PoE Guild Arcade Race League

PoE Guild Arcade Race

Purpose: create a temporary void league that incentivizes the following things:

Guild versus guild competition

Play in an economy where every item is NOT available at your fingertips within seconds via trade with everyone else in the league

Be a part of something bigger than just *you*

Create an endgame and a goal that doesn’t revolve around pushing to level 100

Create an endgame where you can play the maps you enjoy, because gaining exp isn’t the goal, and you’re not beholden to this spreadsheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QpJJRuCnp1SeOUchW0EUFGJKOWKA6vGO0Lv42Y4HCJw/edit#gid=0

Rewards players immediately and consistently for rolling difficult, high IIR maps


PART 1: How do guilds race against other guilds? *Guild versus Guild competition*

You take the sum total of their contributing members levels. While the Arcade system won’t use experience, for this early illustration, we’ll use a simple level model.

Guild ‘Laser Raptors’ has 10 players and they all get to level 100. The Laser Raptors have scored 1,000 points.

Guild ‘Rocket Sharks’ has 10 players and 9 get to level 100. Their tenth player is a slacker and only reaches level 99. The Rocket Sharks lose (or are second place winners!) with 999 points.

“but guilds don’t have even numbers of players! And not everyone in my guild is as <hardcore> <casual> <awesome> <lame> as I am!”

Yes thank you padawan, I have anticipated that comment. We will segment and subdivide the leaderboards at 4 size tiers. Super Guilds with over 200 members will have one leaderboard (membership can go up to 250) and only their top 200 scorers will count toward their total. Large Guilds with over 100 members will compete against other guilds with between 100-199 members, but only their top 100 scorers will be counted. The other two cutoffs are 50 and 10, because I’m making this up as I go along.

That’s also why we only take the top X contributors - those in your guild who play casually won’t have to worry about playing a certain way, or letting down the guild by playing something ‘slow’, or ‘fun’, or ‘not meta’ (gods forbid).

PART 2: This isn’t another Solo Self Found thing, is it? * Play in an economy where every item is NOT available at your fingertips within seconds via trade with everyone else in the league*

No. At least, it doesn’t have to be. But it could be. If you wanted it to be. What is a ‘date’, really?….erm. Oops. Wrong conversation.

The idea is that party size would be capped at two. You can only party with people in your guild. You can only trade with people in your guild. This is supposed to be a guild race after all, but I think that once you open up full 5-6 man party play you start to make certain things mandatory. Granted, limiting it to 2 or 3 or even (and especially) solo makes other things mandatory, but I have a solution for that too:

No more than 10% of your contributing members can use the same main skill. Now we’ve solved the problem of tryhards going 200-man Vaal Spark, or w/e the hell it is that the cool kids do these days. It seems like GGG can already track these things, so I’m (100%) sure they can stop this from being exploited in this hypothetical race league. (the parenthetical was sarcastic, this is a half-baked idea, just keep rolling with it).

PART 3: What about the players who aren’t contributing to the guilds score? What are they playing for? * Be a part of something bigger than just *you**

Hopefully they’re playing because you’re not an asshole, and they enjoy your company. If they aren’t in your top half of contributors by score, they probably don’t play PoE all that competitively in the first place. They might be social gamers first, and enjoy the other aspects a bit less than you. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test

for more information.

But they aren’t left out by any stretch. They will act as facilitators and glue for the competing top half. Facilitating in terms of finding that build enabling unique for another player, trading chroms for chaos when someone desperately needs it, and otherwise doing the things that they probably already do while going largely unnoticed and underappreciated. They are probably organizing things like Forsaken Master rotations, leveling ancillary gems to 15-17 that people forgot they wanted. Farming Vaal Frags, fusings, making donations to the cause here and there.

While this may sound foreign to some readers, or perhaps that such a player is being used or abused by the guild, I assure you that there are players out there who actually live for this kind of stuff - this is their fun - to be a behind-the-scenes agent making things easier for those who have more time to devote to PoE than they do. They enjoy being a part of something big - something more than just themselves - and this will be a great league - probably the first league in PoE that would incentivize behavior to such a degree.

