The problem of factions (CoF/MG)

Feedback and Suggestions
1

In my opinion, the way the factions are designed ends up reducing the maintainability of players in the league/season. I played both quite a bit, and each has its pros and cons, but both have a short lifespan for more casual players, who make up the majority of the game’s user base. Although I don’t think they will drastically change the game, I’ll try to explain my points.

----------------------------------------------MERCHANTS GUILD------------------------------------------------

Pros:
1 - Good for testing builds, especially at the beginning of the league.
2 - Friendly for mid/end game.
3 - Easier to obtain and manage stash tabs. Store what you need at the moment, sell everything else.

Cons:

1 - Equipment price checks are usually chaotic and not worth spending much time on. Unstable values, with little consistency.
2 - Many worthless items. Polluted/complex filtering.
3 - Tendency to lose players in a few weeks, making it a ‘dead’ market.

In short, at the beginning the market is very good for testing things and/or progressing faster, but it soon becomes boring and, later on, unattractive. At this point, more casual players tend to leave, and some try to migrate to CoF.

----------------------------------------------CIRCLE OF FORTUNE----------------------------------------------

Pros:
1 - Great for targeted grinding.
2 - More rewarding endgame.
3 - Good for pushing builds to their limits.
4 - Community independent - allows for long-term play, but generally only retains the most hardcore players.

Cons:
1 - More complicated start - affects more casual players.
2 - Less friendly for casual testing. Sometimes the player just wants to see how a strange interaction between two items works.
3 - More complicated tab management. Many LP3/LP4 items go to Standard without ever seeing the light of day.
4 - Although the drop rate is considerably better, it’s less exciting because it lacks selling/trading potential.

In short, for those who already have a defined path and want to maximize their vision, it’s great. Most casual players stop here, after finishing their first character.

----------------------------------------------MY SUGGESTION----------------------------------------------------
**The main goal of this post is to bring the problem to light. My personal solution is just a bonus, which can be ignored.

So, in my opinion, it would be more beneficial for the health of the game if there weren’t two factions, but rather a reworked union of the good things that each one has.

For example:

All players have access to the grinding benefits of CoF, but there are no Prophecies for Unique or Set items.

All players can use the conventional market, but only to sell or buy Unique and Set items. Sales are limited by Tier.

max 20 Lp0 offers
max 15 Lp1 offers
max 10 Lp2 offers
max 6 Lp3 offers
max 3 Lp4 offers

Perhaps it would be possible to sell/buy shards/runes.

Create a super-limited alternative exalted market, where each player only has 1 slot to offer an exalted item, and only has 1 slot to demand an exalted item. (This could leverage the black market)

For example, I might want an item that necessarily has a T7 Health and T5 Strength, so I create a demand that another player can accept, if they have the item to sell.

Or I might have dropped a really awesome exalted item that I don’t intend to use, so I try to sell it.

----------------------------------------------What are the benefits of this?-----------------------------------

1 - All players in the same ‘faction’ makes the game more alive and tends to keep casual players around longer.

2 - Less polluted market, with a limit on offers.

3 - It values ​​unique items more.

4 - More cohesive price checks, since unique items/sets are deterministic. It makes the buying/selling process less exhausting.

5 - The market stays ‘alive’ for much longer.

6 - This gives CoF players the opportunity to test more ideas.

7 - It allows CoF players to sell top unique items they don’t want to use, while they can buy some they couldn’t drop. Or simply obtain more tabs.

8 - It keeps the grind for exalted items active for everyone, giving longevity to the game.

9? - If you can buy/sell shards/runes, it facilitates crafting and boosts the economy.

10? - If you can sell 1 exalted item, it increases the satisfaction of dropping strong items, even if you won’t use them. It keeps only truly interesting items on the market.

11? - If you can create 1 exalted item demand, it mainly facilitates boosting builds that are in the mid-game. But it also helps to finalize S-tier builds.

