Race Season Nine Preliminary Information

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jstq wrote:
Maybe you should learn how to race instead of whining? Lets change racing so any idiot can stay afk and get a demi, GGG please!!!


Making rewards more accessible to the top 20% of racers instead of the top 0.6% is, clearly, not the same as handing out demi's to participants who afk (in fact, my suggestion on page 6 would have zero influence on the # of demi's awarded). What you should realize is, encouraging greater participation will improve competition over time. Players will get better at races as they participate more. The problem, as historical season data shows, is not many players are involving themselves in the race seasons.

In August GGG had a player concurrency record of 154,300. Yet in season 8 we saw about 15,000 accounts aggregate at least 5 points across the season (a participation rate lower than 10%, since the total number of active accounts is greater than the concurrency record). Of that 15,000, fewer than 1000 accounts obtained more than 155 points, meaning players who performed within the top 7% did not even receive the 4th highest alternate art unique. Given the data, it is not unreasonable to request greater reward accessibility to the top 20% of performers.

Jstq, in season 8 you got twice as many points as the top 40 (and the top 40 obtained more points than 99.7% of participants). Moreover, the 40th place got twice as many points as the 150th place (i.e. you got 4x more points than players in the top 1%). GGG has a problem with exponential reward schemes, where points for level based, first clear, first quest, and top 20 all increase at increasing rates, and synergize to tremendously bias point rewards toward a tiny fraction of racers. I don't see these numbers as being healthy.

While adjusting the point structure of the level-based tiers so that higher rewards are obtained for lower tiers and rewards for higher tiers increase at a decreasing rate should help, I don't expect any changes to be made. People (myself included) have been making similar suggestions since season 2. The data, reward system, and trends haven't changed.
Never underestimate what the mod community can do for PoE if you sell an offline client.
I really like the idea of racing but I can't justify dedicating the time to it when the reward items are just going to end up in standard. Please implement some kind of cross league skin transfer!

Oh and is that hybrid one week league going to be over the USA thanksgiving weekend?! Hype for that!
When I kill a man he stays dead.
love d2 ladder system

3-4 month is too short for casual player
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where points for level based, first clear, first quest, and top 20 all increase at increasing rates, and synergize to tremendously bias point rewards toward a tiny fraction of racers


This is exactly true. It's pretty unbalanced. However you can get a lot of points by just racing a lot. 3 points for level is easy to get. You get diminishing returns above that. I just checked my lowest rank for getting 7 points in Descent:Champions. It was rank 452, which is not a very high ranking. I suck at this game and getting to tier 7-8 prizes is not that hard if you race a lot. Even a tier 9 prize is within reach if you race several races a day and stay alive to a moderate level.

Besides, I don't race for the prizes, I race because I think it's fun.

I do agree with your overall sentiment though. I think the point system is too heavily weighted toward a very small elite group of racers. But I don't think it's good to go too far the other direction either. You want participation, but you don't want to give out freebees just for showing up either.
sweeeeeeet, thanks for the news. This'll keep our juices flowing till the next update, Thanks for the info and being connected to the community :D. GGG - good guy gamers
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Vhlad wrote:
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jstq wrote:
Maybe you should learn how to race instead of whining? Lets change racing so any idiot can stay afk and get a demi, GGG please!!!


Making rewards more accessible to the top 20% of racers instead of the top 0.6% is, clearly, not the same as handing out demi's to participants who afk (in fact, my suggestion on page 6 would have zero influence on the # of demi's awarded). What you should realize is, encouraging greater participation will improve competition over time. Players will get better at races as they participate more. The problem, as historical season data shows, is not many players are involving themselves in the race seasons.

In August GGG had a player concurrency record of 154,300. Yet in season 8 we saw about 15,000 accounts aggregate at least 5 points across the season (a participation rate lower than 10%, since the total number of active accounts is greater than the concurrency record). Of that 15,000, fewer than 1000 accounts obtained more than 155 points, meaning players who performed within the top 7% did not even receive the 4th highest alternate art unique. Given the data, it is not unreasonable to request greater reward accessibility to the top 20% of performers.

