Restart league, every league once please - league cycles

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derbe#6071 wrote:

Calling it "selfish" cuts both ways. Your position also protects a specific playstyle – the Standard-feeder arbitrage – at the expense of players who've already left the league and have nothing to come back to until next cycle. We're both arguing for what we want. That's fine. But neither of us gets to claim the moral high ground here.

The honest version of this debate is: a parallel league would shift value from the Standard-extraction crowd toward the "I want fresh starts more often" crowd. You're in the first group. I'm in the second. Pretending the answer to that is "just use private leagues" sidesteps the actual question.

agreed. i too am selfish as i m trying to protect my interests.

i kinda missed your reply earlier.

and in any case, i think i've found a compromise while responding to another dude.

which is as long as league exclusives are not too rare and the number of current player base is low enough then yeah. its a good time for a parallel league and since the league exclusive items are common enough then players would have already been able to get the item way early into the league.

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TheDarkKnightRises_POE#2069 wrote:

Parallel leagues are only good for those players who want additional currency they can (against the rule) RMT off. Why else would you need the fresh economy anyway? Any build can be played in the original league. All items are available in asynch trade. The parallel league has the same rules as the original league, so no new builds can be made and no new uniques can be found. No new achievements can be unlocked, no new mtx rewards can be gained. So what is left? Currency.

I wander if OP wants a parallel league if it would be voided?

ggg did do parallel leagues before in settlers and mercernaries.

i m not sure but they may have handed out some additional mtx rewards for players who jumped in.

as for the parallel league to be void only. i support that notion a lot. anyone going on the parallel league are there for the enjoyment of a fresh leagues start. it would also completely remove any notion of fomo a standard player might have (since i cant get anything from there anyway)

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exsea#1724 wrote:

i will mostly agree with you on this, and if and only if the league is effectively dead then yeah i would agree a parallel league can be justified.

The league has already been effectively dead for weeks, and realistically that situation is not going to improve the deeper we move into the cycle. With a potential delay to 3.29, it would be in GGG’s best interest to give players who prefer PoE1 something to bridge the gap until the next league arrives, because doing absolutely nothing is not suddenly going to convince people to log back into the current league or Standard.
At that stage, the issue is not a lack of available content, but a lack of motivation. Once an economy stagnates and most progression goals have already been exhausted, many players simply lose interest. Offering some form of fresh start would at least give those players a reason to return and engage again instead of waiting out the patch cycle.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

i still have a little bit of reservations. because it still does impact me.
regardless as theres still the possibility players that have the item i want may just abandon the league for the new one. we do not know whats the extent that this can mean, some players give away their gear, some may delete the entire character, while some delist their items. the item i was chasing for simply.... gone.

Not to be rude, but if someone still has not managed to get the items they wanted after 2 months, that is probably less of a league timing issue and more of a personal progression issue. I do not really see why everyone else should miss out on a fresh restart just because a small number of players move at a much slower pace.
At some point you have to accept that the game cannot be balanced around the slowest possible progression curve. Most players who wanted to push builds, farm upgrades, and engage with the economy have already done so. Keeping an exhausted league alive indefinitely for the sake of a few remaining goals does not suddenly make the experience more engaging for everyone else.

And realistically, the introduction of a fresh start would not even change much for those players anyway. You can still continue playing the existing league and keep working toward your desired items, or ultimately wait until everything gets transferred over to Standard.

A fresh restart does not delete your progress or lock you out of finishing your goals.
At the end of the day it is a bit of a hit or miss either way. If your desired items have not even shown up on the market after this long, chances are that situation is not magically changing with or without a fresh start. Delaying a reset does not automatically create supply where there was none to begin with.

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TheDarkKnightRises_POE#2069 wrote:

Parallel leagues are only good for those players who want additional currency they can (against the rule) RMT off. Why else would you need the fresh economy anyway? Any build can be played in the original league. All items are available in asynch trade. The parallel league has the same rules as the original league, so no new builds can be made and no new uniques can be found. No new achievements can be unlocked, no new mtx rewards can be gained. So what is left? Currency.