1 Like
2

As with all “solutions” that try to get things from both factions, yours has the same problem.

Right now, people that don’t want to trade (which are about 50% of the players at the time of the poll) are on a somewhat even field with those that want to trade. Both factions need some love and balance, but they are somewhat equivalent, especially if said balance is addressed.

With your solution, people that don’t want to trade will always be behind those that use trade.

5 Likes
3

I love the system and do not support a change - my 2 cents. Sorry man.

2 Likes
4

With your solution, people that don’t want to trade will always be behind those that use trade.

Yes, but that’s normal when a player chooses solo self-found. I don’t know if that 50% ratio is accurate, since a good portion of MG players leave the league in the first month. Perhaps the option to start the game as a solo self-found player will give the player access to prophecies of unique items, since they wouldn’t be able to access the market. This way, those who want to play SSF don’t miss out on anything.

Both factions need some love and balance, but they are somewhat equivalent, especially if said balance is addressed.

I agree, but I don’t think the problem is overall balance. It’s the lack of player retention caused by the relationships between the factions. Although Last Epoch is considered accessible in terms of difficulty compared to some other ARPGs, it fails to hold the attention of casual players for very long - And I think part of that cause is the factions:

MG Faction simplifies gameplay, but isn’t self-sufficient > casual players abandon the league quickly.

CoF is self-sufficient, but adds complexity to the gameplay, is less friendly for casual players to test their ideas > casual players abandon the league quickly, usually after finishing their first build.

The game becomes emptier, with a short lifecycle > casual players buy fewer cosmetics because they become less attached to the game > The game profits less from casual players and seeks to recover losses from more dedicated players.

In a short time, the LE season becomes almost an offline game, which doesn’t imply major problems for CoF players who want to play solo, but it’s not healthy for the game. That’s my main point.

1 Like
5

No problem, man. In a way, I also quite like the systems, although I think there could be some specific improvements. My main point is to question player retention – I think the factions bring problems in that aspect.

2 Likes
6

While there is likely to be a significant overlap between SSF & people who don’t want to trade the two groups are not the same. This has been said many times by many people. All CoF means is that you can’t trade, it’s not SSF, though it is the only faction that makes sense for SSF.

Player retention is definitely an issue & it very heavily impacts trade/MG. One of, but not the only, issue that MG has is a lack of players to enable MG to function properly (currency/inflation is another issue), but forcing everyone into trade and the required lower drop rates whether they like it or not is unfair to the people who don’t want to trade.

But that doesn’t affect the ability for CoF to function, so CoF players are less likely to notice it.

7

I agree, they are different things.

There are people who play CoF as SSF for the challenge, there are people who play because they prefer to create strategies to drop their own items, there are people who play because they find it easier to maximize a character, and there are people who play because, in terms of longevity, it’s the only faction that makes sense.

The point is, if CoF doesn’t have any trading aspect possible, then it drives away the casual player. Some will still try to maximize a character for a while, but that’s it.

As for casual players who try to participate in MG, they do face a chaotic market that also impacts the reduction in retention, but beyond that, the moment the market starts to ‘die’, they are faced with two options: Abandon the game or migrate to CoF, which has better drops. And that’s the biggest point: If the market is going to die, and the player intends to continue playing, why not start in CoF anyway? And the tendency is that this will happen.

Due to this movement, the trend is that only the most casual players, who abandon the game after a few weeks, will remain in the MG faction. Those who enjoy playing the game for longer periods are forced, for efficiency reasons, to play CoF.

Certainly, there are better ideas than mine to try and reduce the impact of these problems without harming the gameplay of specific groups of people. But I can’t see how these two factions, as they are, could coexist without alienating casual players. And I emphasize this point because for large games to be profitable, financially speaking, they need to extract the maximum from the casual player base – which is the largest. If these people abandon the game without investing, the most loyal community can’t handle it alone.

Yes, it doesn’t affect the gameplay of people who play CoF and have no interest in using the market (which isn’t everyone); but it does affect the game overall. Smaller community, less content, less profitable game, fewer updates, fewer ideas, and so on.

