Do Masters kill the future temporary leagues for you?

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SkyPiglet wrote:

Besides other people's suggestions of increasing the reputation rate and the chance to spawn, i think the largest issue is that a lot of the missions just aren't that fun, and the variety is pretty limited. Many of them are boring after the first few times, and when you throw in issues like desync in Karui Spirit missions or Zana's Lodestones being nigh-impossible to click on, it becomes frustrating rather than enjoyable. There need to be more mission types, and the ones that are in the game right now need to be fixed.

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Mivo wrote:

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heyyous wrote:

Are you the same people that do not realize selling rares and stacking alts makes a ton of currency alone?

Irrelevant to this topic. Yes, you can sit in trade channel all day and flip items, or sell crappy stuff at 1-2c, but what does that have to do with this thread? I could have spent a week in 820 and leveled my masters, too, and I could do that every 3-4 months again. That doesn't change the fact that I have no interest in doing so and that it might kill future temporary leagues to me.

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Mivo wrote:

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Sneakypaw wrote:

Define long-term please. I see people already have them at lvl 8. Sure they grinded a lot, but we are only a few weeks in.

I can only go by my own experiences, obviously, since it's the only reliable data available to me. One of these experiences is that I ran 27 maps (yes, I keep track) without meeting Zana even once. There are people who make different claims (either not seeing her in 50+ maps, or seeing her repeatedly in just a few maps), but again, the only information I can really base anything on is what I have experienced myself. I'll keep collecting this data for myself and see what maps-per-Zana ratio I eventually arrive at.

XP gains, especially from 7-8 are extremely low, and running (and getting) higher maps for character progression is not necessarily trivial. If we assume 3 hours per day of playing video games as a "normal" and "healthy" amount (most of us play more than this right now), I conclude that getting Zana to 8 would definitely take me longer than a year, based on my experiences so far.

Those experiences (not those of others) determine whether or not I will participate in temporary leagues and repeat the masters grind. This is really about the appeal of temporary leagues -- not so much about the masters system itself in the context of a permanent league. If I was a primarily Standard or HC player, I'd not consider changing how I play the game in the future. I'd just keep playing and do master quests as I encounter them.

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Spodean wrote:

Every time you start a new league you are abandoning the old with all that time spent grinding for gear. You spent untold hours grinding away to get that new 5 link or 6 link perfect item to your build etc....

There will be no difference here, between grinding for the gear and grinding out masters.

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Sneakypaw wrote:

To do anything to "give advantage" to the haves vs have nots in a new league would completely defeat the purpose of people starting over on a level playing field, which is why they have leagues and seasons. Everyone has a fighting chance to be on top, even the newest player.

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Mivo wrote:

In another thread, that topic was touched on, but it probably should have its own one.

So far, I have pretty much exclusively played temporary leagues, because I like the fresh start, and feel that it's a good opportunity to try out new builds without twinking them. I'm also not a fan of legacy items, and I do enjoy the little challenges in the same way I enjoy achievements: they provide mini objectives and keep the game fresh; they're "something to do".

Sometimes, restarting every few months felt a bit like being trapped in a hamster wheel, but still, since it was always fun and I ended up playing way too much at the start of every new league, it was always worth it. Fun, at the end of the day, is all that matters in a game.

And that brings us to the new Masters system -- the new mechanic aimed at making the game less frustrating and tedious for mostly-solo players, which is the stated focus of this expansion. After two weeks, I can safely conclude for myself that in its current state it is anything but "not frustrating" for this mostly-solo player.

Case in point, I ran 27 maps in a row without encountering Zana even once, and I saw two other Masters in that time. Or rather, one: Haku the Master of Desynchronization, twice. A map takes me about 15 minutes, so that is about seven hours. At that rate (and I may not find her for another dozens of maps), it will indeed be a "multi-year grind" to get her to a higher level. You know, the thing we've been told it wouldn't be.

But anyway, the real issue for me is that I absolutely will not re-do the masters grind every 3-4 months, because it's not fun. For me, this means I'll play the Beyond successor at the end of the year into the next (since I have no HC masters), and then probably stick to Standard or Plain HC. I'm not totally decided on this yet, but if masters need to be re-leveled in temporary leagues (is that even an "if"?), I think that really destroys them for me, much as I love their other aspects. I don't really particularly like to play in Standard, either, which does present a bit of a problem for me.

How do you see this?