger of Stars is interesting, a “build around” item potentially. But no matter how interesting it may be, it’s not just possible but likely that a 100%+ Increased Damage / Crit Avoidance / Resist belt is just objectively better than the LP0 version, and depending on the gear you may find yourself unable to Afford to use them. My Sorc at one point had 6 slots filled with uniques, they’re admittedly nice for levelling. Currently he just has one, Rares outclassed them all, and we’re not even talking about Exalteds with Sealed Affixes.
To be clear about what I would want to see to significantly lower the time investment to even get something Close to BIS gear for a given build (which is indeed what I would propose), I would want to see Legendaries able to be smashed to create some kind of “legendary essence” which can then be used when crafting future legendaries to select the affixes imbued rather than having them randomly selected. This allows a LP2 Unique to be the thing you actually want it to be after 2 or 3 attempts (depending on how you structure it) and means you know you’re making progress towards it, rather than someone taking on average 6 attempts per piece of gear, potentially much more, without any actual progress getting made in the interim.
Even while crafting the BotD I knew I was getting progress; it wasn’t just “kill Mephisto a million times and hope for the best”, I was constantly cubing up Ums and Mals and Ists dropped into higher runes with a guarantee I’d get there eventually.
And as far as the rest of it, if I’ve crafted even halfway BIS gear (LP2 Uniques or Sealed Affix Exalteds, depending on the slot) and am moving on, which is an entirely valid choice, after less than 100 hours? You say there’s only roughly 15 builds. But Druid alone, you’ve got pure Werebear, pure Spriggan, pure Swarmblade, Werebear / Human, Werebear / Spriggan, Werebear / Swarmblade, etc. etc. etc. And a “standard” Werebear / Spriggan is entirely different from one using Roots of Vithrasil and Silvafrond, where they’re self-rooted in Spriggan form and act like a turret, teleporting to vines or changing back into Werebear to move. And a pure Werebear going physical is entirely different from one going Lightning.
There are probably 15 interesting builds to try for Druid alone. Maybe more. Across all 15 masteries, there are hundreds. And sure, they’ll often use overlapping items. But because they have different stat priorities and needs, a LP2 Silvafrond geared up for that turret Werebear / Spriggan is likely to have totally different affixes attached than a LP2 Silvafrond for a highly mobile cold maelstrom stacking Spriggan / Swarmblade.
So I pretty wildly disagree with the idea that if someone can get the items to get even a LP2 imperfect inherents imperfect affix rolls version of the BIS gear for their build in less than 100 hours they would “play out” every build in the game in under 1000 hours.
And even if that were true, where’s the chase? For folks who are serious about their build, and want it to be perfect, we’re not discussing increasing the drop rate of LP4s here. Getting a perfect inherent LP4, how many hours will that take? Times the number of gear slots, and you’re telling me that because someone can explore a build “as it’s meant to be” in a relatively short time, the true gearhead like you who is only playing for the next upgrade won’t have a better version of that gear to pursue? I don’t buy it.
And finally, let me say this - the game doesn’t make money off folks playing 10,000 hours. It makes money off of sales (mostly to casuals as we both agree), including sales of additional content; expansions, cosmetics, you name it. The ideal for a game like this is that when players leave, they do so with a good taste in their mouth, so that when they release something else folks can buy, they go back for more.
Which is more likely to leave a positive taste in someone’s mouth?
- The player who got their version of BIS items for a build, didn’t feel like making a different character, didn’t feel like grinding for “perfection”, and didn’t feel like doing boss runs, arena runs, or other endgame content anymore, where the game is “played out”?
- The player who “bricked” their 7th LP2 unique in a row for a single build and rage quit, being unable to obtain the items they felt they needed for their build?
Folks feeling like they are ‘done’ with a game is fine. They’ll come back when there’s more to do. Folks hating the game for, in their eyes, being obnoxiously punishing to obtain the desired character state is less fine. I can probably find 100 threads complaining of things to the effect of the latter in this game. No one is asking for perfect things to be common or for there to be no “chase” items, at least that I’ve seen. But many folks are asking for it to be easier, and yes, have a lower time investment (and just as importantly a more consistent one) to be able to actually Use the build they want to use, and have it not feel like it’s totally gimped because the items they’re using are worse than the generic exalteds they smashed while trying to get the gear they were after.
