So after looking some more there does seem to still be an advantage for CoF players that party up all of the time due to the gifting with resonances. Maybe to the point where drop rates would need to be adjusted for CoF parties if they want it to be more balanced with CoF players that play alone.
Otherwise CoF leaderboards would possibly be more akin to D3 leaderboards where group meta is key, albeit for different reasons(paragon farming).
Solo still exists.
CoF will basically be the only option for “solo” players.
Because of gifting in general, if your goal is to compete as a “Solo” player, you should play account solo.
You will always lose to people who are getting group boosted regardless imo. its an unsolvable problem while keeping people in the same leaderboards.
But thankfully there is leaderboards for that kinda player.
Im sure MG players will find ways to use gifting and party synergies to farm very fast and obtain insane wealth to be used to win their leaderboards as well. Which means regardless of the faction you pick, the solo player cant beat a party. Thats just the situation tbh.
These switching strategies will ultimately slow down your progression.
You go to the boots stall and it lists all boots that you could possibly buy. Then you go to the gloves stall right beside it and it lists all glove that you could possibly buy.
Yeah the issue is that Solo isn’t quite ideal yet as you can’t share items amongst your Solo characters. Nor can you transfer them to MP. And so the solo experience isn’t quite ideal and it’s not really great to find good items you have to trash.
If they address that I’d definitely choose Solo ladder. But at least the trade faction is now available.
this is changing in 0.9
Great then I guess you’ve addressed all of my concerns.
You will – from the OP In the expandable FAQ:
In the proposed system by EHG, trade players (“Standard” or “Non-ssf” in my proposal) will already be getting the reduced drop rates. That doesn’t differ between our two proposals.
You get to keep your progress, but you won’t be able to equip the item from the MG if you are currently aligned to the CoF, per the FAQ:
And a bit further down:
–Comment:
There is hardly any benefit to having these factions. Just force the player to create another character (and everyone acknowledges that very few players will ever even want to swap factions on one character. This will not be incentivized in any way and the vast majority of players just won’t do it – ever.)
Which gets us to this point:
What player choice? No one will be swapping anyway. You can’t use the same gear between the two factions – it is basically like having two different characters. Just force the player to make another character – who cares?
This system is tailored to cater to an extremely small minority of players – the ones who will swap between wanting to trade, and wanting to not trade, on one character, while having to maintain separate gear sets for each.
Edit: And in my proposed system – the simple one – those above players are the only ones who lose anything. Everyone else just gets to enjoy a simpler system.
The cost-benefit analysis to me seems very clear – the benefit is not worth the cost.
You can’t gift in SSF. The confusion here comes from using SSF and CoF interchangeably.
You are missing a very important group. The people who want to perhaps play pick up groups, or play with friends while also having solo oriented gear progression.
I plan to pick CoF, I have some friends who will probably choose MG. if you created “SSF” and “Trade” we could not party through these account flags.
This allows us to all play together while having different gear acquisition goals.
I also think it adds another interesting system to engage with. I personally am glad they found a way to add flavor and some system to the game above it just being “okay we mad a trade ui, ssf gets +100% quant, enjoy”
Sorry wasn’t very specific. I meant when you wanted to play a second (or third as I am assuming you have max rank in each faction) character you could start the character out as a Merchant’s Guild, get leveling gear and get to monoliths with a decently high build setup. Then as you get replacement pieces can make the choice to switch to CoF to get the magic find incentives.
Yeah, I don’t understand this. What would Non-SSF-CoF even mean? Or on the other hand, SSF-MG? It seems like SSF and CoF are the same, and Standard and MG are the same.
I don’t understand – just allow SSF and Standard players to play together. They can’t trade or gift or anything – but they can play together. Nothing in my comment stated that those players shouldn’t be able to party together.
Yes, the thing is that it will be just better to play CoF from the outset in this situation.
I totally agree, It’s just an option for those that want to immediately get to their build’s potential. The switch to CoF would most likely only happen at an extreme late game scenario to try to increase the odds of getting those ultra-rare LP items (or stick to MG and grind out the currency)
Mark me as seriously impressed. I’m glad you guys came around on the option of giving players the freedom of choice in how to play the game, rather than compromising in a way that would left a sizeable chunk of your player base in the lurch. I was decidedly in the Trade camp and tbh I had lost interest in Last Epoch as a serious ARPG when I heard that Gifting was going to be the extent of trading in the game. My faith was largely restored when EHG put out that wonderfully extensive Trade Survey as I knew then from the structure of the survey that EHG was taking our feedback on the issue very seriously.
But now… With this new Factions system… I’m once again very excited about this game and I think I’m honestly most excited to explore BOTH factions to see which one I actually enjoy the most.
Keep it up, EHG!
SSF stands for Solo Self Found.
CoF players can play with MG or CoF players that are also non-SSF
SSF-MG is a little weird and I suspect that it will become a sort of meme challenge mode as a joke.
Or a noob trap 
I don’t understand at all. The stuff you get from (the bazaar) being MG would instantly become unusable when you switched and the stuff you found would be more plentiful if you had just started as CoF in the first place.
There is no efficiency gain to be had by switching.
It’s not efficiency gain, it’s a speed up of build potential. I quite like the idea for build testing and seeing how loot would interact.
I wouldn’t do it to increase my gear acquisition rate. I like the system and it’s drawbacks to switching.
Ohhhhh, with the assumption being that MG would be notably faster to obtain gear in.