Challenge League Post-mortems

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Chris wrote:

We plan to stop giving shirts out to the first 50 players to complete all the challenges. Printing a low number of special shirts and shipping them internationally from New Zealand is very expensive. We feel it would be better to spend that money on the design of in-game prizes that can benefit everyone.

Seems like a small drop in the bucket when compared to the expenses you've mentioned when designing new leagues. Anyway, it will help immensely on my decision of going casual when new leagues start from now on :)

cult of the frozen skies? don't you mean order of the frozen skies?

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Chris wrote:

Special items were created for the Warbands to drop. We erred a bit on the low side with these drops, but have enough data now that we can be more aggressive with similar mechanics in the future.

One thing I noticed is that you always seem to err on the least side of things like drops in terms of items, maps, cards, appearance of your chaos leaders, etc. While i'll agree that this is a safer more default way of controlling balance, you also seem to eat a lot of time and patience off your players while adjusting them when it goes bad.

A 3 month leagues economy goes haywire when you decide to change things mid league (T1 unique drops). It leaves a bad taste in the end because everything feels rushed with indecisiveness and a lot of your effort gets saturated in the deluge of players complaining or worst quitting the game. Although everything is a learning process, players might feel less like a lab rat when a post mortem concludes with "drops could have been higher." Can you not adjust drops at a more generous rate when a league starts? I guess not, knowing GGG. But looking back now, Awakening could have retained so much more players if major patches was released with a more generous "RNG" instead of slow incremental adjustments (map drops). The same nagging problems noted in open beta just transferred until it was released and it drained the life out of the whole expansion.

Overall, thanks for the transparency and here's hoping to find a more impactful change in the coming leagues.

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BonumNox wrote:

cult of the frozen skies? don't you mean order of the frozen skies?

Possibly intentional? Given they removed Cult of the Elements entirely.

GGG rocks! \m/ Keep up the awesome work :3

When designing Warbands, we were acutely aware that it was going to launch alongside The Awakening, a large expansion that we spent millions of dollars developing. The Awakening included so much new content that it wasn't necessary to include a Standard challenge league that was extremely in the player's face.


=> Why though? Warbands felt like the most unrewarding/boring league ever. Did you see people hunting for the unique warband drops? Yes but it's not like everyone was going for them ... Risk/Rewards seems completly off. I looked at the warbands uunique items and I really didn't want any of them. Also after 1 month the changes to the mechanics that The Awakening introduced were pretty much apparent (known). So I was left with a 2 month not extremely in my face boring league. Please never do this again! It really felt more and more like playing standard espcially with the economy stuff that happened (ex for 70c rates).

I really don't get why you would undercut league design just because of an expansion coming out at the same time....

1-month is great fun though and alot more fun than warbands. Why not make it 3 month?

Nice write-up. Bring on the new challenge league! But, like, after a short break, please. D:

I've wondered for some time why two very different leagues have been made to run simultaneously. Even if you have lots of time on your hands, experiencing both equally was never really an option for most players. Most people end up with one league having the bulk of their stuff, and leaving that behind to play another league doesn't have much appeal because of it, especially once the economy has settled down.

Personally, I've only ever left the comfort of the standard challenge leagues for the hardcore ones to complete challenges. That means I've missed out on cool bits of content. Tempest, for instance, might have been nice to play in for three months, but since it was the hardcore league that I was only ever going to play for challenges, I experienced it for something like ten days. Will be nice not having to miss out simply because I don't like losing characters on death.

"Many players commented that they enjoyed the small amount of lore that Beyond contained. I expect us to return to that story in the future."

I see, Abaxoth's Lair expansion "confirmed".

Great read.

Just please don't make anything like Tempest again, in regard to you can't choose your own difficulty. Entering a map where you don't know what tempest is on was annoying and could cost you a precious map ...

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Ocylix wrote:

I like that you gave us an overview of the design process. I am now looking forward to 1 challenge league with variations, instead of 2.

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Summoner wrote:

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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.

If you want to encourage more people to try the HC leagues, why not change it so you rip from the HC challenge league into the standard challenge league instead of default. Previously the completely different leagues made doing so problematic; but if we're going to be able to do all the challenges in one league anyway it's not going to be as potentially imbalancing.

the problem with this is the ladder ranking. a rank 2 Tempest ripping into Warbands will pretty much assure that he is at least rank 2 in Warbands, without actually playing Warbands initially.

yea i dont think hc->sc on rip is a good solution either.
i chose to play the hc league only a little bit, mostly when there was corrupting tempest, because the few friends i have play on sc. thats whats stopping me from going full-time hc i guess, im really interested in the streamers that race on hc and it looks sort of more fun and challenging to do hc than sc. both leagues were ok but tempest was more fun since it had more special randomness in it. im hoping to play more hc the next league i just have to
convice some of my friends to try to join me for it
anyways, for people that wonder why challenges are RNG gated its because a lot of them can be done in a group, i.e. you find something you can share in your guild for example a warbands-boss. this 1 month league seems to stop some of that tho, which is good, im mostly talking about the shrine "touching the shrine", which can be done by only one player.
by restricting these challenges this way, you can lower the grade of RNG involved in it
to a meium level. just an idea as usual and i think i already mentioned it over in suggestions corner