I had to re-read your posts a couple times to figure out what you’ve been trying to say. If you don’t mind, I’d like to restate it and you can tell me if I’ve got it correct or not.
You seem to want an experience where you will be able to party up with random people online and play multiplayer, beyond just a small playgroup that has agreed to all play MG or CoF together in advance. You also seem to think that MG will be much stronger than CoF. You do not want to play MG yourself.
There are obviously strong disadvantages to being a CoF player in an MG party. The MG players will get less loot so they are less likely to find things you can use, and you can’t give them items at all because your drops all have a CoF requirement.
It sounds like your concern is that the power of MG will attract a significant majority of the player base, and because parties of mixed factions are inherently weaker the CoF players will end up ostracized from the multiplayer community. Therefore you would feel forced to play MG yourself even though you don’t want to use the Bazaar just because CoF players will have a much smaller player base for multiplayer.
So your concern is that just the fact that MG exists is going to undermine the multiplayer community that you were hoping to be a part of. Do I have that that correct?
If I do, then I think that is kind of fair. I’ve already stated in my own posts that I don’t think it’s possible to balance the two and MG will end up being stronger. While many people have said something to the effect of “I don’t care how strong the two are as long as CoF feels good to play” because they want to play totally solo, for people who do want to play multiplayer the size of each group is actually pretty significant.
I kind of thought this was the case and addressed it in a previous comment but based on the response this apparently wasn’t what they meant because I guess I don’t understand what they’ve ‘said at least 6 times’ and I was recommended ‘the entire paragraph/full sentence each of’ their quotes was pulled from.
For most part yes. Masterfully stated and summarized. I like the game and the devs alot so I’ll still be here playing the game regardless of how this faction experiment goes.
Its just from what I’ve scene these two game mode systems all follow the same path.
1 start off ok and even
2 one side begins to overtake then holds the majority
3 ‘we’re discounting X content’ or ‘X content will now be single player only’
And I’m with you even with the crazy talent on the dev team I can’t see how they make this balanceing act work.
I dont want trade becasue I dont want to be one of 15 people in the CoF faction huffing the copium that the next update will some how manage to defeat/Tame the true immortal king the MG faction.
My man… You do understand that some human beings enjoy playing games with other human beings just for its own sake, right? Why does every aspect of a game need to be evaluated through the lens of “What mathematical benefit does it give me?”
If it makes you feel any better, this is actually a much easier problem to solve. If CoF players are having a hard time finding groups in a mostly MG multiplayer community, they could give CoF benefits to party play. They would just have to quantify how much less a MG group gains from adding a CoF to the party rather than another MG, and then include “MG players in your party gain X” to the CoF percs to balance it.
They absolutely shouldn’t do this to start. We’d need to see what the player distributions end up being, where the balance between the two factions ends up, and if any sort of ostracization ends up happening. If the game does end up going down that path and they can’t fix it within the balance between the factions then this could be sort of a panic button.
It’s also worth noting that MG players don’t actually gain much more from MG party members than they would from CoF party members. It’s not like if you party with an MG player they’re just going to give you any good drops they can’t use, they’re probably going to want to sell those themselves. It’s very possible that we end up in a situation where MG players don’t really care who they party with because the real benefit they gain is improved clear speed, while the CoF players are the ones who are encouraged to ostracize MG players. After all, having an MG in the party means they will get less drops but also want to keep everything they find because they gain value from selling it while a CoF party member doesn’t have any reason to keep their rare drops so would be more prone to gifting items to their allies.
If anything it seems likely that the most toxic environment would be one where CoF is dominant and MG players are ostracized. I don’t think this is likely, but if they really over tune prophesies beyond what they are saying here I guess it’s technically possible. It would also break the game’s progression structure if they went that far, so I doubt they would leave it at that level even if it happened.
I think you would enjoy Last Epoch (and video games in general) a lot more if you didn’t think about everything in terms of efficiency. Video games are meant to be fun.
I disagree with this in principle as it depends on the figures used. If MG was “priced” such that the average player only got enough favour to use it once a week while CoF had prophecies that enabled the player to hunt specific uniques (with or without LP, whatever), I’d imagine that people would probably say that CoF was significantly stronger than MG. I agree that it is probably going to be very difficult to attain a reasonable balance where the two are comparable especially given players different play styles, but the devs can continue to tweak the relative costs & benefits as much as they want.
Also, don’t forget, he appears to believe that the factions are sentient or something & are competing with each other for players for … some reason? Are they actually chaos gods from Warhammer (fantasy or 40k, take your pick)?
If he thinks that CoF will, and can only ever be, significantly weaker than MG, that’s entirely up to him, but that’s not the devs want & they’ll tweak things to attempt to achieve their desired aim (whether it’s actually possible to achieve is an entirely different cup of tea).
Or, he’s actually a deep-XXX plant & wants the devs to buf the #### out of CoF so that can be uber strong or something. I have no idea at this point. But there are going to be plenty (of MP players) playing CoF 'cause they don’t like trade & lower drop rates.
I’ve already made a bunch of posts about this so I don’t want to rehash it too much, but the TLDR is that they have already created constraints within this announcement that make this basically impossible.
