No, this is not an abuse case. This scenario is missing some steps.
After you swap, you would first have to vendor some items, craft them to a point where you could use them a bit. Level up your MG rank and gain a bunch of favor. Then buy all the items you want as though you were MG all along but took a massive detour and wasted a ton of time as CoF.
If the implied last step of this scenario is then to swap back to CoF, you end up swapping back and putting your original gear back on.
So the potential for abuse here is negative as this would put you right back where you started with no gain and a ton of wasted time.
Edit: I was mistaken that the final step was to shatter the purchased items for use in CoF and while this is possible, it’s still not an abuse case because you could just get those same crafting materials as CoF while still utilizing the other CoF benefits and not eating up time gaining MG favor with a lesser gearset.
We have considered this for sure and it’s in the conversation. The one caveat is that these bonuses can only apply to items that are CoF tagged like the example rank 2 perk shows in CoF.
Sorry I wasn’t clear - the intention was to shatter the traded gear for rare shards, then swap back to CoF and use those shards for crafting items that can be used as a CoF. Unless of course I’m missing something and this doesn’t lead to valid CoF gear.
But even so it sounds like it’d be a lot of work to swap, gear up, rank up and get enough favour to buy the desired items. And it’d probably end up not being worth it.
Oh yea, you can do that. It’s still just going to be better to stay as CoF. You can just use the CoF systems to farm those same affixes and call it a day.
If i don’t play cycle and only on the non-cycle permanent environment. And let’s assume I am maxed out on both factions. Then I can swap back and forth on my Druid between factions and I don’t need to level up factions again, because factions are account wide, correct?
What are some potential downsides of switching between maxed factions? The obvious answer is the gear requirement. Are there any further?
To be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that applying prophecies to help crafting on an item would make said-item account bound (because trading such item is akin to gifting reputation with your faction).
CoF with Deterministic-ish crafting + drop is your SSF route, and your end-game is hunting for whatever enables you to craft your gear
MG is the trade approach, where RNG + very large pool means the stats you’re looking for will statistically drop randomly for someone, so your end-game is about hunter for ressources to trade for that item.
Or at least, that’s how I picture them in my mind. Both are valid playstyle, and it’s good that players can pick what they enjoy.
Again, you seem to be at the top of your game, which mean I’m looking forward to how things play out.
Trading will still require MG favor. You can’t just switch, trade, switch back all the time. You have to spend time playing as MG. Which probably can be spent better playing CoF.
One interesting thing that I would like to see with prophecies would be a prophecy that forces uniques which drop to drop 1 or 2 “rarity tiers” higher. Whatever we define “rarity tier” as would be up to EHG and would obviously change over time with game balancing. But it would be a good way to allow us to use a prophecy to filter out those common uniques from the drop pool when target farming if we have the favor to sustain the farming method. Or maybe instead of dropping 1 or 2 tiers higher, it simply rerolls any low-tier/common uniques until a not-common/not-low-tier unique is rolled.
So, it’s basically SSF guild and non-SSF guild, speaking in terms of Path of Exile. But SSF players can play with non-SSF players, they just won’t be able to share the loot (aside of post-raid gifting system from previous announcement). But also if SSF player A played with non-SSF player B for long enough, player A will be able to trade with player B! And in the future there totally shall appear more guilds with more mandatory benefits, like a flask dedicated guild or a movement skill guild! Yes, it looks exactly like that.
Current set of limitations sounds really obnoxious for casual players. And exploitable for competitive players.
(and it makes having players from both guilds in a party mandatory to utilize their wealth accumulation capabilities to their fullest)
I still don’t understand which aspects of trading as a whole you’re trying to fix by multiplying complications. I can only reiterate that the only solutions to “trying to fix 2000 years of real-world trading development” are either ‘make all items have fixed price’ or ‘don’t allow trading pronto’.
In the end, said PoE necessiates third party tools usage for trading - but (very few character/account-bound exceptions aside) is not standing in players’ way after they found each other.
You’re trying opposite approach. The result will not be better.
It sounds like you don’t fully have a grasp on the system, I’d recommend reading the FAQ at the bottom to answer those questions about how each group would interact with one another. I wouldn’t personally attempt to compare this to POE or other arpg systems but rather understand the intention being the system and it’s limitations.
If the dialogue starts, I assume that my opponent is not an imbecile - and if he makes a point, he’s certain that he DO have some intel to back it up.
I’d appreciate same treatment in return.
I. e. in this particular case I’d recommend asking ‘why do you think so?’ instead of making loud biased irrelevant attention-seeking statement.
The only bit I see that could be obnoxious is farming up MG levels before being able to trade for any item, and you only have to do that once.
They appear to have a good idea of how competitive players would try to exploit these systems, and have put restrictions in to address them. What exploitation potential do you think they’ve left untouched?
I don’t see how it could, and even if it did, if you’re really concerned with that and aren’t a streamer or RMT company farmer you’re being kind of silly.
To me, the problems they appear to be seeing in other trade systems and are trying to address:
People who want to be Fake Item Trade Czar instead of playing the actual game using large numbers of disposable alt accounts to engage in trashy/deceptive behavior in the marketplace.
Instant, convenient, unlimited access to any item in the game.
Spam sales of every item, no matter how low value it is (as seen in the D3 AH).
Use of the item farming methods they want to give people who prefer farming over trade to radically increase the access to powerful items.
Whether or not you or I agree that any of those are problems is a different discussion, but based on the restrictions and their past commentary, those are my impressions.
I think you’re overstating the complexity by quite a bit.
@Bakageyama is 100% correct that your first comment makes it look like you didn’t fully read the post and don’t fully understand the system. Perhaps providing your “why you think so” up front would be a better approach than yelling nonspecific complaints and getting offended when it looks to everyone reading that you didn’t do your diligence before commenting.
Seems like you misunderstood this, and then made a lot of assumptions based on that. Player A could gift something to Player B, but Player B can’t do anything with it. Anything Player A finds would have a CoF requirement, so Player B couldn’t equip it. Anything with a CoF requirement can’t be sold in the market, so they couldn’t sell it either. All they could do with it is look at it, shatter it, or vendor it, unless they wanted to ditch all their purchased gear (anything they bought would have an MG requirement so it couldn’t be equipped if they changed faction) and re-grind up as CoF so they could use that one item.
The restrictions and complexity you’re talking about are there specifically to prevent exploits that try to utilize benefits from both factions at the same time. They’re not trying to fix trading, they’re trying to close all exploits of having (supposedly) equally viable trade-based and SSF systems in the same game. They’re adding obstacles that make it so profoundly inefficient to try to use both at the same time that the optimal path will always be to stick with one.
Now I have posted in this thread that I don’t think balancing these systems is possible (at least within the constraints mentioned in this announcement) and the system will likely be heavily imbalanced in favor of MG. That said, it is unlikely to be due to exploits involving manipulation of both factions. It will just be because trade is too powerful for CoF to keep up, so the optimal approach will be to go full trade and pretend CoF doesn’t exist.