I wander if OP wants a parallel league if it would be voided?

It’s more that a lot of players find a fresh economy far more appealing, because starting from scratch is simply more enjoyable than jumping into an already oversaturated market. If people only wanted to make another build, they could have already done that within the same league or even on Standard. Instead, many choose a complete reset whenever the opportunity appears, because starting from 0 feels far more rewarding than entering a league, or even worse Standard, where barely anything retains value and the market is flooded with items.

Players enjoy that dopamine hit of finding something valuable, selling it for currency, and reinvesting those gains directly into their build progression. But in a league that has been dead for weeks, and even more so on dead Standard since years, there is not much left to do beyond mindlessly farming the few remaining profitable activities, like Harvest.

Players want variety, and that is exactly what a fresh start provides. Good luck farming your favorite league mechanic in an economy that has already collapsed under an oversupply of items from that exact mechanic. Good luck funding upgrades through pocket change while sorting through mountains of unwanted garbage because all the actually desirable items were bought out of the market long ago.

At the end of the day, playing late into a league, or especially Standard, just is not that fun for a lot of people. The exception is SSF, where everything you find can retain value at any stage because progression is entirely self contained and you are not competing with a market that already solved itself months ago. But most players prefer trade leagues, so I can absolutely see the appeal of fresh starts, even if it is technically the exact same league again. As a gap closer until the next patch, it gives players a reason to come back and experience that early economy progression and item chase all over again.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

Not to be rude, but if someone still has not managed to get the items they wanted after 2 months, that is probably less of a league timing issue and more of a personal progression issue. I do not really see why everyone else should miss out on a fresh restart just because a small number of players move at a much slower pace.

in most cases i agree with you. 2 months people should be able to get what they want. but as i highlighted in the exceptions that i would accept parallel league. some things with a high rng component would change that.

for example when i was playing in crucible. almost every week i found a different guy selling a sword with a crucible tree that i wanted or was better than the one before. or had alternate trees that did something else that was desirable. some had very nice combinations of passives that synergized well.

in fact my strongest crucible weapon was something i bought during the last few weeks of the league and it was what ? below 30 divs? i had spent 200-300 divs buying and combining my own and only got a ton of failures only to get a real good one prerolled and sold at such a cheap price.

so yeah i have to disagree on that. also you have to bear in mind. as i said, i m farming for standard. making my build work does not require me to have a 100-200 div item. but the stuff i am aiming for are usually never cheap and sometimes are very rare. like the example i gave. viper strike with endurance charge imbue. so far i've only seen 2 being sold this entire league and i quickly snapped one of them up. i have been trying to roll my own too and its mostly failures.

i've been doing stuff like this for years. i have a double corrupt mageblood on standard many other good double corrupts. legacy mod watcher eyes, various different cluster jewels.

its understandable that you did not consider all this, because its not how you enjoy the game. but for me and for many others like me, item acquisition during temp leagues is something we put serious effort into.

if ggg carelessly splits the playerbase repeatedly by introducing parallel leagues. one day we'll just get tired and not play. i do not know how many people are like me but i believe ggg would benefit to keep as many players engaged in the game as possible.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

doing absolutely nothing is not suddenly going to convince people to log back into the current league or Standard.
At that stage, the issue is not a lack of available content, but a lack of motivation. Once an economy stagnates and most progression goals have already been exhausted, many players simply lose interest. Offering some form of fresh start would at least give those players a reason to return and engage again instead of waiting out the patch cycle.

there is one thing that GGG can do that could actually keep standard "more alive".

just simply allow temp league content to exist parallel on standard league during league launches.

for sure an issue i mentioned "maybe a god item i want rolls on the temp league" while im playing standard. but the difference is on standard i never did need to restart a new character, i did not need to refarm my gear. the overhead effort/cost to get me going is practically zero.

will it split the community? definitely but i would argue, standard players are playing on standard anyway and many of them avoid temp leagues anyway. i actually resent having to restart my progress. i hate farming everything all over again. i find zero enjoyment clearing the atlas all over again. but i do all that for the sake of farming.

