Using Gold as the main trading currency is a mistake. Change my mind. Or, why can't I get excited about loot

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So a new season of Last Epoch is neigh. I’m trying to get myself psyched up for it, but I just cant. My friends are ‘meh’ on the idea too. We both love POE1 and had a blast this last league. Admittedly, we’re the types of players that love to accumulate currency to buy fantastic gear. We love the sound of a high value drop and enjoy some gambling here and there. I dunno. Maybe we’re just sickos. The idea that a high value drop is around the corner is intoxicating. The point is, these loot drops potentially open up new content to play that was formerly out of reach.

Last Epoch doesn’t seem to offer that at all. I probably wouldn’t even be able to recognize a ‘great’ drop when it happened. Even so, I’m not really sure what parts of the game open up after a build reaches a certain point. Doing ‘Monolith 600’ versus ‘Monolith 400’ doesn’t seem any better than what a mobile game offers. I admit, I haven’t pushed the endgame far enough probably, but I don’t recognize any content that opens up. I’m willing to push this league and really give the game a fair shot. Are people enjoying Temporal Sanctums, Souldifre Bastion, and Lightless Arbor?

I think part of the problem is that I’m a trade league player and LE systems seem more keyed for solo-self-found. Using gold as the main currency for the Market seems antiquated compared to bartering for crafting resources in POE or Rune trading in Diablo 2. Gold doesn’t seem to have any compelling value. What do you do with gold once your build has BIS gear? What’s the sink for Gold? Wouldn’t it be better to use an alternative currency that could purchase enhanced Monolith runs or special crafting options? In POE or Diablo 2, if you tell me you have a couple of Mirrors or Ber and Jah runes, that’s impressive and valuable. In LE if you tell me that you have a billion gold, I have no comparison.

Bottom line. I really like Last Epoch. The graphics and multiplayer have really come around since the early days. The combat feels good and should be even better for minion builds this league. The screen doesn’t fill up with a ton of effects that block the entire area. I’m lacking the thrill of itemization and obtaining valuable loot. I fully admit I probably need to push further and learn more about the game. I’ve bought support packs for the game in the past and will remain optimistic about LE’s future until there’s a reason not to. For now, I’m trying to put my finger on what’s not clicking. Is it just me?

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Gold isnt ideal, but as it stands now, barter/trade would be too complex.

All the currency in poe is loosley gold. All that it being a “crafting item” does is make sure the economy does not crash. So chaos is universally traded, and for the most part for 90% of players, is gold. when they see a chaos orb drop, or a divine orb drop, that is “money” not “crafting material” poe’s economy is resistant to collapse however because they have crafting values.

A good example is shit like hinekoras lock is tons of divines in trade, in SSF, its a good item, but isnt worth more then an actual good item. Because having one extra chance at a craft isnt the be all end all since you are unlikely to find more locks. A mirror in SSF? same deal. So really a mirrors value is trade.

Id say the market in this game is quite shit, but I think thats because a huge part of the system from the ground up were made when trade wasnt even in the game. Trade is an after thought slapped in opposite CoF because people really wanted trade.

I play exclusively CoF, And even in a game like TL:I I play exclusively SSF. The only game I play trade in, is PoE. because the game sorta almost as a foil to last epoch, was built upon trading. SSF in that game feels like shite because so many items are balanced around trading existing when it comes to item rate.

I think honestly you should just try CoF and see if things click better. People in my circle generally didnt enjoy MG, and I dont think id enjoy the game playing MG either.

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Bearing in mind trade was on the kickstarter, I’d say it was the other way round, CoF was tacked on so as to not fuck over people who don’t want to trade.

Yup & that’s why LE has CoF.

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Yeah but they certainly waffled back and forth. I am of the take for a good while they were mostly in the boat of “we dont really want trade at this juncture” but they had enough people who desired it.

Do they have stats on what the player divide among factions is? That would be kinda cool to see.

