MG and CoF progression is boring

Feedback and Suggestions
21

That’s already in the game data though, it’s broadly the reroll chance. But the game (& devs) don’t expose that to players anywhere so if you just started using it to determine when a given unique could be bought by a player it’s going to confuse them. One could just chuck that in the item card (multiply it by 100 & call it item power or something), which would be easy, then allow uniques in a particular bracket be buyable at rank 1, a higher bracket are buyable at rank 2, etc.

Only if you play legacy. If you play cycle you have to do it all again next season, which is rather the point.

It’s not necessarily always a “sense of entitlement”. Kulze was able to talk to me about a different way of doing it in a logical polite manner, neither of which is what one would usually think belong to someone with a sense of entitlement.

22

Buying an item costs Favour. Every Favour you spend gives 2 rep.

In addition, you do not need to sell an item to earn rep, you only need to list it (which costs Favour and thus earns rep). So you can list/unlist a single item all day long to convert all your favour to rep instantly. Since endgame items can cost thousands of favour to list, you only need to list/unlist a couple of times to convert dozens of thousands of favour to rep.

I walked into MG, levelled to 3 in under an hour then promptly bought a bunch of chase uniques I was missing to complete various Alts. This included 3 Twisted Hearts, 2 Heart of the Mountain, a Falconer Talons Bow with decent numbers and a Wraithlord Helm. Total bill was under 300k. Can CoF do that? I’ve been chasing Twisted Hearts forever.

I’ve said it before, MG is best if you have a mountain of gold and/or play Legacy.

1 Like
23

Exactly that, the whole issue would be solved this way. Just don’t tell players the exact weighting for bases, affixes and uniques so they can’t properly compare, not knowing the math behind deciding on power level and it’s fine. All still hidden and people can go along on their day and have a functional market system at least.

Well… starting 1.1 we’ll see how they use their cycles. Currently it’s identical in function so I’m playing Legacy, because… why not?
If they go with the PoE method of locking people out on Legacy from the new mechanic I’ll be fairly pissed since I’m forced to re-start from the beginning each time to experience it or wait for a whole cycle. I hate that in PoE and besides the trading system there it made me quit the game to move to LE, so it would be a shame to do that in my eyes at least.

If it’s solely for the ‘economy’ then that falls flat. No users of MG means no economy means no meaning. That solely leaves people using it for the competition which renews, some oddballs actually using a broken mechanic (you do you after all) and those which don’t want to have access to their old stuff. It’ll be a huge detriment for the game for sure.

The argument of OP is that the later levels are either so far off that they become fairly useless (MG) or aren’t worth putting the effort into to achieve (I imagine CoF is meant there).

While I don’t agree with the part of CoF since Rank 8 is ‘25% of rares become exalted’ which is… a massive upgrade and Rank 10 is ‘Items from prophecies are duplicated’ which is utterly and insanely broken without question it’s nonetheless a viable point.
Why if I think those 2 ranks are fine?
Because Rank 9 is utterly and absolutely worthless, leaving a hefty cap for reputation grind. From 7 to 8 you need 500k rep. That’s 125k favor in the best of cases (2 for acquisition, 2 for spending outside of re-rolls if I got it right, not 100% sure).

It’s nonetheless a viable notion and not ‘entitled’. So get off your high horse and speak to people at the same height.

I thought so as well. Tested it… nope.
Which might be an oversight.

And I’m talking about buying items from others, not listing my own. Also listing/unlisting is a very dumb thing to do, loosing potential gold which is needed to expand your stash and buy valuable items.
A smarter option is to list a boatload of idols you don’t need and put them all in for 20-30k. They get sold sloooowly.

The exact issue the system has, putting the right items in the right place.
Hence there’s a problem.

