League Mechanic Feedback

Hello ? ... Hy!

Sadly I decided to write this instead of playing the game, but in just 2 matches the massive and numerous flaws are so blatant that I can not enjoy it and just hit Alt-F4.

I don´t like auto battles and LoL style games and was therefore quite skeptical to begin with, but as soon as I tried the league mechanic the first time I got intrigued and can see how enjoyable it could be even for me ... could be, if not for the following.


TLDR: Fixed revive timer (one that works), remove immobilize (since it doesn't seem to work for the opposing team) reduce overall damage by 60%, average mobs and bosses life by 90%, others (tanky and weak) life by 30% and tag all mobs as unique instead of just 'white'.



Base UI

- There is no revive timer

- You are unable to estimate difficulty/ranking of an opposing team. Why is there a ranking value, when it is not relative or equivalent to anything.

- You are unable to view the setup of tribes before you make purchases or are looked out of using favors once you select a match and review the setup.

Information about an opposing teams ranking and team head count should be the minimum.


Vendors

- Name mishmash and convoluted vendoring:

Why does the favor currency display show tribe names instead of the vendors names. It is highly confusing to have to remember the icons, the clans name and the vendors name and position.
Everything could and should be compacted into one single window accessible by any vendor or league mechanic hotkey:
Tribe Name and seller icon to the left, followed by the team members bracket, then the idol bracket, then the equipment bracket and ended by the available currency to the right - everything in one row.
Very much like the match selection widow, it already exists.
It is at he moment extremely convoluted and exasperated by the travel distance between the vendors.

- Favor amount and tier unlock (added after feedback below)

Favor always seems to be 75-150 too short of purchase which means the next fight will always be under performing massively. Even though you can sell, it often won´t be worth missing out on filling a slot.

Under certain circumstances one can accumulate enough favor early to buy a decent unit equivalent to the opposing teams strength (they can field good units way earlier) but its not unlocked until 2 or 3 rounds later. Buying a crap unit earlier and then trying to resell and buy an expansive one later never works out due to lake of favor (and the 50% loss on resale).


The Arena

- Win or lose you should spawn by the chest, not the center of the arena.

- There still is no way to forfeit.

- Constantly losing lock on totems (and mobs). Once clicked on a totem the character often just runs circles around it, missing lock to despawn. This also happens with monsters.
It took me the better part of a minute to read Kahuturoas name by trying to lock on it, but he ran from the cursor position and I lost the name tag (and lock) every time. This does not happen during normal gaming.


Players/Own Character

- Revive revive revive: one of the biggest issues.

There was no timer > there was a timer (for half a day) > there is no timer. There are some timers, all which are meaningless.
Fact is, if I can't respawn for 5 seconds all the way up to a minute or more, the mechanic is broken, end of discussion.
At this point you can just remove the timer (as it should be for active players).

4 times in a row I get a timer of 5 seconds that says: respawning increased by ally >>> I do not respawn for 25 seconds. What? Why? How?
6 times in a row i get respawn interrupted flickering from 1 to 0 disappearing and showing 1 then 0 then disappearing, while at the same time 'respawning increased by ally' counts down from 5 to 0 and then restarting again and again and nothing happens.


Own team

- Defenders do not defend or are ineffective. See Opposing team being often immune to immobilize mechanic.

- Discernability Friend from Foe (added after feedback below)
All area effects look the same and it is therefore hard to differentiate which aoe to avoid and which one is harmless (looking at tidal waves here). It would thereby be helpful if friendly effects would get a different color as suggested or transparency would be increased to 75-80% for them.


Opposing team

- Opposing team does not suffer from immobilize mechanic (multiple occasions where a de-summoner gets constantly hit by defenders and still channels, then runs away when I approach.

- Mobs are too tanky (way too tanky like 10-20x) some bosses are almost unkillable (I made comparison videos between a normal low tier match and T16 map run).

- Damage vs player and minions is still extremely high, AG got instant killed by Kahuturoa and 2 goliath. Some slams are still too strong and are used too quickly even after the 'fixes'. Fact is HP and damage is in no relation to player power.
How can it be called balance when I die instantly and take up to 20-30 sec to respawn when a boss takes 1 minute to take down with a full endgame minion army and revies in 2 seconds - come on!.

In one match i got instant killed 3 times in a row on my totem by slams while waiting endlessly for respawn only to be instnat slam killed again. I won that match though, since all the mobs were on my totem while my team de-spawned the opposing totems - no fun though, highly frustrating.

