I personally think having too many Stash tabs available is a bad thing for the game, because there is no reason to make decision making what items you want to keep and which you don’t.
Having a limit and needing to spend resources to increase this limit is very good.
I honestly didn’t understand and disagreed with the lowered Stash tab prices a lot. It actually hurt my enjoyment of the game.
So always keep in mind, there is always another perspective. Even if you think it doesn’t hurt anyone it might still do that.
Getting back the gold and/or stash tabs worth of that gold is something I actually don’t agree with.
For me Stash tabs are just a tool to keep items temporarily to either use them at a later point or sell organize them.
You should definitely not loose items, but I don’t agree that all Stash tabs need to get refunded or migrated. Stash tabs are just one thing that you need spend money on in the economy. But I don’t agree that all of that money needs to get migrated back to legacy.
Calling others clowns, because they have a different opinion does not really help your point
While Wissle and you can’t see any harm or issue, there might be good reasons why people dislike and disagree with this. Even if you don’t agree with them.
By removing gold from the economy, permanently. This is anti-inflationary. And Lightless Arbour being viable would do that with gold itself again since people would use it… which isn’t done in general.
But that brings the issue of it needing to be good enough to be viable, which it generally isn’t, which would increase item drops massively.
Hence the detaching of Gold from MG to keep other relevant game systems in need of Gold viable for MG players (which currently isn’t the case) while providing a functioning element for MG to work with.
Then the taxation following for ‘insert resource here’ used in trading. Favor is generally removed, which is fine… the payment resource though isn’t, it goes currently 100% in the hands of whoever sells an item.
Yes, but it detaches the other gold systems which are nice systems - like Lightless Arbor - from MG, which is literally a tacked on system beyond the basics and is a nigh impossible nightmare to balance other content handling gold while 2 intrinsically opposite systems need to work with this resource.
It’s just a really bad design choice, always was since day 1.
There is no market taxation for gold. Maybe in 1.2, but there is none of that currently existing.
Yes, which is good. This is no survival game with ‘you can only carry so much weight’ and with inventory management mechanics to enforce decisions. These simply don’t fit the genre well.
Last Epoch is first and foremost a looting-based hack’n’slash ARPG. Focus is on acquisition of loot, and not management of loot.
Yes, and for that you use Gold, which in MG is your potential power, hence you give up said potential, hence it has value, hence this value should in ‘some’ way be retained for Legacy.
Having limited space and needing to make decisions what loot is important enough to keep is a net positive for the game, because otherwise you could just pick up everything and store it.
The question is where is the line?
With the recent changes to lower stash tab prices LE moved the line into a direction that I strongly disagree with.
Will I quit the game over it? No
Does it impact my fun and engagement with the game negatively? Yes
In MG you don’t even need to store that much loot to begin with compared to CoF. The decision that you need and buy so many stash tabs already is an economical one. For me these Stash tabs are just a temporary tool, but they come at a price. I still disagree with the sentiment that you should get all your value back worth of stash tabs.
It is for the decision making of direct acquisition, hence during the content, not in-between. You’re absolutely right there.
Stash-space has no meaning for that, you’ve already gone through the relevant aspects of limitations by that time.
There literally is none. You could make it endless storage and it wouldn’t change any important aspects. The major point is the acquisition method and the limitations to doing so, be it backpack space or drop-rate. The increasing amount of tabs is just a miniscule progression mechanic which has no major relevance in LE in the current state.
You don’t need a tab full of keys, you neither need every single unique stored up as you’ll get a hundred duplicates before long unless they’re rare.
You also don’t need 20 different exalted bases at once more the vast vast majority of the game… and you also won’t need 10 duplicates of 1 LP uniques for crafting.
The starting tab count is low, yes… but after 10 tabs even in the best of cases it’s solely being messy.
To iterate here… I got 50+ tabs, I am a hoarder in these games because it brings me enjoyment. But solely for the sake of actual ‘necessity’ we could easily go down to 5 tabs max and it would ‘suffice’.
So the tab-prices themselves are the least of the issues with LE currently, especially with the still - glaring - issues of MG (which is supposed to be 50% of the playerbase) and the fairly backwards scaling method of item power and hence acquisition rate.
That’s actually a false statement, the opposite is true. CoF has less need of long-term storage if handled well. You get necessary items quicker which creates a higher turnover rate for them. In MG thoughts about market usage come to mind, which are keeping items in storage until inflation causes them to increase in value versus putting them into the market right away for immediate potential power. But that’s another topic in itself which can get quite in-depth with details… and not the main aspect here.