Some items are achievable a lot earlier then supposed to, others seem impossible to gain for people in a cyclic system lasting probably 3 months.
And yes, CoF does exactly that, law of big numbers. You go to the Prophecies after obtaining 20-30k favor, slap em all onto the base type you want for uniques and go to those tasks. Doesn’t take long. And then it offers something which MG doesn’t: Items with LP… cause you can’t buy em in any reasonable capacity.
For Twisted Heart for example pick Relics which trigger on killing the Emperor of corpses. The same trick can be used for Shades and his ring as an example, if you need higher LP then the usual ‘1’.

Yeah, but it’s so underwhelming since very few people use it. You have nigh 0 chance to acquire more rare items with 3 LP reliably, they’re bought out immediately from those which can access them… because the supply and demand chain is completely screwed.

You get loads of money from putting low favor but high return items inside the market, rake in millions of gold this way and hence are able to afford every single item anyone might put up… because they aren’t put up for more then 10-20 mil for the really expensive ones currently, or the others are already gone.

So you have this suply/demand issue here. MG doesn’t drop many uniques, meaning LP is rare, but since you can’t buy LP items in the first place without tens of hours of intensive grinding non-stop people give up before coming to that point, hence the influx stops before the really good ones are dropping, the people have less reason to stay in MG in the first place since it can’t provide them with further upgrades and CoF suddenly looks around the corner with a shit-eating grin and beckons them over to its side.

And well… even if you chose CoF you can still trade, it’s a hassle but you can through the group mechanics.

The only reason currently to pick MG after coming far enough along in the game is to acquire more gold to afford more tabs. That’s it, otherwise it’s a waste of time outside of pulling secondary characters up… and even then CoF in the later stages shines a lot better since you have so endlessly many uniques, sets and exalted items that a fitting one for every stage of the game will be there.

To give you a benchmark of how much better CoF is in terms of item drops:
In a single map with tons of rares I drop between 10-20 exalted items when using MG
With CoF I need to change my loot filter as I get over 100, and I don’t even have the 25% upgrade chance from rares yet, which will surely push it to 150-200 per similar map.

1 Like
24

I am level 7 and what I’ve mostly done is buy.

But I’ll check next time I am there.

But shortage of items? Heck no. I can see a ton of items with 3LP that I absolutely want to buy NOW but I can’t because I lack the rep. Simply tons. All my 20 Alts are going to hit the moon once I am level 9+ and get spending. All hand-picked, exactly what I need, plenty LP in sight.

Yes, I have a LOT of gold. I only play legacy, which is why I said MG was for legacy.

Also not sure if you know this, but a large number of the awesome items players have collected pre-1.0 that were sitting in 50+ stash tabs of top bling are tradeable in MG. That’s 3000 hours worth of items I personally had, many of which are chase and that I was immediately able to list/sell in MG. So MG in legacy has plenty of supply for that reason.

Not sure why it isn’t all items I had from pre-1.0 that were tradeable - or even none of them (which is what I expected). For some reason it is “some” of them. (I am talking hundreds of top tier items I had been saving for years). Cant tell what the pattern is or what makes some tradeable and some not.

25

I am level 7 MG and it wasn’t 10 hours of intensive grinding by any means. 10 hours of playing the game normally? Yep, sure, and also visiting the Bazaar every couple of hours, on spec. It was really no effort at all to hit level 7. I would have played those 10 hours anyway.

And I hoovered up a ton of really nice itesm on the way. Cheap (like 20k) Twisted Hearts with nice rolls, chase stuff like that. I filled out all my 2x1 idols with multiple 5% health and 16+ resist; and 1x2 idols with +3 vitality and high resist, etc. Cost almost nothing but a little time.

Didn’t feel like a grind at all, unless you count the very act of running monos a grind. In fact it was a pleasure and I improved my overall inventory massively, hand-picking nice stuff and filling gaps (for 20 Alts lol - still a lot of work to do).

26

I mean, over time in legacy the market will probably fill up, so that’s a thing to look out for.
I shortly tested out both, CoF and MG at the beginning and though ‘Yeah, interesting concepts’ before I stuck with MG.

