New Hardcore League Season Ideas

[Qadashael]

Post new ideas for things that you think might be easy to implement, but would change things up for a future season of Hardcore. Bad ideas are OK.

A few from myself:

• Hardcore Speedrunning: A timer ticks up when in quests. A leaderboard tracks the top players getting to 20 by time in quest. All quests lock 1 minute into the quest, preventing other players from entering for the league so that players can't just enter near-complete quests.
• Item degradation. Remove the ability to repair items on server. Possibly double items from chests to compensate. Players need to constantly cycle their items and cannot easily farm gear for mains, and/or need to save their best gear for scary situations.
• Forced team play - Possibly by only opening quests to groups of 3 or more, or having a stacking debuff for number of missing players.
• Some use of veteran status as a means of rerolling on death to mitigate lost progress. You keep favor collected up to level 4 or level 7 based on unlock status.

[Gram]

No action points earned from experience.
If that is excessively hardcore, an alternate means of earning action points in place of experience: 1 ap/100 favor, 1 ap/faction favor reward, or 1 ap/monster manual character deed?

Everyone has permanent Epic Defensive Fighting active.

Remove all vendors, but replace gems with spell components, dissolvers, etc. And leave a torch on the floor somewhere in Rest Stop.

Reduce the overlevel entry limit from 4.

Remove the elite difficulty.

Progressive content unlocking, either over time or based on player influenced milestones. Or both? Allow platinum (or shard) "donations" to be accumulated as "votes" for the content to be unlocked the next day.

Remove all shrines, disallow quest reentry, implement a 2 minute lockout timer, and disable hirelings with divine vitality.

Disable moving forward and backward. crab people crab people

[ironmaiden-br]

1- must play quest at level on normal hard elite.
if you run R1 you can run 1 lv above , R2 2 lvs above R3, 3 levels above, R4 4 lvs above

[Memnir]

Just bring back the Mimic Invasion, or something like it. Don't need to reinvent the wheel every time - and that was honestly the most fun I've had in Hardcore. This season just felt like week-old leftovers as a result, and I didn't partake of it much.

I also don't feel like adding challenge by reductions or restrictions are going to make future seasons fun, either. Challenging, sure. Fun - hard no.
And if it's not fun* - I'm out. That's a game-wide axiom, not just for HCL, but it's been the secret to my long-term enjoyment of the game so I'm going to keep abiding by that mindset.



*for me. YMMV

[DoctorOfLiterature]

I would like to see a Lvl 30 reward. I achieved 1750 favor and reached lvl 20 and stopped. If there had been a lvl 30 reward I would have kept playing to try and reach it.

[TrinityTurtle]

Just bring back the Mimic Invasion, or something like it. Don't need to reinvent the wheel every time - and that was honestly the most fun I've had in Hardcore. This season just felt like week-old leftovers as a result, and I didn't partake of it much.

*for me. YMMV

I'm with you Memnir, I had a blast with the mimics. I got my horse with a month to go, so just kept tooling around collecting up mimic gear because it was silly fun and a good time. I hit this season to get the rewards, I didn't make it season one and two, had to learn to control my add behaviors in an unforgiving setting, so was happy to get them, but the minute I did I just wandered off, there wasn't anything fun to keep me goofing off on hc once I got the footprints (which look hilariously bad on a gnome, they don't scale like horses, I look like a bigfoot faker wearing big wooden foot patterns running around).

[Qadashael]

Just bring back the Mimic Invasion, or something like it. Don't need to reinvent the wheel every time - and that was honestly the most fun I've had in Hardcore.

I'm with you there - the Mimic season was probably the most fun to play. That and the one with unusual champions no one understood at first - the danger was real. Maybe let the mimics do something other than acid damage, or even a random typed elemental damage? You can still skip a chest, but if you take it and it's a mimic, it might hit hard in a way that isn't completely negligible with some acid resistance. Or maybe mimics have an element based on quest level. 1-4 acid, 5-8 fire, etc.

Reskin reapers as skeletal ghosts and make it pirate-themed, maybe. Add a few creepy sound effects, or a one-second piano rift that announces spawn of a reaper so you know that there's danger somewhere before seeing it just to heighten the tension a bit (Left4Dead did this to great effect).

[Oxarhamar]

Just bring back the Mimic Invasion, or something like it. Don't need to reinvent the wheel every time - and that was honestly the most fun I've had in Hardcore. This season just felt like week-old leftovers as a result, and I didn't partake of it much.

I also don't feel like adding challenge by reductions or restrictions are going to make future seasons fun, either. Challenging, sure. Fun - hard no.
And if it's not fun* - I'm out. That's a game-wide axiom, not just for HCL, but it's been the secret to my long-term enjoyment of the game so I'm going to keep abiding by that mindset.



*for me. YMMV

I’m with it but hopefully this time they will also bring it to live

Mimic event on live is too rare & too short

Chests should always have a chance to be a mimic if you asked me & mimic event should make the chance higher

[brian14]

I too vote to bring back Mimics! That was the most fun event.

[fatherpirate]

hmmm

I would have a season called Friends.

Besides all the usual stuff, the only (brutal) change would be ...
anyone can and will get hurt by any AOE attack (spell or otherwise)
if they are standing in the area of effect. Regardless of who throws it.
(combat areas only)
no ganking noobs in Korthos village. (sorry)

to include cleaves

That should ... encourage better teamwork :-)

oh yea, don't tell the players about it ... let them figure it out.