8

Let’s start with this one. There was a poll way back. The devs asked which players wanted to trade and which didn’t want to trade. The result was about 50/50. So it’s pretty accurate. It’s actually the reason why CoF even exists.

As has been pointed out, CoF != SSF. You can play in a group with your friends or just internet randos. You can even gift stuff around between them.

The biggest misunderstanding I see with CoF is “That is a faction for people that want a challenge” when this isn’t true. The devs looked at games like PoE or D2 where people that didn’t want to trade were basically screwed over massively and they decided to give them something that would place them in an equal footing.
CoF is the faction that was specifically created for people that don’t want to trade ever. That’s why they’re exclusive.

The lack of player retention isn’t related to the factions, but rather to the endgame, especially a lack of diversity. Everything always revolves around doing thousands of monolith echoes and players get tired of it, especially when it’s their 3rd or 4th season in a row where they have to do that.

Player retention hurts MG, MG doesn’t hurt player retention (except when there’s a dupe).

Casual players will always abandon the league quickly, no matter what faction they are. That’s why they’re casuals. They join in, check the game for a few days, then leave.

The problem with retention is actually twofold:
1- Lack of a diverse enough endgame. Everything just happens in echoes over and over again. You do an echo and you might get mechanic A or B in there, but otherwise there is nothing really different to do.
2- Lack of an actual seasonal mechanic. As long as season and legacy remain the same, way too many players will simply keep playing legacy. Which means that the seasonal playerbase will be much lower than it would usually be, which directly affects both retention and MG.

9

Agreed.

10

I agree with some points, but not all.

You mentioned that the main problem for abandoning the season is the lack of endgame mechanics – I agree that it’s a big problem – but even if there were a robust endgame that kept players for longer, as you yourself said, casual players end up leaving and with that the market loses value – this happens in every ARPG and is a normal process. But here we have the option to play CoF and obtain much better items with it, so when the market ‘crashes’, the more hardcore players who are in MG will want to migrate to CoF. And here’s the big problem, if the player knows they are doomed to migrate to CoF, why not start with CoF and ignore the market?

Maybe I’m the only one (although I don’t believe so) who, even liking trading, plays CoF, simply because in terms of gameplay longevity, it’s more worthwhile. So that’s why I believe that MG has more casual players, who tend to have a very average experience and abandon the game.

Even though casual players will abandon the game after a few weeks anyway, there’s a big difference in how experiences can influence whether or not they invest more time or money.

With this faction system, I can’t see a promising future for MG. I believe that the most dedicated players will continue to prioritize CoF, whether they like trading or not, because they know the market will crash sooner or later (which is common). With fewer hardcore players participating in MG, the tendency is for the market quality to be worse than expected for an ARPG.

I understand why CoF-exclusive players don’t want any changes, since, individually speaking, it works very well for them. But I see this as problematic for the community as a whole. If an ARPG manages to survive for very long without a functional trading system, I would be truly surprised. I hope I’m wrong since, in terms of gameplay, LE has become my favorite ARPG.

In any case, I appreciate those who offered their opinion on the subject.

11

CoF getting “much better items” is a balance issue. Ideally both MG and CoF get the same items with the same amount of effort.

CoF is a faction that works in the long term only. You get plenty of good items, but the majority will be good items for other builds, not the one you’re currently playing. Switching factions isn’t a good strategy (especially with the penalties in place).

Hardcore players that are MG will either already have almost every item they want or they will leave with the rest. Much like in PoE hardcore players will already have several mirrors by the time players numbers dwindle (and they will likely leave as well).

This is an issue with trade in any game, CoF just gives you alternatives to deal with that.

Again, this is a balance issue. And also a sign of some issues MG has, namely having gold as a currency, having a cap on sales, no proper sink to deal with inflation, etc.

