My experience in the 5 Day Solo Race & Idea for the future

Disclaimer: I have not slept a lot lately so some parts of this posting may be confusing, also english is not my first language so excuse my shit.

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I really liked the concept of a longer solo race so I figured I'd give this a try...
On Softcore.
Here is my Gear.

My Racing Experience:

The Playthrough was easy as usual, getting into maps was managable - had to run Piety for a bit to get some innitial maps but after I found Zana I could buy some 66s off her and I was doing fine.

For the first 3 Days (noslept for the first ~30 hours - the race started at 10pm in EU -> slept 6h went to university to take a test (6h) -> played till 4am -> slept 4h -> played till 4am) the competition in the Top50 was incredibly high - I loved it!
The others were a couple of maps ahead and catching up was hard because everyone was mapping their asses off. Every small break meant someone would pass you on the ladder - brilliant.

Oh, and I killed Atziri after reaching Level 84 - only wanted to run for some 70-71 maps but my first attempt went pretty well, so I decided to try again and succeeded.

What might have played a role was my horrible map-RNG. My Gems reached level 20 when I was level 88 iirc (As comparision, when I checked Rank 1's gear on level 91 early on day4 his gems had not reached level 20). Having people pass you although you rolled through your higher maps as quick as possible and having people pass you anyway just because they were in Areas 6-8 lvls higher than you felt bad.

I found a total of 5 carto boxes in the race, all of them after dropping down significantly, the most horrible situation was on Day 3 when I managed finding 2 level 76 maps and dropped down to 70s after not getting a single mapdrop from either of them. Then I found 2 Carto boxes within 5 level 70 maps - it felt incredibly disheartening.

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On Day 4 I woke up to the supporter pack announcement. The race was dead. I went to bed at Rank ~30, woke up at ~40 and would still be in like the top50 right now if I had not played anymore.

At least my map RNG got better - still not brilliant, no big cartos, but I managed to grind my way well into level 91 and to rank 6 before running out of maps again towards the end of the race.

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The possibility to buy beta access for 30$ instead of spending 5 days of hard grinding basically put a pricetag on everyones time. I bet some people think they have wasted 3 Days trying to get 30$ worth of beta access and I bet it did not feel good. Especially if they took days off work for this event in which they would have probably made more than 30 bucks.
This does not apply to me, I like doing this sort of stuff occasionally - I even got a beta key 3 days into the race which I passed on to a friend because I wanted to finish what I started - the 5Day Grind.

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My Idea:

In the future for longer solo races I would prefer a version that does not require sick map RNG.
I liked the "24hours endless ledge" race a couple of months ago, but its a horrible mode to play that long because you cant reroll zones properly (go offline for 15min to reset zone), no vendoring, no support gems unless very lucky.

What I would love to see in the future would be a 3-Day Race (Over the weekend) similar to endless ledge with like a seperate room at the end of each ledge that includes a 1-Tab Stash and a vendor (Krillson?) that sells one random Gem (same price as masters).

Also the room would have 2 Exits - One to a new ledge of the same level, one to a new ledge one level higher.

Since the league would end up in the void league you wouldnt even have to cap the zone levels and let people play the level 92 zones to get to 100 in 3 days. If you can clear it - go for it.
This would make success depend on your itemluck rather than your mapluck and items are fairly easy I guess

You could even make it like 1-39 are normal difficulty, 40-55 are cruel, 56+ are merciless (or however). You could even make merciless zones like corrupted zones so they have different map mods - Maybe it would be good to be able to dodge a specific mod like reflect or - well, idk - by chaosing the instance.

While this would be fairly nice for spell based builds characters that have to rely on getting a good weapon would have a hard time, I could still see it being fun for everyone.

Another problem would be "What if you cannot deal with the monsters and you do not know about logging out and waiting 15 minutes"
or "What if you progress too far by accident" - Just get a brightbeak and jump to level 200 to see what its like - game over.


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TL;DR
5day sc was fun for 3 days, league was dead when betakeys were being sold for 30$
I'd love to see an improved version of endless ledge for a future event like this.


PS: The 5Day race ended 75 minutes ago, wheres my beta invitation?