The main aspect is about ‘retention of value’ which is not even a worthy discussion point because it’s a obvious visible thing and baffling if overlooked.
It takes time to acquire gold.
Gold could be used either in MG or Lightless Arbor (for CoF) to directly acquire more power.
Tabs cost gold and hence they are a part of ‘potential’ exchanged for ‘convenience’.
This value isn’t retained in any form at the end of a Cycle.
That goes actively against the design-philosophy of a Legacy/Standard/‘whatever you wanna call it’ place… which is about conservation of value long-term to not allow personal effort to become ‘lost’.
In PoE it happens as well with the removal of league mechanics… but it’s not so all encompassing as in LE since it happens infrequently and comes with a direct opportunity as it directly increases character power there… which leads to acquisition of value through it once more. You could call it a ‘cost of opportunity’ even while Tabs are not providing something like this. They are a net-negative for a Cycle acquisition hence… theoretically you want to avoid buying a single one if you can.
It should have been implemented in 1.1, but they also said they would talk about it more prior to 1.1 & I’m not sure that happened. I’ve not been in a position to test it, certainly.
It wasn’t. I asked Mike on stream a few months ago and he said he didn’t like the idea of a gold tax for MG. He’d rather make LA more appealing to serve as gold sink.
Maybe we’ll get something implemented for 1.2, but for now there’s nothing of the sort.
Yeah, I mean… I would love that to happen too! But I would also love to win in the lottery even without playing in it! It’s close to the same amount of realism.
It’s the sole guaranteed and tested method available, everything else in comparison needs excessive amounts of effort to make happen… which obviously comes at the cost of cutting corners elsewhere. It’s not worthwhile at all given the state of the game. Hence a quick tax and a change later on would be the most viable choice, especially since making LA more appealing would mean the need to outperform MG in value since it’s directly correlated currently.
And by what I mathed out a while ago that would mean increasing the loot… I think it was by a magnitude of 8 times? Which obviously is not really feasable for now.
Is it though? As PoE as shown, the best form of fighting inflation is to have players spend the currency. In their case it’s crafting, in LE’s case they’d like it to be spending it on LA.
You don’t need to create a tax, you just need to have players spend it.
Not really. It just needs to be a gamble with high rewards. As long as you have the potential of really great drops players will gamble on it.
And if you make LA drops better than your average runs, it will also fulfill that purpose. You generated content to sell (so potentially more gold than you spent) but you also spent gold that is forever gone from the economy.
The currency in PoE has inherent value (for direct use) and the market value is directly derived from this inherent value.
Gold itself has no inherent value in LE, it is given value with the respective mechanics attached to it. The sole value it gets is from the effort and hence time needed to acquire it. LA is a secondary measure of providing said value, on the same level as MG, hence they would need to work on a equivalency basis to ensure neither is ‘left behind’. That would inherently enforce that CoF is ignored for that measure, either by adjusting the loot provided from LA according to the state of the market prices or letting LA outperform market prices.
This in itself brings other issues though. If LA is supposed to adjusts to market prices… then which basis is taken to ensure that happening? And it also causes CoF to directly be affected by MG, which goes opposite the design philosophy in a major way.
If LA is supposed to outperform MG then this automatically means that MG gets the respective inflation and prices rise accordingly to expected LA outcomes, LA needs to hence be the best viable method in the whole game to provide equipment compared to anything else possible… which causes LA to have massively massively more loot.
For a gamble to be viable there needs to be a chance for decent return.
The interaction between LA and MG doesn’t allow that in a steady way. LA would need to reliably and in decent quantities provide double- and triple-exalted items or high value uniques under the current premise of the item system.
The alternative is to implement rare but - for the mechanic - unique drops only available in that content. Which isn’t the case.
Hence we’re back at excessive effort to make something happen which has a simple surefire way to function.
And also… once more… as mentioned. The magnitude to become feasable would mean increasing loot drop rate of LA by around 700%, any less and it’s not even remotely a match. To make it absolutely clear: Even with that amount it still underperforms heavily but at least has a realistic possible win-chance which I deemed to back then to be around 5% positive outcome. Hence a win-lose ratio of 5/95, which allows around 0,1% or so for a ‘big win’. Which is still very very low given the amount of time needed to engage with that content.
