Аn influx of new players! For developers/

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I’m an old player; I’ve been playing since the beta test. I really like POE1 and POE2, I’ve been playing them for a very long time. And coming to Last Epoch to wait out the off‑season of PoE was a good idea. I liked the mechanics that weren’t in the beta and the Uber bosses. In the game, I reached 2200 corruption and killed Uber Aberoth 90 times.

Now I’ll move on to my personal opinion. Dividing players into the Fortune Guild and the Merchants Guild is a very bad idea. This is because the penalty for switching between them is too severe, resetting the build’s progression to absolute zero. You’ve been playing the game for 2–3 weeks, the online population is dropping, there are fewer items on the market, and the influx of new items is even lower. You get the idea to switch to the Fortune Guild, but the penalty — “remove all merchant items from yourself” — completely resets your build and your 2–3‑week progress as well.

Conclusion: make fortune and the merchant guild accessible to all players, and then you’ll see a large influx of players, and many players will stay in the game longer.

ps/ I also noticed that the game still has bugs from the beta test. It’s strange that they haven’t been fixed.

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I don’t think this is the right solution for this “problem”. The devs should rather focus on improving the game further in all other aspects, so that the longjevity in both Item Factions increases and thus the Merchant Guild suffers less from decline of players, even though such decline is inevitable anyway.

But both of these very distinct item acuisition playstyles should remain seperated.

Yes, that is also a pet peeve of mine, especially when I reporting some of these bugs several times already.

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Well, in my opinion, first you need to attract new players, not push them away with all sorts of fines—and it’s unclear why.

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I still don’t understand why it’s not possible to disable the dialogues with bosses and other NPCs in the chat. It’s really annoying to see the chat cluttered with dialogues; the chat has a very small buffer for saving messages from other players and the general chat, and you can’t scroll up to see who wrote what.

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I would argue that new players, especially brand-new players will not even go that deep into the specifics of these mechanics and don’t really know the impact of these item factions and that not being able to switch easily is not really a bullet point for not even getting into the game.

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So, you’re already seeing an outflow of players in the second week of the season. Personally, I’m too lazy to switch to Fortune, because I’d have to build the character from scratch — what’s the point? I’ll delete the game and go play something else.

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Without the barrier between MG and CoF, CoF has no meaning. The appeal of CoF is that you can play on the same realm as MG players without feeling forced to engage in trade.

Just start with CoF. No reason to switch.

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Resources are shared, so I farm runes with my farm build in one faction, and craft gear to sell in the other to buy something valuable.

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Yeah, but the way the barrier is made is a bit counterproductive.

I’ve stated it regularly… why cause an account-wide loss for favor if you switch factions with a character for example?
Those things are just needless barriers without functionality.

Instead all that ever was needed (but wasn’t and isn’t done) is a exclusive resource to use for both sides. That automatically puts all the issues at rest.
If you can only earn… let’s say ‘platinum’ while playing MG and that’s used for payments then you can only get the rewards from MG while playing MG.
And if you only get ‘crystals’ from CoF to allow turning in prophecies then you can only be rewarded when playing CoF.

Then you got exactly zero reason to limit equipment based on factions and you also got zero reason to remove ongoing prophecies or remove favor. You stop the douple-dipping entirely and it just becomes a ‘flavor of the day’ choice.
The fixation on locking into a faction so solidly is nonsensical in the first place and only lore-wise explained by aligning with the faction… which is plainly spoken ridiculous as they both have no reason to be against each other in the first place as they don’t compete for anything at all. So not even there it makes sense, and the reasoning was weak to begin with.

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Well, knowing and proving that all equipment is self-found is essential for me. Not a single bought piece on a CoF character is an important distinction too. That only works if you can’t mix and match equipment from both factions. Again CoF is mostly (especially the old system) targeted boosting drop rates for the player that forgoes trade and be marked as such. If you muddle the line, you might as well abolish CoF and bake the boost into the general drop rates, or do nothing. Then let the players that do not want to trade, not do trading on their own. As a consequence, they’d then likely rather choose to play in a distinct SSF / SAF realm or offline.

Having a different exclusive currency in MG would be beneficial for other reasons as well though as you can buy things with gold outside MG, e.g. respec or stash tabs.

I don’t like to engage in trade myself but I like to spectate the kind of “emergent” meta gameplay that it brings (mostly in other games). In LE, this “emergent” gameplay is hampered by not allowing re-trade and having this non-tangible, non-exciting currency gold. But I understand the devs point of view that they want to prevent hideout warriors and have people actually play the game and slay monsters.

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MG is balanced around drop rates for MG. You will never have access to both at once. Even disregarding the backlash from the people that don’t want to trade, if anything were to ever happen it would be opening MG for everyone and removing CoF.

It seems strange to me that players don’t actually realize that what they’re actually asking for is removing CoF from the game.

