Last Epoch News

Hello Travelers!

This past weekend we held our first of multiple multiplayer events, the “Invitational”, which went exceptionally well. The aim of this event was to gather feedback, test our live operations procedures, and give the community their first full look at playing together with friends in Last Epoch. We were able to capture a ton of significant data and feedback to help us prepare for the multiplayer release coming with Last Epoch: Convergence on March 9th.

From what we observed, many of the participants thoroughly enjoyed the new and updated campaign zones, all the VFX, SFX, and music changes, which was fantastic to hear. We also received a lot of positive feedback regarding the ease of grouping up, and generally feeling great playing together for hours on end, outside of a few minor bugs (we’re on them!). Some issues that we are aware of and have been actively working on did rear their heads during this event, such as server-side performance in end-game activities and specific late-game team strategies that were providing too great of a bonus for groups. While we were aware of these kinds of things, from the event, we were able to get a better view of where these impacts are coming from, have made some adjustments to our priorities, and have already made some changes for the next events.

We want to go over some of this feedback and what kind of differences you can see between the Invitational event, future events, and Patch 0.9.



[h2]Server-side performance[/h2]

One of the last things we saw during the event, but one of the first we want to address, is some late-game activities server-side performance. While participants agreed that client-side performance has improved significantly with this release, we did encounter some issues with server performance for endgame builds that can spawn a lot of objects. As mentioned, this was something we were already aware of and actively working on for 0.9. However, the event was able to show us a few specific things that were leading to more performance loss than others.

One of the largest offenders we were able to identify was server lag encountered when groups would split up within an area to individually tackle different parts of the zone. This caused a number of issues, including many actors to all be activated at once, and the server needed to handle that data flow for each player. We’re already well along on a fix for this which should greatly help reduce that performance hit, and while it won’t be in place for Thursday’s event, it will be in place shortly after. There are other hidden things we’re working on (like excessive server logging); however, we think this was one of the more visible issues, and so wanted to make sure we’re addressing it here.

Another offender we saw with ‘lag’, was actually not performance at all. We found some participants who were experiencing lag were actually being assigned to incorrect server locations, such as European players being issued North American servers. This is something we immediately began investigating, and have some changes in place to help address incorrect server allocations which should help with many of these scenarios. In conjunction with the added ability to see server region with the latency tooltip, we expect this to help improve the experience when partying with various players, as well as being able to recognize reasoning for certain ping values.

[h2]Gameplay[/h2]

Of course, there was a lot of gameplay experience feedback provided that we’re acting on as well. For the next event, we’re prioritizing some of the quickest improvements we can get in in time. Some adjustments are technically smaller things, like adjusting the latency bar to represent expectations with ping values better, and adding server information to the latency tooltip, however, this can have a much larger impact on user experience and received more feedback than we expected. As such, we’re working on adding these two items for the event this Thursday.

One of the more common areas of feedback we received during the event was that the campaign was made a bit too easy when in a full party. In response to this, we’re going to be bumping up enemy health scaling for the next event. We’re doing this in smaller increments, so we don’t over-correct, as many of these players are highly experienced players, but we’ll be continuing to monitor feedback on this and adjusting as well.

We also heard from participants that they really enjoyed the new online monolith experience with seamless transitions between Echoes and Echo of a World (the rest area in monoliths). For the campaign, though, the length of some loading screen times was a common topic. We have some adjustments already in the pipe to help reduce these loading screen times, which we’re hoping to have in for this Thursday’s 10k event.

[h2]Itemization[/h2]

Another common topic of feedback was item gifting and the user experience of it. While feedback noted that the interaction felt really good with gifting, and it was a strong addition to gameplay, currently, once you gift an item to a party member, that item can’t be gifted again. Being unable to gift it further caused a couple of negative experiences during the event, so in response, we’re changing this so that when an item is gifted, it retains its ‘giftability’ status and can still be gifted to all the same people who were eligible for it. While this does offer a bit more power to the gifting system, we want to prioritize a fun experience.

Many keen-eyed community members also called out that there seemed to be something up with item drop rates during the event, and that some things appeared a little more common than normal. They’re correct! In response to feedback from both previous blog posts, and event feedback, we’re adjusting some drop rates. In particular, this means making ‘rarer’ idols such as Smite on Throwing Hit not as rare, culling some of the lower level drops - converting them into crafting material drops, and adjusting the distribution of exalted items to make drops more exciting rather than all the focus being on echo reward nodes. We’re continuing to tweak this to reach an even better state in the looting and gearing experience in Last Epoch, and are actively watching feedback on this topic.

