Short-List of EASY improvements

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I made a short-list of improvements as part of my love-for-last-epoch thread.

Here it is as a suggestion:

  • longer timeout on repetitive voiceovers (“Fools…Fools!”)…
  • /played per character…
  • stash-sort should stack 2-wide items first, then 1-wide items
  • dps meter somewhere (on boss healthbar, target dummy, whatever)
  • give Loot Filters indpendent control of border/fill/text color, and an icon, so we can “emphasize” loot in more ways without overwriting rarity colors…
  • hover tooltip dps-estimates for pets (attacks and skills)
  • remove pet power snapshotting (or make a gearset/swap mechanic)
  • optional small “mana ball” on right side of above-character-mini-healthbar
  • Arena “dungeon hotkey” to immediately spawn next group (so we dont have to sit bored at low levels)
  • key storage for harbinger needles
  • stash simple search expressions (lvl<30, lvl>30, LP>2)
  • more female character esthetic MTX (Necrotic Shroud is AWEFUL and has stubble male face even on female, and all bulky shoulder armor makes females look like men)… and show both male and female previews of MTX!!
  • way more skill MTX! (druid form skins, minion/pet skins)
  • armor MTX with many more visual “themes” (current armor MTX to me are all the same - “boroque gawdy colors”, and don’t even seem to lean into any given class fantasy)
  • armor/weapon “imprint” MTX that lets us imprint any item style in the world

Slightly less easy:

  • 5x more “varity options” for each character “emotion” voiceover (not skill triggered)
  • Separate “Solo” split of the ladder for people playing solo-account-found or solo-srkf-found, or at least a filter on the existing ladderd
  • speedrun ladder
2

Longer timeout yes.
Increasing the amount is anything but easy.

How to enforce it? Also a further split of the playerbase which already is an issue with MG, and even when playing solo what ensures that you won’t get outside help anyway, for example swift listing on the bazaar for cheap so you can snipe them? Would enforce a split of the Cycles in a fixed manner, hence no interaction… also not easy and actively detrimental.

Heavily against it.

A DPS tool for the training dummy is fine. In content it’s a distraction at best and detrimental for the community at worst since it brings out the worst parts of comparison and actively leans into a more toxic environment (elitism).

100% agreed, more loot-filter options are important.

Tooltip DPS should be available in the stats sheet, sadly they aren’t. The whole tooltip situation needs a massive overhaul.

forget ‘simple’… have EHG finally include regex + search terminology which leans back onto regex.

MTX is a massive investment of resources, always.
Yes, EHG needs to work on more… but it’s everything but a ‘easy’ change.

That’s the actually easiest implementation functionally out of all of them you brought… and it’s situated at the hardest :stuck_out_tongue: Btw, the point above is already listed in the ‘easy’ section too.

3

I’d actually prefer a system like the loot filter applied to stash. Easier to use for everyone.

4

Solo ladder split or filtering would be enforced by the game’s solo-account-found or solo-cgaracter-found settings which deny trading and grouping of any kind. Solo players already cant use MG so There is no splitting.

When i was talking about easy, i was talking about programming wise.

There is zero programming to add mtx, and virtually no programming to add a variety to voiceovers. The mtx takes some 3d artist time, but this isn’t massive, and they will generate money to pay for themselves.

A speedrun ladder is probably the hardest programming on my entire list… First they have to start tracking and saving /played in the server (so it can’t be cheated), then they have to define what a speedrun ladder is (fastest to an o jective? With 3-5 objectives? Fastest to each level) And then they need to add Ui to show all that.

5

This is true, once the framework has been laid down, for armor and pet MTX. Not for skill MTX, though. That requires more effort.
Which is why we still don’t have skill MTX for transforms. Because those require a lot more, especially because transforms also get skills and those skills also need to be changed to the MTX.

6

Fair point… Though the major thrust of my suggestion to ad more of the “easy” MTX is to give us players more things to spend money on to get EHG more money… The harder MTX can wait… they could just have some people churning out more of the simple MTX.

I mean, they have a wolf skin, thats it… where are the bear reskins, crow reskins, etc… I’m not saying art is trivial, but it has to be done to give us fans more ways to support the game and EHG! Please!

7

They haven’t done that because it hasn’t been a priority yet. With the sales from launch and since then, they had a comfy monetary cushion that has allowed them to work on the game stuff without having to focus on MTX sales to survive.

