Season One and Race feedback

I have seen and heard a lot of "reward progression" going around. For those wanting it, please be more specific about ways to do that. KoTao etc.

As for MyH4os comments I like them. Again, how do you determine "progression" eactly?
- Act 1 is linear and only question is if sideareas should count in any way.
- Act 2 is non-linear and it is a fair question if reeaching Vaal Ruins or killing all bandits are most progressed, or reaching the pyramid is better than reaching Pools and Streams, having done the bandit quests etc.
- Apart from that, there is the question of "what is needed to show progress?".
Are we gonna see level 22 characters in act 1 cruel, rushing with 4 quicksilver flasks and bugging the boss-fights? I hope not!
There needs to be some measure for what progression is and only "reaching area x" is not gonna cut it! "highest area level"? Sucks in the beginning of cruel! Reaching the areas waypoint? Same as reaching area x! Etc.

I wanted to take some time to convey my opinions and thoughts on the races and what I would like to see from Season 2



Race Start Times:

I understand these are global events but this is MY wishlist.

I am:
Eastern time zone (GMT+5)
Employed – 9am – 6pm Monday- Friday ( on average )

I cannot (read: have but didn’t liked) wake up at 6:30 am to do a 1 hour race at 7 before work. I tried this once or twice but don’t think this can happen frequently.

This my job prevents me from doing races at 7am(sorta, see above) 1pm ( at work ) and 5pm (at work for start)

I understand I have a job and these are the sacrifices I make to work it. I expect these times to work much better for other time zones.

What would work for me:

1hr Races:

Starting in my evening 6pm-11pm

2/3hr races

Starting in my evening 6pm – 10pm

During the work week, I can’t ‘plan’ to be up passed midnight. It happens, often but I would rather not plan for it.

Party Races on the WEEKEND while I can do a party race during the week, and I do when its applicable. Seeing a Saturday with 3 solo races is beyond frustrating. Ideally for me would be a mix of solo and party during the week and for the weekend do party races !!!!! shouldn’t omit solo races for weekend I understand people enjoy those, as do It. Just having no party races on the weekend is silly.

More two hour races !!


Race Prize Structure:

Overall: Great !!

I enjoy the different uniques, even if they have no inherent use as an item ( some this season did ) I am sure we will see these turn into currency items down the road.

Bring back random currency amounts:

I don’t want to see 200+ currency items for particular race placement. But maybe between the unique items on the seasons ladder we could have smaller denominations like 5/10/25. Potentially so a full season where someone gets all the unique items they also get 200 random currency items.

Race Mods & Race Divisions:

I want to talk about race mods, and I think one solution to this could be Race Divisions.

I enjoy the race mods, I will pretty much do any race I can’t feasibly complete regardless of mods. However I think its pretty clear that these mods are there to make the races more difficult for the upper echelon of player. Most ‘normal’ users either don’t complete the harder modded races or just barely hitting level requirements. We all can see the pro’s still crushing the races, just with a bit more effort. ( which is fine )

Looking at the XP gains by the top teams/players it’s pretty apparent they are miles ahead of most people. I honestly do my races with 3 or less party members. The way XP is awarded this severely limits our ability to compete that highest level and probably the largest factor in me never placing in the top 30 overall for a party race.

I am not saying that needs to be changed, but it’s a reality. Some solutions to this could be to do different sized party races, to have 2/3/4/5/6 team size party races. The different dynamic provided by different party sizes would add a nice niche to this system.

Another solution could be to have different divisions of race evens, strictly solo strictly party, mods/no mods etc.

I play these for fun but I am sure with the data access GGG have you can clearly see where some lines could be drawn to make a more engaging/challenging race system.

As my last point on this topic I also think it could be considered to change the level requirements based on the race mods. Take a quick look at the numbers and see what percentage of people maxed out RP during the lethal races.

Re progression based races: Furthest area reached and number of acts/quests completed both work- for that matter, races of each progression type could coexist. I dont see players rushing with quicksilvers as being any worse than players grinding docks, and the risk of rushing while underleveled is certainly much higher than the risk of grinding while overleveled. As to the waterfall 2 vs bandits complete example a few posts up- waterfall 2 is obviously more progressed, but to rush there you cap your progression at pyramid. So theres a risk:reward factor that the player has to consider, as making it to pyramid first doesnt mean much if youre stuck there while several other players continue on to act 3 before the race ends.

Re orb rewards: The whole point is to have incentives for the 99%~ of players who arent going to win demis regularly or at all. I also dont view my demis as currency and im surely not alone in this.

I haven't read everything so I apologize in advance if I repeat something.

#1 Act 1 All Quests Finished. Race ends when 20 people do this. Hardest thing is to figure out how to reward the other players.

#2 Random Currency awards. These are limited to one per account and only if you earn 3 points or more. These are a random roll of 5-15 pieces of currency as long as you earned 3 points.

#3 I'm echoing the need for a solo race to be going on the same time as a party race. However, this should only happen once a day and the time slot it happens on should rotate day to day(ex 7am then 1pm then 5pm then 10pm)

#4 An endless dungeon race with no town and no portal scrolls. Every 25% of a level your potions refill. At 15 minute intervals players below certain xp levels die. Have to be fairly generous to start, but as time goes on more and more players die. Race ends when less than 20 players remain alive.

