Post deleted by author

PTR Feedback
1

post deleted by author

7 Likes
2

I posted comments about this in Mersinary’s similar thread found here: Please add paragon filter to leaderboard

There are two approaches to implementing such an idea but both have major issues that don’t seem to have a good way to fix them. I’ll summarize both approaches and their issues:

Approach 1: Implement paragon filter in leaderboards. While in theory this idea is simple and straightforward, it won’t produce the desired result of “who has the best clear for x paragon”.

For example, if you clear a GR100 at paragon 500 in record time and are rank 1 if you filter under paragon 500, you are faced with a dilemma should you wish to continue playing. If you later clear a higher GR with higher paragon, you will erase your previous result!

The underlying issue is with a filter you introduce an extra objective: staying low paragon, in addition to the original objective: clearing high GRs. Such min-max multi-objective problems aren’t too bad in some situations; however, if you cannot lower your paragon, then you essentially only have a limited number of trials to get a prestigious low paragon clear.

This will also lead to undesirable player behavior such as having high paragon players carry low paragon players in high GRs (who wait in town) to collect items but not experience. With this trick, it would be possible to rank gems to 150 and have crazy level augments even with paragon 0!

Approach 2: Implement paragon brackets in leaderboards. In essence, this is kind of like how the new set leaderboards function but with several paragon brackets. There should still be a way to self-restrict your paragon to compete on lower boards, and possibly lock out high level gems and augments.

However, the major flaw with this idea is that you multiply the number of leaderboards by the number of brackets. We already have 180 leaderboards: ([7 classes] x [5 + 1 sets] + [3 groups]) x [2 season/nonseason] x [2 hardcore/softcore]. With 6 paragon brackets, you would have over 1000 leaderboards!

4 Likes
3

This wouldn’t work well directly as you’ve suggested because paragon levels are always increasing (you cannot stop gaining levels) so people cannot tweak for optimal performance at any given level. If you wanted it to actually work it would have to be based on assigned paragon points which you could tweak for but is a little convoluted to explain and would likely cause more confusion than good. Probably the only way to do with without being totally confusing would be to have predefined buckets and you choose the bucket you want to compete in (like 800, 1000, 2000, etc) when starting the GR and then have to assign your paragons (and of course some way to save that setup ideally). Not something the devs are gonna do in one week though.

2 Likes
4

True I didn’t consider the total number of leaderboards with buckets. I think if we chose even 1 or 2 iconic ones it would be good enough. I think that’s what some people really want. Doesn’t have to be so many. Like 800, and 1500. I don’t think there needs to be that many buckets because after all the point of using a fixed bucket is to show skill within the specific limitation and not an infinite number of paragon. I’m not a top tier player ( I was always mid tier when I competed) but I don’t imagine the dynamics of your gameplay changes much after a certain paragon level (ex. 1500).

1 Like
5

Min-Max Text Input Fields. The cheapest way, it gives the most control, but is the worst user experience. No universally understood brackets.

Preset Brackets are a cheap way to accomplish a lot, as long as they make sense and fairly represent players:

  • 0-1000
  • 1001-2000
  • 2001-3000
  • 3001-4000
  • 4001-5000
  • 5001-6000
  • 6001-7250
  • 7251-8500
  • 8501-10000
  • 10000+

These are universally understood paragon sets.

These can also be setup as Unders or Max Limiters. Allows you to see every clear under the specified value. Those low paragon super clears prevail on multiple dropdown options, as they are truly competitive. Ie. GR135 @ 2500 paragon will show up high on an Under 5000 result set where the top clear is GR138.

  • Under 1000
  • Under 2000
  • Under 3000
  • etc

‘Near My Power’ is a filter which shows results 20% above and below your paragon. These are custom to the player, they are not universal because the results look different for everyone:

I am 1000, it shows 800-1200, i am 5000 it shows 4000-6000. This filter will probably make you good if you are trying.

Again we are filtering 1000 results, so I don’t think players are going to stay low as they will be booted off eventually. If they are 4999 paragon it is their prerogative if they choose to stop pushing.

2 Likes
6

Why not just have a “Paragon: #” Where # you enter the numerical value
And it just brings up the (up to) top 1000 that shows no higher than that paragon range
? Sounds simple enough.

