Suggestion. Buy max level (with conditions) using in-game gold not real life Cash

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1

Good day, i would like to suggest the ability for players to spend in game gold to unlock max level on alternate characters.

So for fairness to others as that matters i though of a few conditions;

  1. You have to have reached level 100 naturally on a mastery to unlock the option to buy max level.
  2. If you buy max level it would unlock level 100 for the character your on as well as the story related idols and skill points and all waypoint locations.
  3. You have to level each mastery per server with no mastery swaps. So this would mean for each season and each server legacy/seasonal/hard core you would have to do each mastery once. And you cant level one mastery per class and just swap masteries and pay to unlock the rest.
  4. Lets say its a million in game gold gold to do it.

So the reason why i suggest this is I’m almost at two of every mastery at 100 and it was a pain to do which made me hate the games at times. I made so many characters as i like running different builds but i don’t want to rip apart one build just to try another. And i would like other players to not have to do what i did potentially causing game hate, and hopefully promote other players to experiment with different build ideas.

If you don’t believe me about the other characters and I’m trying to be lazy here my le character profiles. https://www.lastepochtools.com/profile/legionone

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Hard no again. If it sucks to level, EHG should make it not suck or provide a skill-based alternative relying on the dungeons (which you can already do to some effect) or some other system. Ingame gold is just another indirect P2W and boosts RMT. It also highly favors MG over CoF. It’s already borderline for the mastery swap and other resets that you can simply buy with gold. (E.g. it’s already unfair how you can farm Rune of Havoc so much easier in MG with Lightless Arbor.)

If you dislike the character progression and just want to play endgame, why don’t you just play legacy? The only reason to stick to season would be group play or MG.

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If legacy comment is at me I only play cod legacy and 4K hours played so far

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And yet you forgot that this is very unfair to 50% of the playerbase that are CoF, since MG can make gold much much much much easier.

There is already an MG/CoF imbalance with gold in regards to stash tabs and mastery respec. This would only increase that imbalance.

I’d rather see you store extra xps past level 100 and you can spend those to insta-level alts. Even though I’d still oppose that, at least it would be more fair than using gold.

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Getting to level 100 on a single character each season takes exponentially more time than getting a few different alt characters from level 1 to endgame …

This suggestion would certainly ruin the MG economy, because it’s a HUGE incentive for RMT, botting, hacking, etc. All things that players are fed up with from previous seasons.

As it stands, I can get an alternate character from level 1 to well over 50+ in one or two play sessions using the dungeon skip. From level 50-70+ is about one more play session on top… So we’re talking in 1 or 2 days of play I can get an alt all the way to endgame without any real effort. And it’s fun to do it!

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Look I didn’t want to make this another faction vs faction post. The 1 million was a pull from the sky number it could be one gold for all I care, as by the time this would be ever implemented I’d have all available alts at 100.

This was not intended to be a us vs them thing. Just thought of putting on paper something that I thought would help others.

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Who would this help, though?

-It doesn’t help casuals, because they never reach level 100 (which is a requirement for this whole thing).
-It doesn’t help altoholics, because what they enjoy most is the build growth from level 1, so they don’t want to skip content. In fact, skipping immediately to level 100 would just kill any enjoyment in the build and they would simply drop it after a day.
-It doesn’t help content creators because they can already respec the build/mastery mostly at will and they tend to not have multiple characters in the same mastery, plenty of times even just one for each class.
-It doesn’t help grinders because those tend to stick to a single efficient character.

So for whom, exactly, is this change for?

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Believe me or not there are players who do not enjoy the process, and don’t make alts as they view the leveling process as a negative. There are people who have build ideas and want to try them but don’t want to re-spec their current build so they just never bother trying stuff out.

You could use me as example I’ve leveled over 20 alts to level 100 and unlocked the idols and skill points from story. I personally do not care about the story( although that was not point for all this) and my enjoyment of the game comes from the loot grind. I like to try out different builds and I like the crafting process in this game and the process of making great gear. I enjoy the moments when I hear an anvil sound because a great drop for me just dropped. And as much as I hate failing my slams, the whole process of failing slams and hunting for more loot to push my dmg higher is amazing for me. Because as much as it sucks to fail a slam for 20+ times when I hit the affix’s I want the joy high is so awesome for me.

