You mean a convoluted and senseless mess of an affix system?
You mean effects merging extremely often with the background despite enemy types and area being designed together and not random?
You mean chaste uniques needing 50k hours of play-time to drop?
You mean making a large world only to leave it fairly empty beyond the baseline? (See how ‘bland’ most of the world looks and compare it to the fairly vibrant LE areas)
You mean it having nearly no crafting?
Which one are you talking about here?
It’s definitely not the balancing though, that’s the least of Blizzard’s worries with that game.
If it’s needed then it’s needed.
Short-term backlash has less meaning then long-term longevity of the game.
It’s simple as actually and many devs give in to community pressure at the wrong time… or don’t give in to community pressure when doing something wrong… which is the wrong time.
Power-creep is a given in a game, but reigning in broken stuff and fixing it is a baseline that needs to be adhered.
While i was with you for the most part, i’ve to disagree highly on this because:
Don’t get me wrong, i personally don’t care about the pricing-adjustment of the keys itself, because i don’t find it good that a mechanical component is so highly encouraged to be sold versus actual gear or goldrops. My Problem is rather that this Change exist to begin with, because as i highlighted: “burden of optimal on MG players”. Which kinda tells us two things:
This would’ve potentially not happened if it would’ve effected ‘only’ CoF players. But rather just because of MG Players. And by thus:
That CoF is linked to the Economy of MG Faction. And that due trying to guarantee that one faction’s experience isn’t altered, it did already alter the experience of the other faction.
If you have one concept build on pure economy, and the other one not, it is pretty problematic if the interact with each other. I mean that’s why Items are separated to begin with, so it doesn’t have an bad influx in terms of economy and we can have both playstyles/experience guaranteed. But at that point when they decided that both have the same ‘Currency’ or let’s rather say ‘Wallet’, it did become already an issue. And changing the Prices of the Key doesn’t really help in the long run but rather is a short-timed bandait. Because now they always 've to double check if it comes down to the balancing of the Gold-Income for CoF Players, because it might have an impact to MG players. (Vica Versa not so much).
And:
I don’t disagree on this in ‘general’ but if they change the pricing of keys for the sake that MG Players don’t feel forced/encouraged to play CoF to be efficient. Do you really think they will introduce another way so CoF can farm more effective gold? That would lead to the exact same issues as with the Arena-Keys, as long as the currency for both factions aren’t ‘separated’.
/Edit: Again - to clarify - i agree with you generally it would be good if CoF would get a equivalent way to make gold, my point is that this is just half of it’s solution because as long as the other problem isn’t fixed, i don’t think it will really happen or if it does, leads to the same issue/problem as with the pricing of the arena keys.
In a general ‘sense’ i do agree don’t separate the basic concept of gold from trade, but i still would separate gold as a currency to two currencies based on it’s current faction. I don’t really care about semantics if the currencies are more split into two different ‘wallets’ like you have a Goldwallet for CoF and a Goldwallet for MG; or if to make it more exotic by calling the CoF one Gold and the MG one Platin(rubbies, pennies or whatever), but a maincurrency for each faction but seperated.
In it’s functionality, as pointed out above - both share pretty much the same. With BOTH you can buy stashtabs, or gamble, or the vault, or npc vendors. Both have the same functionality, with the exception that Platin or MG Wallet-Currency also works for the Bazaar. And that where the money is drawn from but also went into based on which Faction you play right now.
You play MG Faction? Then every money you make is platin / went into the MG Wallet. If you sell or buy stuff, (or based on what item-tag it have like a mg items with the mg tag only gives platin while CoF items only gives Gold).
You play CoF then obciously ‘Gold’.
But as long as the economy is shared because they both have the same currency / wallet, it will effects both - and i’m just not sure if i would call that ‘fair’.
/Edit:
I also want to point out - i also find that both Factions don’t need to be perfectly balanced. My Argument here is that it’s kinda wonky up to bad, if each individual factions gets ‘balanced’, ‘adjusted’ or ‘changed’ because it effects the other Faction which for me looks a bit unfair and also not exactly in the key-experience/spirit of the faction system…
I feel there was some weird phrasing in their patch notes or they misunderstood the issue.
I don’t think it changed because of MG. MG can already make more gold than CoF does easily without the arena keys.
I feel like this changed because it sort of “forced” CoF players to reroll for key prophecies if they wanted to make gold, which is something that takes away from their intention for the faction. They want you farming gear, not stuff to vendor.