Not really. If LA outperforms MG, then you get a bunch of stuff you don’t want to use but want to sell. However, if lots of players are using LA, the amount of gold available globally massively decreases as well, so you can’t sell for as much. It auto-adjusts until you get a balance between both.
The only problem with this is that it completely destabilizes CoF.
As long as you can get better loot, on average, for every million spent than you would get during the time required for getting said million, people would use it.
You can increase the “potential value” of loot dropped overall, as long as you decrease the globally available gold. So that you have more better items available to sell globally, but less gold to spent on it globally.
Well, then let’s take that into consideration, because that’s the exact reason why prices would rise:
So, you got a place where ‘better’ loot then normal needs to happen, which is LA, otherwise LA is not viable since you get loot in those places more likely. Hence Gold is not the primary reason to go and tackle this content but the potential loot is (the current state).
This brings the necessity of LA being ‘superior’ in drops. That means prices in MG adjust to prices for opening the vault as the loot is directly correlated to investment. So ‘it really’ is like that sadly already.
But that’s not where it stops! From here on out we go into the pure detrimental aspects as it has a ‘over time’ effect.
You’re right, it takes gold out of the economy. Initially (at the start of a cycle) this causes decent gear to be cheaper. But good gear is traded related to cost of LA hence. This means you create a ‘pricing floor’ for items… and if this doesn’t happen it means LA is not viable enough to use → no engagement into LA (current state again).
So the pricing floor needs to happen, with LA being viable enough to supercede the usage of Monoliths for item acquisition, hence those items will inherently be priced higher then they usually would be, and not engaging while finding such an item will be a big win! But… as supply and demand exist it means that the gold influx will be directed towards LA for item outcomes, which means it creates a ‘cost of opportunity’ to either buy items or invest into direct upgrades from MG. Over time this reaches an equilibrium where the item prices get based on ‘run quantity’ of LA. Hence… Red Ring? Let’s say needs 2500 runs on the modifier limit (max cost) to get one. Hence this item will be minimum 2500 x max cost x markup to be a viable sell.
This means that the prices for those items rise accordingly. Availability gets higher which makes the game overall easier for MG but creates a barter-based market since MG has a gold-cap which hence won’t see specific items… ever. They’re intrinsically higher valued then the gold cap from the start of a cycle rather then inflating over time, with the markup only getting worse.
What you hence create with this measure is a so called ‘floor raising’ without any upside, causing the system to break earlier because of technical limitations implemented currently, and acquisition being even harder since the minority ever gets to a stage where LA max-runs are even a thing which can be thought about.
And that’s not even something I’ve gone into in this post, which is - as mentioned - utterly and entirely against the design philosophy of both sides being roughly ‘equal’ to a degree. This would be a measure actively working against it.
On average is all that needs to be said. Which yes… as mentioned… around 700% quantity increase.
If you increase the potential of other loot otherwise dropped this means in comparison LA will reduce in value. You can’t have both. Good gear drops outside LA? LA becomes worthless. Good gear only drops in LA? Everything becomes worthless outside LA.
In the end the result is that having gold connected to MG automatically causes issues with LA, you can’t get around it.
This is why I’m so fervent about a special trading currency and a taxation system. It circumvents all that stuff, is viable and allows other mechanics to stay relevant while working against inflation since it gets reliably taken out without immense amounts of balancing work which would take up ridiculous amounts of resources better spent at one of the other 20 construction sites the game currently has ongoing and in dire need to have finished.
You realize that this is a spectrum, right? There’s one end of “LA is not worth using thus it has no impact on MG” and one end of “LA is so good to use that it breaks MG”. Which means that you can adjust things between both until you reach a happy balance between both. It’s not unachievable. You don’t need to completely scrape everything and start over (which I know is your favorite strategy), you just need to invest some time into balancing it.
Again, it’s a spectrum. You can make them balanced. You know, like PoE does with it’s several mechanics. On some leagues running Sanctum might be a bit stronger than running Delirium and in others it’s the other way around, but overall you can run either and be sure of similar results overall.
Besides, you don’t need to make it better. You just need to add a big dangling hook on the top. The vast majority of people will always lose more money than win it on the lottery. Or on slot machines. And yet they will gladly spend the money in search of that big hook which is the jackpot.