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And I retract my post since I was too dumb to read, gonna answer after a good night’s rest :stuck_out_tongue:

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Ok, so this change is for the very legacy-minded older players that just want to skip to the end because they already have level 100 of every mastery. Which is less than 1% of the playerbase?
This will rarely be used in seasonal realm, since only a very few reach level 100 in the first place, let alone create another character in the same mastery.

So you’re either someone that’s been playing legacy for a few years (and even then you need to have the grinder mentality to actually push them to level 100) or if you’re a player that usually only pushes to level 90-ish something you’re seeing other players get benefit based on seniority alone.

Lastly, Mike has always said they don’t want to add anything that requires level 100. No prestige levels, for example. Because they don’t want the players to feel like they have to push to level 100 or they’re missing out on something.

And this goes against that by giving you a benefit to pushing level 100 (which, again, only a very small percentage of players even reaches, even in legacy) and making people feel forced to play to level 100, even if they’re not enjoying it anymore.

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So I don’t expect you to see every reply, but previous in this thread I said I’m over 4,000h’s (according to steam) played in LE and I linked my account for reference.

To note if the issue goes against the dev wishes of having a “bonus” for having reached a milestone, for the reason I gather of basically boils down to FOMO.

To this I have two replies, first if 100 is too high then set it to a more acceptable level let’s say 50 and keep rest of unlocks.

The second reply (what I’ll generalize) of most players don’t reach 100 so no point or value of doing things that benefit them. Just because the amount of players who could “benefit” from this is “low” does not mean it’s not worth effort or attention. If that was the case you could say that developing uber Abby is a waste of time as the majority of players will not make it to him and even less will be able to kill uber Abby.

And just a post note, to be argumentative if “very few players” reach level 100 and even less have multiple level 100 characters is such a major argument point that people keep using. Maybe having no point to reaching 100 is actually a negative on the game and the exp gain/cap should be readdressed or the max level should be adjusted, if your going to argue most players don’t do it and you should design gain around the majority player (and as I see it not “ideally” as what’s for the good of the over game and player-base).

P.S. although this was not the point of the post, if the leveling process/ story repeat for unlock isn’t a problem why does almost every week in the Friday twitch dev stream chat contain comments or questions from players about having another way to do it.

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I mean…on one hand I understand your frustration on leveling alts on the other…last epoch(at least for me) is by far the easiest and most chill game to level them. I never felt sick to my stomach thinking I have to go through the campaign again like poe 1 or even worse 2 where I literally cannot bring myself to make a second,yes a second, character that goes through that sloppy shitty thing all over again since its release.

So I am okay with this games campaign so far. At least we do not have to go through ALL of it on alts. Once you finish unlocking idols/passive points you are done.

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Ok, I had my good night’s rest!

So first off:
If you’ve already reached level 100 then the limiting factor for your builds going forward is not the level, it’s the equipment. LE’s system is surprisingly lenient for the last few passive points, they make not a lot of difference (unless you decide to take away the core functional ones, but that isn’t smart :stuck_out_tongue: )

Your second point is fine… but given you’ve already reached level 100… isn’t that nothing else then a progression skip for the campaign then? Because outside of a campaign skip there is no reasonable function here.

As for your third point… if you’ve already got a character at the mastery finished at 100… then you got a character finished at 3 masteries, because you can switch masteries. Hence it’s class-specific, not mastery specific already. ‘No mastery swap’ is not a feasable thing… unless you give players a specific warning ‘if you switch mastery you’ll not be able to unlock buying concurrent characters for this mastery at level 100 when you reach it’. Something that will make people hesitant and reduce the respective quality of the experience when they reach that situation, suddenly feeling limited where there was supposed to be no limits in design anymore (after those limits were removed ill-suitedly… but that’s another topic).
Then there’s also the question of ‘why?’… you have the option the respec at that point already which removes the need for buying yourself up to another char in the first place.

As for the pricing range… 1 mil? That’s far too low. This level of power is at least a 50-100 mil gold functionality. Not to speak that Gold is absolutely ill-suited for the job anyway given the sheer magnitude of difference between CoF and MG in acquisition rate.