If you were to make both factions freely available to everyone without restrictions, you’d still have a market crash because those issues aren’t solved that way.

LE needs a better endgame to keep players engaged longer (which will come in time) and they need some changes to how MG currently works. Even disregarding RMT and bots farming for gold, which drives inflation up faster, the system itself has no self-regulating mechanics.

In PoE the currency has inherent value. It’s used for crafting and is spent constantly, leading to a more stable total currency available in the game.
In LE the currency doesn’t have much inherent value. You can buy stash tabs with gold but there isn’t much else to spend it on. Lightless Arbor isn’t really enticing for players to sink their gold in, so the overall amount of gold will just keep increasing without being spent.

So the issue isn’t that CoF exists. It’s that MG has inherent issues that need to be fixed for its own longevity.

But the community as a whole means that half don’t want to trade or feel forced to trade (as happens in PoE). Rather than fixing the issues which trade currently has (which will continue existing whether CoF is exclusive or not) you’re just forcing half your playerbase to either engage in trading, which they don’t like, or to feel left behind (as in every other ARPG out there).

Making half your playerbase unhappy doesn’t seem to be good to the community as a whole either. Especially when MG/CoF is actually a very innovative way of fixing the issue of people that don’t like to trade and not make them feel like the unwanted bastard child.

12

I understand your points, but I believe we think differently.

I don’t think it’s a balancing issue, but rather a fundamental one. If the market is destined to lose quality as the league progresses, which is a fact in any game, and there’s another option that doesn’t make players dependent on the market to get good items, they will embrace the other option, even if they have to abandon the market. Balancing won’t help, because MG will continue to contain mostly casual players, since the market tends to deteriorate, unless they make the MG faction players less dependent on the market - but this comes down to the point of “it’s not fair for players from MG to have access to prophecies.”

I completely agree, since in PoE it’s extremely difficult to progress without using trading, while in The Last Epoch there are several mechanics that aid progress, and CoF is an excellent idea, in fact. But a player not wanting to participate in trading doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want other people to do it, or if they do, they don’t want those people to have the same auxiliary mechanics as CoF.

Another point where I believe there’s a divergence of opinion. I believe that a very small percentage of players, among those supposed 50% who want to play without trading, see the game as competitive enough to worry if someone is trading and building a stronger character. I believe that most people who play CoF don’t worry if another player is much stronger for whatever reason. As long as the people who don’t want to trade have the means to obtain the items and can build their characters satisfactorily, I don’t understand the problem.

This same argument would apply to the opposite scenario, where someone who wants to extend the season and wants to play MG, buying and selling items, would be forced to play CoF because they know that the market will always lose strength from the middle to the end, to the point where it’s no longer worth staying in the MG – not because the people in CoF are getting stronger and leaving you behind, but because it’s unfeasible to build decent builds from the middle to the end of the season if you stay in MG.

So, one side has all the necessary mechanisms to continue make their builds satisfactorily, for long periods, but the concern of some is that players will become stronger, or have more advantages, if they use trading alongside these mechanics.

The other side is dependent on the market, which tends to lose quality sooner or later,
making it difficult to create satisfactory buildings from a certain point in the season… If you’re not a player who intends to play for only a few weeks, why play here?

CoF kills MG in any scenario. It’s simply fundamental. People need to be able to play satisfactorily at any point in the league, regardless of balance. Balance is only important for a very small percentage of players who approach the game competitively. Just create some challenges for those guys and please the rest.

13

I understand your point, but this is the crucial point. And it does boil down to balance.
MG is better at getting THE good item you want for your build.
CoF is better at getting A good item that will most likely not be for your build.

MG is great for people that want immediate access to the items. These people will tipically play a couple of characters only per season.
CoF is great for people that want lots of drops that will give them incentive to create new characters.

CoF is an altoholic’s faction, besides being an alternative for people that don’t want to trade.

All non-traders want in LE is to have equal opportunities and not feel screwed over like in every other game.

