Challenge League Post-mortems

NiceNshort likeit

great post, looking forward to the next leagues!

It is surprising that it took this long to realize that (1) league with shared content between the two game formats (hc vs sc) was the ideal route. HC leagues have been generally less rewarding than the SC leagues - really annoying considering advancement in the league is more difficult on HC. Not sure if this was deliberate or just general bad luck for HC. Ideally the theme for the next new league is better than the previous leagues. Tempest was, in my opinion, terrible. Did not play warbands but I also did not hear anything good about it.

Side note: I would love to know what players "fondly" recall invasion. I do not know any and I seem to remember the league was super dead after a matter of weeks. The bosses were nerf'd more times than I can conveniently remember and they were still over-tuned at the end of the league.

Double side note: Learnt is generally considered colloquial. My understanding is it is more common on your side of the English speaking world but an international publication should probably strive to avoid local dialects in an effort to be more cosmopolitan. Basically, it was really annoying to read "learnt" that many times in a single post.

Sounds nice :o

(The last part of the post, since its all i read :P)

Can't wait for the new leaguessssssssssssssss!

Interesting insights. Thanks for taking the time to write that up.

"

Chris wrote:

We have also learnt that rewards should be present throughout the league, rather than just available for top players in end-game content.

This, thank you for remembering casual players.

Nice :D first Challenges where hard [ im talking about PowerRanger ones :D - i didn't like Blue i try Hard Core and died lvl 25 new record :D ]

But this idea is cool.
and Chest thing i remember back when there was a big Chest i miss them so much :(

I really love that kind of articles. It reminds me WotC.

But there is still something that I feel is lacking to PoE : interactions between specific league uniques and the league itself.

Most of the league specific uniques are useless, some are OK and a few are OP (while still very specific) which is... of course perfect for the balance of a game but none of them are related to the league.
The last league that had uniques that exploited its mechanics was rampage and it was more than 1 year ago.

If you like comparison PoE <-> MtG, you can notice that in each sets we have a couple of cards that are very specific to the extension (PoE equivalent: Null and Void) but that are only powerful in the latter extension and some that use the extension mechanics but become staples (Headhunter).

It would be cool that we have more uniques that exploit the league mechanics in the future, even if they are bad in the permanent leagues.

Thank-you for this post, it was interesting to read how you made decisions based on the information and resources available. I trust GGG will continue to improve its Challenge Leagues and create more dynamic risk/reward values for them.

With that said, I am interested to see what this upcoming "singular" challenge league will be like...
Overlapping content with minor differences? I think GGG is onto something with this. When i start a HC challenge league i tend to stay in it rather than migrate to the SC one just to experience new content.

With the incentives changing, my decisions will likely also change (i like shiny stuff, cmon!). Changing the prizes will reinforce the idea to switch between leagues. MTX rewards are a much better way to spend resources rather than shipping actual product; you can create new MTX's, give them out as prizes (and also sell them later on, after the event has ended).

Good work GGG, looking forward to a more detailed release!

Thanks

P.S. Invasion and Beyond the hardest challenge leagues for me! Got to lvl 66 and ripped to a unique beyond boss, got to lvl 81 in Invasion and ripped on Mao Kun to Fairgraves, of all things.