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SSF.
That simple.
Because otherwise you can exchange it anyway with teammates and circumvent it, hence it’s not a viable argument anymore as that essential portion is lost.

It’s not an argument against what I state at all.

MG is not balanced at all, it would be great if it were, but it isn’t.
So also a quite moot point.

If the self-made faction cannot counteract the community aspect at least in part then it’s simply a badly designed system.

There are options to not fall into this trap, I stated them by now years ago repeatedly, I’m not going into it again for the bazillionth time.

Your last statement plain and simple doesn’t uphold, that’s the active balancing act EHG has to handle.

The ONLY reason that the whole system is set up as it is rather then being given a choice between locking yourself into one faction or allowing switching about (which can be seen by others) is that they have a weirdly overrepresented focus on group-play despite that portion of the game being fairly badly designed while being riddled with bugs on top.

It’s just a complete mess, plain and simple. Solutions left and right existing to uphold all the points mentioned by you and Shator… but simply failed to be done. That’s all it is.

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CoF just needs to uphold the illusion of choice - being fully aware that is nothing but an illusion - and the feeling that not going trade is not completely a bad one from the get go.

In PoE 1 or 2 or TLI this doesn’t exist. Deciding not to trade in those games is purely for your principles and idiology. On the very character creation screen, you know that you’re never going to be as geared as a player who trades (with same time investment). GGG and XD Inc. also need to balance droprates with market-trade in mind to some degree, instead of what feels more “natural” if that didn’t exist.

In LE, the illusion somewhat works (or worked) because you can feel smug about not buying a single piece of gear AND that your interaction with a distinct system let you get better “untaited” gear that you’d not have easily obtained with trade OR with neither CoF nor MG.

Unfortunately the last point is crumbling with the new CoF. Before it somewhat let you acquire rare world drop uniques early in the season easier. That is gone. :frowning: . It already is starting to feel like going trade is a now a necessity to be successful.

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In LE the choice of CoF is for SSF and for single-player primarily. Secondary for small-scale group-play.

All of that can be respectively upheld still with fixating a choice of staying only CoF or MG from the get-go. And it being a opt-out mechanic where you loose the respective tag for it and it allows the ongoing premise of being able to switch.
That solves all the issues related to perception and the ‘pure’ progression.

You then can only gift and receive gifts from other ‘pure’ characters. Because MG and the ‘flavor of the day’ switching both don’t need this in the first place, only CoF itself needs it.

Also, EHG also adapted the drop-rate with 1.0 accordingly. I don’t remember how much it was, but baseline drops were reduced by 30 or 40%, one of them, I think it was 30%.
This was specifically done because of MG, with the CoF design being made so it would counter these 30% losses in drops through prophecies.
So that’s also not an argument, EHG started to balance it in that regard but simply messed the whole system up, there’s nothing else to state to it.

The faction system could be good, it could be half-way decently balanced even between the factions, but they can’t get their shit together with MG being a hot mess and CoF having so many fringe-issues for specific items being not taken into consideration to counter the power of market-acquisition.
One option EHG could’ve done is to use the ‘no trade’ tag more often, hence specific equipment on the upper end only being possible to be acquired by personal effort rather then through acquisition of economical power. There’s more then enough progression in the ‘baseline’ items after all.
They could’ve also simply disallowed the trade of uniques in total, hence only allowing the bases and crafted base-items for combining with the uniques to be a thing. But that was also not done.

So so so many options available to counter the sheer power of a market accordingly, keep a framework of personal effort mattering still up and provide a overall good experience.

But alas… none of that was done.
They couldn’t even get their shit together enough to not create a market system which inherently breaks as they double-dip into a resource acquirable in both factions. That’s baffling enough.

And yes, the new CoF is a complete disaster in my opinion, they failed entirely to uphold the premise of at least a semblence of both factions being just ‘flavor of playstyle choice’ rather then having one become superior then the other.
Which warrants even more to finally fix the goddamn root causes for all of it rather then tinkering around at the top-end like absolute beginners which have no clue about game-systems.

But alas… also that is something which they have not done since the whole mess started. So it’s a lost cause.

The last ‘great’ version of LE was 0.8, starting with 0.9 it went downhill design-wise by introducing more and more fundamental issues which are extremely hard to solve as they’ve been implemented half-assed. And the factions are a major half-assed mechanic since Day 1.

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support

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I still believe that to attract new players, it’s necessary to open access to both factions for all players at once. So that the trade doesn’t die out and everyone enjoys farming items. Those who want to play on the SSF can play on the SSF separately.

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Until this happens, the number of online players will remain low. Lower than in even the worst game. And all of this is due to the faction change, which is essentially unnecessary. More players are playing on the trade server, there are more items available on the trade server, and the season lasts longer. And to achieve this, you need to attract new players. But there’s nothing to attract them with. The faction system only drives people away with each new season.