The first absolutely major and awful mechanics attached to both factions:
You loose the ability to use the items you personally own from the other faction. Whoever thought this was a grand idea needs to get back to the drawing board and throw that train of thought right out the window, crumble up every piece of paper and delete every file related to it.
From a player’s perspective it’s ‘I wanna try out something else’ and then be punished by taking away all the nice stuff they’ve worked their ass off in acquiring. So Factions are a permanent commitment with no way around it. In CoF your best items will most likely have dropped from the faction. In MG you’ll likely have bought some items for yourself by then. So you’re stuck, permanently.

It’s the actual dumbest way to handle this stuff which could’ve been imagined. Access to your personally owned items should under no circumstances EVER be hindered.

So, despite that I decided to switch back to CoF after getting to tier 7 so I can compare the experience overall, going to Tier 7 there as well.

CoF provided me with over 10 LP 3 items on the road to that. I dropped up to 18 uniques when killing some of the bosses, in-between I have sudden unique and exalt explosions as well.
From picking up every exalted item and sorting out afterwards I had to move over to solely taking T7 or double exalted items to even be able to store them in my inventory at times. I get around double the amount of idols, many I don’t even have a use for since I got so many multiples of % health and flat health ones… which are the most prevalent ones to be used, EHP is after all king when not using ward.

Which also brought me to my second complaint in terms of changing factions. So… you loose your favor, right? Which in itself offers the question of ‘Why?’ when we’re already locked out of using the items from before. Makes no sense from the mechanic’s standpoint.
You worked for it, so you should damn well keep them when switching around.

As for not being tradeable… this system makes utterly no sense. It’s ‘some’ items from pre 1.0, not all. This includes all sorts of categories as well. The same goes for items acquired while using CoF… which also makes no sense if it’s not a faction drop. So a good chunk of the chase items are simply goners.

Also for availability… chase items, hence LP3+ ones (outside of the especially rare ones).
I just personally checked the availability. In Legacy there’s a total of 10 unique helmets listed.
Which brought me to test something out, are they actually server based? Listed where you were online last?
Turns out no. Listing are global, so that’s good.
Which means I have actually no idea which sort of sort of chase items you mean. The really rare ones are basically non-existent at all.

Let’s not speak about Legendaries, they are so rare on the market that they basically don’t exist. And I have actually no clue how to actively search for them either while blocking out other uniques of the same type!

That’s the position where the market is supposed to shine though. So despite it being Legacy… the availability of is isn’t there.
Might be in the future, but by now people probably are able to run 50-100 LP items through the Temporal Sanctum, so not seeing any listed is just… odd. Shows just how little the system is actually being used.

27

Ah, but if players don’t know why they can’t buy any given unique it’ll just feel like a random and arbitrary system. IMO, they need to know that item X is in bracket Y for which they need rank Z. They’ll bitch about why anyway but at least they’ll be complaining about the right thing.

Though it would say when the item is listed that you need to be rank Z I guess.

No we won’t, not yet. Currently season and standard get the same content because they still adding what they consider core content. They reserve the right to go PoE’s route but Mike also said that he likes everybody getting the same stuff and not splitting the playerbase. Who knows which way they’ll go…

Why? They can use it if they switch back? No regrinding nevessary.

They’re only permanent if you decide that they are. The game doesn’t force you to delete your faction gear when you change. You chuck it in your stash & that’s it.

No, it’s all pre-1.0 & any gear dropped while in CoF regardless of whether it came from the faction mechanic

Nothing is “server location based”. Even chat is mixed between season and standard.

1 Like
28

Don’t tell them the math behind it is what I meant. Display the ‘power level’ as a value though.

I would absolutely love that! Which is in my opinion the better route to take.
All the more important that trading is substantial and fixed though.