There is also something you’re not taking into account: unlike most games in this genre, LE has an offline client. There are people that have internet issues and can’t play PoE, for example, but they can play LE. If you balance the game around trade (which is what any “universal” solution inevitably does), then those people will inevitably have a harder time and play the game less efficiently.

Any solution to the factions has to be balanced around the fact that offline exists and is a valid way to play the game. Especially now that MTXs also work offline, because they also spend money on it.

If you have to work twice as hard to achieve the same things other people achieve just by trading, then that makes you feel inneficient. It makes you feel like you’re playing the game in a way the game doesn’t want you to play (as happens, once again, in PoE).
This leaves players feeling frustrated and inevitably leads to them leaving.

Again, this is more specific to LE’s market than CoF existing. PoE’s market also loses strength as the season dwindles but it remains both active and stable despite lower player numbers.

There was some post from a PoE dev some years ago (Chris Wilson, maybe?) that showed that most players have minimal engagement with trade in PoE. They buy a dozen items, they sell a dozen items and that’s it. And yet PoE’s trade has remained healthy over the years, even in off peak parts of the season where only a few people are playing.

The problem is that LE’s market will never remain healthy for long, even if everyone trades. You can easily see this by checking the trades and seeing the top items no longer being sold a week into the season because inflation has made the items way more valuable than the gold cap they can be sold for.
Why would you sell a 2LP red ring for 1.5B when you can sell an item that is much easier to farm for the same price? You might as well just keep it and use it yourself.

So the biggest issue is that PoE’s trade is actually created in a way where it becomes stable fast if you have 250k players, but it also becomes stable fast when you have 5k players.
LE’s never becomes stable, even if you had 500 million players in MG.

This is a flaw in MG, not something caused by CoF existing. And is mostly caused by not having good sinks built into the currency.

14

This is because PoEs economy is disgustingly robust. even in the newest league where by level 100 I had 500+ exalted self farmed, and stopped picking up chaos orbs because they were so common, we only saw maybe a 50%-100% increase in chaos to div ratio. but that wouldnt even matter, because you can always trade other stuff. because there is no central currency, and the ones that are kinda central have intrinsic value.

its why even tho GGG was afraid of async trade, they added it and the market is still robust, and hell even more people engage/trade late into a league with it now.

Last epoch simply wasnt designed with trading in mind, and as such it falls into a ton of pitfalls that an economy can fall into. its almost like trade was just slapped in there halfassed!

Even from the very get go, the kickstarter plans for trading were very much not expecting you to buy gear, it was like “you get to see random items from random people every hour” or something, basically flavorful trading but not good trading.

I dont think the factions will ever be or should ever be “balanced” the market dying off at a month is part of the trade experience. if you dont want the trade experience you dont pick it.

Factions were never presented as being perfectly balanced, but rather simply as choices the player makes to shape their own enjoyable experience.

if someone thinks they have an advantage to gain by going CoF even tho they like trading, thats their own choice and they can suffer by it.

15

My idea was the opposite of that. It’s about balancing around CoF, which is what already works. MG doesn’t work separately, and it won’t. In my suggestion, I only kept the trade for Uniques/Sets, so that it would be much more limited and clean, while the CoF mechanics would continue to be applied almost the same way they are today. Furthermore, it was just a suggestion; it wasn’t the main point I wanted to address.

I completely agree, but this already happens today for those who try to play MG for a long time, and in a much more serious way. Because those who play CoF, whether they feel disadvantaged or not, continue to have sufficient and satisfactory means to create their builds, while those who play MG, from a certain point onwards, don’t have those means – it ceases to be satisfactory, because it ceases to be viable. It’s not even a matter of balancing, of one tending to become stronger than the other. It’s about not even having the option to continue, in a minimally consistent way, using MG. An offline player can cheat the game files and make a completely maximized fake build – and that’s irrelevant if I have satisfactory means to make my build. A CoF player can use prophecies to drop 40 uniques at once and obtain several with high potential – and that’s irrelevant if I have satisfactory means to make my build.