i usually play temp leagues this way for the entire duration. which is ironic considering temp league enjoyers quit in 1-2 months. imagine that. standard players are more dedicated temp leaguers than actual temp league enjoyers.

i m also aging. i m not as young as i used to be. i used to be able to get to red tier maps in 1-2 days. nowadays i might take a week. i have life commitments.

i m pretty sure many older gamers are going thru the same. i dont have many IRL friends playing POE. but back in the day my guild had what? 10-15 members. nowadays its usually me alone or one other guy. most of the others have already accepted that they dont care for standard and that temp leagues is too much effort. one day i might come to the conclusion that i dont have time for any reset/temp league. that might be the final push towards me forgetting poe entirely. the one thing that could potentially prevent that, is if ggg finally allowed standard to access temp league content on standard.

times have changed. one major reason ggg does not do this is balance. some league specific gear gives players massive power. but ggg in the recent years are now more open to voiding those items at the end of the league.

if ggg does this one thing, i would not care at all if theres 10 parallel leagues running. i ll stick to standard

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

At the end of the day, playing late into a league, or especially Standard, just is not that fun for a lot of people.

this is very true which is why even if my suggestion splits the player base, the numbers wont be much as most people who enjoy temp leagues will continue playing reset leagues.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

if ggg carelessly splits the playerbase repeatedly by introducing parallel leagues. one day we'll just get tired and not play.

But there’s literally no player split happening.

Players who already quit the league are no longer contributing to that league in the first place. If some of those players return for a fresh start, the original league is not actually losing anything, because without the fresh start those players would most likely remain gone anyway.

Meanwhile, the players who are still active or committed to seeing the league through until the end will most likely continue doing exactly that. We’ve already seen this happen before when GGG opened fresh starts and plenty of players still stayed in the existing league, so for your situation nothing really changes.

At the end of the day, getting your items is always a race against time and availability. A fresh start does not suddenly make those items disappear. If anything, a fresh start can even mean that more items eventually end up carrying over into Standard.

If you’re getting tired of not being able to acquire your desired items, that ultimately comes down to your own pacing and engagement, and if you decide to step away again, that is entirely your own choice as well.

If those desired items are that important and currently non existent, it might be worth spending the time actually playing the game and working toward them instead of debating their absence or treating a fresh start like it meaningfully affects the situation, when in practice it really doesn’t.

That being said, personal difficulty with item acquisition isn’t really a defensible reason against a gap-closing fresh start designed to provide a short period of bridge content and entertainment for a broad portion of the playerbase.

Framing individual progression frustration as a reason to block that kind of wider engagement doesn’t really hold up in a broader design context.
If anything, treating a single case of progression friction as more important than the enjoyment of a larger group would be the only careless part here.

Honestly, I think we've actually converged on something workable here, and I want to give credit where it's due.

@exsea – the voided parallel league idea is a genuinely good compromise, and I'm fully on board with it. If the parallel instance doesn't feed Standard, your entire Standard-extraction strategy is completely unaffected. The items you're hunting still only exist in the main league economy. Your viper strike imbue, your crucible weapons, your double-corrupts – none of that supply gets diluted, because nothing from the parallel league ever reaches you. That's a clean solution and I should have arrived there earlier in the thread instead of arguing in circles.

For me personally, voided is fine. I'm not in this for permanent items; I'm in it for the fresh economy experience and the reason to log back in during the dead weeks. Strip the items at the end, hand out a participation MTX like GGG did during Settlers, done. Everybody gets what they actually wanted out of this.

@VoidWhisperer42 – appreciated the economic framing, especially the point about late-league economies collapsing under their own oversupply. That's the part I was trying to articulate and didn't have the vocabulary for.

@exsea – also fair point on the Standard-accessing-temp-league-content idea. That's a separate proposal and probably deserves its own thread, but I'd read it. The aging-gamer-with-life-commitments framing resonates more than you'd expect; I think there's a quiet majority of us who'd benefit from GGG acknowledging that not everyone can reset their entire progression every 3 months anymore.