Runewords don’t really equate to uniques in LE. The only thing that is similar is PoE. A 0LP unique is the same as a regular max-link unique in PoE. A 4LP unique is the same as a max-link/double corrupt/max quality/enchanted unique. And I’m not even talking about perfect rolls.
In either of those cases, you can expect to see a handful in each cycle. Although, to be fair, it’s actually easier to get a 4LP BiS in LE. You just need the 4LP and the exalt and you are guaranteed to get the desired outcome. In PoE you need to hit max quality, then hit the proper enchant, then hit the proper double corrupt.
D2 doesn’t really equate because you don’t have improved versions of the same thing. In fact, until LE came up with the legendary system, PoE was the only ARPG (that I’m aware of) that did this.
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As clearly demonstrated by D3, both will leave a negative impression on different types of players.
As I said before, if you lower the difficulty for getting BiS gear, the ones that are happy with the grind will leave. If you maintain the difficulty, the rage quitters will leave.
Wherever you draw the difficulty line in getting gear, players will leave. So it’s up to EHG to decide which players they want to stay.
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Yes, and nonetheless it’s the ‘101’ of marketing. And without that all you do is throw stones into the dark and hope it hits something to let you know there’s even something there.
LE was made by avid diablo-clone players for avid diablo-clone players. They weren’t happy with the games out and hence made their own version of it.
It’s not hard to provide a proper product to a specific target audience when you’re the dev and also the same target audience at the same time. Don’t need much research there to know what you want after all… you’re part of the group.
Monetization model is nothing important for the whole topic.
So yes, LE stays afloat through shelf-price + upcoming microtransactions instead of monthly fees.
It’s still a live-service game, no matter how much it’s said otherwise.
Hence to function it needs to work inside the confines of a live-action game. Try to treat it as a single-player game or a co-op game and you’re out of business in a year, simple as that.
Why? Servers cost money. Personal to support the hardware costs money. Coding needs personal and network code is a ‘fucking bitch’ to say it mildly and hence needs a lot of money.
So overall… a live-service game costs a shit-ton more money then a equivalent Single-Player Game does. No way around it.
So, to take that into perspective.
The first argument is not true. Just because runewords work that way doesn’t mean that everything needs to be a direct copy.
A ‘non-optimal’ BiS offers less power then a ‘optimal BiS’ item. The base stays the same. Hence if you drop the best baseline item in D2, all affixes there the highest rolls, the sockets at 6, ethereal even to increase the possible roll-range… and then you slap random runes without rhyme and reason inside it’s garbage.
That’s the equivalency of LP, your base item is great but you didn’t get the best out of it.
The equivalency of a ‘bad roll’ for a runeword is when you get a perfect item and the LP chance picks one of the less desirable affixes.
That’s a proper equivalency.
So no, it functions similar, your base item is better then before in 100% of the cases unless you use a sub-optimal exalted item.
Yes, that’s the power disparity between high and low outcomes simply.
A ‘decent’ item with a good runeword that has fantastic rolls is still utterly inferior to a great base item with mediocre or bad rolls.
So it’s similar to LP once more. Every factor plays into it, the base (unique item) provides the majority of the power level. The LP provides the potential and the exalted item provides the possible rolls. You have a lot more agency over that system then D2’s runeword system has actually since you have full control over each of those aspects.
Got a 4 LP item? Good! Now onward to a ridiculous exalted item! The outcome is 100% guaranteed, no low-roll.
3 LP? A fantastic outcome guaranteed! Far stronger then any item in the game could otherwise ever be.
2 LP? Fantastic top-tier item even with sub-optimal rolls.
1 LP? You should get the right roll onto it to make it able to content with anything above.
That’s the variance there.
The +1 Meteor alone is an upside that a generic affix usually has a hard time to make up for.
Also a 1 LP version is very easy to get (common unique), a 2 LP version also very easy… hence ‘high value’ starts at a 3 LP version, since it’s common.
So yes, that item is fantastic in the current state for a meteor build.
I’ll gladly take it over any perfected exalted item by the time it has 2 LP, and a perfected exalted item? That’s hard to get, you’ll see it much much later. Base farming simply like in D2.
So a fairly bad example.
Yes, common uniques without LP are less viable then a rare (not even exalted) well rolled item.