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Oh boy. You couldn’t have summoned Kulze to write an extensive novel in your thread faster if you had said (tagged) his name 3 times. :rofl:

Mostly, I think gold as a currency in MG is a mistake, but not for the reasons you listed. As DiceDragon said, in PoE you get excited from the drops because you know they are valuable. If a Mageblood or an Original Sin drop, you get excited because you know they are valuable.
Likewise, in LE, if a 1LP red ring drops you can get excited because you know they are valuable.
That part only has to do with knowledge of the game and what is worth a lot of money or not.

The reasons why I think gold isn’t a good option are mostly 2:
1- Variable cap. Gold is stored in a variable and therefore it has a cap. You can’t store more than 1.6B, iirc, or thereabouts and trade is limited to a 1B or 1.5B cap, can’t recall which.
There is a lack of a good gold sink for LE, so overall gold keeps increasing and soon the top items aren’t being sold anymore because weaker items are already being sold by cap value.

In PoE you don’t have this issue because you have tiers of currency. You don’t sell an item for 1k chaos, you sell it for 6-7 divines. This tiering makes it so that you never actually reach a cap because there is always a tier above it.
The fact that they’re consumables just help it so that inflation isn’t rampant, but even with gold you could fix inflation. However, having a single currency that even without trading can reach cap is bad.
If they were to use favour instead it would be harder to reach cap because the base prices would be much lower.

Right now you will never sell anything for less than 1k gold, more likely 100k gold. If you used favour (or another harder to farm currency) the base would be maybe 10 or 100, meaning you have many more magnitudes to increase before you reach a cap.

2- The second main reason why gold is a mistake is simply one of equality between CoF and MG. The fact that there are in-game things that cost gold, like mastery respec or stash tabs, mean that a CoF player will always be at a huge disadvantage in this regard compared to an MG player.
A CoF player needs way more stash tabs than an MG player, because the strength of CoF is hoarding, whereas an MG player simply considers the Bazaar as their stash. However, it’s a lot easier for an MG player to reach 50-60 tabs than it is for a CoF one.
Likewise for mastery respec. It’s a lot easier for an MG player to respec multiple times than it is for CoF.

So yeah, it’s a mistake for sure. But not because of the reason you mention. If a new player in PoE drops HH they probably won’t be excited until they realize that HH is worth a lot of currency. And that they can use that currency to buy other stuff for their build. But if you’re a more experienced player you’ll immediately get excited because you already know it’s valuable.
Likewise if you drop a 1LP omnis or 19WW Sword of Clotho you won’t get excited as a new player because you’re not aware of the value and you’ll get excited if you’re a more experienced player and are aware of the value.

Ultimately, players get excited by the rare drops because they are valuable. Either so you can sell them in trade and buy other things you need, or, like in CoF, because you know they’re rare and you can now use them in your builds.

So when you say you’re impressed if a player tells you they have a couple of mirrors or a ber/jah rune, that is because you know they’re very valuable. A new player would likely simply ask “is that good?”.
Likewise, you could have a similar reaction to having 1B gold. If that were actually a good thing and not something that MG players reach multiple times in a season. It all comes down to knowledge (and in this case also because of inflation making it irrelevant.

I remember back in the day (during Harvest, so before the switch to divs) when chaos drops were kinda good because they weren’t so common and an exalted drop was huge.
These days you don’t even bother with chaos unless they’re in a stack (other than early game on a new character) and you don’t get too excited about a div dropping because so many drop already.

So, in short, you’ll only get excited about drops in a game when you know how rare/valuable they are. That part has nothing to do with using gold, chaos/divs or runes/gems as currency.
Especially because the majority of players don’t actually craft in PoE (or only do basic crafting) so any leftover currency isn’t used for that purpose anyway.

To put it in real life terms: you’d be impressed if someone told you they have 2 lamborghinis. And that is because you know that a lambo is an expensive and rare commodity. And you can get impressed if someone says they have a million dollars, because you have the knowledge that this is a large amount of money to most people.
But if someone told that to a 3 year old (equivalent to a new player) they wouldn’t be likely to be impressed, because they have no way to know if that’s a good thing or not.

So if a lambo “dropped” on you as an adult you’d be excited, but as a child you wouldn’t be.
The excitment about drops comes from value/rarity knowledge alone.