But it is. I immediately loose access to using my gear I bought. Why would I buy an item I’m not actively using?
So imagine after… let’s say a month of play-time. You’ll likely be outfitted with 30-50% of faction gear.
Now switch over… you have to take off 30-50% of your gear.

It forces you to commit permanently with no realistic chance to switch.

You basically restart your character from a vastly lower point.
With MG gear: Corruption 350
Without: barely managing 100

That is a really harsh punishment for switching play-style.

But some pre 1.0 is also tradeable. Not everything… but some things.
Which is why I say it makes no sense.
And that non-faction items dropped during playing CoF isn’t tradeable also makes no sense, it’s earned ‘normally’ after all and not through the faction mechanic.

1 Like
29

I am in complete agreement with this. The design is terrible. And I think this will be the long-term issue that kills the game if not addressed. Trading is the lifeblood of ARPGs. The very concept that I can get hold of an item (regardless of how I got it) and yet I cannot do whatever I want with it among my own Alts, is just unacceptable imo.

As I said before this is not the case for MG in legacy. Legendaries are for sale everywhere. Many of them will be perfect for me but I cannot buy them at my rank. But they are plentiful, I’ve searched a round a lot. As are uniques with 3 LP. Surprisingly so. My only concern is all the good ones get bought up before I get the rank high enough to buy them all up myself.

Yeah but did you NEED those? In my 10 hours to level 7 MG, I probably bought 50+ items thus far (138 million gold goes a long way) but I needed every single one of them for specific Alts. Just curious.

30

Rank 9 in CoF is amazing, it does unlock the 9th lense slot.
I think because this is not listed in the Rank Overview people feel like Rank 9 is bad, but its actually one of the best ranks.
Using both Greater Lenses to make prophecies more expensive but double the amount of fullfillments + loot is great already. But when you unlock the 3rd lens slot you can actually go ham with the bias lenses that target more specific pieces.

2 Likes
31

I don’t think it is intented to be fun. It’s just a system that needs to be there, but it do needs work. Especially MG.

32

This is incorrect. I have 50 stash tabs of items from pre-1.0 and a huge number of them are marked as tradeable and some I have already traded. I have been questioning this already, as I cannot see what the pattern is. For example I stock-piled a dozen Mad Ladles pre-1.0 and ALL of them are tradeable. Whereas I stock-piled a half dozen pre-1.0 Squirrel Hats and NONE of them are tradeable. No idea why.

33

I actually agree. These systems are on top of the regular gameplay loot and while there should be eciting moments, like some great prophecy loot explosion or some amazing item buy/sell. They should be functional and give benefits.

They don’t need to be overly fancy.

34

Well the devs certainly took all the fun out of trading with this implementation, that is for sure.

Whether it is important for trading to actually be fun in order to keep players interested is another question.

I think it is important. I played PoE much longer than I would otherwise have because of the power of trading. Spending the huge wealth I had earned over thousands of hours, on top notch things I really wanted felt great, very addictive and kept me playing the game for years more.

Trading has to be functional at least. This is borderline functional due to silly design, terrible UI design for searching and the rules for 10 levels of rep. They have basically made trading “a pain in the backside”. Note I do not mean the grind for favour, that was fine, I mean the actual act of trading.

The net result is awesome, I got exactly what I wanted. But the hoops to go through were just palaver.

And it certainly is not fun.

35

No, this is the same argument that people use to complain about respeccing skills. If you’re thinking about switching factions you can farm some gear to use while you acquire better gear in the new faction, you can use some previously farmed gear that doesn’t have a faction requirement, you can craft some replacement gear to use, you can play easier content until you’ve got better gear. You have plenty of options you’re just unwilling to use any of them. The devs/game isn’t forcing you to stay in 1 faction, the only thing you’re actually loosing is any unspent favour…

Yes, the devs don’t want “faction dancing” to be a thing.

What? I’ve not noticed anything.

Except the higher drop rates that CoF get.