Note that even though it’s unfair to have mechanics that benefit certain types of players, the most important thing is that even the least favored player can still play in their own way in a satisfactory manner.

And I believe the market continues to function, at least minimally well, because there are no other options. PoE is totally dependent on the market and doesn’t give you alternatives, so the market remains alive, even if it loses quality over time, as it always will. That’s why I emphasize that if there’s an option that removes the great dependence on the market, and that can’t be used mutually, the tendency is for the market to die. That’s what happens here, and in this way it won’t change. The problem is that without a good market, in this type of game, player retention drops. And this post is about that. My solution ideas aren’t necessarily the right path.

16

This would be the case if the MG faction remained viable over time, even if it was inferior. Then it would be a choice between something more efficient that you might not like very much, and something not so efficient that you do like. But both allowing for decent and enjoyable progression. It doesn’t matter if one is better than the other – what matters is that both are, at least, good. If that’s true, then the decision is yours. If that’s not true, you’ll play frustrated regardless of your choice and will end up abandoning the game, especially if you’re a more casual player.

For those who want to play with trading in Last Epoch, there simply isn’t a very good option, and the trend is that this won’t change.

17

Yes, but this means that drop rates for sets and uniques will have to get adjusted to the fact that both CoF and MG can provide it for you at the same time. You don’t simply keep the same drop rates you have now, otherwise they will simply drop way more than they do now.

It might surprise you, but most offline players aren’t actually cheaters. They just don’t want to have to deal with server latency, or they have bad connections, or they even have social disorders which makes interacting with other people hard or even impossible.

You can’t just dismiss an entire group of players, especially when they are actually supported by the devs by providing them with an offline client.

Yes, but a CoF player can’t get boss specific drops unless they can actually fight the boss. MG players can buy Uby items from trade even if their build can’t even do 100c. CoF players have to actually have a build that can kill Uby to get those items.
So there’s a tradeoff in there.

No, it continues to function because it was built in a way that self regulates itself. You can have only 1k players and PoE trade will still be healthy.
But, as I said, you can have 500 million players in MG and the market will still collapse after a week.

Most players leave MG not because the playerbase is dwindling, but because after less than a week every good item costs 1.5B and many of the BiS items aren’t even listed anymore. Because they feel like they don’t have any chance of actually buying anything good anymore because prices are far out of their reach.

The fact that CoF exists only leads to those players actually having a chance to keep playing, rather than leaving and never returning again.

18

My suggestion for a possible solution isn’t the main point and can be ignored. I just wanted to raise some options. The idea of ​​the post is to discuss the fundamentals of the factions.

I didn’t say that. My point is: How much another person might benefit from a mechanism is less relevant if I have a satisfactory option to achieve my goal in the way I want.

I agree 100%, but this is only valid for a specific period within the season, which is what will always make MG unviable/unpleasant in the long run.

Dude, I don’t know how long you’ve been playing MG after the middle of the season, but a lot of simple items aren’t even available to buy. Inflation on some items is a fact, but it’s not the biggest problem. At the beginning of the league, I always managed to buy and sell the items I needed, no matter how inflated the market was, because you also sell at a high price. But from the middle to the end of the league, if you want a single specific LP1 or LP2 item, you often won’t find a bunch being offered. It’s not just the price.

There’s simply a lack of options. If you’re a player who likes the market but wants to enjoy the league for a long time, there’s no point in playing MG, because you’ll have to switch to CoF at some point anyway, since from the middle of the league onwards, MG becomes the same as CoF, just without the drop benefits. This would happen in any game where the market weakens and there are options that are independent of it. MG will never be self-sufficient with CoF, even if they fix all the problematic mechanics that cause inflation and all the user interface issues that players hate.

19

There are 2 reasons for this:
1- Most players don’t actually play season. There’s no reason to start over since the content is the same, so they stick with legacy.
2- Most players leave MG (or the game) once things start to get very expensive. So a month into the league there aren’t many players left in MG (or even in season, most “eternal” players that are still playing now are playing legacy).

