Race Ideas, Improvments, and Suggestions

For DC -

45 Minutes
Fix the Frenzy Stuffs on swords ( both things imo )
Give shadow/scion options for single target ( for both spell/attack based )
Fix Rukuku

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Throzz wrote:

ENDLESS LEDGE
Guaranteed Core Items. Right now EL can be very frustrating if certain simple items like a coral/iron/topaz ring, medium flask, jade/amber/lapis amulet, or base weapon doesn't drop. Either add some (not all) in the starting chest or add certain guaranteed drops to the bosses. Say the first boss drops an iron and coral. The next boss drops medium flasks. The next one drops resist rings. I realize this isn't suppose to be endless decent but just a little something to help out would be huge.

Limited Monster Types. Certain Act 3x mobs (and others) in the early zones are a pain. Make it so they cant spawn until later.

So i played an EL yesterday (Marauder) and had all these issues. No rings for the first 20 min, small life flasks for the first few zones, Evangelists in zone 2 and 3, Vulnerability Necros with Sparkers in zone 2, A3x Leapers in zone 3, etc. I survived just fine, got a bit lower level than usual (21), but i had a blast. I like challenge.

I've been trying to understand why high end racers complain about challenge in EL so much. Now even Throzz, who i thought might be the only EL defender among them! Everything that's complained about is what makes the race interesting. EL is adapting to randomness on the fly (i.e. the major skill part of racing), taken to the extreme. Why do they hate it so?

I think it comes down to dislike of extreme variance. Top players get in the habit, want to feel like they are able to compete for #1 in class, in every single race, for the entire duration of the race. To me that's a silly goal/mindset. You can't have as interesting of a textural experience (lots of decisions) in the short-term (minute to minute) if the long-term experience (1 hour) is based on a goal of low-variance constant competitiveness.

For some of them, as soon as a few bad stars align, they lose their morale. Part of being a great racer is emotional control - not letting current roadblocks or a race's result mentally affect you. I feel like PoE racing is still a bit in its infancy, as a lot of the top racers (at least the ones who stream or post on the forums) do not have top-tier emotional control.

Not every. single. race type should cater to this no-variance, flowers and sunshine mindset. No-variance also happens to cater to another player type, the ones that want a constant stream of season points. They dislike races that don't award points on death. To me both these extremes are doing it wrong. It appears that the per-race and per-season reward structure are actually skewing how people want the races to work. Rather than the other way around. I think races should be built up as interesting (e.g. EL in its current state), regardless of the reward structures. And then build reward structures around them.

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Throzz wrote:

Starting Grace Period. Not sure about this one, but 10 seconds to picks up everything needed at the start before being allowed to proceed might be nice.

Again, this is just removing more skill out of the race. I'm terrible at picking the stuff up at the start and item management, it's what keeps me below top-tier. In yesterday's race i even forgot to pick up Sweep, which is a huge problem. But i don't want to be spoon-fed a 10 second grace period.

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unsane wrote:

EL is adapting to randomness on the fly (i.e. the major skill part of racing), taken to the extreme. Why do they hate it so?

I like normal races because I can measure my progression. When I first started racing, I reached Merveil at level 11 in ~40 minutes. Nowadays, I reach Merveil at level 12 in ~30 minutes. I'm happy that I'm improving. This type of progression can also be seen in the Descent races, where you try to hit certain zones at certain times/levels. Endless ledge ignores all this because mob types and item types are unpredictable, so you can spend literally three times longer in a zone because you got A3x monsters instead of A1 zombies.

It's why I still want to see progression based races rather than races ending with 30+ minutes of farming in a zone. I don't think very many racers actually enjoy farming the final zone forever, it's just what you are forced to do to get the best experience.

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terrex wrote:

have some kind of indication that lets you know the path is to a corrupt spawn.

This is a great idea, very thematic and makes ~everyone happy. It would likely be trivial for them to change the tint of the corrupted layout area spawn. By that i mean, the leg that leads to a corrupted entrance, could have a corrupted red tint to it.

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jstq wrote:

And for the fuck sake, widen this damn passages, remove the doors and slow down this stupid mobs that run 50 times faster than you. GGG always talks they working on desync, but this is just a lie. This will greatly reduce desynch without changing anything significant. The dumb game design in one of the main things that cause desynch. It feels like all that GGG wanted to show with this current location and enemy state is - 'We want players to experience more desynch and we are happy about that'. I dont believe that people in ggg are so dumb that they cant notice such obvious things that cause desynch a lot. If they are - I guess its time to move on for us.

The narrow passages are there by design. Mob collision is by design. What you are actually asking for here is to remove mob collision. That's never going to happen, it is a fundamental design choice they built the whole game around. Mob collision is the disease, desync is a symptom. GGG are not going to cure the disease, they are treating the symptom.

That said, i don't necessarily think that the game would be better without mob collision anyway.


Another thought occurred to me: complaints about EL are a symptom. Cutting out EL or changing it doesn't cure the disease. The disease is the season rewards structure. Because season rewards _exist_ and all race types fall under the same season, players feel the need to play in every race they can, whether they love the race mode or hate it. Players should be playing race types they enjoy, and skipping the race types they hate. How can we incentivize that? Ideas welcome.

Possible solutions?
1) Seasonal rewards by race type. Don't like EL? Don't go for the EL reward.
2) Permanent "time attack" ladders by race type (like signature records but not based on season). No prize, just status. EL would work well for that. EL open 24/7 for 1 hour time attacks (maybe even other lengths). Top 50 EL ladder by class.
3) Overlapping races and modes. (I don't think this works.)

