Last Epoch News

The curse of the online action RPG strikes again: real-money trading and gold exploits. Lost Ark was plagued by it and now Last Epoch is too...
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Hello Travelers,

Today we wanted to connect with everyone regarding the recent gold exploit, as well as exploits in general within the online environment. We want to talk a bit about what we’re doing in regards to these issues, and what our plans for the future are.

We take exploits within Last Epoch very seriously and ensure that any time an exploit comes up, we give it our full and immediate attention. We strictly enforce our Terms of Use when it comes to exploits and RMT (Real-Money Trading), and as such, one can expect that abusing such exploits or engaging in RMT, both buying and selling, will result in a permanent account ban.

Since 1.0 has launched, we have been aware of two exploits. The first allowed duplication of items through the bazaar. We were made aware of this exploit three days after its first discovery, and deployed a fix for it the same day. The second exploit we became aware of was the recent gold exploit, which we created and deployed a fix for in less than 24 hours of being made aware of the exploit.

[h2]Current Actions[/h2]

In response to the gold exploit, we have reviewed gold activity on an account level, identifying, and banning those accounts which have been participating in illegitimate gold generation. We don’t want to speak too much to how this was tracked, as it could only really serve to provide bad actors information to try to avoid detection. With this, we are aware of the concerns of legitimate accounts being falsely flagged. We are quite confident in our tracking not falsely flagging accounts, though as always you can appeal any moderation action through support.lastepoch.com.

We have also banned accounts with duplicated items from the first exploit, and we have been and are continuing to process and ban all accounts linked to RMT services (both buying and selling). These regular account bans for RMT involvement are actively removing significant amounts of gold from the economy, which we expect will help bring down inflation.

We are aware of the inflation which has occurred within Merchant’s Guild, and are discussing methods to deflate the economy again. We expect the removal of much of this gold through the bans to both those who exploited the gold bug, as well as RMT involved accounts, will help quite a bit, though we are also discussing additional actions. At this point, we’re not implementing any actions which we’re able to talk about, however if we do plan to take any actions which directly effect players we will communicate those actions.

[h2]Moving Forward[/h2]

We want to make sure we’re not only reacting to exploits, and are instead working on proactive measures to prevent exploits in the first place. We’re making sure to act both on a technical level and on a user level. Actions we’re taking on a technical level are much harder to discuss, as saying what we would be doing is just providing information to bad actors on how to try to exploit after. However, we want to strongly state that we are not ignoring these exploits occurring and are taking active measures to combat them.

Lightless Arbor and Runes of Creation generating legitimate duplicate items has also been contributing to the perception of item dupes. Some of this comes from awareness regarding that these legitimate duplicates are possible, as well as to what extent. It may be surprising to know that Lightless Arbor’s Vaults of Uncertain Fates can actually produce up to 12 duplicates of the exact same item. These legitimate duplications can produce some very suspicious-looking listings on the Bazaar. So when we talk about changes on a user level, what we mean is that we are working on not only preventing these exploits, but also this kind of confusion being generated by user experience. As our first action to help address this, we will be introducing mirrored item card graphics to help visually represent when an item is a legitimate duplicate (on duplicated items, the 2D art for the item will be mirrored / flipped).

We’ve also found, in general, the Merchant’s Guild centralizing of gold leads to a fair amount of inflation all by itself, and as such, are looking into and discussing inflation control methods such as implementing a Gold Tax on transactions in 1.1. We don’t want to implement this kind of change during the current cycle as it would be a fairly fundamental change to the Bazaar and Merchant’s Guild. We’ll have more information concerning inflation counters, Tax or other, as we get closer to 1.1.

[h2]Closing[/h2]

We don’t think it’s a very controversial statement to say that abusing an exploit, ruining the game for all players is not acceptable, and that doing so should result in a ban. We also acknowledge this isn’t just on bad actors, but it’s also our responsibility to do everything we can to prevent these exploits from being possible in the first place.

With that said, we want to be clear in stating that we acknowledge the feedback from the community concerning allowing these exploits to have slipped through, and want to make sure we state that we are taking these events very seriously. We are actively investing in both addressing, and preventing these exploits, with no efforts spared, or shirking of the issues.

Hello Travelers,

In today's Hotfix, we are fixing a list of things for you!

• Improvements have been made to Monolith visuals and performance along with several bug fixes
  • Fixed a bug where some channeled movement skills such as Rampage could end abruptly in the Alpine Halls monolith echo
    
  • Fixed issues with trees obscuring your view in the Hidden Oasis monolith echo
• Added a fix that will warn players when files must be verified.
  