A 2 LP version of the same item will be likely to provide more upsides - and is fairly common - when you try to slap even a sub-optimal affix collection on that as long as 2 ‘useful’ ones for your build happen to land on it. For chest/helmet at least 1 rare affix at T5 in the end. Which is fairly easy to achieve.
And that’s not even talking about BiS uniques which outperform them by miles with 1 LP often.
Only possible with a ‘fail state’ for it, unless you want the LP-rate to drop significantly. Progression speed already is extreme in comparison to competition. That would solely make it faster.
Don’t get me wrong, any sort of RNG system in my eyes should’ve a deterministic slow-paced system at the side to make sure to cut off extreme cases of ‘unlucky’ at the cost of less overall progression rate.
You just have to take that into consideration and be ‘fine’ with it first, there is no argument to be made to create something easing things ‘on top’ of already existing things when they’re already baseline too quick to achieve.
The issue is the RNG, take the RNG out to a degree for a hit in overall speed and it becomes fine.
15 specs, not builds. Currently the only hindrance for having 1 spec for all builds are blessings. Blessing will be itemized in the future though and hence fall away.
This way you can store all gear for all possible builds on 1 character and respec with miniscule time-loss (10 minutes roughly) to achieve the build as far as you have ever taken it.
That’s not ‘BiS’ on how you talked about though.
If 2 LP items aren’t the issue (which is absolutely an achievable goal, even for boss-drops) then what’s the issue actually existing?
Is the cut-off line 2 LP rare boss uniques with the perfect affixes? Below? Above?
For now I imagined it to be above as a ‘BiS’, which is a notion that’s nonsensical because it inherently is built in that range to enforce high time investment.
If it’s below… then it’s also nonsensical since we have that already, but the direction can change according to circumstances.
3 LP
4 LP
Perfect rolled exalted item
Double exalted item
I know, not the perfect things, very RNG heavy… but a given with the current amount of content as it doesn’t allow for vastly more complexity. For that we would need more in-game content available and more crafting options, hence specialized bases which are rare, extra options to improve exalted items. Alternate bases like the influences in PoE, mechanics for changing unique items into alternate versions with different stats (to allow a higher variety of builds) or anything of the sorts.
We don’t have that… yet. If we have that it becomes a thing, until then not though.
Common unique? Rare unique? Boss rare unique?
LP 4 is fairly decent to get, every 100 hours of play-time in CoF you’ll likely see one at higher corruptions, often even less.
The exalted for it? A bit harder, would say 250 hours for a fantastic fitting one with the right outcomes, solely singular T7 with all the right affixes, not chest/helmet slot.
A rare unique? LP 3 is the limit there usually in that time.
rare boss unique? LP 2 in that time, LP 3 is a ‘wow’ item, hopefully addressed with CoF adjustments in 1.1 as boss-drops seem to be an oversight.
Given the numbers? Around 10000 hours for a single character. Which is a high number. Lower then in PoE definitely (as there’s BiS items which nobody managed to even craft yet because of the sheer cost of them).
I’m talking about a 4 LP item with a 4 LP exalted disregarding rolls as a large portion of uniques have a low roll range.
The high roll-range ones are equivalent to a perfect ‘ventor’s gamble’ in PoE, good luck! Nobody got one to date.
Also take into consideration how many people already have such an item in their storage, now.
We just don’t see them as we have no ‘item copy’ function like the Mirror of Kalandra in PoE. I guarantee though that there’s a few ‘god-tier’ items out for nigh every single unique already.
It does, microtransactions.
It’s not implemented yet.
It’s coming.
They announced it.
It’s the basis of a live-service game after initial shelf-price sales to keep the business even running.
So yes, they do. The longer someone invests time into a product the more likely they are to also invest money. It’s a direct correlation which is upheld in every business sector.
As you named it ‘cosmetics’… which are not ‘content’ but ‘vanity’.
And people love ‘vanity’.
1 leaves a better taste in you as a singular individual. You can talk about this ‘great game’ that was out for a year before closing shop to everyone in 5 years.
2 for the option to alleviate those issues with adjustments (as mentioned above) in the future while people can actually get into the game, play it and enjoy the core-style of it because ‘there’s still something to do left’.
So pick your choice, those are the presented ones from your side.
If it still exists, sure.
How to make sure it exists though if revenue decreases because retention-time is low which directly corelates with revenue?