We also see the efficiency of boss farming in multiplayer talked about frequently. We currently have an active plan to bring this in line that we’re working on implementing. When you participate in a monolith boss fight in multiplayer, in order to get rewards you will need to have sufficient stability for the fight, and receiving rewards from the fight will cost your stability. So while you can participate in any boss fight, in order to get rewards you need to have, and spend the stability for it. This means you won’t be able to farm stability once as a group, then chain bosses with each party member. While this change won’t be in place for Thursday’s event, we wanted to acknowledge that we do hear this feedback, and are actively working on it!



There are, of course, many other things we’re continuing to work on, and with our next pre-patch event in only a few days, we’re hard at work on getting everything ready for this Thursday’s 10k Multiplayer Beta week-long event. We’re really excited to get everyone in the community into the experience, as well as the big Pack the Server party, where we’ll ask everyone to help us break things on Saturday. There’s a lot to see and explore with 0.9, including many new unique items, base item changes, updates and adjustments to almost every skill in the game, new zones, VFX, SFX, Enemies, and a whole bunch more. Even if you’re not a big ‘multiplayer’ enthusiast, there’s still a lot to see and check out in this patch.

If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to sign up for the 10k event, you can quickly and easily do so here: https://events.lastepoch.com/packtheserverparty. We hope to see all of you in Eterra in just a couple of days.

Until then Travelers, may the bees be with you!

Hello Travelers!

March 9th is getting closer by the minute. With only a bit over a month left, that means It's getting time for pre-patch events!

Everything is kicking off this Friday, January 27th, with the Invitational event! For this event, many of your favorite Last Epoch streamers will playing and streaming the internal test version of Last Epoch Patch 0.9.0 - Convergence.

If you've been paying attention to our streams and dev blogs, there will still be all sorts of new features to catch, including balance changes to almost every skill, item changes, more than a dozen new unique items, visual reworks, new music and SFX, and more! So make sure to tune into your favorite content creator this weekend to get their point of view on Multiplayer and Patch 0.9.0 Convergence.


Here is a short list (though it's not final) of content creators who you should be able to catch throughout the weekend streaming!




Presented in no particular order:

- GhazzyTV
- Lizard_IRL
- McFluffin
- Ter3k
- Heavy_GamingTV
- QuietForMe
- AaronActionRPG
- Palsteron
- crouching_tuna
- PerrythePig
- dr3adful__
- VisionGL
- Thyworm
- jaytheproduct
- TheAristotelian
- RektbyProtos
- BorOfSol
- DmGamingEu
- VulkanARPG

After this event, make sure to keep your eyes peeled on our social media channels as we will then be posting more information regarding the February 2nd Pack the Server party, open to all Last Epoch owners. This will include information on how to get your account registered and put in queue for the event!

Finally, on Feb 23rd will be the Multiplayer Open Beta Weekend, which will feature a special trial version of Last Epoch available to all steam users to try out Patch 0.9 and multiplayer up to Chapter 5! So if you’ve been watching Last Epoch, and have been waiting for an opportunity to give it a try, this event will provide you an opportunity to not only try out Last Epoch, but also the upcoming patch!

We're again really excited about these events, and hope to see you all this weekend with the first Pre-patch event!

Join us as for our weekly Dev stream with Senior Game Designer Mike.

The Stream Charity for December is Salvation Army International.

All twitch subscriptions, bits, and donations will be going towards this charity!

All past streams can be found on our youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LastEpochGame/videos

Join us as for our weekly Dev stream with Senior Game Designer Mike.

The Stream Charity for December is Salvation Army International.

All twitch subscriptions, bits, and donations will be going towards this charity!

All past streams can be found on our youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LastEpochGame/videos

If you’ve been following Last Epoch, you’re probably aware that our plans for how trading will work in the game have evolved significantly over development. In this dev blog, I'll explain the reasoning and design process that brought us to our current plans, what those plans are, and how they relate to patch 0.9.



One of our core beliefs when designing Last Epoch has always been that it feels more rewarding when you find and/or craft the items you use, rather than buying them, and that this also helps keep item drops exciting because there's a reasonable chance that the dropped item itself will be useful for your character. Because of this, we've always wanted to ensure that killing monsters and playing the game is the primary way of acquiring items.

However, we also wanted to have a player economy on top of this. This led to us designing various iterations of the Bazaar, an auction house or player shop style system, always with a lot of restrictions on the rate and type of items players could trade to hopefully keep the system under control and ensure that the items you could acquire in this manner didn't eclipse those you found from drops and/or crafted.



The more we found problems with these iterations of trade, ideated new ones, and advanced those ideas, the more we realised that any of these economy-based trade systems would damage this progression. Economies are extremely complex, even when they're limited to video game items. They're often unintuitive, they change over time as the player base finds more items, and they can act very differently depending on the number of active players. All of this makes it very difficult to accurately predict how an economy will function in practice and balance it accordingly. Ideally, we'd want it to feel relevant and useful and not overtake other methods of item acquisition, but realistically the unpredictability of an economy renders that level of balance precision impossible. The downside of getting it wrong could be trade taking over the game, making item drops unexciting, and ruining the balance of the game's combat.

