What are you talking about? Item dupes and gold generation exploits have nothing to do with the core system of the factions and are rather on a technical level.
These were bugs and exploits using inintended behaviour.
The rest of the system is working great and I am sure they will fine tune it a bit more and next cycle will be a lot better. This is an ongoing process.
Nobody was talking about the âcore systemâ. I dont care about âcore systemâ if dupes and expolit make that system broken.
It would honestly be nice if both factions could be joined and shared favor and also expanded upon. MG Could have missions and CoF could have some scenarios to run. Obv CoF would have to prevent the fortune item from being sold on MG or something
To be honest I donât think they need to expand the factions. They already do what they are supposed to do.
But they could add more new factions that are not mutually exclusive with these two already existing factions.
But being able to join both factions is against the fundamental design intention of the system. So that should not be a thing.
I think the MG could be improved to make it more RMT-proof outside of exploits/duping.
Making the gold cost raising the favour cost for each trade would make it harder for RMT services to transfer their gold as needed by buying white items. In return, the base favour cost of exalted items and above are reduced. Like 10k fervour per million gold.
I would assume that a legit player should earn enough favour in the time they need to acquire large sums of gold, while RMT often funnel many small sums into some hoarder account.
Next step: remove direct player trade. Every trade will be listed in the AH, with a 2h period before it can be bought.
I agree with this. Seems like a good fix.
I would agree with this in principle, but the way it is now is the only way you have to give stuff to your friends. You just want to collect favor and sell for 1 gold, which, according to point 1, wouldnât need a lot of.
Resonances seem like a good idea but with a bad implementation and doesnât really let you help your friend that is new to the game.
So, removing direct player trade is good in theory, but ends up screwing that up. Still, I would be all for it if it stopped RMT, although I doubt it would anyway.
Iâm fairly new but thereâs limitations on what I can gift already.
Perhaps a forthcoming guild system with cooldowns on joining/leaving guilds might hamper RMT traders, i.e. you can freely gift items within your guild to other players, or utilise some form of account bound gifting currency that can only be earned through play/longevity of attachment to said guild.
This caught my attention. What are your thoughts here? Add new factions in twos, so that the player has to pick one or the other? Or just add another faction reputation grind as another progression system?
If they release a faction that improves crafting, it becomes effectively mandatory. So while I really want that, Iâm pretty sure I donât want that grind every season unless the tasks the faction requires are fun and rewarding in and of themselves (I think they did a good job with prophecies).
Wouldnât one say that about a trade or MF faction? What would be an âequallyâ desirable faction to compete with one focussed on crafting?
What I was thinking, and should have typed was, âif they release a faction that improves crafting in isolation, it becomes effectively mandatoryâ. I think that is true.
I did ask myself the same question you asked, âwhat could compete with a crafting guild?â.
I think if they release Craftaholics and Cosmicetology, there will be some folks that pick Cosmicetology because their characterâs hair is a mess, and itâs about time someone does something about it. 
More realistically, if they had a crafting guild competing with a pet guild⌠I donât know what I would pick. I do almost anything to not have to run around to hoover up gold and shards. But I would hate them so much if they did that.
I donât know if weâll ever get âcompetingâ factions. CoF and MG arenât competing, theyâre just alternatives for different playstyles, namely trade vs non-trade.
I donât think they would ever make a craft vs pets. It wouldnât make much sense. I could instead see something more like crafting vs targeted affix drops, although that kinda falls on CoF territory. But those would be 2 options for different playstyles, namely craft vs non-craft.
I can see them adding crafting as a single faction, though. Yes, it would be âmandatoryâ, but if itâs not competing with anything then itâs just another tool to improve your loot experience.
Yeah, but thatâs what he means & certainly what I meant. What faction could compete for the playerâs choice with a crafting faction?
Then itâs not a faction, itâs a buff to crafting. Why add the extra steps unless the higher ranks unlock different stuff?
Absolutely.
No. No matter how many times folks say this, you arenât going to convince me that EHG didnât think and intend that these two were competing options. This whole, âCoF is hardmodeâ, is just a comment on the reality, not the intention, of the massive torrent of shit loot that drops in this game. And that being the reality is an EHGs problem, not mine, not yours, to fix.
Mikeâs recent comments on this topic (Friday stream, I think two weeks ago) convince me that Mike, at least, thinks that these two should be competitive with each other. And I think heâs saying it in good faith, players in both factions should be reasonably able to level to end game at reasonable rates. But I think itâs impossible to make CoF compete with MG. Thatâs the reality.
So then the conversation is, âwhat is competitiveâ? Yeah, that is where EHG is going to be broken on the wheel of reality and end up agreeing with you; hey, these are just alternatives. Ok, itâs reality, but itâs not what was intended, and itâs not what is being communicated to players via the game and EHG conversation.
