Challenge League Post-mortems

I've been saying for years that the challenge leagues should be:

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"Hardcore" in an ARPG traditionally is a perma-death league that mirrors the gameplay of the softcore equivalent.

Then I *finally* see from Chris's Manlyfesto...

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When the next challenge league starts, there will be both a Standard and Hardcore version of it

Bout time...

GGG, THANKS !

2 very telling things in bloodlines. half talking about how great keepers of trove is ..when it isnt. I cant tell you how excited i get knowing how many alteration shards im going to get.

the other half of the paragraph talking about how p-link was not terrible design because..

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"it's a hardcore league so we want it to be challenging and at times, really difficult"

im sure p-link and necrovigil are just really challenging and not actually garbage. no matter how many times ggg can be told that it is simply bad they are daddy and know better. thats why it was a super dead league right ? ...

10 lbs of intelligent thought in a 2 lb post.


Particularly, Invasion was actually a little fun for being so crazy (in the first days where it felt like things could just nearly off-screen kill you at will.) But eventually, it mostly just felt like we got shafted dealing with this crap with little reward, while Standard go to play with Strong Boxes which sounded really cool.

I'd think that having the two leagues be more similar could help avoid the chances of such possible ill feelings that some felt.

I imagine that if both leagues were doing ghosts; each could have a couple ghost types that are unique to them. With some bits of unique content allowing for bits of unique flavor. Like putting different condiments on a hot dog or hamburger.

+1 rainbow moon sock of awesome

I've always thought it would be better to just do a standard and hardcore version of basically the same league

Warbands was utterly boring and I did not try Tempest.

If anything ever makes it to the core game, I'd like a reason to stay in the normal gameworld and for the normal gameworld to be much, much larger. It takes just minutes to get from one end of, say, Ledge to the other. With the way the game works there's no reason it shouldn't take at least twice as long. The world feels extremely tiny since Awakening.

The map system is super dull and only done by anyone because of the reward mechanics/penalties. Tiny areas that just recycle the same basic layouts a few times over.

The change makes sense, good stuff.

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XRacKS wrote:

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Chris wrote:

Rampage (Standard, August 2014):
The Rampage league introduced the idea of kill streaks. It was not a particularly popular feature and was eventually not added to the core game except in certain niche circumstances.
We learnt that good challenge leagues involve the environment/monsters changing, rather than characters' abilities. We also noted that Rampage was the only league that made the core game easier without any additional challenge.

IMO Rampage was a really fun way of adding "speed" into poe the gameplay felt much faster and "rewarding"... Keeping the streak up was fun and a nice "flow" came into play.

my 2 cents

The problem with that speed is that if you had the damage to sustain rampage then you didn't really need that boost to begin with.

Awesome post and analysis, looking forward to seeing the lessons learnt implemented in forthcoming challenge leagues....