If I’m P2864, maybe I’d wanna just see all the GRift clears of P2900 and under
And see my position within that list and how many players are above me. And if I input P3000, I wanna see where I should be at by that paragon compared to how others on the leaderboard are performing.

7

That is a Max Text Input field, personally, I am not into having to type out a number, I much prefer mouse activated select fields.

1 Like
8

tbh it’s a lot of extra work to primarily support the fantasy that you’re a competitive player but you’re just being drowned out by botters/4man farmers, which is a recurring subtext in support for these suggestions.

I feel like people are better off with the excuses the current system provides.

[Note: “you” is second-person tense here, I’m not singling anyone out.]

2 Likes
9

Perhaps that’s the OPs motive. Not mine though. It’s actually a way to make it fairer for the top level players. Most of them all have maxed out gems and augments anyway. So it would be fun to see the true skill of the top players against each other. Sometimes it’s great just to watch a good show. And of course just gives another way to compete that’s fun and a little more about optimizing than grinding.

1 Like
10

Okay but

we ended up right back there.

“Paragons are not a valid influence on rank so I want you to include paragons as a metric so I can exclude them and see the real players.”

1 Like
11

My thought, since we cannot assume players with similar Paragon level also have similar Argument level, especially when Paragon is low, how about using “Main stat” (Paragon + Argument) instead of “Paragon”?

1 Like
12

Or just make a customizable filter, where you can find at least one way to make yourself rank 1.

2 Likes
13

We are p much marching toward “fastest clear of a GR 75 by male Manajuma Witch Doctor under 600 paragons in the last 15 minutes”

1 Like
14

hi.

i think paragon brackets would be fine. wouldn’t take much to implement them either. however. with this
 there would need to be a way to ‘turn off’ paragon advancement, via an in game toggle.

example would be, player realizes their paragon level goals for the season, understands they have reached a specific plateau and wishes to live in said paragon filter cap. turns off paragon advancement to stay within that cap and then competes for fishing the best riff or using said game talent experience to compete with other players who also live within that paragon plateau.

if you have the levels separated by 500lv sections up to 2k paragon. and then a 2k+ free for all. you can allow the player to decide where they feel strongest to compete, based on the players time constraints
 this also would help design a way to limit bots tilting the competitive culture for the specific bracket, either making most bots live in the 2k+ bracket 
 or forcing the bot user to shut off the paragon to focus a certain bracket.

another way to circumvent the “turn off paragon toggle” idea
 is to make earned paragon by character instead of by account. aka “twink” play. where you build a character to the level paragon you want to live in (like p1000 bracket for barb) and then make a second alt for something different
 (like p500 and less WD) and then farm for the ultimate legs to twink the build for that paragon level. in this instance set leaderboards would not need to apply. just who is the best twink barb at p1000 and who is the best twink wd and p500-. ect.

as much as i like the second option. paragon by character instead of account would be very hard to implement and probably not favored on by the community. however would give the player the best options.

lastly
 another idea for paragon leaderboards 
 would be to allow for a ‘paragon bank’. the player is readily free to farm as much paragon as they can during a season, leaving no restrictions to either account or paragon turn off toggle. similar to how it works currently. all paragon is available. but when the player wants to participate in a plev bracket of 500 cap. they can only use 500 paragon from the amount they have for that run. having an ingame sum check, at the time when the GR key is used, to make sure the character being used has only 500 paragon or less distributed
 all other paragon would be locked for that GR. this could be done at the obelisk. ie.

activate obelisk,
choose gr level from drop down
choose paragon level from drop down
choose empower or not.
activate. at this point checksum would check paragon amount used on player and would either open GR if all reqs are met. or tell the player “to much paragon is allocated in your current build. please redistribute paragon to 500 or less”
THIS result would then be added to the leaderboards if applicable, once the GR is complete.

this method imo would be the best for everyone involved. but one could only guess how much dev effort this would take to complete. probably easier than a toggle. MUCH easier than paragon by character. and pretty sure the player base would favor this the most. could be wrong.

enough. sorry for the wall.

all the best.

1 Like
15

The major problem I see with choosing to run a GR with a lower paragon: Someone who reaches several thousand paragon in a season reaches paragon 500 about 4 hours into the season. They then play for 1000+ more hours throughout the season, accumulating rank 150 main gems and 13x 150 augments. When that person assigns 500 paragon for their GR clear they will still be rank 1 vs the person who is actually only paragon 500.