Jstq, in season 8 you got twice as many points as the top 40 (and the top 40 obtained more points than 99.7% of participants). Moreover, the 40th place got twice as many points as the 150th place (i.e. you got 4x more points than players in the top 1%). GGG has a problem with exponential reward schemes, where points for level based, first clear, first quest, and top 20 all increase at increasing rates, and synergize to tremendously bias point rewards toward a tiny fraction of racers. I don't see these numbers as being healthy.

While adjusting the point structure of the level-based tiers so that higher rewards are obtained for lower tiers and rewards for higher tiers increase at a decreasing rate should help, I don't expect any changes to be made. People (myself included) have been making similar suggestions since season 2. The data, reward system, and trends haven't changed.


In any competition, only the best competitors win ever. Any competition...and it's completely reasonable that alt art demis/1000 point rewards are supposed to be rare and hard to get. That's the point. In fact, a lot of racers are having complaints especially last season that it's TOO EASY to get points. Look at s6, when 1k points was only reachable by the top 10 racers. Last season it was like top 50, which is way too many. This actually detracts from the whole unique alt-art race rewards being special/rare.

It's not even that only the top 0.6% of players win rewards. In fact, it's very possible for any player to win rewards, given you actually put in the time to practice and get better. I started playing PoE when the game was released and was a complete racing noob in season 6. Last season I won 20+ demis and accumulated around 1400 points on 2 account. It's not like the rewards aren't obtainable - you literally have to get good to win the best/rarest items.

And even if you aren't the best racer, there's still a very open door for casual racing. I think some dude named Shashko got like 1500 points for like rank 5 on racing ladder the league before and rarely ever placed in the top 20, but managed to get points in almost every race. But obviously that's a huge time investment most people aren't willing to commit. But the point is it's actually not hard to get top 50 in races with enough practice.

Finally, there's so many random drawings and point available that I don't see why anyone is complaining that the top 20% aren't getting race rewards. In fact, someone who gets to 600 points basically gets the same rewards as someone who gets to 1000 points minus 1 item or 90% of the same rewards. That's 400 points...easy? Hell no. 360 points get's you 80%. I'm pretty sure top 20% of active racers easily get's 360 points if they tried...don't use data of inactive racers to justify your exclusivity argument.

Last edited by ctcsback on Oct 6, 2014, 4:05:06 PM
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ctcsback wrote:
I'm pretty sure top 20% of active racers easily get's 360 points if they tried...


No, they don't. There's a consistent trend across seasons where racers who perform within the top 5% by point total don't even recieve the 4th highest (i.e. 220 point) award.

Note: I'm already excluding ~40% of accounts listed in the ladder from the data - accounts which haven't earned enough points or participated in enough races for me to consider "active". If I raised the cuttoff to exclude 75% of accounts (i.e. only using the top 25% by point total in the data set), you would still have only 319/6300 (5%) achieve the 360 point award. That's a long way off from better including the top 20% in the reward scheme, especially since we're pretending that the bottom 75% of season 8 players don't count [and while I'm using season 8 as an example in this case, the ratios are consistent amongst all the prior seasons].
Never underestimate what the mod community can do for PoE if you sell an offline client.
Last edited by Vhlad on Oct 6, 2014, 5:11:13 PM
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GodKas wrote:
New demigod body armour?
hope 3d art is good


İmagine an armour based normal chest with a 2D beatiful art.
Neden yaşıyorsun?
Last edited by Jideament on Oct 6, 2014, 4:27:54 PM
Rampage + Beyond = worst 1 week race league ever
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terrex wrote:
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SlixSC wrote:
The only problem I have with famine is that it favours Leap Slam classes way too much. They are the only classes that do not rely on Quicksilver charges. This is especially problematic when farming zones such as Sarn or Docks where non-leap slam classes lose alot of time whenever they reset zones.


It should still be class based.. Otherwise this will be completely imba / messed up.


Well, what I mean is if the point brackets (that apply to all classes) are balanced for Leap Slam classes then there is almost no way non-leap slam classes will reach max bracket in Famine.
#1 Victim of Murphy's Law.

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