Yup, this is the main angle that gets presented. However, the favour costs and opportunities of each faction mean that you would be foregoing some bonus in each to dip into the other. It works out to be more efficient to just play one or the other.
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I was also reminded of the Everquest Bazaar when I read this. Didn’t you have to stay online and logged in at first at least? At least I have faint memories of having my PC on the whole night in order to sell stuff. Fun times.
But on topic: Your solution sounds very elegant EHG. Before I was convinced I did not want any trade in LE (or nerfed SSF drops rather) but this solution is way better for the game.
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To be fair, the vast majority of people commenting on this haven’t spent thousands of hours designing games and studying game design. They’re basically taking your word that the two factions will be balanced, and this is the type of thing that is extremely hard to evaluate. It’s easy to just assume players will get X value from MG and Y value from CoF without anything to back it up. There are also very few details on the systems, so it’s easy to assume that something will be there to fill in gaps even nothing could possibly do so.
That’s why I’m going back and looking at real numbers. From that we can get actual values for how much benefit each faction would need to give in order to stay balanced. Currently there are 29 rare-tier unique items that aren’t target farmable, assuming LE tools is correct and I didn’t miscount. When farming a specific item, that means that a CoF player has a 1 in 29 chance that a rare drop is the one they want. For an MG player, it’s 100%, assuming they are rank 4 in MG and the items are around the same value because they are the same rarity. That may sound generous to the MG player, but even if the one they drop is less valuable they can supplement with other drops, gold, and target farmable drops. Of course CoF does have prophesy, which is supposed to allow balance to be restored.
From this we can build a rough equation of what would be needed to balance these two factions at rank 4.
AB=29C+D
A = CoF base drop rate
B = CoF benefit from prophesies
C = MG base drop rate
D = Value of drops that can’t possibly be the desired item (boss drops, gold, etc.) earned during this farming period.
Now we start plugging in some numbers to see how reasonable it would be to balance this. If we assume A = 2*C (CoF has double the drop rate of MG) and D=0 for some reason, you’d still need prophesies to increase your target farming effectiveness by a whopping 14.5 times just to match MG. If we assume that the MG player supplements their farming by covering half the cost with other drops we get D = 29C. Solving for B again, we find that now prophesy would need to increase your farming effectiveness by 29 times to match the MG player.
This is all assuming that CoF players already have double the farming effectiveness for uniques at Rank 4, which from the listed reputation rewards is not the case. The balance will obviously favor CoF when looking at any Rank/Item combination that the MG player can’t buy yet (e.g. Rank 6 looking for an item with LP), but it will swing back hard in favor of MG once you reach a rank where they can.
This also assumes that the current item pool is fixed. As new items are added it dilutes the pool, which makes it harder for CoF to find a particular item but has no real effect on the MG player. This means that as extreme as these numbers seem to be, they’re actually only going to get worse as new items are introduced.
As an added complication, the pools of items at different rarities change. So while there are 29 rare-tier uniques, there are far fewer very rare ones. So if we balance the game around improving unique drops in CoF enough to let them farm a rare tier item at around the same rate, they end up vastly overpowered when farming something that is very rare and thus has a smaller drop pool. Of course it the drop rate for such an item gets too low, the MG player jumps back into the lead again because they can just skip the need for any such item to drop and farm it up with a combination of many lesser drops.
This means that the benefits CoF players would have to get from prophesy even at very low ranks would need to be nearly deterministic just to match MG. They would also have to get stronger as items are added to account for the effect that item dilution would have on them and not MG. If the desired balance point involves CoF being slightly lower than current drop rates at this rank, then MG would need to have their drop rates absolutely gutted to balance that. Since players aren’t locked into MG to get tradable items (you could join neither faction to farm before joining MG to sell things and buy what you wanted) this means that this drop rate reduction can’t be tied to the MG faction and would need to be a change to the core drop rates. But since factions aren’t introduced until end game this would completely break the campaign.
Every issue you fix causes another, leading to a chain reaction that ends up disrupting the entire game. That’s why I said that I wish you all luck, because when I look at the actual numbers it seems like balancing this thing is going to be a complete nightmare if it’s even possible at all.
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You’re absolutely right that this will be very difficult to balance. It doesn’t need to be perfect and probably can’t ever be absolutely perfect. There are however 2 major variables missing from this calculation that will make it way easier to balance it. Favour costs on both sides of the equation. You can directly manipulate the relative power of each faction by adjusting the rate at which you can interact with them. If MG is a clear front runner then we can slightly reduce the cost of prophecies and slightly increase the cost of interacting with the Bazaar. These also get broken down further because we can adjust these more granularly. Each Prophecy has its own cost, we can adjust different item types in the Bazaar and we can adjust buying and selling independently.
Together, these form a pretty complex system. Part of why we have this more complex system is so that we have these dials to turn to be able to fine tune the relative power between the two.
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Technically the cost of prophesy is already in there. B = Pv/Pc. My value for B would be the actual value that prophesy gives divided by the cost. I’m saying that the net total benefit including factoring in cost would need to be a 29x improvement to farm rate.
