Settlers League Feedback after 40/40

TLDR:
Great league but I barely did any league features.


The launch went great, EU servers pretty stable atm.
I went into this league with a lot of preparation. I had a plan which build to play, which items I wanted, I had addons set up so that for the first days all I had to do was work off priority lists.
Which was nice, but overall it took me 3 weeks to obtain mageblood and get 40/40. It felt like I had no time to do anything else on the side.

The Town:
Upgrading the town:
The first week was constantly grinding gold to keep the town running and upgrade some buildings. I wasn't mapping fast enough to feed the town sometimes. I lost as much gold in an hour just running the town as I made in a map. Then I also had the feeling I needed to keep the town running over night or I would be at a disadvantage. So the FOMO was there. I spent so much time farming gold that I had no time actually doing things in the town and understanding mechanics there. They were underexplained as well - so... yeah.
In the end I managed to upgrade all the buildings. I stopped running the disenchanters at 2 mil dust. I let mappers run a bit and I did some shipments on and off. I think I did around 20-30 shipments total. A lot of them yielding good loot.

Workforce, Buildings, Tiers:
I get it, this game has an obsession with tiers. You can't just have things drop in one variety there need to be 500 giving the illusion of variance and making things like an auction house or trade site impossible or hard to navigate.
In the town there is absolutely no reason to tier the buildings or the workforce individually. The player could "tier" the efficiency of a building by just putting less people on a job. Ores and such do not need to be unlocked on the building because they are also locked behind are levels. I think I marked a ton of ores that couldn't be mined forever.
There is no point workers cost different amounts of gold per hour - or even have different names because I barely took the time to send them into a map or on a ship mission - I cared very little about their names or wages. Minmaxing had no point too.
Tiering and not communicating means I had a almost fully upgraded mine for a long time, missing out on the gold/ore bonus - which could have been very handy to finance that mine upgrade.
The disenchanter tiers are essentially worker slot tiers.
The runecrafter tiers are essentially recipe tiers - but you don't have the required runes anyways - so why the tiering needed?
The shipyard tiers tier how many ships you have, but they are hard limited by resources too...

Shipments:
So once I upgraded pretty much every building in town I started sending out ships. (I send 1 test mission before that. And the others would have been day 4 or 5) I fulfilled the quota in every port once - and after that they demanded 200k of an ore and then I just was never able to fulfill that again. The demanded goods never changed in the ports I could just send random stuff they didn't want and I didn't find that engaging at all.
If a town demands 100k ore and you get like 2k ore per map, how many maps do you have to run to get a new order in that one port? 50. Do you think that is a reasonable amount of maps to run?

Delayed Looting:
Like I thought before the launch, the town is just a delayed loot mechanic. In maps you loot a bunch of gold and ore and in the town you turn that into other stuff and then you start a timer and then you get the same loot you could have found in a map. Just some place else and with a timer.
I did not enjoy a shipment with 2 divines more than finding 1 div and a t17 map in a 8mod t16 map.
Which is one reason why I didn't engage with this mechanic a lot. Not having the Fomo was an upside as well. but then - why even have a league mechanic

Runecrafting:
I think this could have been very fun to use, if only:
1. It had been communicated beforehand what was possible. Crafting Battlemage on a weapon could open up a lot of fun builds.
2. It weren't so insanely pricy. It's okay that you need runes that drop very rarely. It's not okay to need 15 of them and it's also not okay to need more than 50 of any other rune.
3. Again with the tiering... you don't need 500 animals to do one beast craft. You don't have 20 different horticrafting thingies, you have 3. You are the developers you can control drop rates. I don't need 700 meaningless runes to drop, I need 7 drops that I recognize as being nice. Not great, just nice.

Currency Exchange:
Big win there. I hope you do a better UI at some point. Glad you implemented current rates as well. I think this solves a lot of price fixing on the trade site.
Uber invites need to be in there and the sanctum tomes (which should not be tiered btw - nobody runs them low level if they can run 83)
GOLD COST is super annoying. I know since now you have gold you need reasons to get rid of it - but the auction house might not be it. It's not like you need to punish people to interact amongst each other. This is a feature that increases retention, don't put hurdles on that. Also you can't really exploit it horribly. If there are trade bots flipping currency a gold cost is probably not the way to stop them.
Especially if you trade big amounts it becomes very annoying. 5k gold is a alched t16 map and you can easily spent that on a trade in the exchange and then not have it for your town.

