As a degen trader in other ARPGs I felt this way, but it’s dawning on me how insane having access to everyone’s items with an IN-GAME UI is. It’s an absurd “droprate” multiplier.
I just wonder if people want gold that much.
How will this system work with a possible Guild Stash?
I’d really like to see some flavor for MG. Just like anything besides having an access to the trade system. Imagine you are choosing between a trade league in PoE and an SSF league, but with an atlas tree. I can’t think of any good option, but here some ideas: achievements / MTX (mantles from the Twitch drops would make more sense here) / something with gold (increase drop rate to make other stuff more affordable / decrease vendor prices / increase getting gold from selling items to a vendor).
As for CoF, ideally to have more choices rather than predefined rewards. E.g. extra drops vs increased quality drops. Though I suppose you want to achieve this with lenses and prophecies. By “quality” I mean higher crafting potential (or higher chance not to use it during crafting), better rolls for affixes values inside a tier (so in 20-30% tier you’re more likely to get 25-30% than 20-25%), higher LP, etc.
But I really love how you are trying to solve trade vs SSF issue! I hope it gets a huge success and affects other games too 
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Prophecies already give you alot of options to personalize what you want or don’t want. Lenses are just one more Step towards only getting that that you really really care for. In case its not clear. Lenses onl< affect Prophecies
I hate comparing everything to PoE especially for systems that are really innovative.
But even PoE has this with Atlas Passive Tree and Scarabs you can’t jsut get them right out the gate.
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I don’t see how this update is adding barriers to progression. Both factions only speed up your gains. Progressing within a faction only improves your search that much more compared to what we already have.
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It wouldn’t work. We don’t currently have plans to add a guild stash.
Before we even start, I think Merchant faction NEEDS a way to remove the currency from the economy in large amounts, or you will get massive inflation. It cannot be gold because the only major gold sink is a 1-2 mil per run dungeon that people will rarely enter in a trade league as they will prefer that money for trades. If the currency is favor, then you have already partially solved it via price to list.
I will comment on CoF because merchants is self-explainatory
Rank 1: 35% more items, which is ok, but still less than I think is needed
Rank 2: Ok for farming drop uniques that do not have a special base type… but players should get just enough runes of ascendance to not need this at all, and they could just pick up the item at some point if it drops, and the most important ones to farm are ones that drop only from specific bosses and thus cannot be got from Ascendance - so overall rather weak rank upgrade when trying to farm the big items
Rank 3: 25%more idols, stacks with items for 1.6875 times mult, which is way less than I think is needed
Rank 4:50% more exalts, stacks with more items for 2.025 more exalts(which is getting close to acceptable levels)
Rank 5:35% more mono rewards… meh, monolith rewards are generally weak
Rank 6:Double legendary potential chance -OH BABY YES!
Rank 7:Double T7 chance OHHHHHHH
Rank 8:Rare to exalted conversion:Absolutely insane, may exceed merchants faction in value, I love it
Rank 9:Great, this fixes the issue that merchant faction would have been the only ones running full sets, now CoF will run full sets too
Rank 10:depends on if prophecy drops are good or not
I think that the most important change is Rank 2 - as currently CoF does not in fact seem to have a decent way to target farm specific uniques the way a merchant can just BUY an omnis for a ton of favour.
Item base is not the only thing people look for. in fact SPECIFIC AFFIXES are the biggest thing that matters to a lot of people, it is not enough for it to be a rare body armor, thousands of those drop in monos, but only a few of the affix they care about drop. I have never cared about the mono rewards that give rare/exalted of an Item class, because they never give anything I care for.
On that matter, I do believe that the monoliths should have as both their affix shard rewards and some gear rewards ones that give gear that has certain generic groups of affixes(such as one that drops leech/regen/healing related affixes).
also on “unique weapon” being a possible reward, that is insanely vague, at least narrow it down to 1 handed, 2 handed and off hand, or even more specific - remember that the LONGER THE GAME GOES, the MORE UNIQUES EXIST and thus the less effective getting a random unique is when compared to just buying it off merchant faction. If a player wants a specific unique they should be able to prophecy it for a bunch of cost + a hard/long prophecy condition.