For #3, e.g.

1pm 1hour vanilla
1pm 1hour EL
1pm 1hour D:C

The points would take some tweaking to make sure all race modes awards about the same. The problem here is that people would still feel the need to play modes they hate, if there is less competition in them. So it's not a solution.

Sorry to spam the thread rather than 1 monster post, i've only got bite-sized pieces of time this morning.

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janimauk wrote:

there should definitely be incentive to progress past dicks in vanilla races. 1h races have become such a long farm fest aswell

All they really need to do is add boss points, as has been suggested many times, and by Throzz above. Incentivize progression. Not just 3 points for first Dominus (which is better than nothing since it incentivizes 1 or 2 teams), but 1 point for everyone who kills each Vaal, 2 (or 1) for each Dominus. Just think about that. How much more interesting would vanilla races be if everyone were trying to kill Vaal in 1hr races, Dom in 2 hr races, and Cruel Vaal/Dom in 3hr?

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unsane wrote:

Spoiler

"

Throzz wrote:

ENDLESS LEDGE
Guaranteed Core Items. Right now EL can be very frustrating if certain simple items like a coral/iron/topaz ring, medium flask, jade/amber/lapis amulet, or base weapon doesn't drop. Either add some (not all) in the starting chest or add certain guaranteed drops to the bosses. Say the first boss drops an iron and coral. The next boss drops medium flasks. The next one drops resist rings. I realize this isn't suppose to be endless decent but just a little something to help out would be huge.

Limited Monster Types. Certain Act 3x mobs (and others) in the early zones are a pain. Make it so they cant spawn until later.

So i played an EL yesterday (Marauder) and had all these issues. No rings for the first 20 min, small life flasks for the first few zones, Evangelists in zone 2 and 3, Vulnerability Necros with Sparkers in zone 2, A3x Leapers in zone 3, etc. I survived just fine, got a bit lower level than usual (21), but i had a blast. I like challenge.

I've been trying to understand why high end racers complain about challenge in EL so much. Now even Throzz, who i thought might be the only EL defender among them! Everything that's complained about is what makes the race interesting. EL is adapting to randomness on the fly (i.e. the major skill part of racing), taken to the extreme. Why do they hate it so?

I think it comes down to dislike of extreme variance. Top players get in the habit, want to feel like they are able to compete for #1 in class, in every single race, for the entire duration of the race. To me that's a silly goal/mindset. You can't have as interesting of a textural experience (lots of decisions) in the short-term (minute to minute) if the long-term experience (1 hour) is based on a goal of low-variance constant competitiveness.

For some of them, as soon as a few bad stars align, they lose their morale. Part of being a great racer is emotional control - not letting current roadblocks or a race's result mentally affect you. I feel like PoE racing is still a bit in its infancy, as a lot of the top racers (at least the ones who stream or post on the forums) do not have top-tier emotional control.

Not every. single. race type should cater to this no-variance, flowers and sunshine mindset. No-variance also happens to cater to another player type, the ones that want a constant stream of season points. They dislike races that don't award points on death. To me both these extremes are doing it wrong. It appears that the per-race and per-season reward structure are actually skewing how people want the races to work. Rather than the other way around. I think races should be built up as interesting (e.g. EL in its current state), regardless of the reward structures. And then build reward structures around them.

"

Throzz wrote:

Starting Grace Period. Not sure about this one, but 10 seconds to picks up everything needed at the start before being allowed to proceed might be nice.

Again, this is just removing more skill out of the race. I'm terrible at picking the stuff up at the start and item management, it's what keeps me below top-tier. In yesterday's race i even forgot to pick up Sweep, which is a huge problem. But i don't want to be spoon-fed a 10 second grace period.

I actually used to like EL for many of the reasons you mentioned. I always considered it a "fun" race that was more focused on racing against the content/yourself than other players due to the large amount of randomness that could occur. I have no problem with this. However after several seasons of that combined with a large percentage of ELs this season I slowly began to approach it as more of a competitive race (probably due to the lack of other race types I could do.) My suggestions were ways to make things slightly more competitive, but you're right, not everybody races this way. Perhaps a better race schedule can change things.

Why would one player who get zombies and spiders every zone get more points for this race than other player who get act 3 mobs every race? How this can be called competition?

I think less shit races and more good races sounds like a good place to start. I would also like the removal of burst races because they are retarded. I would like them to cut the number of EL races down to about zero. Basically in my dreamland were GGG cares about races I would be doing 90-2hr solos every race.

Welp cya guys next season (My guess is 2 months from today) hopefully GGG takes their head out of their asses and fixes racing. A lot of great suggestions in this thread, although personally I'd like EL to be removed from racing, that or have multiple races always overlap so the two time slots that I can actually play my best I'm not stuck doing endless ledge all the time.

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Rithz wrote:

Welp cya guys next season (My guess is 2 months from today) hopefully GGG takes their head out of their asses and fixes racing. A lot of great suggestions in this thread, although personally I'd like EL to be removed from racing, that or have multiple races always overlap so the two time slots that I can actually play my best I'm not stuck doing endless ledge all the time.

I second the removal of EL. I also am for the removal of bursts although u prob are not because u are better at them then me. I wouldnt mind dc being removed or only having very few unless they change the probs with it