#Remove the League System in its current form.

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

remote nest
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One of the game’s unique selling points is the idea that there’s "no need to level, you can jump straight into dungeons". However, that isn’t entirely true.

Yes, you can technically start doing dungeons immediately, but Contender feels more like a tutorial phase where you’re introduced to the one-boss dungeons. Adept is where the actual dungeons begin, with all abilities finally unlocked. That raises the question: why are there two additional leagues after that? Why not move straight from Contender into an infinite scaling league like Eternal and let players begin the real grind?

Instead, we’re forced through extra leagues that add nothing new except more three-boss dungeons. On top of that, there’s a frustrating gearing system where your final gear doesn’t even start dropping until you’ve completed four leagues that are nearly identical.

So what’s the point of skipping traditional leveling if all you’re really doing is leveling inside dungeons? At least with a normal leveling experience you get a storyline and some variety. Here, it’s the same content repeated again and again. Don’t get me wrong, later on you’ll be pushing those dungeons repeatedly anyway, but at least then you’re engaging with the real endgame, not slogging through a drawn-out precursor to it.

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Adding to it: Seasons with hard resets make this problem even worse.

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And to be entirely honest: We had a good system when the first playtest last year was held in february or so. Why was that changed? (Same goes for the queue system, but thats another failed evolution that can be tackled in another thread)

unborn rune
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well, technically Champion introduces a second curse

I'm personally in favour of introducing the first curse in Champion and the second in Paragon, but I also wouldn't mind shortening the league system

wet saffron
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Remove paragon, rename eternal to paragon (or don’t) and expand the ilevel brackets between each league to 100 instead of 75. I think that would help matchmaking AND reduce progression bloat.

Or you could even squish the ilevels down from 330 max to 250~ max.

gusty skiff
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i prefer season resets, if it comes with new ways to play

frigid badger
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The game is fine as it is in that matter, its a good time to learn without feeling stressed that you’re at the ”highest rank” and already at the endgame so its also a psycological thing.

remote nest
remote nest
manic kernel
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Let me being with saying that I think the league system needs a revamp to reduce some issues (difficulty curve, queue times for example)

However, I disagree with you about removing them.

I think your argument falls short because there's no meaningful differences between the leagues and eternal.

The reason it feels like leveling for you is only psychological. There's no "tedious grind". If the leagues were removed, the only difference is that you would have access to each capstone dungeons faster.

The gearing issue will remain the same more or less, the tutorial phase will also be present because people won't magically learn the dungeons. The difficulty curve will be worse if all affixes and abilities are there from the start.

And on the other hand, it will create more issues... less sense of progression. No "cap" to reach for players given an idea of how good they are. More frustration and lack of common goal overall.

I think the leagues are important so that newcomers are not overwhelmed

frigid badger
# remote nest Then just stay in contender? Just because some people are slow, doesnt mean ever...

And with that sentence you proved why your idea is not good, you are already getting annoyed just hearing about people not being able to perform in eternal correctly. What do you think will happend when new players underperform ingame in eternal?
So now you have people ingame telling that to new people that they should go back to contender and learn what? There are barely any mechanics or hard hitting stuff in contender, you wont learn anything from there other then the basics of your own character. Your idea just creates alot of tension between new players and players with experience which will only make new players even less interested in this game then they already are.
Its not like the current game is getting overflowed with new players.

They made a patch not too long ago to make the learning curve less steep because alot of new players that wasnt familiar with MMOs had problems learning the game and just got frustrated. And now you wanna bring it to a much more steep learning curve then it was before that update. It doesnt make sense at all.

remote nest
remote nest
manic kernel
manic kernel
frigid badger
manic kernel
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The leagues are just "artificial", there here for perception / psychological reasons.

Your proposition will essentially change nothing that matters mechanically.

remote nest
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No, i wanna reduce this useless leveling experience which is nothing but a gear grind. Why not cut the crap out and just let me grind the final gear from the start rather than spend idk how many hours to even get there...

manic kernel
frigid badger
remote nest
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No, you would reduce the max gear level.

remote nest
frigid badger
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They already said that they wanna reduce the grinding time to get gear and make it more easily available to get an alt, which in itself is what you want; less grind to the endgame just that you want it in your own special way.

remote nest
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Fine by me, but dont sell the game as "no leveling".

manic kernel
remote nest
manic kernel
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For a very good player, you proposition will make the whole thing slower

manic kernel
# remote nest No you dont, I jumped in eternal as well.

Say they remove the leagues.