Jut realized I made fun of Kulze for writing long novels in his posts and I just made one myself (and I rambling one at that). :laughing:

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As I told many times: Market needs an own currency that is tied to your guild rank. Using gold for the market is just a trainwreck of a else well thought out system.

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Because there is none.

Corruption 100 (hence getting into empowered monoliths) are identical mechanically from corruption 1000. There is no difference.

The only things getting included are Aberroth and Uberroth, that’s it. Which is why the game struggles so much, there is no gradual progression available in terms of content. The weaver mechanics could’ve properly provided that, but outside of a few specific ones - which you need to specifically go for to have any warranted reason to be in your view - there is no ‘unlocked content’ at all. Quite the contrary, EHG shoved it into your face in 1.2 early on without any option to avoid it. No opt-in… no opt-out… just ‘do or die’.

A very small subsection is.

In general ‘no’ though. The dungeons are awfully badly designed. Very very lackluster and empty content.
Only the bosses are interesting and the outcomes, the dungeon on its own is very boring.

It only has the tabs as a compelling value, and the inherent exchange value of it for other items. Hence other items become more valuable comparatively to others… until the game’s actual technical Gold limit is in your way… which does happen with the top-end items and breaks the whole system currently.

There is no BiS gear in Last Epoch achievable actually. It’s so oddly designed that the majority of BiS items (actual BiS, hence 4 T7 or 4 LP uniques with 4 T7 exalteds made into legendaries) are just not a existing thing. You can hence be extremely lucky and get a absolutely insane top-tier item which nobody ever will get again simply because the chance is so small that before it happens our sun burns out.

Yes… that timeframe… that nonsensical timeframe is a thing.

There is none, which is the complaint since 1.0. Yes.

Yes, it would, and I’m urging for that since 1.0 too.

Sorry to disappoint… but no… you actually will only feel that more the further you go. There is no turnaround like in PoE 1 where you can say ‘Ok, lemme make this absolutely perfect item which will need thousands of hours to create but nobody else is sane enough to try it as well’. It just doesn’t exist since there is no way to do that. The player is not given the means to achieve any item pushing on their own, all is pure drop RNG.

Exactly, which gives em inherent value.

Something that Gold lacks.

That’s the core reason it’s set up like that and makes it superior as a currency.
A non-stop sink.

Factually wrong actually.
Trade was a Kickstarter goal already.

Which makes the situation all the much worse.

It would be understandable if it were as you say, but it’s not.

If you provide something in the kickstarter as a core feature then there is no ‘waffling back and forth’ unless you’re intending to shit on your backers… which is not really a thing you wanna do if you want to keep any semblence of trust.
Something EHG gave up by now sadly. Had hoped for it not to happen but it did.

Who? Me? I think you’re mistaking me for someone else… right? Right? :stuck_out_tongue:

Which LE could at least partially copy through including a exclusive currency solely for trading instead of Gold. If we currently have 2k Gold minimum that could hence be reduced down to ‘1’.
Which means we have a magnitude of 2000 times the ceiling capacity, which already should take care of a substantial amount of the issues.

Then follow-up with implementing a actually useful and hence used method for a sink of that specific resource and voila… problem solved.
PoE has a good Gold sink with the Settler mechanics, be it map running or shipping items, also usage of the Recombinator. They permanently remove the Gold from the economy and hence make it a worthwhile resource to actually decide if you wanna quick-exchange the crafting-currency or use it for creating items and currency instead.
Means it’s never going to break in any reasonable amount of time.

Absolutely!
MG has a unfair advantage in that regard for some. And the majority a masisve disadvantage since they need to choose between using their miniscule gold for buying something (as the majority lacks the ability to properly price items and even then the ability to make profit, basic market situation) or using it for those things.

On the other hand CoF double-dips between the factions as a long-term CoF player can create a MG character and basically immediately outfit themselves to the top-end without ever putting any effort into the faction.

Lose-lose situation. Shouldn’t exist.

You always pick up chaos even as a uber-uber-strict lootfilter player and a ‘div’ is a ‘ding’. A ‘ding’ is always what you aim for.