Now to the core premise behind it:

‘Leveling feel like it sucks, hence I don’t want to level’.
Ok! Fair!
What part of the leveling process is the thing that you didn’t enjoy?
The repetition? Then sorry, for variety you need repetition, otherwise the product has no staying power long-term. So that cannot be done because of it.

You state the following, which is:

Which yes… fair!

But that’s also not a progression issue… it’s a character limit aspect since you cannot keep endless characters. We got 25 slots and 15 masteries… so at best you can have 2/3rd of the masteries with 2 different builds, and that’s it anyway. And that includes all game-modes together.
So… if you wanna play Cycle and you’re a Legacy player as well then you already can only have a single char per mastery anyway… as otherwise? Your SSF experience… your HC experience… your Cycle experience… there’s no space for the characters anyway.

The next thing is: Why two of every mastery? You’re not even supposed to rush through this way. And the time needed isn’t that much anyway. The biggest ‘hurdle’ in gameplay feeling are progression of corruption for the characters… and the campaign section. Both have significant options to be reduced in scale, a level 95 character in 10 hours is nothing major to create in LE actually, and level 100 is not a major boon by then, maybe 5% total power unless the equipment suuuucks.

Yep, that would be a much better option, absolutely so!
Those systems work well… but only in regards to games which focus on longevity in grinding of some form.

So LE can’t make good use of it anyway.

Welcome, me! I’m extremely reluctant to create alts since I don’t enjoy re-doing processes. Sooner or later I do it anyway and expand my options slowly this way… but I’m generally a ‘1 character forever player’.
I’ve played my Tornado Shot Deadeye in PoE for around 5000 hours now, a good 3000 hours farming in maps. Why? Cause I enjoy the process. Everything else of my 10k playtime there is bossing and testing other characters over time, most being dropped again.

If you do not enjoy the process… then the product is not for you. It’s always that simple.
I don’t enjoy the process of leveling secondary characters… I’m not the core audience of any mechanics focusing on replaying characters hence as it reduces my enjoyment.
Hence I need longevity mechanics in a game… and nowadays? A good ARPG has to provide both.

Hence I see the issue as LE not providing enough value in playing singular characters long-term while keeping the respective enjoyment of playing it alive.

Isn’t it more reasonable to play Legacy then and switch between builds on the char with the respective mastery? 1 Tab for a build… put all of it in, take up new gear and start the farming process for it then and there at level 100 with good blessing unlocks as well.

In Cycle this doesn’t make sense anyway as basically nobody would use it, 99,99% of people don’t reach level 100 and get the urge to replay the same mastery to level 100 then rather then simply respeccing.
And value acquisition in Legacy at least provides you with realistic long-term means of respeccing anyway.

I really don’t see the target audience for this change… maybe 3-4 people total would actually profit in a serious way?
The change is so insignificant (and has downsides for perception as well if introduced) that in a list of 1000 things to change it’s somewhere at 995 in priority :stuck_out_tongue:

You’re right, a low number is not meaningless… depending on the impact this specific group of players has for the game.
That’s why end-game focus is so high despite the majority never playing in it. The minority makes the vast chunk of revenue and it keeps the product alive as well long-term, right?

But the target you’re setting is a fraction of this fraction and then another fraction of that. There is a cutoff line when invested effort and the respective results are not congruent anymore. And this suggestion clearly is one of those, not to speak of either screwing over people which switch mastery along the way (as you stated you have to achieve it without mastery changing to 100, right?) or giving a warning notice to vastly more people and causing potential choice paralysis at that moment then the total amount of people even getting into the position to use the mechanic you suggest, which is a detrimental situation to exist.

Developing uber abby was a waster of time!
Absolutely so :stuck_out_tongue:
The focus of the development went absolutely awry when EHG decided to make the uber boss and it’s caused massive detriment to the game since then.

Depends, there’s 2 sides to this actually.

At one hand… a significant portion of players in ARPGs are goal-focused. Reach goal? Stop playing!
Level 100 is one such significant goal, that’s why several games in the genre tend to make it very hard to reach this point. It’s to keep players engaged longer.
There’s even been a discussion around this specific process with streamers once, which pushed of a bigger discussion on Reddit as much as I remember (PoE Reddit) where people relatively regularly stated that ‘yes, the enjoyment drops when I reach level 100’ actually.
So it seems to be a surprisingly significant portion of players which have this feeling.