Rank 2:ok, but I think the specific item type thing should be really specific, not just “weapons”, but all the way down to “wands”
Rank 3:Meh, doesn’t give better rewards
Rank 4:That is a mouthful, I think it means increased chance of rare/unique/legend/set/exalt. Which is ok for uniques if this is a BIG multiplier, but I expect it will not be enough to make up for not being able to trade uniques
Rank 5:Good for early farm, on that note we really need faster stability gain in earlier monos so that we can actually get to empowered(not as a CoF thing, I just think monos should be faster to get to boss in general)
Rank 6:nothing… I am sad 
Rank 7:Double prophecy uses, cool
Rank 8:Double prophecy rewards, cool
Rank 9:Third lens
Rank 10: nothing… I am sad
Oh, one question: Do lens of same type stack or do you need to have 3 different lenses, because if they stack you pick 3 times double rewards, if they do not, double rewards +double uses+ one other
This is why i suggested to EHG to allow prophecies to be used by both factions.
It doesnt feel good imo to give something content wise to COF but MG is strictly the bazaar.
This would also allow for MG players to also have another way to target farm other than just echo rewards.
This is still a RNG driven loot based game. There is and always will be some RNG involved and narrowing down on specific item slots already helps a ton with targeted gearing.
LE has not that many item drops to begin with, even if you compeltely disable your loot filter.
Are we playing the same game? Surely not every single of these rewards will give you something you can work with, but alot of these are really good when you throw on one or two crafts. I really do like those occasinal Exalted Body Armour loot explosions its always exciting for me personally.
The only thing that I am missing from MoF is a separate Idol rewards, the idol rewards only give class-specific rewards and those generic idols are really hard to target farm. The best loot explosions for normal idols are usually the Shrines (the only shrines I am actually excited about and even those give a lot of class-specific idols).
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my filter ends up REALLY strict by high monos
I think Idols need better means of farming them IN GENERAL. CoF certainly isn’t helping with only 25% in case of shrines and 68.75% in case of enemies. This causes problems with trade as people will target farm shrines for idols as idols will sell for a lot.
Everybody to their liking.
I mean my filter is pretty strict as well, but with you saying that Rare and Exalted Monolith rewards are not exciting seems like that your threshold of at least looking at a potential good items seems to high. The beauty of LE’s crafting system is, that a medicore item can turn into a really really good one with just 1 or 2 crafts with a little bit of luck.
The rare item rewards definitely really quickly begin to become weaker and weaker, but the exalted item nodes are always exciting for me.
expect by that point I am running insane items with every single good affix and the only items worth picking up are 3/4 of affixes with a specific base where everything is at least T3, T4 if only 3 of them are correct
This system looks awesome, I can’t wait to try it out
still debating which one to go since its just me and hubby play or by myself when hes not at home…i like trade in poe but i do like the sound of CoF too
Rather than banning reselling, you should take the more traditional approach of imposing a small AH fee.
Banning reselling makes for a very illiquid market. This could be problematic. Lack of a secondary market is bad for peer-to-peer exchange. It makes price discovery difficult and very volatile.
It especially doesnt make sense for items that should be pretty commoditized, like mid-roll idols.
The imposition of favor as a limiting mechanic on trading sounds nice on paper as I guess a solution for trading bots, but to skip a few steps in the thought process, why not just ban gold sellers instead? Your game has an up-front license cost.
Also, what about the relisting of an item or alteration of its price or whatever other sales settings? Would that also cost favor?
What these sort of restrictions do to the player is weight the market towards limited trades of mostly high value items, since every trade has to recoup the investment of the favor.
It also means players will be even less inclined to list less meta items, because meta items will have more demand and more guaranteed returns. Do we really need to have a mechanic that helps reinforce metas?
You’re going to regret some of these choices.
What you should actually be looking to solve instead is the seasonality of the PoE economy, where faster players sell things that shortcut the progression of all the middle-speed players, and all the slower players or players who do not catch the beginning-of-season economic wave struggle to sell anything at all.
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They did.
Yes it does.
This contradicts imo.
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Can someone please answer are prophecies, factions and favour all available in pure offline mode?
This is a problem with the way the loot grind works in most ARPGs. The stronger your gear gets, the more specific and high quality it needs to be before it’s even an upgrade at all, let alone a significant one. Even with higher drop rates, the time between upgrades increases until you get too bored to keep going.
LE’s crafting system does wonders to help make the early part of the gear grind feel a lot better since you can actually take decent looking drops and turn them into gear you want with just a few crafts. But it doesn’t do much to fix that higher end of the gear grind since any piece that isn’t already really close to what you need isn’t gonna suddenly be good enough after a craft.
I do kind of wish the game could have a solution for this, either through CoF or some other system. It doesn’t need to be easy, but there needs to be some light at the end of the tunnel for whatever you’re chasing.
How is faction reputation shared across cycle characters? You mention it here, but it doesn’t explain it well:
Like, does this mean all characters on the SAME cycle? Or all characters in EVERY cycle, meaning your faction progress carries on from one cycle to the next (you never have to grind for it again, even years down the line)? Thanks in advance for answering!