Race Event Season One announced!

Been mentioned by plenty of other people in the thread, but this is essentially pointless if you have a job or any kind of commitment outside of PoE.

Here's a list of the events I can compete in (assuming none of these 7:00pm Sunday races are over 3 hours long):

01. Sat 23rd Feb @ 1:00pm - 1 Hour Solo Race (S1E2)
02. Sun 24 Feb @ 7:00pm - 3 Hour Party Race (S1E5)
03. Sat 2 Mar @ 1:00pm - 3 Hour Party Race (S1E16)
04. Sun 3 Mar @ 7:00pm - 2 Hour Solo Race (S1E19)
05. Sun 10 Mar @ 1:00pm - 1 Hour Solo Race (S1E32)
06. Sun 10 Mar @ 7:00pm - 3 Hour Party Race (S1E33)
07. Sun 17 Mar @ 1:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E49)
08. Sun 17 Mar @ 7:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E50)
09. Sun 24 Mar @ 1:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E66)
10. Sun 24 Mar @ 7:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E67)
11. Sat 30 Mar @ 1:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E83)
12. Sat 30 Mar @ 7:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E84)
13. Sun 31 Mar @ 1:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E87)
14. Sun 31 Mar @ 7:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E88)
15. Sat 6 Apr @ 1:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E106)
16. Sat 6 Apr @ 7:00pm - ? Hour Race (S1E107)

Now, let's be generous and imagine I somehow manage 10 points from each of these events. That will give me a grand total of 160 points for the Season. I can't say I'm enthused by the prospect of throwing away my weekends for a month so I can get Goldrim and a couple of other trinkets. The system we had in CB was a lot better and it allowed people to compete when they wanted as opposed to having to sink time into fifty odd events. More importantly, it gave people a fair shot at the reward regardless of whether or not they had outside commitments.

I am in strange position here. I never cared about races or prepared to play one. But after reading this announcement i was left dissapointed anyways.

It's probably becouse you can see a lot of game companies making bad decisions. You know they are bad, they will be proved bad over time and you can even tell them that they are bad but they dont react .. or dont react in time. Or even worse decide not to react becouse it is more profitable. (in short term)

Then you will find that once company that seems to do a lot of things right. They publish fix after fix, reset server in minutes instead of hours and communicate with their players. You get your hopes up ... until you read this announcement.

The prizes are garbage for hardcore. Most of these have little to no value, unique artwork doesn't really mean much when no one is going to use it. A change like this should have been tested in closed beta. Extremely disappointed and now no longer looking forward to races. :/

It's already been mentioned but the season concept caters to the jobless peeps without other responsibilities who can schedule their life around these events. The CB events were much better because you could choose events and be rewarded for doing well in that individual event. GGG just took WoW dailies and introduced them into PoE, and I am now a sad panda.

the solution to reward the successful players with points smartly avoids the closed-beta problem of transfering the orb-rewards over additional chars created on your account and so allowing char counts over your allowed limit.

seeing the amount of leagues i finally understand why ggg allows soo many chars created for free. participating in all races you will have to delete chars after some days nevertheless.

since OB PoE gets worse and worse....

sweet cyou in the races!

Great announcement Chris, I'm sure you guys worked on this for a long time.
I like the RP system but like mentioned above, the event time for the EST is really crap. I can only play on the weekends and I will be no where near the points needed for a good prize.

I really liked the random currency in OB. I think you guys should combine some of that to this system and also add some night time events for the east coast in US.

to all the whiners and complainers about price nerfing:

please recognize that the race prices in closed beta were higher because ggg knew everything gets wiped finally.

running a stable ingame economy for a longer duration (avoid inflation) is much more complicated as you can't force people to use orbs and there is no ingame tax system which allows the devs to reduce the amount of orbs.

many people will only play one char and stop playing when they can't improve it any further. the cheaper the orbs the earlier they reach that point.

for those who don't know what inflation is: prices for gear in trading go up to amounts which are not affordable by the average player.

beautiful!

All the times in the US eastern TZ are during the day all week. Those of us that work a 9-5 have no way to participate. :-(