Theres a banner that pops up from time to time above the global chat window advertising them. As well as advertising new once. Also as far as i know turning chat off doesnt stop this. Thats the ad OP is speaking of.
No one ever said they don’t allow cursor scaling. I don’t know where you got that that was being discussed.
What Unity doesn’t allow is you having a different cursor from me.
EHG can make a custom cursor (obviously, since they do have one) and they can make it any size they want. But once they make a build, they can’t change the cursor anymore. The render is locked by Unity.
So you having a big red cursor that looks like a star and me having a small blue cursor that looks like a square just isn’t possible in Unity.
Ummm any MTX even one pet iv bought and iv bought almost every one of the MTX goese right to the steam wallet page asking u to add more epoch coins. Even buying epoch coins goes right to the steam wallet page.
If u have the epoch points this doesnt happen. Yes the 30% steam takes does apply for all MTX afaik
Take that lion pet with wings its 100 epoch coins. If i remember right. Also last single MTX i bought this season i didnt have the coin had to buy some which went right through steams wallet fund page. Me buying that single pet steam still took thier 30% cut of it
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Affer reading the rest. Ur pretty clueless on how live service games work it seems. Both of us are middle aged gamers.
The box price of LE being a live service game wont keep the lights on even poe being free to play had it had a box price as well being a live service game it needs money coming in. Games that are live service need that flow coming in to keep the lights on servers running building cost (in the case of poe) ect.
MTX and supporter packs are there to do just that. Without it these live service games wouldnt beable to survive.
People buy these packs not to be a sheep or to shill for the devs. Its to keep the lights on for a game they enjoy without out it these live service game and possibly the companies behind them would shutdown
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Just going to leave this here for u. Yes in game steam takes thier cut even in game currency. Doesnt need to be DLC for steam to take thier cut. As u see below
Copy past from Google.
Yes, Steam takes a 30% cut from the revenue generated by in-game purchases, including currency, on their platform. This 30% fee applies to all in-game purchases made through the Steam platform, as well as game sales and subscriptions.
Here’s a breakdown:
Steam’s Revenue Share: Steam takes a 30% cut of all revenue generated from sales on their platform, including in-game purchases.
Developer’s Share: Developers receive the remaining 70% of the revenue.
In-Game Currency: This 30% fee applies to all in-game currency purchases made through Steam.
Other Platforms: While Steam’s 30% cut is standard, other platforms may have different revenue-sharing models.
When u go to buy epoch coin. U click on the coin bundle u want say 100. Which is what 10 bucks if i remember. In game shop takes u to steams wallet fund page. Same thing if u buy a supporter pack via in game it takes u to steams wallet page. Steam is getting there cut for all of LEs in game purchases. Doesnt need to be a DLC for steam to take thier cut. Same thing happens with poe if u use the steam client. Rather than the stand alone client
No EHG isnt getting 100% of the money from in game purchases since it goes through steam to make that purchase
Ummmm yes it does. Copy past from Google
Custom cursors for each player In local multiplayer scenarios, you can create a custom cursor for each player by hiding the default mouse cursor using Cursor.visible = false and then rendering a separate image or sprite on the screen for each player’s cursor based on their individual mouse or input device position. You’ll need to create a script that updates the position of each player’s custom cursor image based on their corresponding input device’s mouse movement
And here even online.
Network Synchronization (for online multiplayer): If you are creating an online multiplayer game where each player controls their own character with a unique cursor, you would need to synchronize the position and appearance of each player’s cursor across the network. This typically involves sending the local player’s mouse position and selected cursor type (if dynamic) as network variables or RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls) so other clients can replicate it for their respective players.
So not sure where ur getting this info this cant be done with unity
Heres more on this
Yes, you can have custom cursors for each player in a Unity online game.
Here’s a breakdown of how it can be achieved
Implement a custom cursor system: Instead of relying on the default system cursor, you’ll need to create a custom cursor using Unity’s UI Canvas or by drawing the cursor directly using scripting.
Manage cursor textures per player: You can assign different cursor textures (images) to each player or allow them to choose from a selection of custom cursors.
