Suggestion for the MG! I’m hoping this skeleton idea will help improve the system. We need more players to make it great again.
Problem: Not enough people interacting with MG system Duplicated gold still in circulation Interface annoying to interact with, a lot of time wasted when posting or searching for things.
Idea for a solution:
Introduce Low Stakes and High Stakes purchasing. Each will have separate vendors. (Does that mean 2 databases? I’m unsure).,
Goal of the solution:
To deal with over inflation of pricing by dribbling away gold slowly (but faster as is currently).,
Allow Market players to utilize the many stash tabs available (we dump all our extra items onto the MG).,
Make the system more pleasing and convenient to interact with, attracting more players to the Market.,
Low Stakes:
Will have predetermined gold amounts where players checkbox their amount of gold to price items, then shift+Right click to post. Minimum 100,000 gold, incrementing by 100k up to 1M,
NPC Interaction will be for purchasing items as well as posting items to sell, as it currently exists.,
All items currently posted on the Bazaar that are less than 100,000 are now set to 100,000,
All items that are more than X days old will be removed (Low stakes only).,
Many trades will happen here, with the minimum set high and the tax in place, we can expect total market gold to decrease slowly. The convenience of a simple Shift-Rightclick to upload items will have players picking up more items to sell off because of how past uploading would be. More players + more items.
High Stakes:
Items are set to 1,000,001 minimum; setting the gold price per item works as it currently exists when posting an item.,
NPC Interaction will be for purchasing only.,
Selling on High Stakes could adopt a POE style system, where players need their own stash space to hold items for sale. Stash tabs can be designated as Market tabs, with pricing done in the stash.,
The menu that players interact with at the NPC will search through stashes that are checked off as Market.,
If players have to invest in their own stash space, they may be less inclined to price items ridiculously. High Stakes trading may not become as common later on as gold runs out, but a benefit to this would be that players can interact with this from their stash. If you want to be aggressive with the gold duplication quashing, make the tax rate for High Stakes higher.
More then enough do, that’s not the core issue, that’s a symptom of bad design in how to interact with MG. It’s clunky, a total mess… so who would willingly go through that besides a few?
Also no issue, because of the low cap the amount of gold created that way isn’t a massive problem.
The first Cycle without a dupe you’ll see the same thing currently happening once more happening.
Why? Because the core MG systems are faulty and lead to massive inflation.
That is the first actual one.
MG needs major UI improvements on so… sooo many fronts.
Which is a aspect of the UI.
Price checking methods of a variety are mandatory but completely missing.
This is a massive detriment for the beginning of MG, 100k is not readily available for the average joe wanting to use that system.
Not a viable solution.
Minimum pricing based on a power scaling of items instead is a more viable one.
Auto adjustments with a new system are a necessity, yes. Unlike the former change.
Item removal is a bad thing. It created tedium to ensure they stay listed. This is a net-negative.
Instead of removing items the provision of a limite listing space is a better solution. This leaves space open for newcomers as long-term players have more valuable items to list and hence no space to list lower value ones.
Those adjustments make the differentiation between low-stakes and high-stakes already redundant.
This means a extra system which is not easy to implement for EHG, coding wise.
High risk of bugs, long-term investment, many resources used.
Not a optimal solution… but a solution, a clunky one.
Not really, MG has not much need for stash space plainly spoken. You can easily allocate 160 tabs solely for selling this way, which is a ridiculous amount.
Filling them with utter garbage and hoping for the best is a prime option this way, simply cycling out the first tab when all of them are filled up.
Gold won’t run out, we got solely a 15% tax. That’s laughable.
The game provides no gold sinks at all. The current limitation is mandated via favor to exist… and that’s a ridiculously underutilized - while also atrociously wrongly utlizied - for MG.
The numbers can be tweaked cycled vs legacy, don’t take everything so literal, this is only a skeleton. I came up with this idea with legacy in mind, the system itself needs to have a way to gold dump, maybe paying a listing fee of 30 days, the higher the price the higher the fee. Something. Vault runs aren’t an incentive to gold sink for merchant players, and the gold just keeps going up. 15% is less laughable when the minimum to post is high. Change the posting amounts in cycle, make it scale with the total gold of the server, there are ways. But making the system more convenient would be the first priority.
Gold dumping systems need to be outside of MG, otherwise not even a 75% tax would suffice.
Also the higher the tax the lower the top-price you can set since the gold-cap is in the way. Items are already at gold cap.
Which is why a alternative currency is so often said that it needs to be implemented, starting at ‘1’ rathern then ‘1000’, which provides 1000 times the potential price capacity of MG currently.
Which is not supposed to be on the seller but on the buyer. EHG wants player to fill up the market so other people can buy those things, hence them being available. If items aren’t available then the market by design fails.
