Challenge League Post-mortems

Chris, please don't make us play leagues we don't want to to complete the challenge again. It's just no fun even if the league mods are interesting. Just lower the price on Zana mods so everyone can try the other league out.

Very excited for earlier rewards!

The lack of cross-league play makes sense. Softcore players don't want to deal with the pressure of hardcore and hardcore players don't want to play without it. Your tactic of making one challenge only completable in each league resulted in a lot of "Oh crap it's time to be bored for a few weeks in softcore" in my guild.
It doesn't help that the past few leagues the softcore challenge has been HEAVILY RNG-gated - Beyond, Invasion, Bloodlines and Tempest were all reasonably straight-forward to complete by just playing the game, whereas Torment and Warbands required you to spend months running maps trying to find that one ghost or that one unique to finish the challenge.
It was probably done because getting to maps in hardcore is a challenge in itself, but that's only for the people who aren't playing hardcore anyway.

Overall a pretty good post. I'm looking forward to a single league with hardcore and softcore variants. 40 challenges sounds awesome as well, a good way to feel like you're making progress while still keeping full completion difficult.

Great post!

To be honest, challenge leagues are the reason I play PoE to this day. My favourites were Anarchy, Ambush, Beyond and Tempest. I like the extra difficulty that league mods pose.

One problem I always had (as Chris stated in the manifesto) is that once I start in either the sc or hc league, I just stick to it and never try the other one. Having challenges in both leagues made me give up on completing them since most players can't or don't want to commit to both.

I'm keen to learn more about the new challenge league format and prizes. I'm sure you guys will come up with something awesome. Also, new content is coming! Awesome news.

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Qarl wrote:

We have at least a couple of designers wanting to return to Beyond, and really explore the story, lore and mechanics some more.

I'm SO excited about this! Please make it happen guys

I like that you gave us an overview of the design process. I am now looking forward to 1 challenge league with variations, instead of 2.

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Summoner wrote:

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Chris wrote:

Players don't switch between the two concurrent challenge leagues as much as we had hoped. Most players just pick one and stick to it, missing out on the experience of the other. Combined with the intense development cycles of these leagues and the fact that we want to continue to push the amount of content they contain, we have decided to change the structure of the next leagues.

If you want to encourage more people to try the HC leagues, why not change it so you rip from the HC challenge league into the standard challenge league instead of default. Previously the completely different leagues made doing so problematic; but if we're going to be able to do all the challenges in one league anyway it's not going to be as potentially imbalancing.

the problem with this is the ladder ranking. a rank 2 Tempest ripping into Warbands will pretty much assure that he is at least rank 2 in Warbands, without actually playing Warbands initially.

So only one challenge league in development, but there will be a HC and SC version of it. I like this idea, mainly play SC as with my hardware and latency issues I'm sure I would die every 4 days.

This is why I love GGG.

Transparent, realistic, heavily involved with the community and always striving to step up their game.

Thanks, and I'm hyped for a cool league shared with SC and HC :)

Interesting post.

The only reason why I play anymore is the challenge leagues, I have a couple friends that play standard, but I simply cannot.

Around 40-50% of the game for me is the economy. Getting an exalt... hell, even a mirror, in standard doesn't provide any excitement because everyone has thousands of exalts.

As long as challenge leagues continue relatively frequently I'll continue playing this game, because no other game comes close to the complexity (well, maybe EVE).

I really like what you're doing with the challenges in this 1 month, instead of rewarding us with things that we can only use in standard, you're giving us stuff that we can use in other leagues.

I know that I'm not the only one that only plays leagues, the trade system is too good to not take part in (you can still take part in it in standard... but you know... it's not as fun).

Keep up the leagues, I find all of them to be very fun and unique, no real gripes about any of them, and am looking forward to future ones as well.

I have full faith in you GGG, the only concern I ever have with this game is you might make the game too easy, and make it lose its charm. I have full confidence in you guys in everything but maybe making it too easy (due to pressure to get more people to play), and know you guys will provide great content for years to come.

P.S. I'm all for having more challenges per league. Everyone loves achievements (as long as they're not insanely hard to get).

"The next challenge leagues will have a set of 40 challenges, which range in difficulty. Completion of specific milestones (every 10 challenges, for example) will reward you with a microtransaction. Regular casual players who don't make it to maps can still receive some prizes for their participation in the challenge leagues."

Finally a reason to actually do the Challenges! Been doing the 1M challenges and its super fun to have something to work towards

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Chris wrote:

When the next challenge league starts, there will be both a Standard and Hardcore version of it, with overlapping but slightly different content. The new league represents more effort than we put into any previous league, which is possible because we're not developing two completely different leagues simultaneously.

I've been thinking this for a few months now. I whole heartedly support this! Thank you.