Synchronize custom cursors: While the actual cursor movement and interaction with the game environment are typically handled locally for each client, you might want to synchronize the custom cursor type or appearance across the network, particularly if a player’s cursor changes based on game actions or selections.
Hide the default cursor: Ensure that the default system cursor is hidden for each player to avoid displaying both the default and custom cursors simultaneously.
Its not a unity issue. Its the devs taking the time to actually implement it
Yes, that’s doable, but it’s also a very bad method.
The common way to render cursors is to enforce it to happen over the OS. Why? Because when the game freezes you would loose control of the cursor and potentially the option to move out of the window hence as the position would be ‘stuck’.
This is a common problem with in-game cursors. Path of Exile offers one, and I can tell you… it’s an awful experience.
The issue with Unity is that the support for this method of creating individual cursors is now available. This usually happens by checking the position of the cursor related to the OS position of the window, hence displaying the windows one normally and doing the custom one when in-window.
While your method is supported it’s not the method which should be used for a game which needs low latency and high reaction times. It’s fine for a game that doesn’t focus on that as small jitters/stutters wouldn’t matter, in a ARPG or a shooter it absolutely does though.
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Thats fair u make a really good point with that. Which is most likely why the devs say they cant do it.
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I got it from here:
And from Unity forums. It can’t be done.
The things you’re suggesting is basically what Yolomouse does. It’s a hack. It’s not a proper implementation. It would require the devs to basically make Yolomouse just for LE.
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I see wasnt aware the way unity allows this to work is basically just yolo mouse.
Always happy to learn more about game development. Learned something here today. Thanks
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I know it’s going to be pedantic, but no, steam takes their cut of any (real world currency) transaction that goes through steam. Any epoch points that were acquired throughthe kickstarter/alpha/beta packs didn’t go through steam & thus steam didn’t take their cut. Any points acquired from launch (& subsequent) packs will have gone through steam so steam will have effectively taken a cut, but it’s of the initial pack purchase not the mtx purchase (which is in epoch coins). If steam’s cut was taken at the point of mtx purchase then they’d be building up a balance of epoch points which is useless to steam.
I am probably more clued in than you are. I am a Sys Admin, I maintain servers for a living. I interact, run procedures, develop scripts, evaluate operating costs for servers every day. I can 100% guarantee you that they don’t pay that much to “pay to keep the lights” on for their servers. They rent virtual private servers at a cost that you as a consumer, could reasonably afford. I haven’t bothered to lookup which VPS provider they use, but I can assure you, the servers that maintain the “live service” aspect of Last Epoch is hardly worth considering compared to the wages of the people who develop the game. They almost certainly put more money into developing the chat box in the game than they do to maintain a server to allow it to pass strings between players.
When you use a VPS you don’t have to pay the electricity, Internet connection, air conditioning, sys admin to maintain, pay to have a fire company to inspect fire suppression systems regularly, you just pay some amount to AWS, Microsoft, Google, or some other company a few hundred every month. For the number of copies EHG has already sold, they could pay to have the “live services” part of the game already paid up for a decade for every one of their servers. Compute power and storage just aren’t that expensive. The operating costs of live services part of a game are so inexpensive other games allow players to host private servers and players do!
There are other aspects of “live service” that aren’t just operating costs, there is the continual development cycle, but if a business’ revenue model is so bad that I should pay them extra money out of my pocket beyond the box price, then it is a bad business model. Now I am willing to pay more for a significant content addition, like for instance I considered Phantom Liberty to be enough content to be worth paying extra even thought I had already bought Cyberpunk. Paying a MTX or a subscription both just kinda suck. I am not going to defend either, as I think some others in this thread thought I might do since I mentioned I have played WoW.
I’m not pro-subscription just because I’m anti-microtransaction, but some of what has been said in this discussion makes me think that some assume I am pro-subscription model. I am neither. What I am is pro-ME. I value not having pay extra for entertainment than what I consider reasonable. I value the time I spend working, and I value what those wages afford me. What I don’t want is having to pay extra costs, particularly when it is something I don’t value like vanity items in a game. I also don’t feel obligated to “support a game” just because the developer and publisher decided on a revenue model that doesn’t provide value to me beyond the core game. I paid for a WoW subscription because it was a cost that I was obligated to pay to play the game. I don’t purchase skins in games because I am not obligated to purchase a skin to play game.