So providing risk for the seller is not a viable option. Limitation is instead, enforcing that choices have been made relevant to value.
Agreed, they’re not even a incentive for CoF players, Lightless Arbour is really bad overall.
Not really, all it does is screw over the buyer. Because first off the fee is put onto the buyer anyway (how it should be) so the seller doesn’t care. It just means you’ll see tons of low-value garbage at exorbitant prices which are fitting for far better equipment instead. Who will buy that? And why?
Acquisition of the currency needs to stay in relation to the pricing on the market combined with the perceived value of the respective item.
So measures to change the perception of value are mandatory. If people can throw in 100 idols after playing an hour then that means the listing is a mess, which currently is the case.
And that’s expedited because EHG thought it was a smart idea to enforce access restrictions on the market and those can only be alleviated quicker by using up favor… which is worthless for gambling in most cases and hence people throw random listing in, flooding the market… solely for the off-chance that a bit of gold returns. And some even do that since it’s simply quicker and ‘someone might need it’ which leads to all those basically ‘0’ listings, the new minimum listing is laughable anyway.
Posting limitations, as mentioned, yes.
Scaling on total available gold is a really bad idea overall. Screws over newcomers even more then they are already. The suggestions are to improve MG, not make it worse, right?
Absolutely, especially since it’ll showcase the actual mistakes in it more clearly. Currently people dimple around providing suggestions since the mess of a setup and QoL in usage mask the actual ones, and there’s a lot.
So far all you’ve done is criticize without offering a single example solution. Unless the conversation is constructive the MG will never improve. At least I’ve offered something, I know it’s got holes like swiss cheese, that’s why I called it a skeleton idea.
For every quote, Change the idea, take it out, or add it another. That’s constructive.
My posts are nearly entirely pointing at the things which fit and those which wouldn’t and the alternatives?
Here you go again:
I mean… those bits aren’t that hard to overlook now, are they?
Yes, and what do you expect me hence to do?
Leave the flaws and just work with it?
Or would you rather have the solutions I and other people have for those exact flaws provided since 1.0 was released to make the system better?
I mean… I can pat you on the back and say ‘well done coming up with an idea which won’t be taken though’ and leave it at that if you’re more happy with it, EHG has read more then enough topics about MG hopefully by now to at least start to get an inkling, so it won’t hurt to do that at a single topic.
But is that what you wanna achieve?
Or would you rather have a discussion with the pros and cons leading towards improvements of systems ultimately?
Honestly, its easy to overlook a lot of what you said. So I apologize as I didn’t mean to offend. There’s a lot of unnecessarily complex language you’re bringing into something that I kept in simple terms.
As an example, I have no idea what this is talking about. The 1st sentence sounds like something from an economics paper, and I can’t see how it relates to what followed. There’s a lot of jargon in your post. Now that’s not to say I’m ignoring it, I actually read it all over 4-5 times already, and this is now eating up more attention than it was worth cause I just wanna get back to grinding.
I thought I would offer something that the developers could take or leave. I’m glad there are many other MG suggestions, and it’s nice to see greater minds than I are at work on this. LE is the only game that I play so I want it to succeed. However making the system too complex will implode it completely, so I’m trying to angle my suggestions to within the confines of the game as it is.
So I’m going to try and keep this short and to a point.
I love the idea, but realistically who is going to variably change the value of items on-the-go during a season?
Even if you limit space, we’re talking about over 500,000 pages of auctioned items, this has to start somewhere…
Alternative currency would be great, but EHG is firm on gold. I love the gold system too. Lets come up with ways to make it work.
If this was true, auction houses on MMOs wouldn’t work at all. A listing fee, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Hell no, by all means peel it apart. I’m just afraid that if everyone is coming up with radical ideas from way out in the left field, we’ll never see any of it implemented. Suggestions need to be simple and effective; within the confines of the game as it exists. EHG is an indie company, they may be growing but they aren’t about to revamp a whole system that took them a long time to implement.
Yeah, sorry, that’s on me. Never managed to shut that off when going into explanations.
Lemme rephrase it then:
If people get a item then it has value, how much is not clear. It’s based on if they need it or others need it.
The value of items on the market are based on how many people need it (demand) and how many can provide it (supply).
So that creates the perception.
So to change how much people perceive something is worth you need to change one of those things. Since we’re talking about the market it can only be done with things related to the market.
In our case it would be to change the possible supply.
If you - for example - limit players to listing 100 items then they can’t do the same as I did anymore, which is putting 7000+ items onto the bazaar.
So instead of only me providing those things you need 70 players instead.
If you do that it means people playing for a longer time - like me - won’t list items which are less valuable because they can’t. You don’t have the space.
So that means people not playing as long can list those instead since they don’t have expensive items yet anyway, and this way people buy from them rather then from me, allowing them to get the funds to buy from me further along then.
