Season One and Race feedback

Not sure if this has been mentioned before but the issue I see with the current race structure is that for the majority of players the time spent on races > the reward they could possibly get out of it. Allow me to expound a bit. For most people, they have no chance of winning a race as they do not know the tricks of racing and there is just a very large skill gap on top of that. As such, there is no practical reason for them to participate in races. The idea I would like to propose to solve this issue is to create multiple race servers per event and cap how many people are allowed per race server. This way, you dont have all of the best races competing against everyone and sweeping up all the prizes, but at the same time you arent denying them anything either. If you wanted, you can expand on this by implementing a rating system and make it where people join certain servers based on their rating, but I'm unsure whether that would be a good idea or not.

more solo races plz

FWIW, finished 49th/18350~. Not because i'm any good, but because i have a lot of free time and played a ton of the races (73/109 = 67%), because i love the game. Here follows my s1 feedback.

1) More race length variety. Apparently you got a lot of feecback that 1hr and 3hr were preferred. While that's fine and all, but simply more variety in race length would add significant race replayability. Doing 1hr and 3hr over and over and over and over, really gets repetitive. Plus, my guess is that at the time, the feedback was due to where 1hr and 3hr progression were. But as we all get better, 2hr progression actually becomes interesting, since ppl can now reach docks. So in fact 2hr is now more interesting than 3hr because of that! So how about 1hr, 2hr and 4hr races? Certainly would be better than 1hr and 3hr. Really there's no reason it needs to be as rigid/boring/repetitive as only 1hr and 3hr.

2) Standings UI improvement. Duplicate the race thread standings "next" page links at the top. It's annoying to have to scroll down a few page-downs just to advance to the next page, then scroll up to see the top of that page. Especially so when viewing 100 players per page.

3) Spam accounts? There are a fuckton of sketchy-looking, likely spam accounts in the latter races. See e.g. the lower ranks of s1e91 rankings http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/280418 Dozens of accounts with gibberish names of e.g. 03_6esg0oiqov25626biar7gfp55b6 with zero experience. Clearly something abnormal is going on here.

4) Clarify race rewards are random versions. In the race detailed thread it clarifies "The sockets and values of the mods on the items are random within the regular ranges. The specific values on that page are only for illustration." This unequivocably needs to be right on the main race rewards page http://www.pathofexile.com/seasons to avoid any confusion whatsoever. It didn't affect me, but the status quo has turned off new players and that's bad.

5) /classladder This is an absolute must if you are going to repeat the current rewards by class. Unless you're fighting precisely for the #1 spot (which 99.5% are not), it's completely irrelevant to know how anyone but your class is doing in the race. If you're going to continue giving rewards by class (which i think you should), you need to add the in-game /classladder command, returning the top 10 of your current class.

6) UI class rankings. There needs to be a way to sort the website rankings by class, once again if rewards will mainly be based on ranking within your class. All you need is a simple combo box allowing selection of which class to display, that would do the job nicely, and with nearly no effort on your part.

Another thing I think needs sorting is muling, either take steps to prevent it and force the players to play the class they chosen with it's own rewards. Or have the first three or so quests award all level 1-4 skills, the first support reward be all below level 15 support to level the playing field a bit.

Might be better solutions but it's something that needs addressing I think, especially for special mod races like no projectile.

"

Real_Wolf wrote:

My feedback:

Races are not wortyh doing at the moment because there is no way I can play that many races to get just an item that I don't want and will not use. Part of this is no ingame difference to the looks of the item, similar to how fairgraves cap looks AWESOME in the image, but looks like a stupid shower cap.

Secondly, races are fairly bland. There is no feeling of progression, its 'get to here fast, farm, get to here fast, farm', I don't feel any incentive to do this as I already do this on whatever char i'm playing in the normal ladder, and I get more progression out of this.

Thirdly, I know I will never be anywhere near the higher end of the spectrum. I know I will barely get any quest rewards. I know that I will not be the first to do anything. This means I feel no gain by competing, indeed getting to the minimum rewards itself isn't worth it.

Well stated, and I agree.

Quick easy ways to avoid people bitching about races:

Have 4 races a day, every day, at the normal time intervals.

Make every race an option between solo/group.

Have 2 separate season ladders for solo/group.

Cutthroat.

I really hope Season two doesn't use the offseason race times, I can only compete in 1 =(

I got an idea how about being less restrictive.

Only get the most points you made during a race day awarded.

So each day you get rewarded only once.

Race Idea!

"Mystery League"

Have predetermined quest rewards (Gems) for each class and don't announce them so that people find out what they'll be playing as during the race.

It would be awesome to be stuck with random stuff and have to make it work!

'No TP' races please! Would be amazingly fun and difficult race type requiring a very different approach.