They’re slowly putting into place the frameworks for MTX creation. They adding to them each season. And they’re getting better quality each season as well. It’s just not the priotrity for now. And that’s a good thing.

8

I understand why you would say it’s a good thing, by which I asume you mean its a good thing their focus is on making great gameplay.

My perspective, as a software engineer and retired entrepreneur and businessman is a bit different. Adding more instances of already existing MTX is not a tradeoff of programming resources, and that tends to be the most complicated to manage resource. (Of course there is always some management overhead) A successful product is a virtuous cycle of satisfied customers and profit extraction to create improvement to the product quality. The lack of MTX is always “leaving money on the table” as you might say… While the playerbase is tiny, it’s no big deal, but as the playerbase grows, that is more and more missed opportunity to grow EHGs capabilities as a company, including the capabilities to improve gameplay. I believe it would be better for EHG, and the game, and in turn US, if there were more MTX for people to buy in 1.1, and certainly more now in 1.2. There is very little reason to put it off, as the MTX sales generate more revenue than they cost to make by a very wide margin.

It seems we both agree that their focus on gameplay has paid off… Last Epoch is a great game and Season 2 is a solid installment. I’m still lacking productive ways to spend more money on it. And I don’t think thats “a good thing”.

9

It’s not, but it’s a tradeoff of human resources. To churn more MTX out, you would need to hire more people. So you have higher salary spendings overall and your cushion isn’t as comfortable anymore.

And it’s not like it’s an ever increasing progression. Sure, maybe you can hire 1 or 2 or even 5 more to work on MTX rendering and it might be worth it. But it’s not guaranteed. There’s a curve to it. If you hire 200 people to churn out a dozen MTX every single day, you will lose money very fast and go bankrupt.

Most people don’t buy MTX. Most people of the minority that do buy MTX only buy it occasionally and in small amounts. And only a small minority actually buys them consistently and in larger quantities.
So simply hiring more people to churn them out isn’t guaranteed to make money.

They already have people for this (as well as doing other renders). I expect they don’t feel the need to ramp up the production for now.

Not necessarily. People don’t tend to buy a percentage of the available stock. They tend to buy an absolute value.
So someone might buy a dozen MTX in a season. If they have twice that much MTX to choose from, they might buy 15 because a few more will be really nice to their aesthetic. If they have 10x that much MTX to choose from, they might still only buy 15. Because that’s what they can afford. And this is for a whale customer. Most of the rest will always only buy 2-3 per season. Even if you churn out 100 MTX per day.

So, again, there’s a balance to it. There is a point where making more MTX actually looses you money.

10

The point of regex is that you use so called ‘placeholders’ to actually search, hence you write out the term and use them instead of the official regex instruction.

That means that the full functionality is still there for those knowledgeable but you can use it as a normal non-insane person as well.

It’s solely a combination for the best of both worlds. Simplicity + powerful searching tool at once.

You mean SSF then?

We already got character bound and account bound separate.
No more need beyond.

But there’s modelling involved + texturing.
That’s extremely time intensive and expensive.

Programming is not the beginning and the end of things.

All things you mentioned are literally 5 minute jobs. One is ideas during lunch (which goals to implement), ladders already exist so you derive the code from there directly and /played should be tracked anyway, if not that’s a mistake from EHG already.

That’s called a ‘reskin’ and is highly frowned upon, gives negative perception.

That I agree with 100% though.

Yes, but you want to create them in a targeted way.
Simply ‘flooding’ the market with badly thought out ones or reskins actively reduces engagement in it. Choice paralysis is a thing, so if you get 5 skins of the ‘same’ type and would’ve bought one… instead some people choose ‘0’ instead. That’s bad. And it’s usually not counteracted by the amount of people choosing ‘2’ or all 5 in that case.

A underlining function to adjust color schemes is a better solution hence.
And for everything else modelling time and costs have to be invested, which is a long-term endeavour.

Does EHG provide too little effort there? Yes. They should increase the effort into those as it would pay off.
But not in the way you want to showcase it off, that’s proven to be detrimental, not positive. Targeted approaches do return a higher margin and provide a better long-term prospect overall.

11

Sure. But most of the time, when I’m searching through my tabs it’s to find something for my build. Of which I already made the filter for. So it would be easier to just apply it and search for relevant items that way.

Best solution would be to have both, tbh. Meaing filter and regex.

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