• Fixed Loot filter toggle "X" sensitivity
  
• Fixed bugs where the following skills' damage areas were not scaling with area modifiers from their trees or from items
  • Abyssal Echoes
  • Dancing Strikes (not all parts of the combo were affected by this bug)
  • Erasing Strike (just the initial hit, not the void rifts)
  • Forge Strike
  • Healing Hands
  • Necrotic Mortar (from Summoned Skeletal Mages)
  • Reap (from Reaper Form)
  
  
  
• Fixed Passive and Skill Tree localization issues
  
• Updated visuals for Announcement banners
  
• Updated Unique Reward icon in Monoliths from Ring to a generic icon
  
• Added missing name to Graveyard
  

[h2]Skills & Passives[/h2]

• Fixed a bug where the player's Falcon could fail to be unsummoned after the player has died
  
• Fixed a bug where Warpath would cause players to become stuck in place and unable to move
  
• Fixed a bug where Drain Life with Blood Pact and Ghostflame with Arteries of Malice would stop channeling when at very low current health
  
• Fixed a bug where Healing Hands was still scaling with cast speed instead of melee attack speed when Seraph Blade was allocated
  
• Fixed a bug where Gathering Storm was still scaling with melee attack speed instead of cast speed when wielding a staff and Lagonian Diplomacy was allocated
  
• Fixed a bug where Thunder Tempests from Tempest Strike's Cloudburst Conduit could not hit enemies
  
• Fixed a bug where Added Spell Damage Affix with Tempest Strike did not work
  
• The grace period for your minions now ends when your own grace period ends
  
• Fixed a bug where attempts to cast minion-targeted abilities like Dread Shade on minions that were in grace period would always fail
  
• Fixed a bug where stationary minions would never leave grace period, resulting in them never attacking
  

[h2]UI[/h2]

• Fixed a bug where items sold in Online mode were displaying original price in the "Buy Back" tab
  
• Fixed a bug preventing Defensive Conversions from displaying in the character sheet online
  

[h2]Other[/h2]

• Fixed a bug where Soul Embers would persist after the dungeon was completed
  
• Fixed a bug causing Void Despair to be invisible
  
• Fixed an error when leaving Offline mode
  
• Fixed a bug where, players spawning into a new location would reveal part of the map too soon.
  

Hello Travelers,

In today’s Hotfix, we are reverting the change to the cost of Despair Glyph Prophecies.

With this, we wanted to talk a bit about why this change made it into the last patch, similar changes, and a bit more about our specific reasoning behind them.

[h2]Glyph of Despair Prophecies[/h2]

This change (favor cost for despair glyphs) didn’t have anything to do with Merchant's Guild (MG) - at least, we weren’t aware of a significant issue being caused by MG players swapping to ‘abuse’ this. We believe MG already has a very good pathway to Despair Glyphs with Vault of Uncertain Fates, so wouldn’t have been benefiting from this prophecy by swapping.

This was actually something we had decided before 1.0, that the favor cost was too low for this reward along with other adjustments in a late pass. However with the post-launch changes/fixes, this was as soon as it made its way through the pipeline with other priority fixes pushing their way ahead of it. So this was purely in regards to its own balance within Circle of Fortune (CoF). One of the discussions this has started internally is regarding review of these delayed adjustments.

Our previous pipeline didn’t include design looking at the final patches when they went out, so unfortunately we missed this change and re-evaluating it. We have adjusted our pipeline to try to catch delayed changes so we can be more mindful of them and consider if they should go out, or be delayed to the next cycle.

TLDR: The change was made before 1.0, got stuffed in the pipeline, and just finally got out without further design review on timing. We’ll be keeping a better eye out for delayed changes like this.

[h2]Arena Key Sell Prices[/h2]

With the Key value nerf, the impetus for it was as we had stated, that it was being leveraged by MG players with swapping factions. However, this was a change we had planned for some time, and it was really just the final push needed to prioritize the change. With the key values, originally they had a higher value on them so it gave them some value for players who didn’t have any use or interest in them (never played arena).

Keys were never intended to be a source of gold farming, which is something which crept up over time with them being easier to target in the Monolith. With the interactions in CoF, it was the straw which broke the camel’s back, so to say. We definitely agree we did not sufficiently communicate reasoning behind this change, and that’s on us creating that misunderstanding. We’ll be making an effort to include bigger picture reasons behind changes such as this, rather than the immediate reason, as we had.

TLDR: Arena Keys were never meant to be a method to farm gold, and it had reached a point of prominence that even MG players had begun to feel the need to swap to CoF to leverage it.

[h2]Mid-cycle Changes[/h2]

In regards to mid cycle changes, we had approved these changes as they don’t impact moment to moment gameplay, and won’t suddenly cause a build to not be able to clear a certain difficulty of content it was able to previously. The survey we had previously gone through was about those kind of build impacting changes, rather than general systems. We should also mention this is our guiding star, not our railroad. In specific scenarios we may decide another route is better, such as this Despair Glyph change not being enacted during this cycle. For these kinds of changes, we will use our best judgment, and will always be receptive to hearing feedback on them.

We have also seen some feedback regarding the survey not covering bug fixes which result in buffs. The reason for this is that we have always had the intention to follow through with bug fixes that result in buffs mid-cycle, and did not feel that was controversial to be surveyed. We won’t be holding back bug-fixes that result in buffs.

TLDR: Our intentions with mid-cycle changes from the survey is to avoid nerfs to the power level of characters, or moment to moment gameplay. We will still do changes that are buffs. These are guides, not rules - we will exercise discretion.

[h2]Thank you[/h2]

As always, thank you voicing your feedback to us - it is sparking discussions about the timing of these changes, as well as communication regarding them. We hope we can clear up that both these changes were things we had been discussing for some time prior and were not just due to abuse, and help to put to rest some of the conflict we’re seeing.

• Reverted Favor cost increase for Despair Glyph Prophecies
  

Please Note that for approximately three hours after the patch goes live it is still possible to connect to an old server which will charge the old costs. Please wait until after this timeframe before visiting the Observatory for specifically purchasing Despair Glyph Prophecies