End of season feedback

Just wanted to give my feedback on this race season now that it's over.

It was alright, not the greatest but alright.

* It was nice to see a return of descent champions and exiles everywhere - now if only we could get vanilla descent back and endless ledge.

* The signature race was boring as always: the damage increase was pitiful compared to what most damage mods do and the speed increase could safely be ignored. Strongboxes really should be removed from fixed seed - it adds even more RNG than random blue packs to what should be a technique-based format.

* Descent burst was an interesting idea for a format and I'm glad it was tried, but ultimately it wasn't very enjoyable. The beginning is one of the weakest parts of descent and repeating that three times just magnifies the issues.

* I was not around for any of the 24 minute bursts so I can't comment on them.

* Lots of vanilla events got tedious. One of the things that drew me to racing was the variety of formats back in season 5 - Ancestral, Rogue, Cutthroat, BLAMT, 12 hour endless ledge, immolation, lethal, turbo, blood magic, multiproj and various combinations of them. In this season there were a few rogue and turbo races but the vast majority of the ordinary races were boring things like 90 minute solo or 1 hour brutus kill. Which brings me to the next point

* Timed boss kill races are boring. Like really, really, boring. Sure there's a bit of a strategy change from other races, but in practice it just feels like an endless torrent of vanilla races with extremely low point thresholds. There's no edge or interest to it, since the vast majority of them (piety and dominus excepted, both of which were seriously under-represented {3 events and 0 events respectively}) are bosses that racers speedrun past anyway.
There's a few ways I'd go about fixing this one:
- Add race mods to the easier events. 90 minute merveil is trivial, 90 minute multiproj turbo merveil is not.
- Have less of these events overall
- Raise the point thresholds significantly. Other 90 minute races' final threshold is level 32, why is 90 minute merveil's top bracket level 17? For example.

* This was the second season with the shorter length. I don't like it one bit. Not only are there fewer and harder rewards to earn, which seriously turns off new players, but there's frequently gaps of 6+ hours between events which just seems odd. Why go for the shorter length but have these huge gaps? It's especially jarring on weekends and holidays when people with jobs actually have time to race.
Changes I would like to see, take your pick:
- Season length is extended back to the old length. Rewards are changed back to 7, 14, 26, 50, 80, 135, 220, 360, 600, 1000 thresholds.
- Events are more tightly packed without massive downtime between races. Rewards are changed back to 7, 14, 26, 50, 80, 135, 220, 360, 600, 1000 thresholds.

* Season rewards were terrible. When there's six items in total and four of them are invisible for cosmetic purposes there's a problem. I like the alt art on the jewellery, but I can't walk around and see it on my character. A flask being the 1000 point reward was the ultimate kek and the only reward people really cared about this season was the alpha's howl because it's distinctive, a good item and you can actually see it. I already went over this in the point above, but the less quantity of rewards and at higher thresholds serves to shut out the casual racers from feeling rewarded by their time. For people like myself who frequently come top 5 in class and are earning 12+ points a race that's not too much of an issue except the lesser amount of swag, but if you're only getting 3-4 points a race it takes a long time to hit 40 points for the ring. With the old thresholds, first timers and casual racers could get 2 or 3 rewards of the season and leave happy.

I know I wouldn't have stuck around if I'd started with these thresholds.


That's all I could think of for now, so I'll let rip and hope GGG sees this. For all my criticism of the season, I had fun and it kept me playing the game. Here's hoping next season is even better.

Nice post, thanks for sharing.

I'll share a bit on how I feel about s10 as well..

Near the end it really fell off for me, couldn't get myself to do most races aside from DC. This might be because of the 2 seasons so close back to back as well as PvP, all the events were a bit overwhelming and time consuming. This was of course my choice to attend them. I still feel the season length is off in terms of how many points you needed for higher tier rewards and how many points are awarded in races.

There were a lot of vanilla races and they definitely got tedious. Modified races are great to keep it more refreshing. New mechanics would be amazing that aren't just increased damage. The 4x 24min races back to back was way overkill. 2 is plenty for these. Maybe some modified different timed burst races would be fun. Only got to do one series of Descent bursts and it was pretty fun.

I don't really like the boss kill ones aside from Merveil & Vaal. Brutus is just another burst rng race and questing in act 3 to me is tedious in a race environment. This is all just my opinion / preference. I've never been a fan of races that can lead up to over 90 minutes.

The meta is still the same for most classes, would be nice to see some changes to this but I doubt that will happen. Tendril, firetrap etc...

Would love to see a nice 3d art reward for the 1k.