Which is why it’s not a thing. Your alts can use the stuff you get if they have the relevant faction rep (which they will if they’re the correct faction). You not wanting to change factions is a you thing, not the devs forcing you to stay in a different faction.

FOMO sucks. But for once it’s not the devs doing it.

Do you at least understand the reason why they made the design choices they have? It feels like you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t call them silly.

And yet you’re perfectly happy to experience the pain in the arse that is PoE trade.

Yeah, it could be improved.

1 Like
36

I’ll argue that respecs for skills (which could definitely be improved, I have a whole topic about a suggestion which takes into consideration both sides for it) is in whole other sphere of effort then re-outfitting half your character.

One takes you 10 minutes end-game, the other can take tens of hours.

We’re at the tens of hour mark here, which simply is too much, no matter how you want to twist and turn it.
If rather then switching factions it seems more viable to create a fully new character then yes… it is a problem, and not a small one.

On the whole account, it’s not character locked after all. So if I store up 100k favor on my Necromancer and switch with my Falconer I loose access to the 100k favor with my Necromancer.

Once more, a clear problem as it follows no proper reason, it makes no sense why an account-shared value is lost in that case.

If it would be a character specific thing the whole argument would be a lot weaker, still there but by far not as pressing. Like this though it is.

And the reason being?
Generally any form of mechanic or idea put into a game follows a design-philosophy of some kind. Written down and fully fleshed out to present to the players or simply one in the mind of the lead-dev, doesn’t matter in that case.

But first of all, which design-philosophy would stand behind that decision in the first place?
And secondly, even if one is proclaimed that doesn’t mean that it’s a helpful or neutral one for the game, it can be a ‘wrong’ decision as well, being actively detrimental.
We can see that with the extremely strict adherence to trading fricition in PoE, it clearly hurts the game but GGG hasn’t put thought-effort into alleviating the problems while creating a system without friction.

Any sort of friction outside of challenge-based ones are to be avoided in a game and only used as a last resort option, period.

I had stored up 15 tabs of idols over time, around 40% could be traded, there’s surely some logic behind it but it seemed without rhyme or reason.

Those are tagged for CoF though, aren’t they?
And if not… why not? That’s the whole reason for the tagging system in the first place!

My opinion there is that any acquired item should always and under every single circumstance without exception be able to be used by me.
Not to be sold, not to be traded through the group mechanics and not anything else beyond personal usage.
That’s the start and finish of that argument.

The reasoning behind it is that for every single item I acquire I’ve personally invested some effort, big or small is of no meaning there, I did. If I put effort into it to acquire it, I should be able to freely use it as well.

Which brings me to the limitations by faction rank… they have no meaning. You keep your rank personally through all characters and hence there’s no limiting factor for personal use needed, ever.
For group trading it’s another topic, giving those items away. Plainly spoken those shouldn’t be allowed to be traded in any capacity. They are acquired through a system beyond the base systems of the game, a ‘on top’ mechanic going beyond the baseline.

Hence the removal of rank requisites and dis-allowing group-trade for those items is my suggestion.
Acquired a fantastic item your friends needs but did so through the bonus drops of CoF or bought it from MF? Tough luck!
Simple as that.

No, I try to really… really hard. But no, because the more I think about it the less sense some of them do.
Others on the other hand are fantastic!
You see… devs also aren’t 100% wrong and 100% right. That’s what a suggestion forum is for, to provide them with new takes on situations as well as alternative systems to make the part which is not optimally solved or outright a bad design-choice become one which is a good one.

It’s the main reason why I left the game for this one. So no from my perspective there. Just to make it clear.
There was no alternative before to PoE, now there is.
And don’t come up with D4 or Torchlight Infinite, both of them are a joke in comparison to PoE for many reasons. Mechanically. Enjoyable games still as I’m a fervent enjoyer of looter-style ARPGs but in comparison laughable.