Current eternal 1 becomes eternal 29, since all leagues levels are now in eternal.

That's at least 15 dungeons to get there.

With the leagues, if you do only the capstone, that's 4 dungeons to get to Eternal 1.

That's 11 dungeon less.

Ergo, your proposition is to have more grind to get to the same level.

remote nest
frigid badger
manic kernel
manic kernel
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(And no I wasn't boosted, 100% pug only)

remote nest
manic kernel
crystal sonnet
# remote nest One of the game’s unique selling points is the idea that there’s "no need to lev...

Its really good for new players, and bad for people who already did it few times, because there is no challenge for eternal players in that league, its just grind.

  1. So the solution is skipping for eternal players, but it could lead us to bad que for new players
  2. Other solution - give for eternal players better reward, so if you try help new players, you can get something from it as a reward, not just wasted nerves and energy) It also could be good if high eternal player help low eternal group to learn
  3. Third solution - make option to unlock grind rewards, if they already unlocked in other character

Also now most efficient way to play that leagues - farm 1-2 lvl dungeons until you unlock capstone, then end capstone few times, then repeat. In that way you can unlock eternal like in 1-2 days.

stray folio
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a lot of this would be solved by letting you queue directly for what you want but that just circles back to the whole queue time issue

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I think a lot of problems stem from them trying to cater to both the people interested in a pure push game (who probably wouldn't have any issues if you outright started with BIS gear and went right into pushing) and casual players who aren't really interested in that kind of competitive pushing

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leading to all the weird padding with leagues that really add very little

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It's understandable, since the subset of players interested in not only playing a pure push game but also doing it here instead of wow is probably vanishingly small, but they kinda need to pick a lane to focus on unless they expand the team enough to put out content to satisfy both

frigid badger
# stray folio It's understandable, since the subset of players interested in not only playing ...

What popular online games these days doesnt offer both competetive and casual gameplay? Its healthy for the game to have both and not to talk about money for the developers so they can keep developing the game. Shooting games solved it with ranks (so you get matched up with opponents at your skill lvl) MMOs does it by adding difficulties and you can choose yourself at what level you wanna play the game.. I dont see how that is a problem tho. If you are one of those pushers you soon wont see the casual player side of this game anyways and it dont matter if they underperform in lower leagues or low eternals, you can still do them in time with alot of misstakes.

stray folio
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I don't disagree that it'd be healthy for the game to have both, I just think they're trying to massage what is fundamentally not very casual friendly content (speedrunning a set of dungeons) into something casuals will play, and I think we can see how well that's worked out

manic kernel
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Speedrunning and timing dungeons are two vastly different things btw

stray folio
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in an ideal world they'd be able to develop content for both types of players to play, but they're limited by the team size from what I can tell atm - m+ as a game doesn't have the inherent variation that pvp games provide, and they can't really put out the same breadth of content that mmos with their massive teams do

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you know what I mean, but calling it timed dungeons probably has an even worse connotation for casual players since it directly implies a failstate

manic kernel
# stray folio you know what I mean, but calling it timed dungeons probably has an even worse c...

I understand what you are trying to say, but i disagree about the fact that having a timer in inherently casual unfriendly.

First I think we need to stop conflating casual with "bad players".

In a game like fellowship you'll probably have casuals at every difficulty level except the very top.

It doesn't take a long time to reach the score of the spider for example. You can very casually get to it in a season time span.

You probably also have people with hundred of hours of play that still haven't cleared paragon.

I think dungeons (and 8 man raid) are content that can appeal to both a hard-core audience (due to infinite scaling) and casuals alike.

frigid badger
stray folio
# manic kernel I understand what you are trying to say, but i disagree about the fact that havi...

I don't think all casual players are bad players, but generally from what I've read over several years of m+ discourse with people asking for timers to be removed, casuals really don't like the timer (even when it's so lenient that it doesn't matter).

Regarding the spider point - you'd think that, and it certainly is not that difficult. However, the reality again is that by their own metrics, the vast majority of people didn't even hit eternal - hell, even in wow, less than 20% of m+ participants hit KSL

As for dungeons (I hope they don't branch out into raids anytime soon given manpower), this is true to an extent but I'm not sure how viable it is if that's the only content in the game

stray folio
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vs speedrunning where it's actually open-ended since you can just try to beat your own time

manic kernel
frigid badger
# stray folio idk if this is a language issue but the existence of a timer directly implies a ...