So hence we gotta think about it… which is more likely? Someone who looses motivation upon reaching level 100 as their brain says ‘progression done, fun over!’ or someone who goes ‘Need all masteries on level 100… multiple times or no fun!’.

Because it’s presented like utter shit in the game.
It’s not well visible, it doesn’t get explained properly and it feels absolutely and utterly choppy to do.
And that’s for first-time characters and follow-up ones the same actually.
A first-time character gets uselessly sent to the dungeon entrance without having a key, which is a shitty time-waster.
A follow-up character might remember the experience on not even go there, not realizing there is a skip.
To see the skip you need to remember that simply portaling out isn’t the only way to go after finishing the dungeon as well.

Good design would shove this option only when available into the face of the player in some way/shape or form. Which it doesn’t. People literally forget it exists still.

And those using it actively? 2 hour campaign playthrough is absolutely possible, 4 hours is on the high side of play-time when using the skip. Then you are in end-game, with the itemization progression and gradual leveling… as expected and supposed.

So it’s the presentation of the skip which needs to primarily be worked on, not even the functionality.

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I’ll reply properly to all the points when I have time to properly think and reply, I just have a quick note about me.

LE is 100% my top game currently and I can very much so enjoy my time playing it. That being said the enjoyment level lowers when I don’t have an objective. When I first started I had the goal of a max level character and when I did that my next goal was to have at least one of every unique drop for me to have a collection of. Then when I completed that goal I decided to make one of every mastery to 100. And when I finished that I said well I might as well fill the character slots so two of every thing. I know someone said that 25 is the max you can have but that is incorrect. At least on legacy you can have 30 characters myself I currently have 26. Also in between getting 30 level 100 characters there’s been updates and changes that made me want to try builds and side tracked the goal of 30 lvl 100’s. All this is done on legacy only playing cof and never mg.

My point of all that word vomit is I’m making my own point to play as that’s what’s needed for me to enjoy the game. None of the goals I set were made by the devs I just found my own reason to play. For the reason that, currently I believe LE has a major flaw of having an answer to the question “why should I play”.

I’ll stop here because I don’t want to derail main post point and create an argument over why you play.

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Ye have two ways to bypass the compaign - dungeons and monolith, I dinnae understand what the problem is.

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Yes, and this specific sentence is the one I’ll want to you to remember, because that’s the gist of it.
Players are goal-driven, external or internal made goal is secondary… but action is goal-driven, always.

You’re moving on to stating ‘First max level, then collection, then collection of max levels’. First off… that’s very far into the goal-driven aspect already, kudos there.

Which leads to this:

They weren’t?
I would argue it still falls very very tightly into the ‘expected long-term play progression’ of players.

To experience the game in full you need to reach max level, because that’s where you can provide proper comparisons between builds the best. Sure, you can do it earlier… but it’s best handled there.
For the variety you need to play up all masteries (or at least classes, hence 5 characters) over time, otherwise you won’t experience the full ‘scale’ of the product.

That’s very much intentional. It’s not like making a redstone CPU in minecraft… which is a unintentional side-effect of becoming possible, the initial one was hidden doors, funky contraptions and so on, ‘small scale’… relatively at least.

In LE this is not yet the case, we don’t have mechanics which create severe ‘unintentional but good’ effects. The current game is ‘hand tailored’ to full, balance breakouts… but not mechanical breakouts yet.

So these goals? They’re expected player behavior, hence they’re ‘by design’. Unless EHG wasn’t capable enough to even thing that far and simply stumbled upon this effect by sheer luck… which wouldn’t bode well for their capability in total.

Which hence leads back to:

And this is the issue now, is it?

Your goal was ‘I want to have all characters at max level’, which is fine and dandy! Expected after all for a long-term player over time. It ultimately always leads to this for the vast majority given enough time.

So why was it a negative experience anyway?
The ‘chore’ of doing it repeatedly.