The problem with live service games aren’t the “keeping the lights on” part of the business. They have to pay to develop people to make MTX, so people can purchase MTX, so they can pay to develop more MTX, so people can purchase more MTX, so they can develop more MTX, so people can purchase more MTX… you get it (hopefully).
It’s an evil loop, and it disgusts me. But you know, I didn’t really come in here to start an argument about how businesses are evil. I just asked to have a toggle to disable having MTX advertised to me. I’m not even asking to have it turned off by default, I just want to have the ability to opt-out of seeing it. I won’t pay for an MTX, so seeing it only annoys me, worsening my experience.
Live-service game servers?
I cook at home, hence I do cooking for a living! Same argument.
If you maintain servers for business applications then please… stay in your lane… which is the technical aspect solely dependant on the server costs themselves… and not the business model associated with it.
Especially since this:
Is laughable to even say.
To maintain live-service servers of the capacity and scale which EHG has you need the hardware, you need the services accompanying it, you need the workers maintaining it and you also need to take the sheer bandwith costs into consideration.
The estimated monthly cost for a game the size of LE during their launch week is roughly 250k/month before tapering off to the 25-50k/month area when it calms down, hence ‘off season’. Hence we can estimate a overall cost of around 50k (the high side of ‘off season’) to be somewhere in the ‘true’ area. Mind you, solely if it would be a large-scale hosting service, which we don’t know if it is, unlikely actually.
EHG has a total of ~100 employees. If we solely take the rate of developers in the area of delaware then we could say every employee costs 5k/month. Obviously janitors and the likes have different rates, but there’s also management which has higher rates. So it should even out to a degree. Hence say 8k/month.
Then we need to take into consideration that a considerable chunk is maintenance for the servers and support solely needed for keeping up a live-service. This is likely ~30% of their whole company in size. So we’re down to 70 employees… with 30 counting against the leftover ones for the income they have.
That leaves us with 40 ‘actual’ paid employees comparatively. So 40 x 8000 = 320000/month.
50k is the server structure, not taking into consideration licensing for services needed beyond the pure structure. So that alone makes at least 15% of the costs of the whole company.
Sure… small scale crap definitely. This is a live-service game, we’re talking about completely different magnitude of bandwith here.
Or do you think if Youtube would use a hosting service they would get the same costs as your 10 measly databases which are accessed 20000 times a day?
Your stuff likely produces bandwith in the scale of a gigabyte per day if it’s extremely well well.
A live service game produces bandwith in the scale of a hundred gigabyte per day easily, if not more.
A streaming service with the same amount of users are in the scale of daily Petabytes of data transfer.
Maybe get back and properly get schooled about more then maintance of a business server, you’re massively out of touch.
Well… there’s only three outcomes.
Either you accept microtransaction to handle ongoing costs.
Or you accept a rental service (subcription)
Or you’re delusional to think anything else is feasable.
That’s… really really cheap to do. MTX cost peanuts. Heck… the work-time some of the people I know which work professionally in game design as 3D modellers and the sheer amount of stuff they churn out in high quality in a short time is baffling.
If that is what you think breaks their necks then you’re more then clueless. I mean… you wrote some blatantly wrong stuff in total, but that’s beyond any reason. Even a layman can inform themselves about those things easily, someone in the IT sector has no excuse not to, besides sheer ignorance.
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LOL… this isn’t even an equitable argument. You are comparing a professional IT worker who does IT work everyday in a related field to a novice cook to a professional chef. Such a bad faith argument.
I can could confidently make up random statistics that aren’t factually true as well, but I am an, atleast I make a best effort to be, honest person.
Again, such a bad faith argument comparing the behemoth of Youtube to this game. The costs of hosting each are completely different leagues.
You are just making up stuff for… I don’t know, but it is definitely being pulled out of thin air with no basis in reality.
