Race Event Season One announced!

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Bcider wrote:

Just make currency obtained from races nontradeable.

you're not serious, aren't you?

if implemented they would constantly have to run a script which deletes new forum posts with "orbs" and "currency" in it.

i heard they already building a mod bot which auto answeres to "can't deal any damage".

The Quest Prizes and Full-clear Prizes are just sad for every recreational player.

As a "normal" Player, I might earn 1-2 Extra points for top twenty if I get lucky.
But I will NEVER be the first one to achieve any of the quests or full clears.

This is just something which is not going to happen since for every "niche" there´s someone specialized in getting that very very quickly.


As a normal skilled player every race you will get 3-6 RP if you don´t die before that. And get 1-2 extra RP if you run really lucky.
So you probably just grind ~30 races to get that Goldrim and thats that.



And please don´t tell me to train hard, unless I play 40hours/week for the next year I will not be able to be "elite".


Edit: Don´t get me wrong, the races (especially team ones) will be a lot of fun!

Kind of disappointed with this setup. Prizes seem too meh, I think quite a number of the more competitive players are not going to bother because of that sooner or later. I think you are also out-of-touch with what people want / expect from the races (and I'm surprised to see that, considering so much in this game is spot on).

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Rather than running self-contained individual races, we’ve now structured the events into seasons.

This "forces" people to play more races just for grinding purposes and more or less removes the competitive aspect and "cut-throat" feel of the individual races. I think many people loved the races because they were isolated level playing field environments. Opposite to what you are effectively making it now.

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Seasons of races help encourage players to play in multiple events and allow us to provide prizes that transcend individual events - giving players something meaningful and special to work towards over several days or weeks.

Yes. Or it may discourage players to play the events at all, because the rewards are stretched out over such a long period of time, whereas before people could play a race for the prize of the race itself and that was it. To be complete I don't think a system like you mean to add here is necessarily a bad idea, but it should be complimentary and not the main focus.

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In past events we gave out orbs and other currency items as prizes. Because these items had a known value, this had an adverse effect on both the economy and the incentives to play races. If the prizes were low, races seemed unappealing. If the prizes were high, it became mandatory to participate in races to keep up with the inflation the orbs caused. We have avoided this in Open Beta by designing new custom prizes for race events. We still want them to be tradeable, but we want to let the market decide their value.

Again a surprising statement. Let me dissect this one:

- Just because the items had a known value, does not mean that the current prices have no estimated value. The estimated value of these items is going to be low as well, and there you have the same result that races seem unappealing. Enough comments in this thread already to support this.

- Inflation is not a good excuse for not rewarding currency items. Being interested in the economic side of these games myself, I still don't get why all these game companies focus so much on inflation to the point of destroying the fun in their game for it and still not solving the issue. PoE already has a very well designed currency system which is an effective sink in itself. Inflation will still happen anyway, and that's because of other reasons which game developpers don't seem to understand/solve well: effective and useful endgame sinks. That is a whole other discussion though.

- Prizes for races should obviously not be set too high if you don't want to make racing feel mandatory, but really this is a non-argument. If you are involved well enough in the game, you should be able to figure out what are reasonable prizes and what not.

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The prizes...
...they have high trade value because of the exclusive icons.

In my opinion you strongly overestimate the value & use of collectables in a game like this (and in any case I'm not so convinced it is a good road to walk with this game). In the meantime you also cause Item Inflation which may be even worse than Currency Inflation, mainly because there is no effective sink for items (see my earlier comment on useful endgame sinks).

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Your total reward points are still tracked as lifetime points which are eligible for other prizes as you participate in multiple seasons.

Again this sounds fun as a complimentary system in addition to reasonable prizes for individual races. Without reasonable prizes for individual races, the prizes for the lifetime points would need to be attractive enough instead, still leading to the same problem of making the races "mandatory", but even more so than the isolated races with overabundant prizes.

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We understand that this system greatly favours players who play in more events. That’s true of almost any sport or hobby.

For ranking systems yes. However, generally individual events tend to have significant rewards as well, unlike the system you are currently proposing.

I was really looking forward to this announcement and I'm not sure I could be any more disappointed with what I ended up reading.

1) I live on the U.S. east coast and I have a job. It is impossible for me to participate in the vast majority of races. Why are there no 1 or 2 hour races that start >= 6PM EST?

Poor scheduling prevents me from playing in the vast majority of races so I will never get even a mediocre amount of RP. Like I said, I have a job, so I was never expecting to be anywhere near the top of the leaderboard. But now I can't even compete for the middle of the leaderboard. Furthermore, inability to actually compete in even 25% of races means I will be low on live experience which reduces my chances of ever lucking my way to a Demigod Triumph.

2) The incentive structure leaves me with no desire at all to play in races besides as a change of pace. Given the fact that I'm not a professional PoE player, I never expect to win a Demigod nor be at the top of the leaderboard. On top of that, the RP rewards are so weak that I wouldn't even be excited if you sent them to me right now FOR FREE.

So, what's left then? The only incentive to play a race for me, and probably for the majority of players, is just for the race experience per se. In other words, for the majority of your customer base, the races might as well not have any rewards at all! Because there's literally no difference between what you have now and just having no rewards period, unless you are a professional PoE player.

Suggestions:

The non-professional player needs some kind of incentive to play races or your races will be nearly empty come April. I know Kripp and Nugiyen are good marketing tools for you guys but I don't think you'll want them to be live-streaming an April race with 30 professional PoE players in it and nobody else, all of them competing for weak prizes.

There should be some kind of actually USEFUL reward for both XP and progression. Like, if you manage to beat Act 1, you get some orbs. Leave the RP rewards for people who actually care about them but for casual players, orbs must be rewarded. If you're worried about inflation, just reduce the number compared to CB races.

As it stands with the current system, I will probably play one race for the novelty and then never play it again. There's no point in taking part in a competitive activity when it is literally impossible to compete, thanks to a flawed system. And this is coming from someone who planned on playing races whenever possible...

Sounds great can't wait for the races to start!

what NiceSewerRat said!


Also to the inflation aspect.
How does inflation not resolve itself in this game?
If currencies get cheaper, more people will craft and get that sink working again.

hmm, I'm not sure i overly like the price structure but only time will tell.

though honestly you could add some more incentive if you add a random map reward for say every 5 points - might elevate some of those "running out of maps all the time" threads that are riddling the forums as of late.

great to wake up to this!! looks like so much fun!

The times seem a little wonky, there are no event in prime time for the East coast the latest time is 4:00 PM or 12 Midnight.

looking at the times for the races, in my timezone US - Central, aside from the first week there are no events scheduled during the week on non standard work hours.(9-5). And those on the first week start at 11pm, which is a bit late for us working stiffs to play.

So any chance of getting any weekday events in the 6-10pm US central time range?