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Actually there is. You need 300c for the full harbingers and for a few woven echoes.
From 300c+ (320c technically for CoF players) is when there is no significant difference other than numbers changing.

You missed the point. The point is that power creep brought about inflation over time. The market adjusted to it, but around 7-8 years ago the average player managed to get around 100c in drops and maybe 2-3 exalted during a season. Purely as currency drops, mind you.
But now an average player can easily get 500c+ and 20-30 divs easily from drops alone.

So the excitment of an exalted dropping back then was much higher than the excitment of a div dropping now. And much more so for chaos.

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Change it up a bit. Ask loot if it will put on lace panties or maybe tie you up…

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But that’s needed. Our society is completele overstimulated and you would lose a lot of potential players if you don “shower” them in dopamine. Not so much for the older players who want oldschool stuff back but rather for the more recent players. Devs might have a hard time to find a sweet spot here.

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Thanks for all the replies so far. I have read every word. I want to keep an open mind and enjoy LE as much as possible. It sounds like I might need to get my brain wrapped around CoF and target farming. Perhaps another alternative is to start with an MG character to unlock tabs and then have CoF alts? I dunno. Playing CoF would certainly encourage me to research items rather than simply buying an item that the build guide suggests. I’ve done some basic campaign crafting and surely need to learn the more advanced methods. As I said earlier, I have a lot to learn and need to push the game further. LE deserves a spot in my ARPG seasonal rotation as I do enjoy the gameplay.

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Sure. But what I meant is that you got that dopamine when a jah rune dropped 20 years ago and you get that same dopamine now. Because the rarity is the same.
In PoE the rarity of those currencies decreased, they drop more, so you get less dopamine for the same drops now than you did 7-8 years ago.

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I don’t think that’s right when you look into the sience but I’m no prof so I coul’d be wrong. Today people feel entitled to this drops and “working” towards a goal or something rare isn’t something that should be part of a game. A ton of people feel like they deserve instant gratification. I’m not okay with drop numbers that are equaly probale then getting hit by a lightning twice while taking a dump and I don’t want to go back to old asia games where you had a .0006% chance to get a drop once a week.

Back then said drops were awesome because there wasn’t much else to do and it broke the braindead repetition realy well. Today you run hard content and achive pinacle stuff and the game drops you a white item for it. It’s hard to get that right and the good old days are gone and weren’t as good as some nostalgic people make it up. From my point of view it’s better to get a steady stream of useable stuff instead of playing 100 hours to get one awesome drop inside a huge drop pile of crap that’s not even worth picking up.

That’s why many people love trading. You don’t get what you want but sooner or later you have enough money/items to throw at a goal you want to reach and simply buy it. As I said it’s hard to find a sweet spot because 2 decade old Diablo memroys are worth shit in todays market unless you want to start a nostalgia game with little to no players.

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Long story short, go play Circle of Fortune.
I managed to pick up a pretty solid auto-orb VK build without farming literally anything. The game just threw it at me.

Seriously, if you are playing for more than 2 hours at a time, just switch to Circle of Fortune. You will, for sure, get better drops.

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It might need a separate currency, that isn’t something I can’t assess since I’m playing offline.

But since most of you mentioned PoE as a comparison, currency is one of the reasons why I dislike that game. Its currency system in its original state was great. Then they started adding new currency items for every little new gameplay sub-system. I hate that with a passion. Instead of engaging in the main gameplay loop, I had to micro-manage my inventories and all the slightly different variants of currency items depending on what part of the game I want to play or interact with in general. That and feature creep in general drove me away.

Instead of spending my limited time in the game with enjoyable content, I spent a considerable amount of it with doing boring stuff, in the hopes to get to the fun parts eventually. Almost all of my play sessions and attempts to give it another chance led to frustration and ultimately me deleting my account so I’d never feel the urge to “try again” again.

So, I hope if EHG decides to make changes to the trading currency system in that way, they don’t try apply the same changes to other systems that might involve currency (at some point).

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In terms of economy, most “currency” in PoE is basically just items.
There are the very low end of items that are traded by an alch or similar, but pretty much every trade is either with chaos or divs.

