Mike_W

I understand that this is a high tension topic and I would urge everyone to just remember to keep it respectful and about the issues. Taking little shots here and there isn’t constructive.

I’m sorry we couldn’t see eye to eye on this.

Hey there, just wanted to clear up a couple things. I think that calling MG non-SSF guild and CoF SSF guild are misleading, mostly because (and I’m sure you know this) SSF means Solo Self Found. Neither MG or CoF restrict your play to solo and neither restrict the items you use to self found only. We do have an optional Solo Challenge mode which is the same as SSF mode that you can do if you want to.

All items obtained by using your factions special bonuses (Bazaar for MG and drops for CoF) carry a rank requirement to equip, similar to a level requirement. This means that if a CoF player is giving items to a MG player, those items are limited to being used only while the player is representing the CoF. The MG player would need to switch over to CoF and gain some ranks before being able to use it. The items can’t be sold at the Bazaar.

The main goals that we have for this system are:

• An optional asynchronous trade system.
• Comparable efficiency betw...

A temporary multiplayer event is currently running. That will shut down in a few days and not be available again.

People who have purchased Last Epoch can play patch 0.8.5f right now. Various patches have been full-availability for several years now.

On March 9th, patch 0.9 will go live and everyone who has purchased Last Epoch will have full-availability to multiplayer.

I think this covers your question but if not, let me know.

Closing Due to duplicate topic existing with relevant information.

No, they will be deleted when the event ends.

Sounds like you’ve got it all straight. In that scenario, the downside is just that you’ve got multiple gear sets to maintain.

Edit: oh and you’re split farming favor so you’re still just getting half benefit from each.

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.

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.

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.

I learned my lesson with systems like that, never again.

The old crafting system had a step like that and we got daily reports of bugs in it not following probability properly. It was as close to perfect distribution as you could expect from anything short of a research paper.

Equipable items only. However you can sell “shatter fodder” to effectively buy affixes.

Well, we’ll just have to see if we’ve baked in enough room for adjustments to get them lined up or not.

You’re absolutely right that this will be very difficult to balance. It doesn’t need to be perfect and probably can’t ever be absolutely perfect. There are however 2 major variables missing from this calculation that will make it way easier to balance it. Favour costs on both sides of the equation. You can directly manipulate the relative power of each faction by adjusting the rate at which you can interact with them. If MG is a clear front runner then we can slightly reduce the cost of prophecies and slightly increase the cost of interacting with the Bazaar. These also get broken down further because we can adjust these more granularly. Each Prophecy has its own cost, we can adjust different item types in the Bazaar and we can adjust buying and selling independently.

Together, these form a pretty complex system. Part of why we have this more complex system is so that we have these dials to turn to be able to fine tune the relative power between the two.

Yup, this is the main angle that gets presented. However, the favour costs and opportunities of each faction mean that you would be foregoing some bonus in each to dip into the other. It works out to be more efficient to just play one or the other.

Nothing, they will continue to be on sale.

I would like to add that attempting to play both factions simultaneously through frequent switching will not yield an efficiency bonus over playing in just one.

I can’t speak for them but I suspect that the implication is that if the two options are roughly in the same ballpark of balance but if finding items was moderately worse, they would not use the trade system even if it was available.

I understand the pull to try and draw conclusions from the limited set of early details regarding balance but please be careful with the assumptions and read the whole post for more information (including the FAQ).

The lack of rank explicitly stating that you can trade LP uniques doesn’t imply that it won’t exist (it will). The FAQ talks about being able to trade items all the way up to and including Legendaries. Each Faction will have 10 ranks. At max MG rank, all types of equipable items will be tradable at the Bazaar.

I understand the desire for open trade but in order to accomplish our goal of not splitting the community and allowing people to play together regardless of the selected faction, we need to be able to balance the relative power of each. Even if you couldn’t play together, we would need to be able to balance the relative power. This means that we need to have dials on both sides of the equation. So, we are going to keep the limiters on trade.

I could be wrong about this one and it will be subject to change but I think it has to be multiplicative in order to be a consistent relative power to MG.

It’s really interesting, we’re getting quite a few people suggesting that MG is going to completely eclipse CoF.

We’re seeing a similar number of people suggesting that CoF is going to completely eclipse MG.

I don’t think that it’s an easy thing to predict really given how big the changes are from what we already have. In order to improve the quality of CoF drops, we are introducing the Prophecy system. It’s not gone into detail on in the main post but essentially it will be a Favour sink that will allow you to influence your drops so you can more easily target specific items.

We also have several dials that we can turn for both factions which will adjust their relative power. Chief among them is simply the Favour costs of everything. CoF falling way behind? Prophecies 50% off, get 'em while they’re hot! (Disclaimer: just a random example, not an exact action that will necessarily be taken)

It is going to be tough to balance the system. I think we’ve put ...