League Resets: Please consider

INTRO:

Although I supported PoE through the beta, I didn't really get into playing heavily until about a month ago. What a fun experience! I was making the transition from D3, and admittedly was still in that mindset of, "There's no way an indie, FTP game could be anywhere as good as something produced by Blizzard." Boy was I WRONG! My first couple weeks of playing this game were very exciting and new for me.

That being said, I want to stress that this post is not just a mindless gripe, because there is so much good that this game has to offer. Everything, from the aesthetics/mood of the game to the mechanics, is on point. Even the community is pretty outstanding ^^.


MAIN TOPIC:

What struck me as off about this game and led me to put it on the shelf so soon after starting playing it, was how short lived the leagues are. I started my first characters in Domination. Mind you, I was completely fresh to the game and had no idea that the league would be ending soon. Needless to say, I was a little put off when I learned that all the hard work I was putting into these characters would eventually be for naught, and that I would soon have to re-roll and suffer a complete economy reset and item wipe.

One of the things I really like about this game is how much of a mental investment it takes to be successful. Even if you're following a build guide, there is so much "new" about this game that fresh players have a ton of stuff on their plates that they must ultimately digest. Of course, I'm talking about things like the passive tree, the nuanced ways in which skills work, and things like the currency and bartering system. This goes beyond just being a new player. Starting a new build from square one is a very challenging, yet potentially rewarding process. There's seems to be nothing better than getting your build all the way to end game and then proceeding to wreck monster face. There are so many builds/items/ways to play, and the reward is amazing when you are successful.

This overall aspect of the game seems to be directly at odds with the ephemeral nature of the challenger leagues. More specifically, what I'm saying is that it takes so much work and effort to build up a strong bank/stash, and also to progress in the game (especially if you desire to play multiple builds), that four months seems like too short a period to really experience the full potential and content of the game.

Of course, one can always just play in the standard league, but after polling the community and watching various streams, I get the feeling that just playing standard isn't really the way to go. Sure, you get permanence, but the player base is small and you don't get to experience the new challenger content.

For this reason, I ended up putting the game on the shelf, and I didn't really want to. I WANT to play this game, but I simply cannot justify investing a great deal of time into something that isn't going to produce some sort of long-lasting feeling of achievement.

I DO LIKE that there are resets in this game. Diablo 3 was far too static. Once you got to endgame, there was really nothing to do except gear up and farm into infinity. That being said, the solution to this problem might be kind of tricky. How do you create a dynamic end game— or a game that doesn't stagnate in the endgame— while still giving players a sense of long-term achievement?


POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

I think the solution to this goes beyond simply extending the duration of the leagues. What I might suggest is maybe only a partial economy reset. Allow players to keep up to 10-20%— maybe 20-30%— of their currency and make a list of uniques and rares that can be transferred into the new league. This list of items can change with each reset. For example, I think that it would be very effective to allow players to keep certain leveling gear sets. That way, we still have to roll a new character, but don't feel that all our hard work has been completely decimated.

Once you get a strong, buff character, it's very hard to just let it go. Being able to hold on to at least a small portion of that strength would work wonders (I believe) in making the league transition less painful. By resetting most of our resources, you would still be ensuring that your content would not be gimped by players just face-rolling through everything on their first play-throughs. This suggested solution would still allow for a fresh-feeling environment, without decimating everything that someone has worked for in the previous league.


CONCLUSION:

If you took the time to read this, thank you! This game has incredible potential, and what I played of it was in a word, outstanding. If the leagues can be somewhat reworked to allow for a more long-term sense of achievement, I can definitely see myself getting back into playing it heavily. Thank you!

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austindk wrote:

Of course, one can always just play in the standard league, but after polling the community and watching various streams, I get the feeling that just playing standard isn't really the way to go. Sure, you get permanence, but the player base is small and you don't get to experience the new challenger content.

About half the playerbase play the new leagues, while half play on the parent leagues. That's plenty of people. The streams give a false impression, because they tend towards the more competitive and hardcore players.

At the start of the last 4 month leagues, 71.8% of players were playing them, leaving a still very very large 28.2% (e.g. 300,000 players if there are 1,000,000 total). Later in the season they said that it was about 50/50 between permanent leagues and challenge leagues.

I've been playing this game for years, and i've yet to get a character above 40 in a challenge league. I do almost everything on the permanent hardcore league, which is by far the least populated. I have no issue finding players. As for standard, it has an extremely healthy player count at all times: 24/7, 365 days a year.

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austindk wrote:

I think the solution to this goes beyond simply extending the duration of the leagues. What I might suggest is maybe only a partial economy reset. Allow players to keep up to 10-20%— maybe 20-30%— of their currency and make a list of uniques and rares that can be transferred into the new league. This list of items can change with each reset. For example, I think that it would be very effective to allow players to keep certain leveling gear sets. That way, we still have to roll a new character, but don't feel that all our hard work has been completely decimated.

There is a way you can do something similar. Race rewards can be used like that, 2 weeks into challenge leagues.

It sounds like you want to play standard/Hardcore & there is nothiing you find wrong with the game. It is true there is new content, but if it is popular it is eventually merged with the permanent leagues. As an opportunity cost for not starting new, you just experience the best of the new content 4 months later.

Part of the reason I think for this is to encourage you to create new characters & builds that you havent tried before (ever wonder why you have 24 free character slots instead of a standard MMO's 4-5?). If they let you keep your levelling gear it could tunnel you into making a pretty similar character compared to your last one.

The majority of people eventually play standard/Hardcore as was mentioned (true statistics show a very different picture than what the forums or streams will tell you because of the type of people that enjoy forums/being streamers is not fairly representative of the entire PoE community)

why is this in race feedback

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jstq wrote:

why is this in race feedback

Someone thought "season" referred to the 4 month league cycle; not the race cycle. If they don't race it's an understandable error.

Personally I think 4 months for the main leagues is plenty. I wouldn't grumble hard at 3 or 6; but their length has to be at least partially driven by GGGs rate of new content creation.