Challenge League Post-mortems

This is all good to hear. Warbands had potential to be my most favorite league so far, but the actual desirable content was buried under so many layers of RNG that I'm glad it is finally over.

The restructuring of challenge league rewards is long overdue. GGG has been systemically over-favoring rewarding an extreme minority of players, both in content and in rewards. This is not how you grow your player base. Hopefully this shift in focus away from the 1% of the 1% will also flow over into how the race seasons are being done.

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Chris wrote:

Players don't switch between the two concurrent challenge leagues as much as we had hoped. Most players just pick one and stick to it, missing out on the experience of the other. Combined with the intense development cycles of these leagues and the fact that we want to continue to push the amount of content they contain, we have decided to change the structure of the next leagues.

When the next challenge league starts, there will be both a Standard and Hardcore version of it, with overlapping but slightly different content. The new league represents more effort than we put into any previous league, which is possible because we're not developing two completely different leagues simultaneously. It's too early to talk about specifics of this league, but we'll probably be announcing it alongside other new content later this year.

Great news! Personally, I abhor hardcore (not just in PoE), so ever since I started playing PoE (a little before Ambush league) I always stick with the softcore league. Also, standard feels pretty vanilla, so I tend to play in challenge leagues for the new/different mechanics (I couldn't care less for the fresh economy though, as I play solo all the time, and only trade when I need something really specific and build-enabling). The downside though is that most of the time I ended up coveting the hardcore leagues mechanics/content, but hardcore is for me a no-go (limited time to play due to work, I usually can manage to reach mid tier maps during the challenge league - but restarting from scratch in case of death is not something I'd ever be willing to do, I'd just quit altogether).

Now, with Ambush, Rampage (I actually loved this one, made gearing requirements and content progress smoother to cope with in a solo environment) and Torment I felt like I got the better end of the bargain (even if Beyond sounded like a lot of fun). Warbands, however, was as dull as dull gets (for my specific playstyle), no reward, just pure annoyance. And Tempest, for someone who loves new mechanics like I do, sounded like a lot of fun. This, plus the off-the-charts annoyance that is setting up spectres (played spectre/zombie necro, my long-time favorite build gameplay-wise - but boy is it annoying to get your Revenants good to go...) led me to quit the league way earlier than I'd have done in the past.

So, all in all, a welcome change, having the 2 leagues sharing mechanics, with them also being more sophisticated, sounds like a win-win to me =)

Great work GGG !

This was a very interesting read thanks Mr. Wilson!

Especially the part about changing the challenges to 40 smalelr ones with milestones is fantastic.

While i have made my second top 50 8/8 in this past league i personally preferred the 1 month approach back when the blue/red seraph set were the rewards.
(No roonm left on my wall for PoE tshirts anyway :P )

Looking forwards to the next challenge league already!

A huge reason why people don't swap leagues is because hardcore players generally only like the idea to have intense gameplay that rewards you for playing carefully with a lot of experience, thus not really caring about what character they play, in terms of fun they dont really factor in what type of build they play(at least this seems to be the case).
And a softcore player don't really care about putting too much effort into the game OR wants to play a character that involves a fun playstyle. However this is just not possible in hardcore. The balance in this game isn't revolved around high skill or sexy mechanics. It forces you to play a build which
maxes out on survivability. Sure if you play an off-screen build you can get away with a little less but then you can make no mistake what so ever.

I for one wanted to play hardcore this league but I didn't want to play one of four builds that are viable for hardcore without putting in 1000 times more effort for LESS. So I decided to go softcore and try to push it with a build that generally isn't very tanky but has superdamage. When I got to tier 9 maps I realised 4.5k hp wasn't doing it anymore and respecced into 200% life. Which pretty much max out life on everything but my helmet (5.7k hp) I still get oneshot by some monsters in tier 11+ maps. That's with 20% phys to fire, arctic armor, 6 endurance charges and 5k armor.

So ggg.. Are you honestly expecting players to go HC when you need 8k hp and 90% damage reduction and still rely on a defensive gamestyle to be able to push endgmae content, there's only a handful of builds that can do that and we all love the idea of having an amazing character that WE created.So Of course people will get pushed away from hardcore, gamebalance is way too poor and prioritises boring builds with little damage over a balanced one, unless you play 1 of 3 builds.. (sorry but there needs to be a lot of changes to balance before people will be ready to play hardcore)

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mandodiao wrote:

"The next challenge leagues will have a set of 40 challenges, which range in difficulty. Completion of specific milestones (every 10 challenges, for example) will reward you with a microtransaction. Regular casual players who don't make it to maps can still receive some prizes for their participation in the challenge leagues."

Finally a reason to actually do the Challenges! Been doing the 1M challenges and its super fun to have something to work towards

Yeh, having smaller challenges has been more fun to do, and gives a greater sense of purpose.

Making the challenge about the challenge, and not about the league you play will be a very positive step and one that I have been hoping would happen sooner rather than later.

Much easier to balance one really good idea, or at least that is how it seems to me.

Missing from the post: the lack of tormented ghosts in torment. The current spawn rate feels much better, especially for some of the rarer ones.

I didn't play Beyond but the starting experience during the 1 month torment/beyond felt a bit unfair in terms of player versus mobs. When one of those floating eye/tentacle things popped up in submerged my only options were die, logout or run(maybe, the burning + flame surge probably would have stunned and then it would have been death anyway). It was softcore so dying wasn't a big deal but it was still a terrible way to start.

If torment, warbands and tempest were the most expensive then I feel like we didn't get out money's worth. Having to rely on third party sites for trading is bad enough but having to do the same for a league's main mechanic is taking that too far. Some of the warband members feel like they are in need of some retuning since release. The amount of kiting combined with their move speed feel excessive when playing melee but even on ranged characters the skills can have trouble connecting. While I already loved projectile speed even before warbands I don't think that should be mandatory(or were we supposed to use bear trap on every character?). Leave it and move on is always an option but that always feels like a terrible excuse.

Edit: oh and speaking of storm heralds why are these allowed on to activate on hidden/"sleeping" mobs before the mobs are active/visible?

Amazing read by the best game developers.

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Players don't switch between the two concurrent challenge leagues as much as we had hoped. Most players just pick one and stick to it, missing out on the experience of the other.

I think the main thing separating players is that fact that hardcore is simply unforgiving in terms of death. With the ongoing design of making hardcore challenge leagues harder, why not make both leagues equally as hard, but equally unique? Then, after some time like the Tempest leagues, the challenge league mods swap. Then possibly some mods swap.

This route is easy enough to swap the problem, but difficult enough to design mods that can be balance, fun and diverse enough to enjoy. This may also be a good time to throw in some more bits of lore like Beyond did.

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we have decided to change the structure of the next leagues.

Or maybe not. :)

TL:DR

Make next leagues like the 1-Month currently happening.

Valuable improvements, love you guys!