Problem with Race Rewards

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When you look at the Reward page, the difference between the top reward and second-to-top reward is 400 points.

Once you hit 600 points, you are most likely better off creating a new account.

That's what most people do.
Get as many lvl 100 white items possible.

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Effectively there is a void of 400 points, with absolutely no rewards for the player. So in a sense you get punished for having accumulated alot of points. Why are there no intermediate rewards between 600 points and 1000 points?

Because it would mean the devs had to reuse rewards at some point, since most uniques are bad less players will participate, especially if some 30 Point reward gets reused.

Good rewards = High Participation Rate

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The way the rewards are set up simply doesn't make sense, because it punishes players for doing well because your points/per race are worth less and less the more points you accumulate.

There is no doing well in this system. It's race as much possible.
There ware several racers who gain 5-6 RP each race and are on the first 2 pages.

Other than that many points are intended to reward an alt Art Demigod.

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You have the competitive races, where the demigod is the main objective.

The competive races are 70% no mod modes. It's only about to give the usual players some demigods while they do worse in blamt etc.
The entire Fun/Competive Idea is stupid.
Even a racemode like BLAMT isn't popular on racers it still should reward demigods.

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You have the signatures, where the record and thus the alt art demigod is the main objective.

And the participation rate becomes less and less once some racers had their lucky run.
This system should be changed into a participation/rank system.
There are several players who do really good in every race but due low participation rate they got like 4-10th of class.


I suggested a sub RP system to reward players with DemiGod RPs. For placing Top 20 of class.
Similar to current system only there are several Demigods in a reward tier.
This would result more players receiving Demigods while the total amount of demigods would be lower.
10 DRP = Crown 30 = Boots 50= Ring etc.

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Why don't the top 5 of all classes for example get some sort of small reward, like an extra ignomon, so that way if you come 2nd you don't feel like you've just wasted several hours of your day for nothing. (I mean the race rewards are so shit anyway, would people really complain if racers got a little extra for once?)

The rewards are so bad and HC is so dead that giving currency rewards would result in a higher participation, because new players can't pay for better items.
Most players stop racing after reaching certain reward or they create a new account.

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Please note, I'm not advocating that GGG throw out rewards like crazy, but give people who come 2nd to 5th in their classes, a small little extra, like an ignomon. That way, you don't feel like complete shit for placing 2nd or 3rd (which relatively speaking is really good).

With that suggestion you will only receive an answer like:
In Fun races you receive more RP for doing well getting more tickets for a random reward.

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Hilbert wrote:

That's what most people do.
Get as many lvl 100 white items possible.

And that's what I'm criticising, players shouldn't have to do that. What's the point of forcing players to make several accounts to farm lvl 100 white items? Not only does it hurt the integrity of the ladder, but it also de-incentivises players from accumulating alot of points.

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Hilbert wrote:

Because it would mean the devs had to reuse rewards at some point, since most uniques are bad less players will participate, especially if some 30 Point reward gets reused.

Good rewards = High Participation Rate

So an increase in the amount of rewards results in less players participating? Is that "Hilbert" logic?

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Hilbert wrote:

There is no doing well in this system. It's race as much possible.
There ware several racers who gain 5-6 RP each race and are on the first 2 pages.

Other than that many points are intended to reward an alt Art Demigod.

Yes, which is part of the problem. Racing rewards should be skill based and not a simple endurance challenge, where the more you race the more points you accumulate. I agree with the idea that it should instead be "the better you race, the more rewards you get".

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The competive races are 70% no mod modes. It's only about to give the usual players some demigods while they do worse in blamt etc.
The entire Fun/Competive Idea is stupid.
Even a racemode like BLAMT isn't popular on racers it still should reward demigods.

That doesn't follow at all. The races which should reward Demis are the one's that are least effected by RNG, awarding Demis in BLAMT races would be ridiculous because RNG plays such a huge role in these types of races.

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The rewards are so bad and HC is so dead that giving currency rewards would result in a higher participation, because new players can't pay for better items.
Most players stop racing after reaching certain reward or they create a new account.

I agree with that, I see nothing wrong with awarding players with currency if they do well in races. That's a good idea.

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With that suggestion you will only receive an answer like:
In Fun races you receive more RP for doing well getting more tickets for a random reward.

Yeah, but that's kinda silly, right? "You did well, now pray to god you are lucky". Why does one have to be lucky to get a reward that they have earned in the first place? I think we both agree that, that system in particular is just silly.

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So an increase in the amount of rewards results in less players participating? Is that "Hilbert" logic?

I said at some point.

Chris said once he won't put Kaoms on the 1k tier. This means the strongest uniques won't be in any reward.