(insert evil laugh here)

[Cranjis]

Something to keep players going after getting their rewards. Most people on hc just show up and play until they get what they came for, then it starts to die out. Maybe if there was some reward system for people that achieve certain rewards?

[Cranjis]

How about time barriers? Sort of goes with speedrun topic, but instead, the first person/group to run a quest sets a time based on how fast they finished it. The next group to run said quest has to beat that time. If they don't the quest kills everyone in the group the moment the timer ticks over the current record. The time keeps getting shorter and shorter until everyone else is too afraid to enter it, and the current record holders get an Otto's box

[fatherpirate]

The only way I can think of to keep players for the duration is
some kind of special loot/rewards that rarely pop up only in HCL chests
but can not be had any other way.

Gold seal BTA hirelings from discontinued expansions.
Cosmetic items from discontinued expansions.
Special event promotional items.
Special HCL only rare loot drops (named items)

and so on.

Make them rare-ish items in final dungeon chests
(level appropriate) and you will see folks stick around ... :-)

[KoobTheProud]

The way you keep players for HCL is to make the server permanent and to make the counts over cumulative lives.

So you keep adding favor up over each life you do. You wipe Reaper points at the end of each life at the TR/ETR but cumulatively add them to the character's score, etc.

That would keep people playing HCL over time and it would prevent Reaper point accumulation from trivializing content over time.

The rewards would be over a set span, say 3 months, that then reset at the end of the span. This would allow the most active players in HCL to continually gain cosmetics and other things several times a year while also being in the grand chase to top the eternal leaderboard on the HCL server.

The problem with cumulative power through many past lives would resolve itself when characters died. Now that would be challenge. Keeping your character alive because when they died all the past lives went with them.

[jskinner937]

The way you keep players for HCL is to make the server permanent and to make the counts over cumulative lives.

So you keep adding favor up over each life you do. You wipe Reaper points at the end of each life at the TR/ETR but cumulatively add them to the character's score, etc.

That would keep people playing HCL over time and it would prevent Reaper point accumulation from trivializing content over time.

The rewards would be over a set span, say 3 months, that then reset at the end of the span. This would allow the most active players in HCL to continually gain cosmetics and other things several times a year while also being in the grand chase to top the eternal leaderboard on the HCL server.

The problem with cumulative power through many past lives would resolve itself when characters died. Now that would be challenge. Keeping your character alive because when they died all the past lives went with them.

I feel like hcl appeal is that you start with nothing. A perma server would be OK but do not like the idea of a running tally and protection at all. That’s not hardcore.

Personally, I would rather scrap the reaper points rewards. Favor rewards are the appeal. Maybe include some additional rewards to replace reapers. Like mysterious remnant count, kill count, mimics coins (if active). Reaper is the worst part of HCL.

Or what I would really love to see is a HCL specific currency (that drops in quests) and transfers to live with your characters to buy cosmetics and special augments or something.

[Oxarhamar]

The only way I can think of to keep players for the duration is
some kind of special loot/rewards that rarely pop up only in HCL chests
but can not be had any other way.

Gold seal BTA hirelings from discontinued expansions.
Cosmetic items from discontinued expansions.
Special event promotional items.
Special HCL only rare loot drops (named items)

and so on.

Make them rare-ish items in final dungeon chests
(level appropriate) and you will see folks stick around ... :-)

Not signed

HCL has it’s reward system

[Oxarhamar]

hmmm

I would have a season called Friends.

Besides all the usual stuff, the only (brutal) change would be ...
anyone can and will get hurt by any AOE attack (spell or otherwise)
if they are standing in the area of effect. Regardless of who throws it.
(combat areas only)
no ganking noobs in Korthos village. (sorry)

to include cleaves

That should ... encourage better teamwork :-)

oh yea, don't tell the players about it ... let them figure it out.

(insert evil laugh here)

Yeah this will never work


Players will either solo or risk being accidentally one shot by party members

Potential for griefing too high

You want PVP on HCL there is a tavern for that

[fatherpirate]

The way you keep players for HCL is to make the server permanent and to make the counts over cumulative lives.

So you keep adding favor up over each life you do. You wipe Reaper points at the end of each life at the TR/ETR but cumulatively add them to the character's score, etc.

That would keep people playing HCL over time and it would prevent Reaper point accumulation from trivializing content over time.

The rewards would be over a set span, say 3 months, that then reset at the end of the span. This would allow the most active players in HCL to continually gain cosmetics and other things several times a year while also being in the grand chase to top the eternal leaderboard on the HCL server.

The problem with cumulative power through many past lives would resolve itself when characters died. Now that would be challenge. Keeping your character alive because when they died all the past lives went with them.

===========================
the hardcore elite players
'the whales'
will never allow it or support it because it will cut into their raid population.

[fatherpirate]

Yeah this will never work


Players will either solo or risk being accidentally one shot by party members

Potential for griefing too high

You want PVP on HCL there is a tavern for that

this was never a serious suggestion ...
it would require serious recoding of the games combat system so that
is never going to happen.

[fatherpirate]

Not signed

HCL has it’s reward system

someone asked how to keep players on the HCL after it had run a while,
I gave an answer as to what would be required to entice
players to stick around.

also will never happen.

SSG will never willingly give away stuff they can
(at a later date) sell for big bucks if they have a cash
crunch issue.

My answer was more of a way to say, most players will not stick around
after they have got what they came for.

As long as that server is closed and wiped on a regular basis,
nobody will invest a lot of extra time in it.