Just some very random thoughts from someone who only managed 121 points in Season One.

"

radiatoren wrote:

I have seen and heard a lot of "reward progression" going around. For those wanting it, please be more specific about ways to do that. KoTao etc.

As for MyH4os comments I like them. Again, how do you determine "progression" eactly?
- Act 1 is linear and only question is if sideareas should count in any way.
- Act 2 is non-linear and it is a fair question if reeaching Vaal Ruins or killing all bandits are most progressed, or reaching the pyramid is better than reaching Pools and Streams, having done the bandit quests etc.
- Apart from that, there is the question of "what is needed to show progress?".
Are we gonna see level 22 characters in act 1 cruel, rushing with 4 quicksilver flasks and bugging the boss-fights? I hope not!
There needs to be some measure for what progression is and only "reaching area x" is not gonna cut it! "highest area level"? Sucks in the beginning of cruel! Reaching the areas waypoint? Same as reaching area x! Etc.

Amount of quests completed would be the measure stick, to progress acts you would have to clear all available quests in the previous act. This for a full progression race, for rewarding progression within normal races you could do "all act 1 side quests = X points" and so on, just combine certain quests to create a criteria.

As far as the race timers goes I'd want to see US/EU/Pacific blocks, for example "Event 25 - 1 hour solo" starting once for each time zone where you can only claim points/win once per event. This would create a more equal setting for all involved and not force the ambitious to die from sleep deprivation.

In combination with my thought above regarding overlapping solo and party races, you could if you had enough time compete solo in the EU block and party in the US block for example.


Edit: This would require the ladders to be divided in to party and solo, preferably with sub class ladders. As for week races you could separate party and solo by checking if the player ever got group XP, if technically possible, thus keeping the ability to trade and party to facilitate those trades, all within the same one week race.

The Random Party race
As soon as you zone in to an area you are automatically placed into a random party.
As soon as you move to a new zone you are automatically moved to a party in that zone.


The one week die as often as you like race

The one week max four hours per day race

"

Crimson_Bishop wrote:

Also, as a way to make more unique race types, consider having leagues that DON'T feed back into the permanent default and hardcore leagues. This would open up a huge possibility of new race ideas without worrying about messing up the economies of the permanent leagues.

Here are some ideas that I have heard other people on the forums come up with:

starting at a higher level
starting in cruel or merciless
crafting only league - only white items drop but currency drops at a higher rate


I would also love to see more ways to keep track of your previous race results and records. I enjoy breaking my own personal records and would like to see some functionality for this integrated into the website or the game. Currently players have to use third party sites to achieve this.

I like that

I would like to see the return of currency rewards, but done differently than in closed beta. For me there was no incentive to race once I got to 60 RP, because there was no way I would get to 120 before the end of the season.

It used to be that the top tier racers would get rich from races, and the rest of us would get the scraps. So that was changed for obvious reasons... Still, getting some currency from races would be good incentive to participate, just don't make the number of currency so large between the top players and the average players. Also I would consider setting fixed currency rewards, not RNG. It sucked when your reward pool rolled nothing good.

"

Muppetier wrote:

The Random Party race
As soon as you zone in to an area you are automatically placed into a random party.
As soon as you move to a new zone you are automatically moved to a party in that zone.


The one week die as often as you like race

The one week max four hours per day race

I like all of these idea. I read a lot of people saying they don't like party races because they don't have a party to play with. Random party would do away with the need for a party and who knows you might get one of those elite players on your party. The implementation above is not how I would do it though. I would set it up where you log in and you auto join a party and you are in that party the whole race. I would also do different races with specific party size... For instance Race 1: random party with size of 4 so all parties will be created with 4 members. Race 2 random party size of 2; you log in and randomly are paired with some other player.

Only problem I see is GGG would need to create a party voice chat incorporated into the game to make this random party style work well.

A second race idea would be a "tower race". See how many floors you can clear. No given time limit but the floors progressively get harder and you have to clear all mobs to move up to the next level. Certain levels you can make boss levels floor 5 Hillock, floor 15 Brutus, floor 20 Merveil...ext. You could passively give a max floor level by doing something like floor 100 has Brutus, Merveil, Bandits, Graviciun, Piety, and Vaal all in one room if you really just want to kill people at some point.

The last idea would be to make a race with no instancing of areas. You can never make a new instance so it get rid of the option of grinding out the same area over and over. You have to progress or give up if you don't think you can go onto the next area. It would make for a different plan/style when racing.

Oh and if you could take the average points earned per race and then group people on those points so that you get different leagues based on your level of play that would be awesome too. It gives everyone the option of "winning" because you are only competing against people who are at the same level as you. The groupings would need to be fluid though so some one doesn't purposefully bomb the first few races to be placed in a lower bracket so they can dominate over everyone else. It would be like chess competition pairings.

"

mesatrin wrote:

The last idea would be to make a race with no instancing of areas. You can never make a new instance so it get rid of the option of grinding out the same area over and over. You have to progress or give up if you don't think you can go onto the next area. It would make for a different plan/style when racing.

Thought about this a bit as well, persistent map racing, would definitely make the player decide where to kill and where to bypass mobs if you only could load a map once and it remain the same for the duration of the race.