[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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hankinsohl wrote:

If GGG wants to maintain/increase its player base as leagues age, well... it's not a viable solution to force players to repeat stale content, over and over and over again until the new league is released.

And, IMO, that's the approach that GGG has taken this league.

IMO, it will backfire. My metric... at this league's end, how many players will be at 40/40.

Metric 2 - and in fact much more important - how many players will still be playing the game (Steam player participation is an insight into this). IMO, no better than previous leagues, and, IMO, likely somewhat less.

Metric 3 - the most important - and which we will not have insight into - how much money/month is GGG earning this league as opposed to last leagues.

IMO... earnings/month will decline.

I disagree on one fundamental thing here. And that's the significance of the impact which you're insinuating.

The general premise of what you've said (which I've trimmed for conciseness in quoting), I agree with. Having a semi-mindless grind to 40/40 is probably going to turn some people off.

And while I don't dispute it will have some measure of impact in retention and financial consequence as well, I direct you to Essence stats, which clearly show spikes in people completing 24 or 36 challenges and stopping.

Only 2.29% of players who completed a challenge got 36 for the Essence portal.

Assuming that first bar line is precisely 2.33% (weird?) the 40/40 mark has about 1/5th the amount, which is 0.466% of players who get 40/40.

Granted, these stats were with a month remaining in the league, so the numbers are slightly higher at the end of the league, but I'm sure you can see the trend here.

They've made 36/40 slightly more challenging with all the Breach challenges, but you can achieve it with only missing out on grinds, map tiers, shaper kill, and your choice of ANY of:

* Encounters III (Coffers)
* Sextants
* Div Cards
* Upgrade Breach uniques
* Kill Breachlords
* Identify Breach uniques
* Corrupted Jewels

Not bad.

It's really the 37+ push that's a lot more time intensive, and when you're only going to be impacting 1% or less of your playerbase who actually goes for it...

Well, you can afford to experiment a bit. Which is precisely what Carl said, they're using this league as a bit of an opportunity to see if more grindy / challengy stuff is what the veteran players who push for 40/40 want.

And they'll adjust from there.

This isn't necessarily a long-term challenge design plan.

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hankinsohl wrote:

RE 40/40 Breach Discussion
My prediction is that 1/5th or so players will make 40/40 this league as compared to previous leagues.

I wonder. Mine is that the % will go up significantly. Many people are praising the Breach mechanic and nothing was added to turn people off. If it is a bit more of a time sink, that won't have any impact because the people going for 40 in the past have not been just barely finishing 40 in the last minutes of day 90.

For me, breaching has improved the game so much I've switched instantly from not caring too much about the challenges or endgame in general - to wanting to actually go for all 40 clears and finally try to push for a 100, in the same league. I now enjoy grinding for its own sake.

Some players just like to chill while farming and leveling and did grinds one way or another in standard regardless of challenge lists and temp events.

It's a matter of taste. For some, no kind of grind will ever be appealing.

Many would like them if they had an ultimate practical purpose, like PvP gear or a truly hard fight so all the grinding no longer feels empty because it is preparation for the really hard stuff.

The way things are, a competent player going for 40/40 can eventually kill Uber, Chayula and Shaper with practice without any of the money, enchants and levels they would get from the grinds. They can also buy the kills fairly cheap long before they actually get into the grind and the kills are cheap precisely because the hardest content isn't hard at all for the best players with the best gear. It's insultingly easy for them.

Aside from very hard fights not existing, for many naturally competitive people the real problem is that the PvP is broken and unrewarding so even if they dislike the grind they reluctantly use these formal challenges as their competitive outlet.

Granted, retention of top players during the mid-late league is not financially significant to the company since this isn't a monthly subscription system. Of course most of this is payed by people who do maybe 12-24 challenges, log on to level and chat occasionally, or just do a drunken struggle through act 1 normal 4 times a year.

But, if they were to boost retention for top tier players, major PvP improvements and 1-2 bosses that simply cannot be killed by flasks and gear while standing still and holding right click would go a loong way.

I think that GGG would be better served if challenges were skill-based rather than time-based.

Why?

Well, if it's skill-based, challenge achievement is a real accomplishment.

But if it's time-based - well, than anyone with a bunch of time can get the achievement. To be sure, you'd want some time commitment to achieve all challenges otherwise development couldn't keep pace with the best players.
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To pull this off, GGG would need to release challenging content much more often. I think that 40/40 should be achievable by the best streamers within 1-1/2 to 2 weeks. Does this hurt the game - no! In fact, top streamers can let others know how good the league is by simply streaming. If it's fun, others will continue to play.

3-month leagues are maybe a bit too long - perhaps shorten that timeframe.

But, there does need to be compelling content in between 40/40 and league end - racing seems to be GGG's answer to that gap - and I like racing. So make racing more rewarding with uniques that are race specific - and maybe make uniques available early on in new leagues (1 week delay) but not tradable until 3 or 4 weeks pass.
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Upon consideration, this league isn't hugely more challenging than past leagues - but it is maybe 20% more in terms of time commitment and requires that you grind maps which I don't particularly like.

GGG's solution to player retention seems to be "make the grind longer." - As stated above, I think they're better served by making the grind more technically challenging - and by introducting incentives outside the leagues to retain the player base.

In other words, make people play because it's fun.

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hankinsohl wrote:

I think that GGG would be better served if challenges were skill-based rather than time-based.

Why?

Well, if it's skill-based, challenge achievement is a real accomplishment.

The issue with this is paid / free services for kills. I think that's partly why the challenges have gone grind-mode, disregarding the notion of player retention for the moment. If you make certain content prohibitive based on skill, a) meta power deletion builds won't care and b) you can just pay for the kill from those who have the skill / build / gear.

I think more than from an aspect of player retention, they're trying to encourage players to achieve things themselves a bit more.

Further, as long as Vaal Pact and CI remain in its current state, there will always be builds that can just outleech whatever GGG comes up with, because I highly doubt they're going to introduce a boss that can one-shot a 25,000 eHP build to brute force skill kills.

Who knows, though. In a way, I'd like to see that.

Then again, I grew up with Battletoads, where you had three lives to get through some of the most egregiously horseshit gaming ever made. And I fucking loved it.

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3-month leagues are maybe a bit too long - perhaps shorten that timeframe.

This is strictly an issue of actual development cycle workflow. They likely wouldn't be able to put out quality leagues in a shorter time frame. Evidenced by all the bugs you typically see in the first week, things that should be caught in QA but aren't.

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...and by introducting incentives outside the leagues to retain the player base.

What did you have in mind for this?