The biggest problem with MG is actually accessiblity. Relisting stuff is a huge hassle so players just keep adding items in the hopes that it will get sold and they never adjust their prices ever again. They just add a hundred new items waiting until some get sold.

This is a big part (along with a lack of sinks) of the rampant inflation that makes most players leave.
And most players don’t actually switch to CoF. You can seethat if you search the forums here, check the discord or even reddit. They start MG because they want to trade, then they see the market crash in less than a week and they leave the game. They stop playing entirely.

Because, just like there are plenty of players that would quit if they felt forced to trade, there are plenty of players that quit if they can’t trade properly as well. Which they can’t once the market collapses in a few days. And these are the types of players that feed the market the most.
That is why I said that even with 500 million players MG would still crash.

Making trade available to everyone won’t fix trade in LE. It will just make more people leave. The ones that love trade that already leave the game (some never return) and the ones that hate it.

And it will always involve rebalancing drop rates. Right now you have 2 distinct drop rates: one for MG and one for CoF. The game is balanced around drop rates for both and can adjust for both.
If you make it so that you can both get CoF benefits and still trade, there will exist only one drop rate and it will be balanced around having access to both. Which means that both players that hate trade and offline players will always end up feeling left behind, like the game doesn’t care about them and they will leave.

You can’t fix trade in LE by forcing everyone to trade. You have to fix its inherent flaws first. Without fixing them, trade will always be an inconstant mess and players will still hate it.

As an afterthought, I’ll just add that it would be much much much more likely that the devs would simply “delete” CoF and now everyone is in MG than actually allowing both at once in any form.
And it still wouldn’t fix MG.

20

Well, I still think it’s a fundamental problem with seasonal ARPGs. Even a stable market, free from inflation, bugs, RMT, and with a good number of active players, will lose strength with each passing day of the season. That’s how it works. At a certain point in the season, the market ceases to be sufficient for the remaining players. So if they want to continue playing, they stay in the market with a low drop rate, or migrate to CoF, since that option exists. I’m talking about the guys who want to continue playing, not those who have already abandoned the league. But if these guys know that sooner or later they will have to make this decision, even if they like trading, it’s a waste of time to follow a path that is doomed to succumb at a certain point. If, anticipating this scenario, these guys choose to start in CoF, the market is left to casual players who abandon the game early and succumbs even more brutally than traditional ARPG models, leaving MG with little prospect of improvement.

If you go to the market now looking for, for example, a Sword Catcher LP2 (1 in 79), you’ll find one page of people selling it. Most with bad rolls. This is something that will persist for practically the entire league in MG, and specifically this type of item doesn’t have a price problem, since it’s just a generic item without much demand. If you dedicate a week to farming this item specifically with CoF, you can get more than what exists in the entire market today.

Let’s suppose that this Sword Catcher LP2 is equivalent to an item worth 1 divine in PoE, at a fair market price, and I want it in my build. I know that in the middle of the season the item starts to be worth 5 divines and can vary a lot if it comes with great rolls, which I would really like for my build. If I know this, and I have the option to abandon the market to farm this item in a targeted way, obtaining dozens of them in a short time, why would I continue in the market? If I’m thinking about a build for a new league, depending on an item that normally costs 1 divine due to its rarity, but that item becomes so sought after because someone popularized it that its price inflates, why would I stay in the market if I can super boost my drop rate and farm that specific item quickly in a system like CoF? That’s why I think CoF is a great solution to remove market dependency, but as it is, it removes so much that the market can’t remain even minimally healthy. Thus, even if a player wants to face the pitfalls of the market, simply because they enjoy trading, there is simply no market to interact with - or a very limited one.

That’s what I think, but I respect your opinion and that of anyone else who sees it differently. I don’t think I have anything else to contribute to the topic. Good night, mate.