A lot of races I feel need their points awarded for levels adjusted. Some are set pretty high depending on the circumstances. Some of the modified races have the exact same as normal races and that feels off.

The monster variety in some areas is still super annoying. The RNG factor on ledge right now is unbelievable because of the variety. For normal this seems so silly to me. The difference in xp gain and kill pace depending on dogs, goats and the birds is stupid. This is just getting punished for no reason in races getting goats / birds. This also messed up some modified races I feel.

Overall I enjoyed this race season more than the last one. A few complaints I have.

- Schedule. I'm not a very big fan of their scheduling never have been. Having one race at 4am and than not having another one until 8pm seems like a bad schedule to me.

- Rewards. I honestly don't care all that much about the rewards. I race because I like racing, but I know alot of ppl race for the rewards and having a 1000 pt reward be a flask is pretty lame. I wish they would put build enabling uniques in the rewards or at least cool alt art stuff especially for 1000pt.

- Race variety. I'm a fan of DC. I find it very fun, but having like half the races being DC is overkill. I miss the old variety of races. Which I assume we don't have because they dong feel like re balancing after they made changes to bosses and such. I also wish they would remove the demi from the brutus kill race. It is a glorified burst race. Races that are RNG heavy shouldn't reward demis. Especially not glorified bursts.

-Sig race. Not really a complaint tbh. The sig grew on me as the season went on. Didn't have any success in the race but it was still pretty enjoyable. I think 90 mins is a pretty good time. Lets you farm docks but doesn't get to boring. Which is nice. Would enjoy a non fixed sig, idk if thats possible but if they did deal with the cheating thing I think non fixed would be nice(less rng dependent).

Season was better than last by a decent margin.

Sig race was a proper length, and since it was so easy to die to random shit the records were actually pretty low on some classes. There was also a major layer of rng with the corrupted zone / vaal gems, especially vaal flameblast, which you could argue both way for. Personally I think it was better now, than in the past where if you didn't kill merveil at x minutes and had something decent rng wise (ipd recipe stuff, ms boots, 2x qs) you might as well log off.

24 min bursts was ok I guess. It really just boiled down to getting rng on coves bluepack. Would probably been better to have 2 in a row rather than 4. But they are still better than regular bursts.

Descent burst again just boiled down to bluepacks in spider zone. But still better than regular bursts.

Some different races modes could be nice, but overall it was pretty decent. Only 1 big complaint have to be the terrible performance issues in this game. Dying from max life to a box without being able to react should not happen. Something really has to happen to exile boxes.

Rewards was kind of disappointing, but it's probably for the best. At least with the schedule these days I'd rather not be tempted to grind out 1k points.

As a casual racer, I found this season to be infinitely better than Season 9, but not as good as Season 8 (my first full race season). I still don't like the shorter schedule as I have college and the only reason I was able to play a lot this time was due to coinciding with my winter break. I still managed 500 points, although the rewards leading up to the Alpha's seemed very disappointing. Not sure if you all realize this, but the reason we see so many rings, amulets, belts, and flasks as alt art rewards is because GGG does not need to make 3D art for them, only 2D art. While I can understand that 3D art for helms, weapons, and especially chest armor is costly and not that many people will actually have them (only 128 people got 500 points this season), this still seems very lazy on GGG's part. Then again, GGG knows this, and has put some good looking items at lower point levels before, the Season 7 Thousand Ribbons at 26 points and being a lottery reward is probably the best example of this. The point thresholds themselves still need work because of the shorter season. Either, give us more points per race, reduce the point thresholds for the rewards to compensate for the shorter season, or make the season longer again.

As for the Signature race, I liked the new Brutal mod, but I immediately knew to switch to a caster rather than play melee for those. After the first race where I played Templar and saw everyone playing Templar, I switched to Scion for Flameblast and it worked out very well. I finished top 10 in every race I lived through, sometimes top 5. However, this brings us back to the whole melee vs. caster imbalance, where casters still have a clear advantage over melee, and a mod that increases monster damage only makes that imbalance more prominent.

As for the other races, I liked seeing the return of Descent Champions and some other mods like Turbo, Rogue, and especially Exiles Everywhere (even though I only got to play one of those). I was not able to play the Descent Bursts, but I feel they just need to bring that back as 1 Hour Descent and not these teaser bursts. The 24 min bursts are a good idea, but are really draining to have 4 in a row. I liked having the shorter boss kill races, but only as easy points. From a competitive standpoint, Brutus and Merveil kills are way too short to award Demi's.