You can also find a ridiculously huge threat complaining about the lack of gender-choice in this same forum, which has had more traction then any of those mentioned topics.
So by that notion does that mean it would make more sense to drop everything the devs do and focus on that first and foremost?
Is it something helping the longevity of the game or something which just eases miniscule aspects which have nothing to do with the gameplay itself?
Are those things more important?
I would say if we go by ‘how many people have mentioned it’ then the direction of game development will go utterly awry.
Mechanics are the alpha and the omega of a mechanical game like LE. Neither are graphics, nor vanity, nor story, nor… well… anything else besides the pure mechanical aspects first and foremost.
So, mechanical aspects are amount of content, balancing, progression design. Your topic is the third.
Content is currently priority 1, balancing priority 2 and progression design priority 3 since it ‘functions’ with hiccups but at least functions.
So yes, as mentioned… it needs to be looked over but not at the cost of other things important. As mentioned, alleviating RNG issues is not a problem, actually good. But not the main reason for longevity of the product in the current state.
So back to the factions… that is a major longevity issue.
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I have a big problem with making it a permanent thing as
the 24h peak today was 4,411 players from wich I would guess at least 3/4 are COF!
MG is player count dependent so mid to high rarity items just aren’t on the market anymore, or only the ones way overpriced remain.
Other than this, even selling low rarity items(like T7s) is really slow or they just don’t sell at all because the players who would buy them are the ones excited to make new characters and their numbers are even lower.
Being MG right now is almost like being factionless
Now, allowing faction swapping I think would make most players switch to COF in these conditions.
Idk if all players being in the same faction is a good thing, that’s why I proposed instead to give all player acces to both(after they grind the ranks separately) through:
- making items dropped as COF, but NOT affected by prophecies and/or rank benefits, tradeable
- commune favor well from wich you can choose to spend it on either faction in any share you want (100/0, 30/70, 55/45 etc)
If this really is deemed as “double dipping” (even though everything is still based on favor/time investment and the loot dropped has nothing to do with the faction benefits) or unacceptable for purists who want everybody to be locked from trading (even though the people that would also use MG would spend favor for it and have less remaining for prophecies), then I guess all players being able to transfer to COF after the middle point of a cycle is okay.
Masteries were brought up as an example of a permanent choice, but getting another level 100 with all passive points, idol slots and higher blessings takes 15-25 hours. A far cry from the 500+ hours put into my character’s gear so it’s not a punishment on the same scale.
Welp, if it doesn’t get changed, Im gonna get the gold blessing and spend the gold dropped from mobs in Lightless Arbor 
Absolutely true!
But for that to take into consideration we need to know the reasons it happens.
I would say there’s 3 major points.
- There’s not enough content in the game, you’re simply ‘done’ with what’s provided fairly quickly, even a casual can easily finish everything LE has to offer in a month… but they’re supposed to be able to stay 3 months with their casual time-investment. That’s 2/3rd too low.
- Then we have the accumulated MG problems. People quitting out early of it because they can’t access the gear they need. Quitting the game as mentioned above and also simply quitting the faction since their turnover for items is becoming less and less.
- And last but not least… with the lowering numbers of people using MG the influx of new high-end gear can’t stay up to achieve a market equilibrium of some kind where value and supply are close to the exact point they actually are, keeping a disparity there. Which devolves the whole system back to basically playing solo as you mentioned.
That’s important for the suggestions after all:
No, too many players in CoF would be the death of the market simply. All in MG wouldn’t be an issue, but that doesn’t happen anyway.
If you combine the system the whole thing tips over and becomes simply ‘more easy’ which isn’t good. Proper distinctions need to be there. The specific downsides (-30% loot compared to 0.9 for MG, no trading for CoF) are there specifically so to make their respective upsides even function.
So that’s simply not a viable voice without severe changes overall.
Hence 1) is a double-dipping mechanic which denies the baseline thought-process of the downsides.
And 2) Makes the distinctions between the factions useless. Outside of a 1-time investment you get the benefits of both at the same time to a degree. That’s once again… double-dipping.
As mentioned often double-dipping isn’t allowed to happen in any manner period. So the moment it happens it needs to be adjusted until the system doesn’t allow that anymore. In the case of your solution we’re talking about a further reduction of loot by 40-60% for everyone to keep the game functioning.