It could be that their reasoning really was the one stated, but it does seem silly when MG already makes buttloads more gold than CoF.
Why do you say MG players have access to more gold? It is the opposite, in fact (marginally so).
This is simple to understand. Think of gold as a resource to be extracted from the game. It does not appear out of thin air. The main source is from killing monsters or selling items to vendors in a much smaller measure. Both MG and CoF get the same amount of gold from monsters, I believe. CoF get more uniques to vendor. So CoF players in fact extract more gold from the game than MG players do.
What this means is that if there were 1000 CoF players and 1000 MG players, the total gold owned by the 1000 CoF players would be very slightly more than the total gold owned by the 1000 MG players.
So no, the MG is not generating gold, it’s simply redistributing it differently, with higher concentration to some players and lower to others. But on average, MG players have slightly less gold than CoF players.
Yes, though Gold is the way to progress for MG, hence you got to choose: More tabs or more gear?
Buy tabs and you’ll not be able to progress your gear and hence it’s not really useful now, is it?
That needs to be taken into consideration. Obviously if handled well you’ll make much more gold then needed for the gear itself, but that’s not common since supply/demand is always skewed in a market, 99% lose, 1% wins.
Which is a necessity since both factions are standing on an equivalence basis, only expected to vary in play-style, not in overall outcome.
Which isn’t possible, which means putting them onto the same level is by design a mistake.
So it’s exactly as you say here! Which means the basic premise of how the whole system is set up needs to change, not the details of the system.
They’re misunderstanding the underlying issue most likely.
It’s shows with how they’re setting it up in the first place as well as how it’s communicated.
But we can hope over time they realize where the friction comes from.
It’s a new aspect for them as devs, and online economies are a ridiculously hard topic to get right since it’s the same as getting any other economy right. And given the limitations of how resource sinks work an ARPG actually is harder to handle then a proper market where everything sooner or later needs to be switched out, not matter what it is.
Massively more actually.
Higher Tier CoF players get 3-4 times as many uniques and very high tier CoF players get a full set of set items rather then singular ones.
Unless you specifically go for gold monoliths or find several gold shrines that puts you by surprisingly large margins above other players in terms of income.
I don’t think the intention was ever that. It’s only players that have based their expectations that way when the devs never said anything to that effect. In fact, quite the contrary. Mike said in one of this streams before that he believed CoF was being over-hyped and MG was still the better choice.
CoF is simply a tool so you can have trade and players that don’t/can’t trade won’t have such a crappy experience as they do in PoE.
As seen in other threads, CoF lets players gear up easily enough to get to high corruption. You just won’t ever min-max your gear with it like you do in MG. Nor are you supposed to. They’re 2 different mechanics that aim at 2 different playstyles and they can bever be equivalent. Ever. Nor do the devs claim it.
Intention or not, that’s how it’s implemented and presented to us as players.
The intention of the devs doesn’t matter for the outcome which is provided after all.
And I hope they never had that intention as it’s a nonsensical notion in the first place. And they also mentioned it.
Even more reason as to why the system in its current form is not properly implemented as it goes actively counter to what the devs wanna achieve.
That’s why having them in the current form is utterly and entirely… atrocious.
First of all, imagine you’re going with CoF and think ‘that’s the way, it feels nice!’ until you reach the end of end-game. Only number pushing is left, content is already handled.
So now the question is ‘should you continue CoF or actually change over where the pasture is a more lush green?’ and I would say if you wanna progress without aimlessly playing then switching is the way to go.
Just… one big issue. You can’t. Your gear farmed through CoF won’t work when you want to switch. You’re not solely moving over to go with ‘another way of acquiring gear’ but instead you’re getting your whole already done progress for your character ripped away.
This is a badly done mechanic which bears no reason to exist in this way.
A sensible implementation would’ve been a parallel existence of both factions without actively punishing to move from one to the other. Because why would you need to get punished for switching over? You simply don’t get any further then you already are! You’ve already earned their trust, worked for them, brought them profit in some way. Taking away the favor is nonsensical already… and stopping us from using the gear of the other faction is just mind bogglingly atrocious implementation of a limiting mechanic that shouldn’t ever get into the brain of a single dev after thinking a bit more in depth about it.
That’s the state of it.