I did some exploring. I connect to the US Central server, they have 9 total servers by the way. The US Central server is “hosted” by Nitrado infrastructure. The particular server is actually physically maintained by Servers.com in Dallas. So the company they outsource their live service network to, doesn’t even physically host the server itself, but is again outsourced to another company. That is kinda my whole point though, that it seems you completely missed, they outsource the “keeping the lights on” costs to other companies. These other companies specialize in the particulars of maintaining the servers, freeing them up to do the other aspects of the game. This reduces costs, and it makes sense, but it also speaks to my point that compute power, storage, and bandwidth just aren’t that expensive. Yes they may have a larger cost than if I were to rent a VPS for me and some friends, but it is still likely within reasonable numbers.
Or you know, I could just accept not paying those costs as a consumer, which is not delusional. No one is forcing me to pay for a MTX, so I won’t. Again, all I want is an option to opt-out out of seeing it.
Honest person would also admit they are wrong. @Kulze spelled out for u what i was saying. Which u are in fact clueless about. Never mind the fact several of EHG devs have said. The box price of LE was never designed to sustain LE for 10 plus yrs. Lets not forget few devs even mike on the developers stream a few times has said server cost is insanely expensive for the scoop of the game LE is. Mike also even said not having permanent maps when u portal to town helps EHG out big time with server cost. He even explains how much more expensive having this would be. Cuz now instead of the instances reseting it would require more server resources to save all that data and have servers remember where ever single play was at before portaling out
U being an IT means jack shit when it comes to running a live service video game. Do ur self a favor and do ur research on live service games. Its pretty clear u are 100% clueless about the overhead cost.
Btw servers u and i can rent are not the same as what EHG or even GGG needs in order to run such a massive online multiplayer game
Ur also not a dev at EHG. And have no clue what the companies overhead cost are. Guess u know better than the devs of there own game which have said server cost are expensive.
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When we say keeping the servers running, we don’t just mean the servers themselves (although having servers that can respond to 100k+ isn’t the same thing as renting a server that will have a few hundred connections).
We also mean continuing to pay the salary for the team for 10 years straight so they can keep working on the game.
Most games will release DLCs/expansions and cash in from those. EHG has already said they will never charge for any future content. So for the next decade, the 30 bucks for the game is all they would get.
Which, obviously, is not enough to keep a full developer team working for a long period of time.
It’s what happened to many live service games. They couldn’t generate enough profit to work on the game, so they shut down the servers. It’s not that they couldn’t afford the servers. It’s that they couldn’t afford the team anymore, so they pulled the plug.
The cost of running servers aren’t irrelevant, no matter how much you try to make them look like they are. I will trust the word of the devs, which have always been transparent about pretty much everything concerning the game and say that server costs are massive and one of the reasons why they’re always trying to improve server code, over the word of an IT professional who doesn’t seem to understand scaling costs.
But even if those costs were irrelevant, keeping the lights on at the office does require an extra source of income. Because the box price (which is half of what most static content games will charge) is definitely not enough to keep a dev team active for a long time churning out new content several times a year.
Your preferred model is fine for standalone games. BG3, CP2077, etc. Those will profit from the game being sold and don’t require any further income. The stuff the dev team is working after that will mostly come in the form of DLCs which pay for themselves as well.
Honestly, the only really morally questionable model that existed was WoW, where you paid for the game, paid for expansions and paid a monthly subscription on top of that.
That is 100% far worse and more “evil” than optional MTX.
Anyway, to adress your initial concern: LE is actually very unobstrusive about this. You’ll occasionally get a single message on top of chat that isn’t even that intrusive (most of the time I don’t even notice it), they don’t have any notifications or UI tricks to guide you to their shop and you don’t even spend that much time in shared towns to begin with. Especially in endgame where you spend all your time in the monolith.
So I don’t see that there’s any issue with that part. LE is nowhere near games where monetization is a priority and they flash stuff to grab your attention or automatically open the shop window at the start.
I do agree that we should have a way to fade out FX, but not for the same reason as you. Simply because the visual clutter of combat can make it hard to figure out what is going on and especially what you’re stepping on.
But this has nothing to do with MTX themselves. The base skills do the same visual clutter.