And yes, I wrote that number in mind with your fairly benign bits of suggestions in mind, we would see even higher reductions if merging them in more aspects would be suggested.
Yes, it is. You don’t get a downside from CoF anymore, hence you double-tip into the sole meaningful benefit of MG, which is ‘items can be traded’, hence why items dropped while in CoF are never able to be traded. Gold is the limiting factor for buying power, not favor, if you can create large amounts of gold in CoF then it gets far more benefits then MG does. Which is bad.
Which also goes to the favor aspect. If you’re in MG you suddenly can store up favor for prophecies… which plainly spoken would be dumb. Why would anyone ever be in MG with more then a single character or a fully decked out character?
When I can use your second argument I would immediately leave only a single character in MG, farm up solely through CoF and then regularly sell surplus through MG. This would give me assets to then buy a full outfit for a new character without any effort, basically skipping the whole progression for free of a full-scaled finished build without putting extra effort in compared to now. The cost for listing the high-value items is basically non-existent.
That’s fairly massive.
100 takes around 40 hours of play-time.
Then we’re talking about mediocre end-game gear for quite a large portion of builds.
And that takes into consideration making full usage of either CoF or MG.
In your suggestions you put in those 40 hours and after 20 more while you upgrade as normal you get a free 30-40 hours of effort in gear presented for free (since you would use CoF and that scales in usability with higher corruption, more fitting prophecies.)
That’s a net bonus, it has nothing to do with adjustments and reworking, it’s just ‘giving us more then we have now’ and that’s already beyond senseless with the progression rate in LE through low amounts of content.
Which is why I’m generally pushing for the reworks that have meaning. Making MG useful at any stage of the game, not broken like early on and non-functional right after. Also making CoF’s small pit-falls sorted out.
Then it functions.
Currently it does not for many reasons, mostly MG reasons.
I don’t know why you’re bothering to lie when all I have to do is quote your own words back to you to disprove it.
You want to be able to run CoF and keep the gear you gained - which you gained through the advantages of CoF - when you switch to MG to finish off your character. All you actually want is to be able to enjoy the benefits of both factions without having to suffer any of the drawbacks. You literally said so yourself.
Which is a factually wrong statement.
You can’t benefit from both benefits at the same time which is the whole point.
Choosing the right play-style you enjoy at any time on the other hand is a part of player agency.
Also the basis of the argument only takes into consideration the current utterly broken state without a singular though on fixing the existing issues at which the faction-switching itself would offer no down- or upsides but be a simple choice of play-style.
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No what u have said i want is purely false.
U already cant benefit from both factions
Agreed, but the solution to this doesn’t have to be “this can’t be done because of these reasons”.
It can also be “these things would also have to be done togheter so that there is no abusable mechanics” like : adjusting favor cost per listed item*(so that you actually get less prophecies)*, using favor as the main MG currency (so that you can’t farm gold in COF),
My point was that it can be way easier to max all non gear related progression on a new character, after you have already made one because of twink items and player experince , while gear can take up to hundreds of hours to make again.
Also how about the “punishing” aspect of faction changing would be limiting it thourgh time like you could swap factions only 7 days after your last swap, instead of the current ones(unequipable gear etc…)
Absolutely!
But as mentioned, combining them means adjusting the prices vastly.
This means your common prophecy will be in the hallmark of 10k+ rather then the current prices.
Baseline drop-rate of items would need to be reduced nonetheless, and to a vast degree.
I think you don’t quite understand the sheer power of a combination of both systems in such a way.
That’s one option definitely, but one I wouldn’t enjoy to see at all.
It treats players differently depending on real-life time after all. People which play little have basically free choice to switch around. People who play a ton will have to wait.
Solutions which solely rely on in-game situations are what I would personally heavily prefer.
Hence once more, the whole situation solves itself by removing Gold as the currency used in MG + scaling favor costs for increasing prices.
No gold-usage means no double-dipping, scaling favor costs means you need to invest the relevant amount of time into the faction itself to profit from it.
I’ve actually put the MG+CoF discussion into a overview in a mega-post here:
It has the whole list of issues people mentioned - and are reasonable - in it + one example-solution which I’ve picked for the reason of it being the one upholding ‘free market values’ the most. Hence making sure demand/supply is not affected which causes prices to reach a natural equilibrium over a short amount of time.
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