Dec 24: One-week HC Race

Thirion to be fair, DDT and Panda were using the old alch recipe aggressively so they had the mats to reroll often. Kripp decided against trading aggressively (which I think is needed for races now) so had to conserve his resources in case he did find a higher lvl map. From what I saw they weren't cheap with high lvl maps but wasting everything on 62-63 maps is a waste.

His Turbo league argument is still valid. ;)
There were barely players getting into merciless so trading rares was much harder unless you farmed many mid level items. I think we got only around 7 alchs/chaos mainly for skill gems.

There were even 2 points we ran out of alchs or had to sell quiet decent rare to get 35+ quantity on open field maps or maze + magic/rare/pack/15+ mod.

At the end of the race I had around 3 63+ maps, 3 alchs 2 scourings and 1 chaos left.

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p.s. Chris, need to give out more demigods, to plummet the value

10 almost parallel 1h races with 5-20 min difference on the same day.
There will certainly different class winners there:p

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I hope not, too many demigods have been given out lately... value is plummeting.

I have never seen a Demigod trade here, since October, so what's the value?
Fools Gold on a botter board?

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RandallPOE wrote:

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CrazylikE wrote:

I think this showes you that if you play a lot you can get really far even if you play solo. I saw hilbert write earlier that you wont get further than 74-77 in a weekrace playing solo, but im pretty sure I could have been closer to 80 if I didnt die with all those characters first.

The thing is you will eventually hit a brick wall where running lower level maps gives you virtually nothing. 80 solo in a week race really would be impossible unless you had such phenomenal luck that you could constantly run 65+ maps and the will never happen.

I agree with this. I ended at 77(99% solo), and in later part of sunday I did a not great 66 and got about 9%. If I was lucky enough to be getting higher maps like that regularly 80 would definitely be reasonable, but getting that many maps in that range is way too unlikely.

I was leveling good until 74, at which point 60/61 maps become damn near meaningless exp wise. Didn't help that I went on a 2+ day streak of getting 99% 60/61 maps.

I get that its an ARPG and stuff is supposed to be random, but relying on randomness to be able to run actual content to me is just a horribly stupid idea. I'll hope that its only like this right now because its beta and so much content is missing still.

Its also a massive issue in competitions when the person who wins does so because of luck and not skill/time management. Seems like it defeats the purpose.

I think it is a pretty clear issue, but how would you solve it? Reducing the range of levels maps can have seems like the only reasonable solution and if they choked off all maps above level 65 except for the unique (obviously!) it would limit the possibility to level further.

Act 3 will definitely change the situation quite a bit since the higher level content it makes available also makes the level 100 hardcap relevant. But we are again dealing with random maps vs consistent content. Chris mentioned an overlap in maps vs consistent content, which is a way to reduce the randomness.

Another way to improve it is through tweeking the higher level maps droprate to increase with players levels. That also has the advantage of keeping the difficulty up. But that is close to the Morrowwind complex - Increase level and the content increases in difficulty as well. That is not really desirable.

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Thirion wrote:

SNIP
Kripp had around 30 maps/alchs+scour in the end - that already says that he had a bad map roll tactic (his tactic works in HC but not races - i used it in races too and failed)

I can't imagine you watched much of the stream. I watched nearly every second of it as I was racing at roughly the same times, and he just flat out got screwed. His map rolls might not have been optimal, but he tried many different types of maps, and got screwed 99% of the time.

As for what they had left at the end, that doesn't say what you suggest at all. They stopped using the stuff at the end because they spent days using ridiculous amounts of them only to get nothing out of it.

The fact of the matter is that the way endgame is implemented is flawed. It is left far too much up to randomness, and defeats the purpose of it being a competition. When two players can play 100% identical, but one automatically wins because of lucky map drops, theres a big problem.

It's only flawed for 1 week races as the luck will even out over a 1 month race and players won't reach maps in races shorter than 8 hours.

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The fact of the matter is that the way endgame is implemented is flawed. It is left far too much up to randomness, and defeats the purpose of it being a competition. When two players can play 100% identical, but one automatically wins because of lucky map drops, theres a big problem.

What is the big problem with that? There are multiple ways to minimize the effects of randomness, if you fail to utilize these strategies then it is at your own risk. If someone happens to get lucky I don't see anything wrong with that.

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Metronomy wrote:

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The fact of the matter is that the way endgame is implemented is flawed. It is left far too much up to randomness, and defeats the purpose of it being a competition. When two players can play 100% identical, but one automatically wins because of lucky map drops, theres a big problem.

What is the big problem with that? There are multiple ways to minimize the effects of randomness, if you fail to utilize these strategies then it is at your own risk. If someone happens to get lucky I don't see anything wrong with that.

The big problem is that every other random factor has multiple ways to mitigate the effects of said randomness; the map drop system does not. Once you hit a certain level and require accordingly higher maps, pyramid runs and trading are no longer options- either the rng grants you maps or it doesnt, and you win or lose based entirely on luck. And i definitely see something wrong with events ultimately being decided more by rng than by the players choices and actions.

The main problem is that you can climb up only 2 levels on maps but you can fall down several levels.


So if you got for example a level 66 map and got an a level where level 63 maps are still an option you got a chance of 18/37 to find a map which helps from a normal mob which drops a map which is almost 50%
On level 63 you the chance is only 5/24 which is around 20%
Everything lower requires luck from magic/race mobs and is limited to 5/24.

This means if you had luck and obtained a good stack of maps that help it will be more likely to get favorable maps, even the map level drops.

Another problem is that some maps are less likely to drop maps on certain Knockback based builds due small corridors and mobs die in walls reducing or removing all the drops.

There must be a way an easier to obtains maps for example, if you chisel a map to 20% quality there is a 20% chance that a monster drops a map with +1 level from mob killed, this includes normal mobs.

So you normal mobs may drop level 61 maps if chiseled.

Also bosses should get a +3 level mod instead of +2.

This way you have also have a chance that a 20% chiseled level 60 map drops a level 64 map even it's smaller.

Ill try not to comment too much, the community never does like it when I do, but....

Why are we back on the map thing? I never thought 69s in a one week race was a good sign at all, but the community liked it, so I don't see that changing, but still complaining that not everyone is going to be able to run them none stop? A end game with value is one of the best touches to this game imo, lets not try to have that taken away. Please.

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KoTao wrote:

The big problem is that every other random factor has multiple ways to mitigate the effects of said randomness; the map drop system does not. Once you hit a certain level and require accordingly higher maps, pyramid runs and trading are no longer options- either the rng grants you maps or it doesnt, and you win or lose based entirely on luck. And i definitely see something wrong with events ultimately being decided more by rng than by the players choices and actions.

People say they dont want parties to have an advantage, so they keep the map drop rates the same regardless of if you are in a party or not, and they also say they want more ways to get better maps. Well you cant have both/everything...You may say that it was all luck, but it really wasnt, you still have a lot of choices such as map mods and such, if two equally skilled players use the exact same strategy (which I doubt they did) then what difference does it make who wins? And why shouldnt luck separate them?

I really doubt luck was the deciding factor in this race anyway, the winners did 2 things:
Put in a lot of time (more than anyone else)
Did not die