It’s not that both aren’t equivalent, it’s that it rips away any sort of further choices after picking a side, otherwise switching around and simply going with the other direction wouldn’t be such a major issue, but your whole account suffers for the decisions made with a single character (all favor gone) while also restarting from scratch in terms of gearing up.
It was intended to make a way so people don’t feel forced to go towards trade, like this though? It does exactly that because if you don’t do it you’ll never have the option to change your mind, could just make a new character as it’s nearly as fast.
Agreed. The imbalance between COF and MG in terms of character progression is ridiculous. When it comes to developing your characters, COF is a meme,.
They should buff the hell out of COF and develop it further. For example add droprate bonuses to specific affixes and base items.
I don’t know about a separate currency for MG but at the very least they should implement a substantial tax on every sale. And,/or make it a gold sink where you have to spend gold to progress favor.
Honestly, I don’t see a point of keeping the faction mutually exclusive to such a radical extent. Locking people out of interesting and impactful game mechanics is kinda silly. I want to have fun progressing with COF because it’s a cool thing. Why do I have to locked out of all trading? And vice versa. If they balance MG properly, this could be possible.
I mean, that’s how you see it. I never saw it that way nor have I felt that the game ever presented it to me in that way.
Again, I haven’t seen this. I’ve seen Mike say that MG is better, I haven’t seen any dev saying that they’re supposed to be the same. Just that each faction progression is similar, which it is, for better or worse.
Yes. I actually think that’s a good design and makes sense. If it wasn’t made that way, then everyone would simply play CoF, switch to MG to fill holes in their gear, then switch back to CoF. Rather than being a mechanic to help your playstyle, it would simply become a meta you have to do to get your gear.
Besides, you can still wear all the stuff that dropped that isn’t tagged with CoF.
If you allow them to be parallel and allow you to use gear without restrictions from either faction, you’ll just end up with guides saying you need to go CoF, then switch to MG, then switch to CoF. It will become almost mandatory to use both factions to get the gear you want.
If you want to switch, you either accept that your power level will drop a bit when switching due to not using CoF tagged gear, or you make another character and have that one farm MG. That one can buy the gear you want and once you have ranked with both, you won’t lose your ranks anyway, since they’re account-wide.
As I said, you can change factions. As CoF you have lots and lots of gear that isn’t CoF tagged. In fact, there are plenty of threads saying that there is only a small portion of gear dropped with this tag. So switching isn’t that big an inconvenience as you make it out to be.
Personally, I like how the system was implemented. The logical thing to do would be to make CoF work like SSF (in fact, there were many people confused initially that equated both), and yet they let you play online with your friends using it. They don’t restrict you in that regard. They even let you gift CoF stuff to your MG friend and vice versa.
And you’re clearly missing what it entails with ‘switching’ as you mention.
So, imagine you start off with CoF, more loot, right? That’s a given.
So you go along, drop loads of loot and gear up your character.
Along the line you’ll reach… rank 6? 7? Something like that I imagine before CoF becomes a bit of a slog, hard to handle.
So now imagine it would be possible to switch.
Now, you might think ‘I wanna fill my holes with MG’. So you switch over. But… can you actually buy anything? No.
You need a specific Rank to be able to do that, it’s already implemented (badly, but still there). To get one of those better items you need 3 things currently:
1 - The rank to be able to buy it
2 - The favor to afford it
3 - The gold to afford it.
Rank is time, Favor is utterly useless to hinder any sort of acquisition speed currently, gold is not something you get much during CoF.
So where does it lead you?
You need to first farm up to the respective rank. That’s 10… 20 hours maybe.
Then you also need to actively list items since you need to actually get gold, which means those need to be items with a demand. (Idols is easiest, but still takes a while). You can implement that into the 20 hour grind.
Then you need to make sure not to use up too much favor, which we can say another extra 1 hour on top at the end simply.
Now you got 1 extra item. A single one. And not a ‘absolute end-game tier’ either but simply a ‘quite good’ item.
So I don’t see any reasonable argument there why besides added to this 20 hour of effort you need to add re-farming the whole outfit into the euqation.
It’s nonsensical no matter how you see it when you try to think about it.
It’ll be inherently detrimental for any guide to suggest that, the time-investment would always be a detriment behind it not worth it.
You would always and without fail go MG to acquire the respective funds from the start as otherwise you’ll be left behind.