There is a limited amount of good and bad uniques. If you add 7 more tiers you won't have got good uniques left at some point.
You are forced to add the best ones or reuse old ones.
Even adding new alt art, won't solve the problem that you have to take them around the same itempool.
Imagine players getting the same bad 80, 120 pts reward again? They will just stop at the ilvl 100 white items.

The devs had to do something like: Alt art magic lvl 100 belt with 1-2 desireable mods, to regal/exalt them on the higher tiers.

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That doesn't follow at all. The races which should reward Demis are the one's that are least effected by RNG, awarding Demis in BLAMT races would be ridiculous because RNG plays such a huge role in these types of races.

You claim BLAMT got too much luck involvement?
There were several suggestions to add a wand/bow for all classes.

I don't like blamt but the demigods I won in those lethal Turbo modes involved strategy to remove offscreen kills.

On the other side normal races also involve much luck. In one race on a mara I found ondars and went cleave and that would be pretty much my best mara result if I didn't get shotgun critted by sparks.
If you want to remove RNG then several items mustn't drop.
Ondars, Sadimas, Wanderlust etc save tons of time.
Why did the +2 bow get nerfed? Because it was too powerful with PA early on.
It would have been far easier to remove it from the droptable.

Imo Blamt and Lactif and other Lethal Turbo modes need less luck than something like Descent or Endless ledge, which are still considered competive.

But in reality EL is the biggest luck based mode so far. You get an ugly area when you are underleveled-->You lost.

Descent was pretty much got reduced to get the alch chests and hope for white items to drop so you can roll them.
You had barely any spiders?--->Enjoy Perpetus/Ribbon Area
You had a good spider Area-->Enjoy Exile/Blackguard Area

The 24h Descent showed how bad it is. Even killing every single mob! I reached only level 29.
Other players ended up level 26 or 27 because they got underleveled at some point.(Those Descent results were worse than some of the luckiest 1h Descents!)

Either everything rewards a demi or a heavily rebalanced normal racemode which prevents norm booster uniques from dropping and rares from rolling.

In 3 classes I am racing in the Top5 of class tier. I had races where I was first mara even using my Hillockreward snatcher after Merv but A2 was horrible because I couldn't buy a mallet and a mallet didn't drop, the next tier I could use and found was level 17. By that time I dropped down to #7 mara and just could get up to #3 because one mara died and the others kept farming western forest/sins.

In the worst 1h Tb races I couldn't even kill merv.

Either go back to the regular Demigod system or create a sub RP system based on Top10/Top20 Rankings.
This way even a player constantly ending in Top10/Top20 will have 1 low tier demigod while Top players will have a high tier demigod, without having several stash tabs full of 2x2 demigods.

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I agree with that, I see nothing wrong with awarding players with currency if they do well in races. That's a good idea.

Sadly GGG is against currency rewards.
They don't need to be as generous prior to 9.11. They could even make it like 5-10 Divine/Exalted Orbs as lottery ticket and other orbs get chosen randomly. They could even punish grinding certain spots many times.
This way new players are able to get 20% gems without paying stacks of chaos and acquire some currency to roll items/trade better items.

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Yeah, but that's kinda silly, right? "You did well, now pray to god you are lucky". Why does one have to be lucky to get a reward that they have earned in the first place? I think we both agree that, that system in particular is just silly.

I dislike the changes from S2 to S3.

S2 had a full shedule so there could be many different race modes and players could play SELECTIVE.
S3 had an US centered shedule. It was "do or die" and was heavily unbalanced like Eu slots getting 2 3h party (c) races or 2 descent (s) in the same slot in a week.

All different racemodes were mainly in the 2am or 5am slot in my Timezone.
I grew tired of normal mode races, especially the longer ones.
The fun/competive setting is pure randomness. "Oh first of class? to bad this 60 min Turbo is Fun try the next one it's competive"

Even in S2 there were 3h races I only killed hillock first, did fetid/crab first got 1 point and quit with 5 Points in 15min. Why should should I bother participating in other normal races.
The mods were introduced because players grew tired of normal race modes and now we are back to a shedule where mainly no mod races reward demigods?

A disappointing rewardsystem a horrible shedule for 2 seasons. Why should I bother getting more than "white ilvl 100 item" tier points?
But here is the perspective of me who could easily get to the 2nd tier and if I push a bit also the 1k tier(10-14 avg points per race):
Currency Rewards->I would do more races.
Far better rewards->I would do more races.
More interesting->I would do more races
Full shedule that allows selective racing->I would do more racing.


Season 5 will pretty much be the same. I will laugh if there will be another 8h race on Monday/Tuesday.