It keeps the market open and makes more transactions possible. More transactions means more taxation and that means less gold in circulation.
As for the favor part:
Having to advance MG with favor means people list items to do that, so they don’t list items which they want to sell but instead which they simply have ‘at hand’.
That clutters the market and makes actual pricing a mess.
So favour should only be used for buying, not for listing.
Also to even buy exalts you need a specific rank, what reason? Nobody knows since you can buy Uberroth uniques at Rank 3, which are stronger then near every exalted out there.
So that’s obviously a bad mechanic by itself, simply failed.
Yeah, if the player sees it as complex it’s bad.
But if the details working in the background are complex it’s fine.
Easy to use, hard to master are for a reason the most loved designs. You can always use it without major issues but dedicated people can ‘play’ the market by knowing exactly what they do. And since we can’t re-sell items anyway the dangerous things can’t be done by them anyway, so it’s not bad if they can get deeply into it either, wouldn’t make much difference.
The minimum one is fine if it’s done by EHG, based on acquisition rate.
So the more often a item generally drops, hence the easier it is to acquisition, the less power it tends to have.
Common uniques have a lower level.
High LP items a higher level.
exalted items with high total Tiers and rare Affixes have a high level.
EHG can make a formula deciding it in the background.
Everything beyond for pricing? That’s supply/demand anyway. If something is more sought after it becomes more expensive naturally.
That’s only to ensure items don’t get close to zero and people still need to put in effort to get em, rather then them being ‘freebies’ basically.
Yes, if EHG does this it needs to have 2 things happening:
The first is that listings only stay for a single cycle. At the end of the cycle they go into a specific tab solely for those items. You can’t list items until you empty it fully (so people can’t use it as permanent storage space).
The second is that it has to be implemented at the start of a new Cycle. In the Cycle itself it makes no difference. In Legacy it puts all items into that storage, hence it fully clears out the market. That removes ‘stale’ listings from 1 year ago.
You don’t need to be ‘active’ for it but it still gets cleaned.
You can’t actually.
The design philosophy between CoF and MG is that you shouldn’t get any upside for a character in the other faction, right?
But when you sell a item which is 10 million Gold, then switch to a character in CoF and go to Lightless Arbour… you can use those 10 million Gold to get tons of items for CoF.
That’s a problem.
Gold also has a technical limit, which is 2,1 billion. Top-tier items are worth more already, even without inflation they would be worth more. A 3 LP red ring is for example so rare that you could sell hundreds of 1 LP rings in the meanwhile… and even if every of those is ‘only’ 50 million it would still be worth more then the cap then.
So that doesn’t work.
So EHG would need to increase the technical limit.
But the technical limit is there because it takes up a lot of bandwith to change that value basically non-stop. So increasing the limit would lead to server performance issues likely.
This is not a MMO and the market is not set up like in a MMO.
In a MMO you can buy any item at any time, you can’t use it though since your character won’t have the level for it.
In LE you get levels very quickly. 2 Days of a bit intense playing and you’re past 90 easily. So you can use everything.
So EHG thought it smart to stop people getting items early by creating the ranks in MG.
The ranks are awfully designed though. Buying a extremely rare unique at Rank 3 is possible. Buying a common T6 exalted not. Buying a 4 LP unique weapon is possible at Rank 6… but you can’t buy a garbage Nemesis legendary randomly created during the campaign.
You see the issue? The system is simply faulty there.
And the same happens with listings and the cost for them.
The seller can’t re-price any items without paying favor and meticulously searching for that one specific item. In a MMO items are commonly ‘fixed’, so you know which item is worth how much. In LE we got billions of different ones, randomly cobbled together instead. And they get only valuable when they are existing with specific combinations together. So searching for prices takes time.
I personally spent 1 1/2 hours simply listing items after playing 2 hours. That in itself is unacceptable. So imagine me having to re-list everything every few days. How is that fun in any way?
If you want people to use a system you can’t make it too frustrating. And Last Epoch has not enough players to allow it to be very frustrating.
They were a indie company.
They have over 100 people working for them now.
The size-definition of a company able to afford making a ‘AAA’ game is ‘hundreds to thousands of employees’. So they’re vastly above ‘indie’ by now. So we should be able to expect at least common sense quality processes which larger scale companies put into place.
As a counter, GGG (the makers of Path of Exile) managed to provide the same size of content as EHG provided in Cycle 2 in 4 months time repeatedly when they were at the size of EHG, with a market that always worked, no matter how badly received it is, it works. EHG’s does not sadly.
Indie means independent and regers to the ownership structure. Usually this regers to smaller companies but it doesn’t have to. I’d argue that Tencent having a minority stake (<25% according to Judd I think) is what’s pushing them away from indie status.
It doesn’t work if people don’t reply to your request to buy something they’ve put up for sale, this is why bots make PoE’s trading better.