So that argument itself won’t work. Trading needs gold, you mainly get gold by being a trader knowing what people need and you’ll need a decent chunk of time to drop those items and acquire the favor to list them on the market.
Even in the current - very badly made in my eyes - setup.
So a hard no there.
It’s not a bit it’s from end game back to mid-game. You loose 95% of your progress after entering monoliths outside of your level.
That’s simply not acceptable, simple as it is.
Gear is tagged so it can’t be traded, it should hence be treated this way. Anything beyond is double-dipping punishments.
Good luck with that, already Rank 10 is barely even expected to be done during a 3 month cycle, doing both is something which needs ridiculous amounts of investment time-wise.
And if you’re doing that you’ve earned it, not to speak that CoF becomes absolutely worthless as soon as you have access to high Rank MG since you need gold, more gold and extra gold… which you won’t get from CoF, which is the whole point why CoF needs no extra major gold influx in the first place as they have no need for it.
Yeah, I can also just start a new character, roughly the same effort needed.
Which is not a viable solution.
Also I actually can’t since it’ll force me to use up all favor before switching as otherwise I’ll loose it all for my other characters.
Also not a viable solution.
So the answer is realistically I can’t switch my faction.
It’s not that hard there.
If the punishment/hindrance is so massive that it goes vastly outside of the expected amount then it becomes the same as an impossibility.
Which is the next huge mistake of the tagging system.
Currently only gear directly created by the system as bonus drops will be tagged… which is nonsensical.
The system needs to tag every upgraded, every extra dropped and every otherwise affected drop from CoF and not only completely freshly created items to be properly done.
Obviously it’s not working of the systems both have each 20 different problems and we can always call out to 1 of them in a circle to excuse the intended and shitty function it should’ve never had in the first place.
Do it right and don’t lean on makeshift failing mechanics which are double-dipping into other punishments already.
That’s just nonsensical by design.
If I loose all my favor and got to use the time I’ve already invested into my character once over to even have the functionality of the other faction then I don’t need to dip into adding something more to it. That’s already plenty enough. So if you add the lost ability of usage to it as well it just becomes a dumb mechanic since we’re getting punished far too much.
Also it affects group play since MG and CoF players can hardly play together, causing issues there as well. The group gifting mechanic was implemented so people playing together have the ability to share drops between each other. So if 2 friends with different factions play together now the total amount of possible shared items becomes less then ever possible otherwise, punishing them for not doing anything unexpected simply for the bad implementation itself.
It all can be fixed and has really… and I mean reaaaaally easy solutions even
But they’re not used yet.
Yes, and then they can’t use it.
Good job for having that mechanic! Exactly the contrary of what the gifting mechanic was supposed to solve.
So for that alone one has to see it’s implemented badly. There’s simply no excuse for it.
With CoF I’m not locked out of trading, I just have to jump through hoops.
Instead we could faction tagged items simply never be exchangeable and solve all the problems from the get-go as they’re ‘personalized’ drops and that’s it.
Instead we have a massive system doing nothing at all right in what it should actually do and instead allowing everything in a diluted filtered-down half-washed method where nothing works fully.
I think you misunderstand what the factions should be. They’re simply a mechanic to help your playstyle. They shouldn’t be a way to simply get your gear as easily as possible, as you want to do with removing restrictions.
Yes, changing factions has a lot of restrictions. Most likely only legacy players will get max rank in both. But they’re done that way on purpose. You’re supposed to pick one. The one that adapts to your style.
I expect there will be plenty of adjustments to both factions with the incoming data. But I don’t expect the restrictions to change much.
You’re supposed to invest into one and end up not liking it, it’s the same thing as if you picked a character, got to level 70 and end up not liking it. You start over. You might eventually still have some use for the faction progress (like you can have some use for an abandoned character), but otherwise you just have to start over.
Except that now you still have a bunch of gear to twink your new character, since lots of stuff isn’t CoF tagged and MG characters can still use it.
It’s not meant to be a flavor or the day where you switch back and forth. It’s supposed to be an actual choice that has meaning. It’s up to you to figure out which mechanic adapts to your playstyle.
They could just as easily have released trade only. The fact that you have CoF is already a bonus for people that don’t like trade.
They’re a way to more deterministically acquire items, they’re put on top of the current existing mechanics without adjusting the baseline drops and allow alternative ways to acquire gear.
If through a community based system (MG) or a personal farming method (CoF) has no meaning, that’s solely the part of your playstyle.