Suggestions for Season 11: Keep Descent Champions, bring back 1 Hour Descent, more Exiles Everywhere, and more of the classic modded races (Turbo, Rogue, Ancestral, BLAMT, etc.). Also, in terms of race length, seeing most races at 90 min long was a great change. Stick with that length.

Thanks for the feedback!

I'd like to note, the level of 3D items will remain similar in race rewards. We have dedicated the 1000 point slot to being a new reasonably powerful non-3D item.

I suppose it's hard to tune low level environment for races, but typical "win" setup of caster with lightning tendrils and fire trap, seems was much better then any other. In majority of videos I've found different classes running with dual wands and lightning/igniting everything on path.

Only Exiles Everywhere was much more different: challenging and entertaining, for non-pro players at least. Since I was afraid to walk out of the door of 1st town.

I think it might be good idea to give some bosses or mobs extra strong buffs, fading with time passing, to see pro-players results less insane, compared to regular players.

In whole I consider race events very nice and entertaining addition to the game.

"

Qarl wrote:

We have dedicated the 1000 point slot to being a new reasonably powerful non-3D item.

I don't think this is what players want. The comment reminds me of how excited you were on Twitch when announcing that the flask was the new 1k reward. You were giddy, and the community reception has been nothing of the sort. Essentially, GGG seems to be out of touch with the racing community.

I think you guys do a fantastic job with PoE in general. I'm just saying that there's still a *ton* of room for improvement when it comes to how you handle racing, even after 10 seasons of (slow) refinements.

"

unsane wrote:

"

Qarl wrote:

We have dedicated the 1000 point slot to being a new reasonably powerful non-3D item.

I don't think this is what players want. The comment reminds me of how excited you were on Twitch when announcing that the flask was the new 1k reward. You were giddy, and the community reception has been nothing of the sort. Essentially, GGG seems to be out of touch with the racing community.

I may be remembering the video wrong, but I believe the excitement was around the Alpha's (and rightly so), not the 1k.

As far as what the players want, I do believe this is what the players want. It may not be what the top racers want, but I don't see why the majority of players would want a 3d reward they will never get.

"

Hemmingfish wrote:

* This was the second season with the shorter length. I don't like it one bit. Not only are there fewer and harder rewards to earn, which seriously turns off new players, but there's frequently gaps of 6+ hours between events which just seems odd. Why go for the shorter length but have these huge gaps? It's especially jarring on weekends and holidays when people with jobs actually have time to race.
Changes I would like to see, take your pick:
- Season length is extended back to the old length. Rewards are changed back to 7, 14, 26, 50, 80, 135, 220, 360, 600, 1000 thresholds.
- Events are more tightly packed without massive downtime between races. Rewards are changed back to 7, 14, 26, 50, 80, 135, 220, 360, 600, 1000 thresholds.

* Season rewards were terrible. When there's six items in total and four of them are invisible for cosmetic purposes there's a problem. I like the alt art on the jewellery, but I can't walk around and see it on my character. A flask being the 1000 point reward was the ultimate kek and the only reward people really cared about this season was the alpha's howl because it's distinctive, a good item and you can actually see it. I already went over this in the point above, but the less quantity of rewards and at higher thresholds serves to shut out the casual racers from feeling rewarded by their time. For people like myself who frequently come top 5 in class and are earning 12+ points a race that's not too much of an issue except the lesser amount of swag, but if you're only getting 3-4 points a race it takes a long time to hit 40 points for the ring. With the old thresholds, first timers and casual racers could get 2 or 3 rewards of the season and leave happy.

I know I wouldn't have stuck around if I'd started with these thresholds.

This. Exactly. I did my analysis at the conclusion of last season's race and the excessively steep incremental points progression towards rewards is a massive turn off. Basically if you're not top 20ing a good number of races and can only do maybe one or two races a day throughout the season because, you know, life and everything there's just no reward for continuing to play.

Yes I enjoy races but I did enough to get my Cybil's paw that was obtainable for me, and knowing everything else to be out of reach I went back to Torment. I still enjoy the main game and playing Torment I was going to be getting some form of reward (loots, levels, etc.) rather than playing for nothing but the experience. As a casual but long term player this is important to me as I still need gear for my characters. Since my last race I found numerous uniques including Rainbowstride boots and a few other reasonable items. When balanced against each other, there was insufficient reward in the race season to continue with it.

Personally I couldn't care less if half the rewards in a season were just the standard skinned uniques. Sure, make the uber-rewards shiny and special, those guys damn well earned that loot but for casual and beginner players it's nice just to get something, even if most players think it's rubbish.