They’ve already said that CoF will be worse farming than we have now until higher ranks, which means no powerful target farming until we reach that point. Since ranks are planned to take longer to max out than level that means that for the core progression we’re at parity or worse than our current farming. We also know that guilds don’t show up until post-game and MG has a lower farm rate than the current game. This means that base drop rates will need to be lowered to the MG level, but cannot be lowered too much because the campaign still needs to be functional without affiliating with either guild.
On the other hand MG gets access to buying uniques at rank 4. At this point they can get build defining items like uniques and idols deterministically. Even if their drop rates are half of CoF drop rates they’re still way better off at this point.
Restricting Favor too much just means that MG becomes a Favor grind rather than a wealth grind, which will be extremely unsatisfying and push all the trade players away again. If you’re only buying one item a week then the whole MG faction is functionally DoA, and they’ve just wasted a bunch of time designing these systems for no reason. I think it’s a good mechanic for preventing high powered players from flooding the market with lower tier gear, but if it is locking out progression (I can afford to buy the item I want but I’ll need to grind 4 more hours to get enough favor to make the purchase) it will feel really really bad and the trade players won’t stick around.
There’s not a wide enough range between “slightly worse than now” and the baseline that would make the campaign functional to make the gap in gear acquisition between CoF and MG big enough to compensate for the power of MG’s deterministic gear acquisition. It could balance out after both characters hit the lv 100+ point where they have maxed their factions, but only reaching parity well after your build should already have come together is not a good place to be.
A few ranks, in a system with 10 ranks, is probably 2-4 ranks.
Its been stated we gain access to a faction some time in the campaign.
The campaign finishes at approximately level 50.
So, I’d be very surprised if CoF don’t reach equivalence with current drop rates by somewhere in standard monoliths; with positive gains on current drop rates by the time we reach empowered monoliths (where most people would farm now anyway).
I’m going by this post because it had a bit more detail on relative drop rates and progression rates of the two factions.
Not sure how that can be reconciled with the Trasochi quote, because one would seem to indicate that your first few levels of CoF will be lower than now while the other says that you’ll match current rates at that point.
My statement is directly extrapolated from trasochi’s.
Edit: I would like to note that attempting to nail down details like which rank things become roughly equivalent to now is a bit of a fool’s errand. I’m sure our initial numbers won’t survive first contact with testing.
That is also why I hope you guys can bring this system into the communities hand 1 or 2 patches before 1.0
I think the majority of people seems quite happy and the few critisms we see, could be resolved with balancing the system properly, which as you stated will probalby not be perfect on the first iteration.
Are resonances and items “time-tracked”? Because for RMT-Reasons it shouldnt be possible to get say an 4LP Legendary and gift it with an Resonance that you aquired only after the Item dropped, yes?
The positive question of a negative statement always trips me up so I’ll just explain the situation.
The time limiting is not specifically there to just limit RMT but it does help.
You can gift a 4LP item using resonance.
The main purpose for resonance is to be able to give those really special stand out, perfect for their build items to a friend who you play frequently with.
Edit: I just got the question, the game doesn’t care which order the items dropped in.
I played D2:R for a few weeks, a few months ago. After not playing D2 for over 13 years and couldnt remember hardly anything about the actual game, I just remember Blessed Hammer for OP for early farming so I made a Paladin
I chose to go offline and go /players8 from The Den onward so I could get phat xp and drops and I did, I got tonnes of XP and gear, I was vastly overgeared/leveled at every point I just walked right into Hell and farmed The Pit for 100 years (from 83-92) I didnt leave as I was scared Hell would wreck me. Hell was a joke even on players/8
I hit 95 heading to 96 which is probably over level 100 in PoE in that time I found top tier uniques Shako, Arachnid Mesh, Gryphon helmet, HoZ, was 1 rune away from Enigma for a week ended up quitting as my progression stalled completely
In that time I found 3 Charms for Paladin…3 with +1 skills and 2 usable, which is basically like Idols in LE would be like finding Bastion of Honour/Ravenous Void but you cant find a Smite Idol above 4% and only 3 in 150+ hours
I wanted to roll a Bone Necro but didnt want to play without Enigma, I also wanted an SoJ so I could fight Uber Diablo. I could of traded for it in a short time on trade. I would of had less drops in general but I would of obtained them even with D2s crappy trade system
The point is, even with buffed drops if something isnt going to happen, it wont. You can farm for days on end and run of pure motivation but eventually mine fades. Personally feel most aRPGs have spaghetti code RNG when it comes to ‘drops’ ie what CAN actually drop in that map etc CPUs cant be random by design
So unless you restrict me personally to buying one idol a week then its MG for life
No, not really. It may surprise you, but some people actually see “I can play this game I like with another person/my friend from across the country/world” as a benefit all by itself.
Your decision to play ARPGs by boiling absolutely everything down to mathematical advantage/disadvantage has gotten you all cross over a system that you’ve barely seen past the concept stage for. Taking you as an advocate, that playstyle doesn’t seem to be very much fun even when you think it’s the right one.