You’re not going to be buying a Mageblood with Conqueror Orbs. So while you can craft with them, Conqueror Orbs aren’t actually currency, they’re items you buy/sell, not that different from a Mageblood.

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I consider this semantics that are irrelevant to my argument. Yes, for trading with other players you might only use a more narrow set of the items available. This is not what I’m talking about. I don’t care about economy in that way, because, as I mentioned, I play offline.
“Currency” in my book isn’t just something you use to trade with other players but also items you might need to simply interact with gameplay systems in the broadest sense. If I interact with an NPC vendor/gatekeeper/whatever then I do consider the items that enable me to use said systems also currency, for the same reason you’d consider gold a currency when you use it to trade with NPCs or in Lightless Arbor.

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yeah gold has no value unless there are vendors you can buy elite stuff from (aka - game merchants, not goofball players)

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Then only engage in the core main gameplay loop and trade for stuff.

What you explain is a natural progression of any game which gets a specific amount of content width.
It’s the guaranteed issue any ‘grand scale game’ faces.

  • You either make everything drop everywhere. This by design causes one mechanic to be superior and gradually the other ones being simply worse in comparison, up to a point they aren’t even used, hence have no reason for existence at all. Balancing that is a nightmare, nigh impossible.
  • Or you go and do what you complain about in PoE, you give every mechanic a unique outcome, which means micromanaging when to do which mechanic to get the thing you want. Which with guarantee will force you into content you dislike at times, hoping for it simply to be over.

So, which one do you choose? Pick your poison here, because both are ‘bad’.

The first one has showcased to be a guaranteed failing method for sustaining a game long-term as ‘all is the same’… which is what LE already struggles with.
Hence why developers commonly go with the second.

The only option is to keep a game below a complexity threshold hence… but that is impossible with a live-service game, those are mandated to progress over time and become ‘more’.

This inherently means your issue is with the whole business model itself and not the game in that case. And that on the other hand is understandable.
What you see as a downside though is something I personally see as a upside. Why? Because I enjoy the variety and complexity of a game expanding, the more the better as I don’t burn myself out since I can do ‘everything or nothing’ at my own pace.

Which parts are you talking about here?
Any mechanic in PoE for example can be accessed immediately upon coming to maps. Some make more sense, some less… sure. But they all provide instant high returns which allows you to focus on them. Usually 2-3 systems at whichever you enjoy at the moment.

This obviously cannot be done in SSF as your progression demands the content you have to run. And yes, that is known to burn people out.
The same thing LE will fare with CoF as it progresses further and further, unless it wants to become irrelevant as people have already ‘played it out’ entirely since nothing is allowed to drastically change.
Mind you, you can alleviate it through drastic inherent changes to the base game, but that is a guaranteed method to turn away the core playerbase, hence it becomes a casual ‘tourist only’ game this way.

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You mean any live service game (including MMORPGs), right? Because most other games I’ve played in the past didn’t have that issue. I consider PoE and Warframe to be equal in that regard, they added a lot of new systems throughout their existence, most of them feeling quite detached from what the original and main game is/was and from other systems that were introduced later on, in case of Warframe even more so IMO.
And I agree, that this a common occurrence among long-lasting live service games. But it doesn’t mean I have to like that. That is exactly my point. I usually quit those games if I find myself in that same position again. And that’s also why I don’t play play online live service games at all anymore.

Yes, both are bad. The second one will only delay the need for rebalancing, which you mentioned in the first one, in order to keep it relevant, so I consider it just a temporary workaround instead of a solution to the initial problem.
A third option could be to reuse an already existing currency/item to give it additional meaning and purpose, for the same reasons our real world money doesn’t suddenly lose its value in certain markets/systems just because a new market/system is created. Then all systems that use that same currency/item can compete with each other, which is interesting. But that would obviously also come with its set of downsides. I’d still prefer that one, though.

I don’t recall the details, its been years I had anything to do with that game. All I remember is the frustration from micro-managing PoE’s systems and their currencies that increased in complexity with every new league and major content update.

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