So you can make LA drop potentially awesome stuff and people will use it. That can be achieved via unique rewards (either exclusive uniques or, for example, the very low chance of getting a double sealed affix) or via a low chance to get a super duper modifier that will fill the screen with better drops. Many ways to achieve this.
So there is more than one way to make LA appealing to players. EHG just needs to focus on one and balance it out.
Yes, as I mentioned, a percentile win-rate is needed to make it happen.
At 2/98 people stop completely interacting with something commonly, even hardcore gambling addicts. The return rate is not high enough to warrant the try, and those 2% chance to ‘profit’ aren’t ‘big hits’ after all, they’re just ‘you got more then put in’, often miniscule amounts.
That’s why I worked with a 5% profit rate (which is really low anyway), commonly it would rather be around 10% or even 20%, enough to cause removal of value but still be a viable method to have a chance.
No, the spectrum for value between LA and other content is not existent.
LA is only viable if gold is otherwise not needed in large amounts. That’s what it was created for after all, if it is though to acquire items directly then it becomes nigh worthless.
Why?
It’s actually easy, think about it… if I’m a player enjoying to farm LA and I need to invest… let’s say 10 Million every time I do… I expect at least 10,5 million back roughly, over a respectively large quantity of runs.
Otherwise… why would I do it? I invest effort, I invest time, and I loose value? That only works when there’s something ‘special’ available which you can get from there but not otherwise in a reasonable manner. But we get everything LA offers reasonably otherwise. In MG through the market (with guarantee, as long as available) or even as random drops during any sort of content.
The point is… it’s not traditional gambling. That’s a false statement. You don’t do LA to simply ‘get something and be happy’, you do it to progress your character. For CoF the quantity dropped there makes it viable enough to use, it offers the best return rate for any content in the game for ‘random loot’. But with MG this doesn’t uphold. (In the current item drop state of LA and the overall game) We would solely ‘loose’ the majority of the time.
In PoE outcome from content is for a reason always higher then access to that content. It’s for that exact reason, market adjustment for supply/demand at the finest. After all you’ll have times you crash or fail or the outcome is a dud. Hence that needs the markup to make it viable nonetheless. Why would I sell something for a loss?
So:
The exclusive Unique is a good option. But double sealed items need to be double T5 sealed or close to it. We already get a reliable amount of double-sealed items from Nemesis, so they would need to get close to the - darn boring - loading and leaving a Monolith strat for that to become viable. If it’s heavily underneath that amount then it becomes not worth it again. Sub-par to that strat is a possibility, but not much since otherwise simply buying it from the market again is the superior method.
In MG you always have to weight against market availability from all possible strategies existing in the game.
In CoF you can forego all that… in MG it’s a mandatory aspect.
And the second alternative is exclusive types of loot solely available through LA, but we still don’t have that, hence it’s also not a reliable option for now.
Not to speak of any implementation of new item types, uniques and so on solely from that (after already beating a boss with exclusive unique rewards) would make it a double-dipping mechanic for loot rewards to a degree, which should be avoided as then the other dungeons get less important. As well as needing quite a bit of effort from the devs for new images, models, coming up with the effects, balancing and so on.
Hence we’re back at ‘low effort and surefire way’… taxation and removal of gold usage for MG to instead use a special currency.
Yeah, also an option, double-sealed would work, but they’re not valuable at all inherently, only with the right base, the right affixes and the right tiers sealed. So massive massive end of end-game stuff.
We don’t have access to several layers beforehand reliably, so we don’t need ‘more’ available, we need access to the already existing possible content in the game… or adjustment to make that achievable in any timeframe before the human race goes extinct Would be a good start.
It’s a good solution in the future, but not for ‘now’.
I’m having a hard time understanding this particular reason. Your game is less fun because you CAN have more stash space now? Emphasis on the can… if you don’t want it, you could just buy less pages, right?
Yes it is. Because having a forced limitation that you can overcome by spending resources (gold for buying more Stash tabs) is fun for me.
Having to choose how to spend your resources is good. It makes items more interesting for me, because you have to make decisions about what items to keep and which are not worth keeping.
I am a hoarder myself and I love stashing items for alts. Even when 99% of the time I will never use the stashed item. But having to make a decision what’s worth keeping is fun and engaging for me.
Early on on the cycle I collect a lot of items and once the Stash get full I have 2 axis of further stashing items: sorting out weaker items or increasing Stash capacity.
).
Would be a good start.