Overall balance of skills and builds and strategies:
has not been this great in a long time. Sure there are strong builds, but a lot of them are on par with each other.
Sure there are good strategies to make currency. but a lot are on par. T17s being still a lot better on goldmaking and scarabs, but also being a ton more annoying. I personally pretty much opted out of t17s. Even though I could run them I just enjoyed t16s more. Which also meant the mageblood currency took a week longer to farm. but still beats doing t17s.
When I had the option to do t17s or run labyrinth for the challenge - I chose lab. hands down.
But I also enjoyed the content creators falling over themselves like clowns trying to peddle their perfect money making strategy and fixing scarab prices over and over again. In the end, doing anything was a net profit. Doing a specific strategy added maybe 10% on top of that, but not a lot.
Doing a halfway decent build was good. No build is truly god tier. Not unless you invest really really big currency. So good job on finding a balance this time and having a somewhat stable market. (without people finding 4 magebloods in one t17)
I think overall a lot of the retention this league had came from this balance. If the average player doesn't feel left behind or not doing enough to keep up then they stay in the fight.


Challenge design:
Some of the challenges are a bit... The unique maps are unfair for SSF for example. Having to spent 3d on a Doryani isn't that fun tbh.
Then the runecrafting challenge and the use currency challenge. I think that cost me 14-20d just to finish those and I could maybe get 4d back from the items I got. Overall a big loss and not really much of a challenge to have enough currency to buy that currency. Maybe in SSF its a bit more trouble to farm some things - but - it's not a challenge if its random.
A lot of the grinds I did not mind. I am a grinder after all.

The changes to item quality:
I still don't get those 100%. Personally I could live without item quality. I don't enjoy the 10 more currency items you have because of them I don't enjoy the randomness of it.
Personally I think you could easily get rid of half the currency and affixes in the game and still have the same game. The item droprates are a lot better now.

Overall state of the game:
Game is still too hard in Act1, I say this in every post, don't punish new players in Act 1, give them a little wake up in Act 2 when they learned the ropes.
Game still needs too much preparation and is too inflexible. I get that idea that the player develops an attachment to their character and you can't just let them switch talents. I still have memories of my first Diablo 1 character.
But this is 2024. I think switching talents should be easier, that attachment can still be there with or without the option to change your character drastically. I would rather have sets of talents so you can try out a different build without committing fully or even ruining something at a big investment currency wise. Leveling a new character is a BIIIG time investment. I have always been a player that likes to play different styles. I leveled at least 20 characters in WoW to max level, I usually played 3-5 characters each addon. And in PoE I try and play 3 builds each league.
Getting a build ready for t17 maps or endgame farm content takes a lot of time and effort. So much that it needs a lot of preparation and currency investment and that takes away from trying out anything else. So this league the day the patch notes dropped I already decided what I wanted to do in the league. When the league launched I had no time to do another build, try out another spell or do anything runecrafting or do a different league related farming strategy. And that's kind of sad isn't it. When your build and strategy planning takes to much time and effort that you cannot easily switch.
So what would I like to see to make that easier? Leveling takes too long, It would be nice if you could start leveling Act 6 with a new character once you beat endgame. If leveling take 2-3 hours it's fine. I know you can speedrun leveling but that's not really fun and it also takes a lot of preparation and time investment beforehand. The ability to have a 2nd character sheet on top of your current that works as a trial version and once you commit you have to pay the changes you make or a fixed amount. Maybe even with gold. Maybe even include a second set of gear for that and not only a second talent tree. I know this won't be implemented, I can still wish for it.

Also at this point I think I am just waiting for PoE2 and hope that this fixes a lot of the things. Like optimized graphics so you don't have to burn 90W just to sit in hideout and trade, or that your fps doesn't die in a 8 mod delirium beyond map with harbingers.

Also where's my beta invite? rude. I would totally give you bad advice like in this post if I could beta test your game.

Overall good game on the Settlers league!

Good luck getting into the beta!

Only thing that stands out for me in this post is the gold cost complaint, If the gold cost were removed from the currency exchange might it be too easy for people to try and game the system? I think the Tax is good and should stay.

Nice feedback btw.

"

it took me 3 weeks to obtain mageblood

This is one of those things that confuse the shit out of me. How did you do it in such a short amount of time?