Yes, I’m comparing someone who knows how to cook thinking they are a professional cook.
To someone who works with a small scale server likely and wants to talk about the big leagues.
Or someone who thinks they can talk about professional soccer because they did play in amateur club.
It’s not your lane, you got really no clue about game design. Learn about it first and then talk, you’re speaking out of your ass simply. That’s not good.
As for the server costs and ‘bad faith’: Unlike you - obviously with those arguments - I got direct connections to a lot of creative people, be it artists, 3D modellers, programmers and especially… people who actively worked on large-scale MMOs.
9 Login servers… Not 9 servers in total…
It’s a similar - but worse - server structure as Grinding Gear Game uses with Path of Exile. You got your login servers which solely keep track of your online status and to relay you to the respective servers with free capacity in the cluster. This is common practice of those systems.
Then the actual game server keeps track of the instances, which are limited in amount. For Path of Exile as an example we’re talking about somewhere between 20-100 people per server. Which is why you can at times have your instance crash out of nowhere, or get stability issues when the login server has troubles and hence can’t keep track of ensuring your status, suddenly kicking you out.
Last Epoch has a higher capacity per server though compared to Path of Exile as their damage calculation is vastly less complex (you don’t get 1 million individually calculated poison stacks for example) and got less mobs (we see up to 500 mobs at once on the screen in PoE, and actually beyond, which all are updated for position and status every tick), so we can imagin their capacity to reach around 500-1000 per server more likely.
You think those are the only thing existing? Not even with the above mentioned distinction between login-servers and gameplay-servers we’re done yet.
Online environments need a different testing scale, which mandates physical hardware at the place of the company itself to set up a mirror of the whole system and not influence it. This is much smaller scale but has to be handled by the employees rather then some third-party company.
Then we also got the people which have to moderate the content inside the game, those are paid workers too, you don’t get that in a single-player game.
Then you also got the Universally accessed - and really badly designed - database of the market. How many queries do you think happen there when a new Cycle happens? Why do you think a simple database query - besides the awful way they handle follow-up queries - often breaks the bazaar entirely telling you to try again later? Why do you think the timeframe in which it loads is so massive? That’s the small little part you’re talking about in terms of server maintance… not the other stuff.
Agreed!
And lucky for everyone else you’re not the norm. Opting out of seeing em would be detrimental to the business… so either you gotta deal with it or you gotta leave, those are your options there.
I’m extremely pro-customer, I call out every but of bad business practice which other people don’t even think about, like timed MTX, season passes of any sort, premium currency of any kind instead of direct buy and so on and so forth.
But this? This is not a bad business practice. This is just literally keeping lights on.
And I’ll provide you with a apt comparison of a physical and completely comparable situation.
Imagine a entertainment park or museum of some sort.
They don’t sell day-tickets, seasonal tickets or anything of the sorts, they only sell lifetime tickets.
So, will they be able to stay in business long term with that alone? Heck no, obviously not, delusional thought process if you think it realistic. So they have a souvenir/gift shop at the end of any tour, you need to go through it every time, they literally shove it in your face.
Your demand for LE is ‘don’t make me go through the souvenir shop!’ which obviously is nonsense, specifically while saying ‘What a dumb thing to say they wouldn’t be able to stay open when they don’t sell the stuff in the souvenir shop!’.
This is fair. It’s like comparing me (qualified accountant) with my parents who “balance their cheque book”.
That was the entire point of what he said. That you are comparing relatively low bandwidth systems that are relatively cheap to run with higher bandwidth systems that are less so.
And while EHG, or any other company that’s using hosted servers, isn’t directly paying all of the costs you mentioned in your earlier email ((power, bandwidth, someone to turn it off & on again, etc), they are absolutely factored into the price the hosting company charges. If they aren’t, said hosting company needs a new accountant.
I think that Kulze is undercooking the salary costs somewhat. $5k per month is only $60k per year & the US is a relatively expensive country so $60k wouldn’t get you a very experienced/skilled IT person. From professional experience, I’d think that $8k-$16k per month is probably more reasonable, especially at the more competent end, but there are lots of things that would bring that cost down, such as not everybody being US based & there being cheaper/lower skilled staff as well as non-coders (artists, etc).
