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.
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.
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?
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 ?
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”.
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.
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.
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
you must understand that trading counts as if you buffed drop rates by multiple times - as you do not need to drop a specific unique, just anything of value, then sell it and buy what you want. This is why PoE has such a terrible drop rate.
I would say that the solo drop rates suggested here are in fact a little LOW, as in it would still be faster grinding to trade.
Also I do not think they made any mention of certain factions having specific gear associated, just a choice between solo loot buff or trading. Where solos still can gift items to people that actually play with them.
do you think CoF could have A system like well of fortune/fate/chaging(random names i came up with)“sacrifice 20 rare tier items to get one of similar rariy of your choice”, or like sacrifice 5-10 of the same rare tier item to get one of your choice to buff CoF, or would This be unbalanced and overpower?