37

No, only items that are acquired through the faction mechanic (the AH for MG, prophecies & rank-based effects for CoF) gain the faction tags.

Then you’d be able to benefit from both the CoF prophecies and general drop rate buffs while wearing MG bought gear. The devs don’t want this to happen.

38

Hence a ‘yes’ rather then a ‘no’.
All rank effects make the outcomes into faction bound items.
All prophecies make those items into faction bound items.
Everything else is baseline of the game anyway, same for MG and CoF.
So I don’t see where the ‘No’ comes from there.

That’s not the case though.
To acquire MG gear you need to have gold, in an established market highly demanded items become valuable and items without a demand become cheap. Access to it hence needs to be as unlimited as possible and limited by your financial capacity, which automatically adjusts to the willingness to spend, which automatically adjusts to how much people can afford at respective times of the game.

In the current situation MG simply is very affordable on the lower spectrum since everyone has access to it and the favor prices for buying aren’t adjusted to the rough items power level. A ‘garbage’ 1LP unique is not able to be accessed easily in the first place and even then costs humongous amounts of favor in comparison to how useful it will be… but that ‘humongous amount’ should be the baseline.
Realistically a character outfits 2-3 times fully throughout their lifetime. Hence favor prices need to be in line with that, also access to specific items need to be in line with that. Both cases aren’t supported yet since the system is not well balanced at all.

CoF on the other hand provides low amounts of gold compared to MG since the market isn’t functional to sustain my suggested system. Accessibility of items happens either too early or to late, depending on the type. Generalizing so heavily with the 10 ranks is a detriment to the complexity of the game for MG, works fine for CoF though.

So overall with the proper adjustments you would hence fail to acquire the necessary favor needed to obtain items from MG if you stay for extended times in CoF and on the other hand also won’t be able to acquire many prophecies or fulfill them if you stay too long in MF.
The transitions between those would be frictionless though, the outcome for the rewards limited by acquisition of favor primarily instead.

As mentioned, without proper balance obviously it won’t work, but that’s the fault of how it’s been implemented and not of the actual suggestion for how it should function.

39

I dont know the solution but MG is in a weird spot.

it has a lot of the pitfalls of PoE trade funny enough. Not exactly in the “omg market is owned by the mafia”

But more that the top 1% of players break it and have the time to exploit it.

Have you seen some of the MG gear? with LEtools you can actually look at the top ladder builds and their gear. None of them are CoF.

The MG gear they have looks cheated in, this was something I was looking at a week ago. 1 week into a few month cycle, and MG is already running 3/4 lp in every slot.

MG is factually broken if the market stays the way it is with the number of players it has.

But at the same time, for the slow casual players, the market is frustrating because they have to grind to even attempt to buy items that are even 10% as powerful as what the best players already have.

CoF progression makes sense, you play, you grind, you get extra gear that ramps up. it feels natural because CoF is all about self found progression. So grinding this extra system is natural.

MG it feels like you are fighting with a system to get to be able to use the feature you joined for.

Again, dont really know how to fix that feeling for slower players, but MG is definitely the way to go if you are planning to play for an extended period of time, CoF hits a wall quite quickly.

40

If it’s a rank reward like “double prophecy rewards”, yes, if it’s a general drop rate buff because of your CoF rank then no. Otherwise every single item that dropped as CoF would be tagged as CoF, which they aren’t.

This just dropped on a CoF-aligned character in a random mono. Not CoF tagged but “cannot be traded”.

It is totally the case, you’d have bought your gear on the AH with your MG-aligned character & put it on your CoF-aligned character to use with some juicy uber-prophecies. That is quite literally what you asked for here:

Here you’re talking about the earlier stages, I’m talking about the later stages where most characters will spend the majority of their time.

The top x% will always find & exploit any issues or “inefficiencies” in any market, real or imaginary, as not a member of that clique, the rest of us will not.

1 Like