Why working on a Descent2? Would it be that hard to give players some currency, leveled gem rewards(lazy ass solution racecurrency + gem = gem+ 1 level) and a level 15/26 character and start in act2/3.
A harder solution would be to create a wipe race where a2/a3 gets scaled down to a1 levels.
Imagine a level 12 vaal in turbo.

Or even adding a bitfield to track down the gemchoices of accounts and remove them as reward. I called that idea fingerprint, so regular racers suddenly would be forced to play spark templar because cleave won't be dropped by the first zombie after muling a certain amount of times.

Or how about modified gemsrewards(level 31 gems for level 4 for example)

This could be even used to beat Blamt bosses: Totem+ Spellgem/Flame totem.

Even the rewards being items+tradeable alt art, would offer players to use the alt art on different leagues.

Those are all suggestion somebody or me did already.

But watching the ladders of different seasons show that players grow tired of the same content and either quit or barely do any races.

Cash and/or real world value rewards are a bad idea until some kind of reliable anti-cheat is implemented.

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boof wrote:

Cash and/or real world value rewards are a bad idea until some kind of reliable anti-cheat is implemented.

I was told they can't do that unless they have legal backing, because it would be considered spyware and very expensive.

Most games that run leagues and tournaments for cash run an anti cheat client (at least shooters). Not sure what would make this game special?

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boof wrote:

Most games that run leagues and tournaments for cash run an anti cheat client (at least shooters). Not sure what would make this game special?

I think it's because this is an indie game and they just don't have the money? This is just speculation on my part, but it seems fairly obvious GGG doesn't care about maphacking or else at least some people would get banned. The fact that seemingly nobody ever gets or got banned for maphacking leads me to believe that they either can't detect it or don't really care enough to try and ban the people who cheat.

Das jus me doe

I think you even suggested that, that the rewards should be weapons with an alt Art which can be removed and traded boof.

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I was told they can't do that unless they have legal backing, because it would be considered spyware and very expensive.

On that terms even knowing that hardware you use is considering Spyware.
Installing a kernel rootkit would be a different matter.

It's not that hard to add crc checks for self integrity, send a keymodule with private keys to get checksums of relevant functions checking for modifications.

The problem is rather how easily the detection can be bypassed.

There are expensive detection which require much effort to be bypassed beside user knowledge how to use it like Blizzards Warden, which was written by a 3rd party company and Blizzard doesn't even know what it can fully do.

And their are beaten primitive detections like Punkbuster, Cheating Death etc.

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Hilbert wrote:

I think you even suggested that, that the rewards should be weapons with an alt Art which can be removed and traded boof.

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I was told they can't do that unless they have legal backing, because it would be considered spyware and very expensive.

On that terms even knowing that hardware you use is considering Spyware.
Installing a kernel rootkit would be a different matter.

It's not that hard to add crc checks for self integrity, send a keymodule with private keys to get checksums of relevant functions checking for modifications.

The problem is rather how easily the detection can be bypassed.

There are expensive detection which require much effort to be bypassed beside user knowledge how to use it like Blizzards Warden, which was written by a 3rd party company and Blizzard doesn't even know what it can fully do.

And their are beaten primitive detections like Punkbuster, Cheating Death etc.

Of course, you are about to drop the knowledge bomb on us now by telling us why they aren't using any this technology to ban cheaters. I bet it's too expensive, though I wouldn't really know, they might just not care enough.

Ok a bit simpler:

It's not hard to add a memory scanner which scans regions of the client and check if there are some external hooks.
2 lines of code would be enough to ban the multihack for example.

Imagine somebody asks you:"Are you cheating?" and you are connected to a lie detector.
But you could modify the liedetector result any time.
A primitive lie test would only ask you are you cheating and there are answers yes or no, so you would simple switch yes and no.

A better attempt would be different questions but then you could imagine somebody knocks at your door asks questions and instead of you some stranger answers the questions while you are constrained and gagged in the cellar.

The problem is how hard will it be to lock you up in the cellar.
Somebody putting effort into hacking the game will always get away.
A basic protection might protect against amateur attempts.
But you can see that Blizzard changed the strategy in terms of gamehacking by sueing every developer of paid 3rd party tools since 2005 because they put much effort into an antidetection.

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I bet it's too expensive, though I wouldn't really know, they might just not care enough.

Paying a 3rd party company is expensive (6-7 digit sums) and even then it's quesionable if you receive the source code or given company still exists in the short lived silicon valley to fix critical weaknesses.

But if you don't have got much knowledge in a field like detections mechanisms and antidebugging you will easily be outwitted by professesionals and the gap of knowledge will always exist.
Sure there are ways to delay hackers like GGG does by contious patching but if somebody puts effort into it he will find ways automatically to identify and adapt towards the stuff he needs.