- Mobs are just 'white' even thought hey are though and act as unique bosses and minions, which is a problem for minion summoning and corpse interaction and flask charge generation. This is extremely obvious and painful for skills like dominating blow where it takes 10-20 sec to kill a mob and all you might get is 1 minion. They should all be tagged as unique minions (like totems, exiles, copies etc which exist in the acts and as map boss minions).


Mob Skills

- Most skills have extremely high area of effect. Tidal waves, rain, slams etc can off-screen.
Maata slam hits from my totem to the opposing totem and with a screen wide aoe - 1shot!

- Targeting happens from up to 2 screens away for single projectile instantly immobilizing the player the moment he touches a totem.

- Aoe Skills like waves and slams often immobilize before the actual hit. I have it recorded multiple times where the wave approaches or a monster swings and I flame dash away just to be tagged immobile before or even without actually being hit. Now, this might be due to lag, but also if the aoe hitbox is bigger then the visual.



I hope someone reads this and takes this into consideration. So I and others can enjoy the league mechanic. And soon, not in a month or so.
And its not about rewards, I think they are too over tuned by now, rather fix the issues and reduce rewards by 30%.

Best

Yahira


Edit: Visibility, Favor amount, Favour tier unlock

Everything you wrote is good stuff.

Only thing i would add, is to make change how Escort mobs act when the player dies. They just ignore enemies, and run over to the player totem, just standing there like idiots waiting for respawn. So dying actually removes a full 5 slots from the competition untill you respawn.
Not sure what kind of logic decided on this wierd take!

Amongst the stuffs you wrote, the thing i agree with the most is the part about rankings. It is so vexing to be unable to gauge the opponents strength before suddenly just get clobbered with no recourse, and no forfeit button, even though GGG has been teasing us with a hypothetical forfeit button that is somewhere in the game. I suppose the logout button works fine, it just takes so damn long to load into town this league.

Edit: Oh i forgot a totally annoying part about this league mechanic.

The Sponsors. If i want to get a Titanic Shell for example, it costs over 2000 Favor/rep thingy. I think it was like 2400 or something silly.
I cant get that much. Ever. 2 matches that give me like 750 rep with that faction and then that enemy was knocked out of the tournament and i can no longer increase the reputation. How are players expected to ever get the top dudes on team, if the sponsors rep rewards are decided by what faction you are fighting, since you can only fight 1 faction 2 times per tournament, it feels like its a deadend system where i cant ever get the good stuff. Forced to play with weak/middle minions the entire game. Never ever ever endgame. Where is the fun?!

Plus 1 to keep it at top. Exactly these are my problems with this unenjoyable jumble or a league. The names te visibility the randomness of whatwe get.. YOu gather 2k points for magma beasts? shame there wont be anything else JUST firebreathers this run foreverandever... I do believethey intended this league to be solely frustrating.. stun stun stun forver you are watching a ppt of a fight. if you die you might get locked to just watch a fragment of a fight or an empty screen. Really disgusting.. what am i supposed to do log out to get rid of this garbage?

I absolutely agree with the thread creator.

However, I doubt that there will be any changes to the league mechanics, because we are getting to the point, namely a week after the release of the league, when GGG does nothing and moves on to create the next untested league.

It is all the more frightening how bad the league mechanics are and how bad the performance of the game has become.

Sorry I forgot one more thing.
In my opinion, another improvement would be to design the character models of the different teams in different colors.

So you and all of your own fighters could have a blue veil while opponents have a red one.
Very often I have the problem that I just can't tell if a friendly monster or an enemy monster is coming towards me.

To make it even easier for GGG, the glow of rare monsters on one team and the glow of magic monsters on the other team would do the trick too. Yellow-Blue.

We also need a way to Quickly derank. We are forced to fight at the hardest difficulty. This is the only mechanic that does that.

Thank you for the replies.

One can sell to vendors and accumulate enough points to buy high tier support, but its extremely difficult and hampering to do so. I therefore agree and added it to the list above.

Visibility between friend ad foe (mostly skills and effects) are an issue and I forgot to add it, which I did now, thank you for bringing it up.

I am not sure about the de-ranking, definitely would help and make things easier. Maybe its intended, maybe not. 3 leagues would be nice where you can choose to enter the next tier league if you sustained the highest ranking 3 consecutive times. And you can chose to downgrade league tier after any loss. But I don't see this happening.

Totally agree played at least 100 arena's to give it a fair go and nothing seems to change from what I have seen so far. Totally getting the LoL/tower defence game theme and it's not something I come to POE to play. In fact it's the reason I left LoL years ago and came here to play. I understand some do like it and that's fine but this league isn't for me.

Thank and i totally agree