Challenge League Post-mortems

When will the next league be? Nov/dec? :D

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zstark wrote:

40/40 sounds awesome

I leveled 2 characters in Warbands, one to 88 and other to 89 and I proudly finished 0/8 "challenges".

They should rather think about adding some challenges you have to complete by your own, rather that "everything is for sales" ones.

It's probably quite funny, but always when I read some Chris statement, I always see this:

Great story mr.Wilson, wish you could post more of them.

Great read.

Few inputs regarding act 4. I love the vibe, ESPECIALLY the lava areas, really reminds me of good old D2. Very beautiful.

I do however disliek the many bosses, it's just too many. Especially the part where you need to kill all the bosses to get to the final boss. Too many bosses stacked too closely together. It's because of that fact my least liked act. Also alot of the bosses are very powerful, especially against non armor classes. I faceroll act 1-3 on normal, then I get really challenged, sometimes dying in act 4 duo to bosses, and evasion being bad against big hits. I feel I shouldn't be dying on normal, I've played ARPGS for almost all my life and I'm 29. I never die in cruel either in act 1-3, also in Merciless act 1-3 I don't think I ever died.

The difficulty should still be smoothened out I think. :)

If you guys read my comments, I thank you.

Also thanks for this amazing game!

Since you've learned so much, let me add another thing in there reguarding challenges and prizes as well as rewards for playing a new league.

I am currently not playing in the one month temporary league... Why? Well 2 reasons really. The first is that it is a very short league, this means that I'd probably spend a very long time to get to mapping due to no currency and skewed prices on items. Now lets add that it's playing a character for one month which will accumulate very little currency to bring into standard which is pointless. Last i could get some of the challenge prizes, but not all and honestly, if I don't get the whole set of armor, then I'm not even going to bother, plain and simple.

So what do I hope you've learned from this?

The majority of the players will not care about new leagues if they cannot bring a good amount of currency from the new league into standard. Let's not forget that the majority of the players are not the players who can farm several exaults per hour but rather a few chaos per day. Whether this happens due to poor builds or poor optimisation of how they farm is a pointless debate. What matters are indeed the results. I in fact will never play on any temporary league again because of this. I have character builds that I want to test out and play because they seem fun, but if I'm constantly starting in a new league, this will only slow me down considerably!

Secondly is that prizes for challenge leagues are poorly implemented. If you make a 1 month league like you are doing now where getting a whole set of items is incredibly hard for the majority of the players, then many, like me will ignore it. I don't care if i could get a few pieces of the set. i only care if I can get the entire set otherwise it will just look awefull to only have a few pieces... It would be better to have 2 different sets as a reward. One set easier to get, one set hard to get. This way the hardcore players can kill themselves playing for their rare set while more casual players (and by casual I don't mean someone who doesn't plays like he doesn't cares but people who simply has more difficulty with the game and plays in a nn optimised way) are capable of getting the easier set.

This is also a lesson you can take for the 1 hour challenges and day challenges. I just ignore them, they are nothing but a waste of my time, so much that I never even tried to enter one because I know right off the bat that I stand no chance whatsoever to get a prize. Make prizes attainble by players who are not as good and then you'll see more participation.

Thank you so much!

good read

Thanks for writing this, it's quite an interesting read!

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Chris wrote:

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.

Really looking forward to this, especially the "reward at threshold" -thing. I really liked that about the 1-month leagues. And having more challenges to complete gives more possibilities to get the first few reward-thresholds! :)

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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. It's too early to talk about specifics of this league, but we'll probably be announcing it alongside other new content later this year.

One League with more Content sounds like a good idea. Though it will probably mean that people will switch even less between leagues. Still a quite good change in my opinion!

A really good read :D thanks! still love your work and the way you react to the community, keep it up , and i will definitely stick around.

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"We plan to stop giving shirts out to the first 50 players to complete all the challenges."

I would like to comment on this. Last tempest/warband league I've decided to dedicate my time towards completing 8/8 and became top50 doing so. The biggest motivation behind this decision was to win/earn an exclusive T-shirt that I would proudly wear in any social ocassion like i'm was doing and I still do with my awakining supporter pack T-shirt.
Getting the T-shirt eventually as top2 racer was by far the most rewarding thing I've achieved in any game ever. Because it connected my skill and knowledge of game plus time spent plus it was going to become memory IRL.

I would like to ask you, my dear developers, to consider keeping top50 exclusive T-shirt reward.