Probably worth putting this as well, as i didnt in my poll response, but seeing others raise this point in the replies here:
The main reason the cycle reset has no interest, is becuase theres no balance changes. No new content for a mid cycle reset is fine, its something that shifts up making builds that matters. You’ve prided yourselves on the customisation people have when making characters for years now, and for good reason, but a mid cycle rest without any of that is just missing a big potential i think. Mid cycle reset, with balance changes we can play around with, come up with new builds because of etc… would actually offer something interesting for it.
So i’d say my real take on cycle reset is just: If theres balance changes, 100%. If theres not, 0%. Offer something to CoF players, balance changes is the thing you could. Otherwise we’re literally waiting until next year for any. If you wanted to make a grim dawn style game, you should have said so and not wasted time on the the multiplayer stuff.
Based on the details revealed about PoE2, it’s not going to be a straight-shot replacement of PoE1 and it’s not going to have this dramatic “kill all other ARPGs” effect that people like to pretend it will. This position very much reminds me of the age old “WoW killer”. Every MMO got touted as “The WoW killer,” then didn’t, and people were flabbergasted that it failed to kill WoW. It’s the silliest position to hang your hat on.
Also, if you want them to release with respect to PoE2, they will never win. Before PoE2: “This will only last until PoE2 and then forgotten.” After PoE2: “This won’t be as good as PoE2, so it will be forgotten.” Literally unwinnable scenario. Trying to scope yourself to compete with PoE2 just because they’re the same genre is exactly how games fail.
Well, that settles it then doesn’t it? (not responding to you specifically Iceberg, but the image you included in your post.)
I’m also not here to debate the English language, and yes, while they are using hedging language like “typically”, “ish” and “range”, the fact that they have a number listed in game is what a lot of people are going to focus on. Now just imagine if those numbers instead said 6-8 months. I think a lot fewer people would be upset because their expectations wouldn’t be as high.
The only point I’m trying to make here is that EHG is shooting themselves in the foot by advertising a certain timeline, and not being able to follow through with that timeline consistently. If you change the communication, you can change the perception, the expectation, and the response.
I think a lot fewer people would be upset because their expectations wouldn’t be as high.
It would immediately, as it has here, be compared to PoE’s 3 month league rotation even without any text akin to that screenshot. “GGG can do it, why can’t you?” will always be the position of the uninformed.
Just look in this thread. People saying that 1.2 has to be COLOSSAL to make up for the time, especially compared to what PoE would release in a similar window, with no grasp on the realities of game development with a significantly smaller budget and team than GGG.
This entire argument about timelines is ridiculous. Project timelines change all the time, that’s a fact of life. Accept it or don’t, it won’t change reality.
I honestly thought alot about this game and was hoping they would really listen. But not having any real pricecheck yet is a joke. How can you make a modern arpg and not learn anything from the games you have a in front of you.
Genuinely asked question #1. Still waiting on that one.
Genuinely informed you there use to not be one. Made no assumption.
Genuinely asked question #2. Still waiting on that one.
Okay, the event sounds really nice. I hope the additional favour gain is really noticable. So far I’m a dedicated CoF player but having a reset and more favour gain trying out MG could be fun. And if not switching won’t hurt as much.
But please, Q1 2025 is a long way off, so please do some kind of balance changes/bug fixes along the way. To keep things fresh, maybe to test new things for the “big” patch. Or maybe do some kind of test server for upcoming changes.
Anything to keep the more dedicated/interested players happy. In the worst case Q1 means 6 more months without any changes. This is a lot.
I made a forum account to post. Needless to say, I feel pretty strongly about this.
I have a group of friends. We bounce between different ARPGs. We played this previous season of PoE, we played the past season of D4, and I played and introduced them to LE. Many of them were turned off by the economy being in shambles and wanted to wait until that was fixed. We all had plans to come back and play the cycle reset, additional content or no additional content. I understand existing players are frustrated at the prospect of being reset but I hope you also consider the new people who were looking forward to play the game in a more ideal economic state.
I feel you either do a reset or do 1.2 earlier. Doing neither will alienate a large part of the player base that has already had zero reason to play with how things currently stand.
Thank you for providing clear(er) communication about inbound changes/improvements. Thank you for putting out a great quality game/product and experience. Thank you for listening and engaging with the player community.