And what makes repetition a chore instead of a delight? Lack of challenge, lack of rewards, lack of presentation between highs and lows. This is a univeral law in any entertainment medium, books don’t have non-stop climax moments, they present a premise, build up to it and resolve it, often layered like a matrjoschka doll with several plot twists. That keeps things engaging. If you don’t even need to read to know exactly what will happen… why take in the information? There is no tension present.
Comedy works the same, providing punchlines is heavily based upon proper timing.
Movies work the same (as they’re visualized stories).
Board games do.
Pen&Paper.

Everything basically, and LE as a videogame is no exception.

That tells us that during this progress of maxing level 100 you’re not engaged, something is ‘missing’ and you keep up with it to reach the reward of success… not to enjoy the process of going there anymore. That’s bad.

So what’s the solution ultimateld? Improve the process to the goal. Not cutting the process away to remove it entirely.

Making things ‘easier’ (time-wise) takes away from the feeling of reward at the end.
It’s a common thing to happen, if you play Minecraft and you make a massive building in creative mode it feels entirely different then when you make it in survival mode. Survival mode ‘hits harder’ when it’s done, the extra effort - which is pure tedium to achieve to be clear here - adds into the achievement.
And if you do the same in ‘Vintage Story’ then it’s a fantastic feeling beyond end. You’ve overcome the grind, you showed dedication, it has now ‘value’ as you put so much energy inside.

The same goes for the process of reaching level 100. If the tedium to go there is badly designed and hence frustrating at points that needs to be fixed. It needs to be a challenge… but it needs to feel smooth and not frustrating at the same time.

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A least, you should be able to get a L100 character of the same class. I always want to try 2-3 different builds or Masteries but respeckign and grind get in the way and I stick with one. Even Grim Dawn, which I am playing again now has a “middle of the road” solution for alts.

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I just want a fun leveling experience and that’s where LE falls flat. I someohw can play though PoE2 for example without much issues because for the most time it feels like I need to play the game and engage with it.

heck even running down Helltides in D4 is more fun right now, at least to me, then going through campaign and normal monos.

From my point of view…

Once you killed the last boss on the campign… whatever forgettfull NPC it was, you are able to level an alt in normal monos that scale with your level. So normal monos would be worth something and not only dead weight you need to get through untill the game “begins”.

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I play and love the campaign I do think @Macknum is spot on about engaging it’s not a challenge especially with twinks but at the same time a 3-4 hour clear is also fun, so I dunno. Hard one for me!

@Kulze just agreeing with uber comment and whoever else said it - time waster I think they added it just to have something new to push for due to the big delay. I can’t wait for new bosses with FUN mechanics and not just balls flying everywhere if I wanted that I’d sign up to GrindR.

Random thought re-stash tabs - would anyone be against just getting 1 tab added per 2 levels for both MG/COF? I’ve played CoF last few seasons and have bout 140-150 tabs, it’s out of control. Golds no issue when you play a ton and same time it’s unfair for me to think someone else shouldn’t have the same access to tabs because they have life admin. Then MG just has to sell 1 decent item and they can buy 500. I don’t think having them places any issue on the games economy for either faction, just seems like a bit of a pain for some folks, mostly casual to spend gold on tabs but then also trying to buy items or respec.

Re: original post - you’re never going to get a happy medium for the levelling I reckon it’s too risky to skew it for either side so it’ll probably remain as is. I still think it’s weird people just wanna jump right to end game in an ARPG or RPG or MMORPG - I mean the whole point of those is to make a character, level them up and build them out. Shrug

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I can feel ya wanting more stash tabs. I’ve been on the max of 200 for over a year and it got to the point where even with a strict loot filter I had to throw two things to keep one. Eventually I just started dumping tabs on the ground and trashing everything below 2lp or double exalt. That being said I do believe it’s a hard stance of keeping limit to 200 tabs for now from devs.

But again this was never a post to dump on campaign or those who enjoy playing it. I guess you could say I just wanted to say other time and ideally promote build experimentation.

Maybe I just have the wrong mindset, and I don’t view a feature that some will use as harmful to other players experience. As one person having one or thirty level 100 beast masters (just air pull example) I cannot see the negative impact that makes on others. I guess I’m at fault for suggesting a feature that everyone could use but not everyone could access I guess.

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