Closing my end of this: voided parallel league as gap content, no Standard impact, opt-in. I think that's actually a proposal worth GGG looking at, and it has a lot less downside than what I originally pitched.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

But there’s literally no player split happening.

Players who already quit the league are no longer contributing to that league in the first place. If some of those players return for a fresh start, the original league is not actually losing anything, because without the fresh start those players would most likely remain gone anyway.

things not addressed.
1. loss of items if players choose to remove the items from trade/do give aways/delete their character
2. fomo when desirable item perhaps even better than the ones i managed to get pop up on the parallel league.
3. in order to remain "trade viable" players would now need to constantly participate in every parallel league and ensure that they have a "trade presence" where they have at least an active character fully geared up capable for farming and with a stock of 100s of divines to quickly snap up whatever they're aiming for.

- this leads to league fatigue/burnout. which could also lead players like me to feel that this practice is unsustainable. if i m not able to get the best items i want any more, than i might as well not play the game. the idea that my efforts will pay off is a big deal.

in any case i think you're dead set on no compromises. i've come to a compromise with op which is to have the parallel leagues void only. i will not give a single damn if theres 1000 parallel leagues in this instance.

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derbe#6071 wrote:

Honestly, I think we've actually converged on something workable here, and I want to give credit where it's due.

Closing my end of this: voided parallel league as gap content, no Standard impact, opt-in. I think that's actually a proposal worth GGG looking at, and it has a lot less downside than what I originally pitched.

at the end of the day i want as many players to be happy with the least players unhappy. ultimately we can discuss all day but GGG has the final say.

as for the standard getting league content. i have proposed it before.

its kinda sad that i had received a lot of pushback. and the way they pushback sometimes feel unnecessarily petty.

for example it splits up the playerbase. which is true.

there are standard players are only there in the league just for the items like me. i have literally NO enjoyment refarming my gear up. in fact i HATE and RESENT having to do that in order to access the gear i want. we dont want to be there in the first place so even if it split the player base, it wont hurt much as standard players are now the minority. also we would be enjoying our time playing poe rather than resenting. but standard players were never truly part of the temp league player base. how big of an impact would it be towards the temp league playerbase really? also ggg actually can see benefit as some standard players might return to the game since theyre no longer forced to reset their progress. LE does it. POE2 does it. only POE1 doesnt.

another is standard players will blaze thru the content in 3 days, get bored and leave. which to me is an extremely petty.

for starters, i find it ironic that standard players like me would actually play temp leagues longer than the average temp league enjoyer, where most of them leave within 2 months while we're soldiering on with our wealth/gear acquisition and yet we're seen as people who would quit in 3 days?

theres an added implication that all the hard work and effort GGG made is just enough to entertain standard players for 3 days before they get bored. thats a really insulting assumption towards the developer's hard work and effort.

one of the main reasons why the temp leagues are split from standard. which is to allow ggg some buffer time to decide whether or not to keep certain mechanics or gear from going to the core game. ggg had previously been very careful to never remove any league specific gear. this was true for almost 10 years, over 30 leagues, ggg has never voided league specific gear, until sanctum where they just poofed all sanctified relics at the end of the league. if ggg is comfortable poofing items like that, then there no longer needs to be a buffer between league and standard. just let standard players enjoy league content and poof it at the end.

also back in the day temp leagues were pretty much avoidable to standard players, where items on standard were still of equal power level. nowadays temp leagues can bring so much power. for example the imbue gem. a good imbue is much more worth it compared to a 21/23 gem. also league content used to be just "heres a box, open to fight enemies to get loot" or "heres some random extra monster to fight". now league content is pretty much equivalent to a mini expansion, with npcs, storyline, voiced dialogue, bosses. standard players really are missing out on a lot of content.

i m too lazy to open a new thread in regard to this. ggg knows that players like me want it. and the old threads exist. ggg decided its not something they want to do but i m just hoping that one day they would actually give in. i m not getting any younger.