But since they provide exactly that and are mutually excluse even in a retrospective way (since the usage of items from the other faction are removed) they need to be equivalent by design.
If you don’t want that you need to implement them in a parallel way to make it nonetheless work.
That’s not done, that’s the situation.
I don’t. The acquisition difficulty stays the same, the only different is the punishment beyond the acquisition as it already removes having put in the respective effort, making the whole time already invested worthless.
Since you can’t switch around 50% of the system is always ‘wasted time’ no matter how you turn it as you can’t access both at the same time in any manner.
As it should, just the right ones.
Currently it has not the right ones, it does not the job it is supposed to do… or doubles down on stuff.
Any Legacy player not actually doing SSF and trying to outfit a character fully would never take CoF, and understandably any legacy player which picked CoF will feel cheated before long as the moment they realize their mistake they loose all the progress gained forever in the current state.
Never said otherwise.
Punishing one massively is a difference from sensical restriction.
You’re restricted in having the positives of one Rank system… otherwise why is it there? You don’t need it, just give everyone Rank 10 from the start since they can’t change it anyway! Everything based on favor. Because it makes literally no difference this way as you can’t switch anyway.
Obviously it’s hyperbole to a degree there but the meaning behind the ranks is highly diluted if you got a myriad of systems already behind never ever allowing you to switch anyway.
So, instead of that… a summary of a meaningful system where both can be accessed:
Rework the whole favor costs of items. 10 Ranks and arbitrary favor amounts are meaningless, favor is never a buy-issue, solely a sell-issue currently. (This means raising favor by acquisition rate, high-tier items loads, low-tier items little)
-Abolish the access restrictions in MG, the above takes care of the whole issue already. MG doesn’t need ranks, it solely needs favor. It’s a redundant system which is only damaging a supply/demand chain currently.
-Auto-tag all even remotely changed drops through CoF, so it reduces the baseline drops through CoF, bringing it actually in line with solo-play.
-Implement a full-scaled and very expensive (favor wise) target-farm system for CoF, which is the end-game method for solo-play. Acquiring a 4LP item needs to be viable, time-investment is what should be the limiting factor, not dice-rolls that can never go your way, ever.
-Remove the limitation for personal item usage of faction tagged items.
-Remove the ability to trade faction tagges items in any way (this means group play). They’re personally dropped items, not base-game items.
-Allow selling base drops in MG while you were in CoF.
-Add taxation to MG instead of the current rank system, that’s their personal meaningful progression.
And if I didn’t forget something there (very likely) it’ll work vastly better then it is now.
No, because I like my character, why should I be forced to restart basically from scratch when I do that? The factions are a simple speed-up method from the baseline drops, nothing more, nothing less. Hence they need to be treated that way.
They’re not.
True, because you reasonably can’t and it gives you a account-wide punishment rather then one based purely on your character.
Which is more then fine! Fair progression for everyone!
Albeit I’ll argue here that CoF was solely made to please people which don’t want to reach their goal through trade.
For that it needs deterministic equivalent ways to gather equipment.
It doesn’t offer that, it’s solely a loot multiplier which is slightly more targeted.
Actually, with factions also came a nerf to baseline drops. So MG drops in 1.0 are worse than they were in 0.9.2. And CoF drops start being better at rank 3+. So baseline drops were already adjusted.
Again, that’s a misconception. They’re not equivalent, neither by design not by intent. Nor they should be. Nor will they ever be. Honestly, the fact that they even let you change the faction at all is already a bonus. I was just expecting that the choice would be permanent for each character and was suprised when I found out it wasn’t.
Ranks and favour are a way of ensuring that you actually play the game, rather than just use the mechanics without restrictions. I agree that they need rebalancing, and I wouldn’t mind seeing ranks gone either, but they do have a purpose behind them.
Why? I mean, why would 2 fundamentally different systems for 2 fundamentally different playstyles ever be equivalent? This is what I don’t understand from the whole discussion. They are not equivalent, they will never be and they DON’T NEED TO BE.
If you want a truly deterministic and easy way to gear characters you go MG. If you don’t like trade, then EHG gives you a tool so you’re not simply screwed over and can actually enjoy endgame. It’s not meant to give you the same thing as MG. It’s just meant not to leave you frustrated if you don’t trade, like it happens in PoE.
Why would they ever need to be equivalent?