PART 4: I’ve totally read every word you’ve written up until now - it’s smart, funny, and articulate by the way - what was that thing you said about using a scoring system not based on experience or grinding to level 100? * Create an endgame and a goal that doesn’t revolve around pushing to level 100*

First, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say. Second, yes! I put the word ‘Arcade’ in the title, and haven’t much talked about it since. I’ll start with a secret. I really like the Tropical Island Map. Some people like the Dried Lake, other love the Strand. My favorite map is what a guild mate once upon a time called ‘Motherfucking Monkey Madness’. When I hit level 65+ is my favorite part of a challenge league because 1) I get to start mapping, and 2) that means I get to run the very recently mentioned Motherfucking Monkey Madness Map without an experience penalty.

It doesn’t take very long to make running Trop Island maps inefficient if the incentive of the league is to level up. But what if the game gave you a score for clearing a map? And what if the formula for your score had many factors, only one of which was map tier? Wouldn’t that be freaking awesome? I hope your answer is ‘yes’ because if it’s ‘no’ you’ll probably leave without commenting, or take the time to say something mean as a reply. Both of those are fair responses, but both would make me sad.

Here’s the formula: I put it in a spoiler because I read once that every formula in your book cuts your sales in half, and I have kids to feed.



If you remember the experience chart, a level 85 character is the highest level that would still get no experience penalty in a tier 10 map. If a monster in the Chateau is worth 100 experience points, the player gets 100 experience points.

They get a 92% experience penalty in a Tier 1 - that is to say that if a monster in the tropical island is worth 100 experience points, the player gets only 8. That’s over 12 times less.

Using an Arcade score system, you only get about 2x less. Can you run two blue T1 maps in the time it takes you to run one T10 blue map? Maybe. Probably. I don't know, but it should be reasonably close. Compare that to our current situation, where you get 12 times less reward in terms of experience.

Your rarity matters, your map tier matters, but it’s not the end-all be-all of endgame in this league. The primary component of your score comes from the fact that you are in a map. Killing things. The second biggest factor is map Rarity which is a good proxy for difficulty. The third is map tier. Isn’t this the logical order of things anyway? I know why the core standard game has the experience math it has, but I think it would be nice - great actually - to flip this on its head for a temp void league.

Rarity is going to feel more rewarding as a result because your rarity is actually a bigger factor than your map tier. How many people have rolled a 140% map - the highest tier map they’ve got, and get nothing out of it in terms of getting maps back? While that can still happen, it won’t be a FeelsBadMan moment, because sustaining T11 and T12 maps isn’t a huge deal anymore.

The Inaugural Path of Exile Guild Arcade Race will incentivize new playstyles that haven’t been rewarded in the past. It will give people a reason to join a guild, start a guild, or have more involvement with the one they’re currently in. It will let players work together to achieve a goal that is unreachable themselves. It will reward players first and foremost for PLAYING THE GAME not for sustaining / buying a T12+ map pool.

GGG could choose to charge for entry and give away big time swag for prizes in terms of MTX or through partnerships with hardware folks like Alienware. They could also make it free and give away smaller prizes and MTX, and demigod type exclusives. They could create guild hideouts to coincide with this venture, and give away stuff exclusive to that for prizes.

They could even do the Arcade league as a non-guild focused thing, and instead make it a fully SSFL.

I’m under no illusions that any of you read all of this. TY 4 Scam.

P.S. I’ve thought-created other leagues in the past, see link for further things.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1364368

np

"

qwertazx wrote:

np

You came to the wrong place buddy, try Guild Wars or something...

"

StDrakeX wrote:

You came to the wrong place buddy, try Guild Wars or something...

No, I'm quite sure I'm in the right place. I really enjoy PoE, and probably will for many more years. I'm not saying the whole game should revolve around guilds, I'm saying it would be nice, for 1 or 2 or 4 months, to have an endgame that isn't about sustaining the same small pool of maps exclusively. It could be a guild thing, or, as I wrote at the end, a solo thing.

Besides that, GGG put guilds in the game, not me. I didn't ask for them, but now that they're here I'd like to see them get more support/attention.