In the event announcement thread, I suggested the following based on what I foresee as a possible future need or desire for resets that may not always fall on cycle boundaries:
I think the above would be reasonable and would better explain dev/management intent, to reduce the possibility of confusion.
The following IMHO is poorly worded can be written in a manner that does not lead to confusion.
The above looks and sounds like it was written with a heavy emphasis on reducing the number of words. It can be a bit confusing, especially if read quickly. I read it twice just to be sure I didn’t misread it. Below is how I would have written the block. Yes it is wordy.
There are several upcoming events occurring in the ARPG landscape, through the remainder of this year. After careful consideration of these upcoming events and keeping in mind the above key improvements, we’ve decide to adjust our development priorities and timelines. The following items come from our adjustments:
The key improvements listed above will be given higher priority.
Some of the content slated for patch 1.3 will be moved into patch 1.2.
A larger 1.2 patch is scheduled for Q1 of 2025.
I’m a fan of employing bullet points in small to medium clumps because it gives the illusion of brevity and arranges ideas vertically in a list that is easy to digest. This is just a spacial technique. I find this important given the very short attention spans and the poor reading habits encouraged by social media. Large paragraphs tend to lose the reader’s attention, which has given rise to the well known “TL;DR”. Large paragraphs sifted through a process of word reduction, leads to complex sentence structure that is often confusion and/or easily misread. This is just my $0.02. Please do not take offense.
I’ve completed the poll. To be clear:
Yes, I’m going to support the cycle reset (I have reservations).
My biggest detractor is that I would not have enough time to achieve my goals with my characters.
The above detractor was before encountering this thread.
Patch 1.2 is coming in Q1 2025.
Cycle 1.1 will last until patch 1.2 is released, which means more than 3 months time from the point of reset on 2024-9-19 (Y/M/D).
I’m leveling and playing several characters. This is because I’m learning about:
the game’s features and mechanics
the game’s systems
the class masteries, which will shape my likes and dislikes
and picking up some of the game’s lore
The above represents a massive experiment in a proverbial lab. Within the massive experiment are multiple smaller experiments (characters/builds). This will improve my game knowledge and allow for even better experiences in the game, especially in multiplayer. I’m currently playing off-line because I’ve encountered very consistent disconnects from the game. If I’m out of town and stop interacting with the game, the game disconnects me, without warning, in less than 30 seconds. Usually between 12 and 27 seconds. Last Epoch is the only game I’ve encountered this behavior. I’ve made bug reports and logged a post in the tech support forum ==> Idle disconnect timer outside of town (online mode)
Playing off-line also influenced my view point on cycle restart. Assuming that the disconnect issue was resolved I, and several of my friends, would be playing online. Many of my buds are playing Diablo 4 and PoE, which I have no desire to play right now. They gave up on Last Epoch for the mean time because they encountered the same disconnect issue that I described above. I’m skipping PoE’s and D4’s current seasons and putting time into Last Epoch. However, this means my crew is spread across 3 games.
Again, thank you for taking the time to engage with the player community.
All I can say is that it is the way most ARPG game developers choose to label their cycle/league/season and the expansions… no matter how they call it, they tend to always follow the same pattern in numbers.
Maybe the dev guys in the forum might come with a plausible explanation as to why.
And maybe you should focus in the Cycle Name. They will all probably have distinct names, which are unknown until the company decides to reveal it when they start releasing information on the new Cycle, pretty much the same as in PoE with their Leagues, and Diablo with their Seasons.
If it’s confusing to you, then you can use Harbingers of Ruin instead of 1.1, for instance. Then all minor changes/mid-cycle balance stuff will be labeled as 1.1.x and have no names.
Here’s a screenshot of PoE’s version history, all the way down from Alpha to Version 2.0, just to give an example: PoE’s Version History / Alpha - 2.0
I like this post EHG. asking players who are grumpy about “cycle refresh” to actually think about why they are actually grumpy. to me the “stop punishing COF” camp are just like people arguing against student debt relief in USA. Because it doesn’t directly benefit them, and does benefit other people, it must be bad.
EHG should move the blurb about how legacy gameplay is the functionally the same as cycle gameplay and their toons wont get deleted on refresh to the main post instead of only in the survey because i doubt many of these folks read that survey doc. maybe just give everyone who plays existing toons in legacy after this refresh a new cosmetic for some achievement there and don’t give it to new cycle toons so they aren’t so butthurt.