Shit, I derailed my derail.
Well, as I said, one that letâs you target affixes for drops. The only problem with that is that CoF should already do that.
Basically, the opposite of crafting is not crafting, which means better drops (maybe with a faction tag where you canât craft on those items or they drop with 0FP). I donât think that will happen because CoF already exists.
Well, adding as a faction would obviously be because of that, unlocking better bonuses to crafting, rather than having them all immediately.
No, theyâre not competing nor did EHG ever consider them as such. Players demanded a trade system (since EHG only wanted to have the gift system originally) so they thought: âWhat can we add so that players that donât want to trade donât feel like crap like they do in PoE?â. And they came up with CoF.
Theyâre not competing. CoF is simply a âconsolation prizeâ if you donât want to trade, nothing more.
They do. You can get to end game and get pretty good gear with CoF already. However, if you want that perfect BiS gear, MG is the only way to get it.
It can even be said that itâs easier to get great gear for endgame with CoF than with MG. Itâs when you want those 3-4LP uniques that MG is clearly superior.
I know, isnât it fun? 
This is entirely in your own head (and a few others here). Unfortunately, you have reality on your side, in that there really is no way to compete with millions of loot drops and thousands of people filtering the loot for you, for a measly few million gold.
But there is no way youâre going to convince me that this was EHGâs intent. That it is not communicated to new customers, that might think they are getting something competitive, is a problem.
Weâre going to have to agree to disagree here.
Eventually, I think EHG will have bow to the obvious as well, and since they seem to be straight-shooters, Iâm hoping they will try to make clear that CoF is for folks that hate trade and want a billion alts and donât mind buying massive amounts of stash space. That is where CoF excels; on your three hundredth alt, youâll already have most of the gear your need (if you keep it all)!
Considering that the devs didnât want us to have trade at all, outside of gifting, and were âforcedâ by the players to add it, I do believe that their intent was simply to create a system where players donât feel like crap when they donât want to trade, or canât trade, or have to play offline.
But even if they were competing, CoF is actually equal or even superior to MG in all stages except the last: BiS gear. You can get your baseline gear really fast, you can get good to great gear reasonably easily. You just have a hard time getting BiS gear, especially because of boss-drops LP.
Yeah, thatâs fine. I think this issue is caused by player (and even dev) perception of the systems and, honestly, thereâs really no way to know who is right, or even if anyone is.
I also believe the devs perception of factions has changed as theyâve seen them in action.
1.1 will come with changes for both, so letâs see what they come up with.
IMO they are though. Theyâre competing choices since you canât have both, so they are in competition in a similar way that the various masteries are in competition.
Is that not obvious when you look at the rank rewards? Should they write that out in crayon?
Au contraire mon ami, if they never wanted us to have trade, why was it in the kickstarter?
Gifting was the initial outcome to the reaction to the Bazaar, Factions was the outcome of the reaction to gifting.
Being exclusive doesnât mean theyâre competing. Softcore and Hardcore are exclusive, since you canât have both, but theyâre not competing with each other. Nor are they supposed to be remotely similar. Same for SSF/non-SSF.
Well, I wasnât around back then, nor when they came up with gifting, but my impression, having arrived later to the party, is that devs changed their mind somewhere along the way about having a free trade market. Which theyâre allowed to do. And changed their mind again when players said gifting wasnât enough.
I might be wrong (and probably am), but thatâs the impression I got about this issue.
No, it was never going to be free trade.
IE, they didnât want trade to be the best way of getting gear (like it is in PoE). they have never said that they want frictionless free trade.
Hereâs how I read the above; âthey are competingâ and âbut they really arenât competing because there is no way that CoF can get the results that MG is going to give you⌠and that should be obvious except to complete moronsâ.
I agree with you that CoF and MG are competing because any character can only have one of those two factions at a time. Further, I think it was EHGs intention that they be competing in the sense that each choice provided enough benefit that cycle characters in either faction could be competitive in end-game activities at approximately the same point in the cycle. But I disagree that the burden is on the (new) player to understand right off the bat the difference between the two choices OR that they should research the game before buying it.
New players coming into this game wonât have any idea how much gear progression falls off a cliff for a primary character from 75 to 85. For people that want to get a primary character to have a good representation of the items/affixes they want within half a season youâre going to have to be pretty lucky. Or, you know, go MG and grind gold.
And I base that on the number of players that posted in various threads saying, âwell this sucks, I picked the wrong factionâ.
While I enjoy how you love to blame the player, and the snark that comes with it (which is always top-notch), I think itâs crazy to have that mindset if youâre running game dev as a business. Which you are,. 
I saw that video you did with DarthMicro, good job on that.