Another question we were increasingly asking ourselves was whether anyone would be happy with the system and have a good time using it. Players who want to play the economy and exchange the valuable items they find with other players were going to be faced with an impersonal and restrictive system. They would likely be frustrated and feel like their expectations of playing an online ARPG with an open trade economy had been betrayed by such a limited system. Meanwhile, players who want an ARPG with generous drops and crafting would likely still have to experience the pains of us having to balance around the existence of a trade economy, or at the very least, their item drops would feel worse because of the higher standard of items that having an economy results in.

With these conclusions in mind, we decided to pivot away from having economy-based trade and cancelled the plans for the Bazaar.





Item trading definitely has some significant benefits in an ARPG. One of them is that if you want to play a build that requires a specific build-enabling item, you're not just praying that it drops; you can reliably farm up currency and buy it. This means that unless they're particularly expensive, needing specific items to get a build going is much less of a barrier for creating that build. This is particularly important nowadays because, in contrast to the subgenre's Rogue-like roots, much of the ARPG community has trended more towards wanting to plan out a build from the start and reliably progress towards that rather than making most of the decisions on the fly and adapting heavily to the items that you find. This is a process a lot of players enjoy and something we want to ensure that we support.

However, trade isn't the only way or even necessarily the best way to support it. The flip side of being able to acquire any item through trade is that the process of acquiring the items you need for your build is just the process of farming currency, so the activities you do and the places you farm are whatever's most optimal to farm currency. This runs a big risk of turning a potentially varied endgame experience into a very repetitive one, where only a small part of the content is experienced over and over again.

Meanwhile, if you need to farm the items themselves, and those items drop either exclusively or more frequently from different specific pieces of content, then that naturally entices you to engage with those different pieces of content to farm those different items. This means that hunting for gear is a more varied process for an individual character and is also more different from one character to another as long as they require different sorts of gear. Because of that, we want to continue to rely on powerful target farming methods rather than trade to facilitate specific item acquisition.





One of the other benefits of one player being able to trade items to another is that when you're playing with a friend, and you find a cool item that's good for their character, you can give it to them. That's an experience that can feel great because it's a way of meaningfully helping your friend out in a way that isn't always felt so often in the fast-paced combat of ARPGs, but it's still one that resulted from you playing co-op together.

There are two sides to this, though. A player giving items to a friend isn't an unquestionable good that always leads to a better experience. ARPGs are games about progression that are inherently more about the journey than the destination, and a friend skipping that journey for you by giving you all the items you need often drastically shortcircuits the adventure of the game and makes it less enjoyable.

Another danger with unrestricted item gifting is that an economy can grow up of its own accord, coordinated and facilitated by the community. It is certainly cool to see a game's community achieve this sort of thing. However this can result in all the same problems that a developer-created economy can, while also being less convenient.

Nevertheless, our primary goal with multiplayer is facilitating a great co-op experience, and we felt that a big part of that is being able to share the items you find while playing together.

With this all in mind, we set out to design a system that facilitated this sort of co-op item gifting without a full economy developing.



Earlier in the year, we said that trade wouldn't be included in patch 0.9. The community reacted with disappointment to this announcement, and so we prioritised getting our item gifting system ready to be tested by our community testers. That testing went well, and we're confident in detailing the system publicly and including it in patch 0.9.



In this system items that drop while you're adventuring with other players (in the same zone) can be gifted to any of those players at any point. This can be done by right-clicking their portrait and selecting "Gift Item.” This brings up your inventory alongside a gifting window and highlights the items in your inventory that can be gifted to that player. You can then simply place the chosen item in the gifting window, press "Confirm Gift," and the item will be transferred to the player's gift inventory. The player will then receive a notification telling them what item they've received, and they'll have an icon in the bottom right of their screen that they can click to bring up their gifting inventory. From there, they can either transfer the item to their inventory now, leave it there until later, or throw it on the ground, because their friend has gifted them a hat with no affixes.

Trade in ARPGs is a topic that has many passionate people on every side of the conversation. However, we want Last Epoch to be an ARPG that, at its core, is about going out in the world, killing enemies, and finding awesome loot, not one where playing the economy is the key to success. We strongly believe that this approach will make the game both a more enjoyable co-op experience and a more balanced solo experience. With this, we'll be able to preserve and continue to improve all the great systems we've built for Last Epoch in terms of progression and the player experience without having to sacrifice them to accommodate extensive item trading. We'll be closely monitoring feedback regarding the details of this system while we look forward to everyone getting their hands on item gifting and more in Patch 0.9 on March 9th.