I see the purpose of a reset not only as an attempt at providing a functional economy for at least a little while on a cycle, but also to limit the time that a price distortion is allowed to exist on the bazaar for meta purposes. I feel like the longer an exploit-driven price distortion economy is visible then the more that distortion can exist in people’s minds without actually having duped gold to deal with. we don’t really have an unpolluted economy to look at for guidance that so the sooner there is an unpolluted economy as a new reference point the better.
This was the case from like 3 days after the dupe brother, its 2 late. I promise you, in this cycle refresh red rings and other top tier items are still going to be gold cap.
There is no gold removal from the economy naturally. We play for a week with 1k players making 1m gold an hour, a week at 3h playtime a day for each player is 21m a week, thats 21 billion gold. meaning if that gold gets rounded up to say the top 10% of players, buying a red ring is going to be nothing for them, and impossible for anyone else.
New players cant compete ever because by the time they are trying to buy anything the top tier players have printed tons of gold and use that to set their own prices.
The economy is fundamentally flawed currently because MG players wont choose to delete mass swathes of gold at the lightless arbor. The majority of MG players play MG as to be able to purchase exactly what they need. Spending 100m gold at the LA isnt going to pay out that much or more for market, so its just spending money gambling which is what they dont wanna do by playing MG lol. So as the economy ages everything inflates naturally cause everyone just has more and more gold as they engage with said economy.
now maybe without a gold dupe it might take a month, but im like pretty convinced the economy isnt going to last 3-4 months ever until they solve the money deletion problem.
I already expressed my opinion in the announcement thread. There is no reason to push 1.1 characters to Legacy, or whatever it’s called here. Leave 1.1 as is until 1.2 is about to release.
Just make another 1.1 fresh start option for people that want that. That’s what POE does. Of course, this require some work but it’s far more considerate to players who never expected such aa short cycle.
If you’re going to do something like this, I think you should do it right or not at all.
You have literally no data to back this up, though.
We’ve never seen a fully functional Market without any gold dupes since it exists.
There was a dupe in 1.0, and there was a dupe in 1.1, without any resets up to this point. So there was always much more gold than intended circulating
Then, I guess this will also kinda work as an experiment for the company too. If they can prevent any new dupes, we will all finally be able to witness how the economy will behave in a healthy environment.
Ok, I’m sorry, but this sounds like a horrible idea to me. It feels like a suicidal plan.
With no big update from September to early 2025, Last Epoch will lose significance and be forgotten by all but its most harcore players.
It also does not make any sense to have a reset now, two months into 1.1, and then spend around six months without anything new.
“Ah, but we can only do a reset now, we won’t be able to do a reset later until we release 1.2” - LOL, sorry, if the game is this poorly coded you shouldn’t have left early access. Assuming this limitation really exists, you need to stop everything you are doing and fix it ASAP.
It would be far more reasonable, IMO, to release a big patch around December (two months after Diablo 4’s expansion and one month after PoE 2’s early access) and call it 1.2 - with less than originally planned in the roadmap, but still better than having nothing for the rest of this year. You would keep Last Epoch in the news and hopefully get some holiday sales. This December update would include the patch you’re planning to release on September (it’s pointless to release a big patch now) and just a few more things, with the big content dump being left for early 2025.
Just liek there is 0 data to showcase that duped gold hurt the economy. We can speculate it did.
or we can also speculate like the post I replied to said, “or there is a perception of duped gold ruining the economy” this isnt a far fetched idea. its a pretty understandable and normal human behavoir.
Even if a real world economy is mathematically doing well, if the people feel it isnt, their spending habits reflect that.
So there is no data either way, simply suspicion.
But there is a distinct lack of gold sinks that are not “uhhh gamble money for chance at more money/gear”
There needs to be a tax, or a use for gold outside the peanuts that is stash tabs. if not, gold simply balloons in value as it has no where to go, it just trades hands over and over.
PoE does not have this problem, because “orbs” are used for their intended purpose. Chaos have an intrinsic value that makes it so eventually if there is too much chaos, people start using them and their supply dwindles.
For gold based game economies you need taxes or some way to delete that gold from the ecosystem!
(not responding to you specifically Iceberg, but the image you included in your post.)