Also since we’re talking about a single item, the costs for MG would need to be prohibitively high to factor in. Basically for it to even factor into this equation you’d need the cost of selling 1 item and the cost of buying 1 item to be significantly higher than the drop rate of a random rare-tier unique. If you do set them so high then MG becomes less about farming wealth and more about farming Favor, since by the time you can get enough Favor to make a purchase you already have enough accumulated wealth to afford it.
Well, we’ll just have to see if we’ve baked in enough room for adjustments to get them lined up or not.
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Your calculation though only focuses on how good a faction is to get one particular build / item.
What if i want to play multiple builds? What i want to get items I can also use further along with a different character?
If my chance to get one particular rare unique would be the same for CoF and MG, wouldn’t i then always pick CoF because of all the things I get on top?
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Will MG league be able to trade affix shards, glyphs , runes?
Equipable items only. However you can sell “shatter fodder” to effectively buy affixes.
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I think there is also another factor in trade: availability.
Do you really think that a 1 LP RV or a 3 LP BoH will ever get on the market ?
And even if one in a cycle would get to the market, who would have the gold to actually acquire such an item ?
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At this point, I think EHG did their due diligence, listened to feedback and came up with a solution.
I think that trying an imperfect system and tweaking it as time goes on is better than analysis paralysis / trying to come up with the perfect system.
I also think many critics forget the “human” aspect when comparing trade vs CoF. Yes, the min-maxer will want to pick whatever allows them to be most efficient. But for casuals (like me and my friends) we will simply be happy that target farming is made easier and that my 1 hour of free time in the evening when kids are asleep isn’t spent trading, but playing the game, even is CoF turns out to be less “optimal”.
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You have plenty of knobs, but the complexity of this is actually absurd. The numbers I showed are for 1 very simple case, solo target farming for a rare but not very rare unique item without LP from a random drop. This already looks very difficult, but it’s just the start.
We need to factor in monolith bonuses (MG gets way more value from gold bonuses, but CoH gets more from targeted drops), farming things with different pool sizes, the fact that some pool sizes will change over time, and the fact that MG can skip the need to get an appropriately tiered drop entirely while CoH can’t. Then we have to factor in the number of builds someone will play (more builds benefits CoH because cross farming has value, while it doesn’t really benefit MG) and multiplayer (a 4 person group with gifting is 4 times as likely for a drop to be relevant while an MG group gains little benefit because they could already convert irrelevant drops). So if it does end up actually being balanced for solo players playing a single build then it becomes breakable just by changing play-style, and if it’s balance for these play-styles then it ends up being much worse for solo single-build players.
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The odds that something will enter the market are the drop rate for an MG player times the number of MG players who could drop it but can’t use it. This includes people playing other builds, and people playing that build who already have a better version of the item equipped. For any non-ubiquitous item this is going to be vastly higher than your chance of dropping that specific item, even in CoH unless its giving you thousands or millions of times the drop rate of an MG player. If something is so rare that it isn’t available on the market then it’s just unrealistic to farm through either method.
Your ability to farm enough to afford it just comes down to the game’s economy, which will generally balance around how hard it is to acquire and its demand. Again, since its rarity is a significant factor you’d need huge bonuses to your drop rates in CoH to match the deterministic benefits of MG.
People who would farm a lot. At the end of the day the question is what the utems are worth to people who are looking for it. On top of it I have no idea if LE implements a price celing for items aka trader buys it fpr 500 you can sell it for 5k tops or something arround these lines just to keep the gold ammount that is ingame in check.
Its rather difficult to predict at the moment what will happen.
But there is a real possibility of the prices going completely out of hand (in either directions).
I guess it will depend on how good of a gold sink the lightless arbor is.
What is your stance on 3rd party trading communities? As I understand, there is no answer about what will be the main obstacle for trading - slots or Favor. So as soon as first will be the problem, people will organize something to put listings for trade. And then there is a chance (based on slots available) that after some time people will move from the Bazaar almost completely - only high-value items sold.
System looks really good, but it all depends on how EHG will tweak the numbers.
As it stands (without any further info on the matter) the most „lucrative” way seems CoF gifting – aka playing co-op in cof with increased drop rates and other perks, then funneling all resources/items to one member – seems busted.
But we’ll have to see the actual numbers.
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Please sir, i would like some more mathematics.
Kind Regards,
- Bayes
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i think every drop in CoF will have CoF Requirment, so if you drop x item while in CoF your friend would need to also have the x amount of requirment that item needs to use it, but if you are in MG and drop the same x item it would have no requirment, but i might be wrong
but if the minimum cost of the item (i didn’t see if there will be minimu cost in MG, because i 100% will play CoF) is obtainable, the question is not who will have the amount of money for the item , but how much the seller is willing to low the item possible “infinite” value to sell for, because if he have no intention of using said item, and is sttuborn wanting a value that no one will be able to afford, the value of the item technacally become 0, because since he will never sell or use it, he wouldn’t get any value from it