That also depends alot on who you are asking - some people get motivated with a timer to always try and beat it, some might get demotivated by it, but when you build a game around timing dungeons I am sure those who join that game arent in a failstate as that would just be stupid on another whole level. Wow and m+ I can buy that, but not in this game as the whole game is based on running timed dungeons.

stray folio
manic kernel
# stray folio I mean we can only really go off data we have have no? Unless there's some facto...

That's my point, we have no actionable data.

Your feeling that casuals dont like timers is just that, a feeling.

I consider myself a casual and I like having a timer.

Also, the definition of casual vary a lot.

My opinion, because it's just that, is that the spider is very casual friendly.

The whole game is casual friendly.

I might get smack saying that, but the gear grind is only an issue for try harders. Fellowship is way more casual friendly than wow in that regard

stray folio
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well to address both of you - I don't think it's an unreasonable inference given the data, coupled with hundreds, maybe thousands of threads/posts for not only this game but wow about removing m+ timers that it's generally a pretty big factor in deterring casuals

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and in that regard I think the league system as it is does little to really address that, which is why I'm in favour of the suggestion in the absence of a decent rework to actually address the curve

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and no, I don't think making you overgear things to push the curve back to champion or wherever the wall is atm really does that

frigid badger
manic kernel
stray folio
frigid badger
stray folio
stray folio
stray folio
manic kernel
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And I think the league system is important mostly for casuals

manic kernel
wet saffron
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I can kind of agree that the timer can be somewhat stressful given a potential fail state. That however is because of how M+ operates. It’s harsher on you not to finish on time. In this game, missing the timer only really matters on capstone dungeons (and eternal, I think). You can still progress if you don’t make time. While it’ll upset random lobbies, a tank can take their time, and still progress the account somehow, until they have fantastic gear and feel compelled to push for capstone. I would encourage more people to run the capstone slow at first to learn it, if the group they were in were patient.

A lot of gamers aren’t patient though.

But my point is, the timer isn’t as stressful in this game, because unlike WoW which has a lot of facets, larger/longer dungeons and more emphasis on recovery and planning between fights and pulls, this game is more consistent and constant in its action from start to finish. At least in my experience, the timer isn’t really a hanging thought on my mind unless the dungeon is specifically a capstone and I’m trying to clear it to advance.

primal mauve
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I agree that the current form of the League system is heavily flawed, but I disagree that the solution is just "remove 2 of the difficulties". There honestly needs to be a lot more thought put into it than that and, as of this moment, I am way too tired to offer more insite than that.

timid stirrup
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paragon can definitely be removed with nothing of value being lost

champion and adept can be merged

difficulty should be lowered from adept onwards, the game still has an insane spike of difficulty going from contender to adept that you dont see anywhere else in the game

leagues can also be shortened without any issues
there shouldnt be 2 difficulties that drop the same ilvl, people will always choose the easier one since there is barely any reason to choose the harder one

all of this would shorten matchmaking times

ofc the best "fix" would be to get more players to play the game but that aint happening any time soon

or they could just introduce AI teammates so you can actually play the game without waiting for god knows how long in queues

The biggest reason why any of this is a problem is because of queue times, having 4 leagues isnt bad if you can just get into a game instantly (although even in that case paragon is still just completely pointless i really dont understand why that one exists, its literally just eternal but its not called eternal, just an extra bit of grinding before u can start farming your BiS)

also timer should be removed in anything that isnt high eternal
devs already said that they kinda agree since the timer is essentially useless early on and it just stresses out new players

manic kernel
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They also can introduce new affix / abilities / difficulties in a more staggered way.

This would allow for champion and Paragon to make sense as "tutorial", and will reduce the learning curve.

The fact that Paragon is easier than the previous leagues because you get gems and weapons and first leggo if you're lucky is feeling weird.

neon sierra
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My feeling about progression system is that 16 dungeons to unlock all heroes abilities is too much. Moreover, I guess than a league could be deleted and ilevels ranges in each league adapted in consequence. Paragon seems not brought more difficulties.

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Gem drop should be possible sooner too

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And having ability to put a gem slot in a non slotted item seems mandatory

prime nimbus
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I agree that 6 queues is a joke with these player numbers and I feel since this is a niche game is not like we're going to get more players even after the reset.
Quickplay should be removed, so that's one queue less. Still 5 to go
You can maybe keep contender, merge adept champion and paragon. Then Eternal.
That way you have 3 queues and with numbers like 3k players queues should be shorter...
Or merge contender and adept, champion & paragon, then eternal.

visual sequoia
wet saffron
ivory atlas
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You can grab 135 gear and suddenly youre in champion capstone

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Im not sure what the grind is for experienced players