Which is fair, but if you want new stuff, EHG needs to pay to develop it & they won’t be doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. And while the servers may be cheap (I have no idea), they aren’t free.
You should be comparing someone who flips burgers at McDs (since that is getting paid to cook food) with running a kitchen at a decent restaurant, your original metaphor was a bit disingenious.
You don’t get that in PoE either.
You don’t get that in PoE either.
If you’re going to have a go at someone for being disingenious, you might want to stay clear of hyperbole. You also might want to stay clear of costings if you’re telling someone to “stay in their lane”.
Oh… it absolutely was, you would be surprised 
There were 2 versions of this issue known and both have been fixed. The one related to enemies has been fixed by reducing attack speed substantially (which makes scaling that + poison non-feasable to crash the servers by now. I think also some other aspects were adjusted since then) and one which was based upon self-poison and how the damage calculation works.
It was around 2019 when this was still a thing, rather then a so called ‘uber-stack’ combining the individual applications of poison together they had them resolved individually.
This meant when you had 100 enemies on the screen with 50 stacks each you caused 5000 mathematical tasks every single tick. Back then poison was a slow ramp-up as well easily leading to 100+ enemies which then had to resolve 500+ stacks… you can see where this goes and why it was a problem.
The self-stack one followed the same issue, but unlike the mob calculation the PoE damage calculation is… old… outdated and also extremely inefficient. Back then at least, we don’t know if GGG changed their code related to it.
What happened back then was that the damage calc first checked the damage type and then went through a list of all unique items in the game before applying the damage, to ensure you were or weren’t wearing any of those items and accordingly adjusting the outcome.
Since you self-stacked and it was not - yet, not it is - limited in max stack amounts players went towards 1000+ stacks of self-poison. This made FPS obviously crawl to a halt and in severe cases caused the instance to crash.
This issue was well known back then as individual instances weren’t yet detached from each other, with a faulty one closing individually but instead the whole server with all instances on it resetting, which caused other players to suddenly be randomly kicked.
This happened in a semi-regular manner and when you were knowledgeable about it you switched servers to not play with someone using such a build together and hence avoid this issue.
Yes, odd anectode… but such stuff is not uncommon to happen overall. We see a much milder version of bad code impacting performance up to a full-scale crash with the bazaar in LE regularly as soon as high player numbers are interacting with it.
Welcome to modern PoE, you absolutely do 
Blight actually does cause up to 3000 entities to be in your ‘reality bubble’ which causes massive flickering client-side currently, instead of the former instance crashes.
As for the 500… I took this specifically because of the most common farming strat for end-game, which is strongboxes. With a caster you have a node automatically opening interactables around you through direct-casting of spells.
Especially in maps like Glacier with a Ambush Scarab of Containment you usually open up between 10-15 strongboxes at once. The baseline pack-size for those is ~20 mobs without modifiers. Since you also take the node to have all of them corrupted you get a substantial amount of extra entities. As you also tend to use beyond in those maps for extra combination of rewards commonly around 400-700 mobs tend to spawn with a single trigger, sometimes more.
You can actually check if that’s the case by using any item with the ‘Rampage’ mechanic. This mechanic counts individual kills displayed on the left side of the screen to trigger effects when passing a specific amount. The first frame does nothing as the enemies spawn and afterwards instantly your count will be at several hundreds as corpse explosion mechanics to make use of the tightly packed enemies getting all destroyed in one tick does showcase how many mobs have actually been spawned at once. It does already surpass 300+ in mediocre maps and can reach 1000 (the limit of the display) in maps like Glacier easily.
So it doesn’t happen anymore?
And it’s not like LE doesn’t have this either. You can have hundreds of different stacks and each will tick independently.
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Yes, which is fine, but it plays into the reason of what I’m saying. This has to be communicated between server and player, it produces massive amounts of bandwith as loads of data is transferred.
And such a hefty data transfer obviously costs money, which makes the sustain of the server more costly and hence doesn’t allow a simple ‘set and forget’ strategy to be used at that would fail.
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