1 Like
16

“Going back” isn’t really a viable option. You’d have to “stop”.

1 Like
17

All these comments, and theres probably more in my thread as well, people trying to discredit and take out of context the reasoning for us wanting a paragon filter. Seriously, what is all this whoblah tryin to insist people are only wanting to set certain filters to make themselves look like rank 1
Is total nonsense.

Some of us just want an easier way to search through the leaderboard to compare to others within our own paragon (bracket). Is that so hard to believe? Hell, for educational purposes if you will.

If I’m rank 150 @ GR136 with P2660. I’d like to see how many people above me on the leaderboard are lower paragon. A filter would just automatically weed out all the info I don’t want to look at, such as players that are higher paragon than what I am or whatever paragon value I’d set it at. Or be able to look at GR137 clears and determine for myself if I should be able to clear it or not compared to others.

People are likely going to look at Hero Details for these players and can determine for themselves if they’re comparable to their items, augments, gem levels and if they should be able to achieve the same GRift clear.

But yall going crazy with these assumptions of people wanting a paragon filter just so they can make themselves rank 1. But even if that’s their intentions, who cares? Yall act like adding features to the game is a bad thing.

4 Likes
18

If it didn’t affect player behavior, I would agree. But if you introduce a feature that incentivizes a different objective (staying low paragon), then there will inevitably be players who will try to game the system for advantages. Of course, most players would simply play as before but it also creates that dilemma where you might not want to push anymore in a season for fear of losing your earlier prestigious clear.

I’m not saying a paragon filter is a bad idea, it does have merits, but it has to be very carefully thought out for it to work, and more importantly, work as intended.

2 Likes
19

I think discouraging an paragon filter being implemented based on possible negative actions of a few players is just bad thinking, and overthinking something so small of a feature. Really, what incentive does anyone have just to purposely stay low paragon just to push lower level GRifts. And if staying low paragon encourages players to push higher level GRifts even with higher level augments/gems then so be it, it’s just more info to the pool of data. It’s just something else to compare to assuming the person doing the comparing cares enough to look at the characters Hero Details to easily figure out, “Wow, this player has 150 gems in jewelry and 13 augments at 150”
That player can simply disregard that entry and look at the next.

I strongly feel more filters could do more good than harm
As I’m fairly sure theres quite a few players in our clan alone look at the leaderboard in this particular way


And again, just to followup about my initial suggestion that I’m referring to a paragon “filter”, and not seperate additional leaderboards.

2 Likes
20

That’s not my motive. I am providing what you called “bad thinking and overthinking” as a warning to developers. As the adage goes: look before you leap!

I’ll reiterate, the paragon filter idea does provide some data analysis and better comparison to your performance in many cases, such as the cases that you mentioned. I just want it to be a good tool and not lead to undesirable side-effects. I will list some of the side-effects here:

Players are punished for pushing (after gaining more paragon)

  • Since you only get 1 spot on the leaderboard, you need to decide at the start of a season what paragon you want to aim for. After obtaining a high GR clear with low paragon, the player must choose to either continue climbing in season or stop (and not play a higher GR). Overwriting your prestigious low paragon 1000
    GR125 clear wouldn’t feel good if you’re now paragon 2000 and just did a GR128, now squarely in the average player tier.

Twinking will be introduced to D3

  • The simple paragon filter implementation will lead to, what is known colloquially, as smurfing or twinking (yes, there is a wikipedia article on twinking)! While I expect the majority of players to avoid this behavior, a growing number may be pressured into doing so for leaderboard glory, now that high ranks could be within reach (albeit after filtering high paragon players).

Some players will exploit the system to remain low paragon

  • The twinkiest of twinks will naturally find exploits such as being carried in high GR while waiting in town (to avoid experience). This will stack the low level paragon clears to extreme levels, possibly discouraging normal players. You can choose to ignore obvious cases such as rank 150 gems on paragon 1000 characters, but what about the not-so-obvious cases?

Some players will complain at unfair leaderboards (again)

  • There would be a new kind of witch hunt for these leaderboard trolls/twinks, akin to hunting botters and cheaters. Would Blizzard make an effort to mitigate this somehow? What about players who feel cheated that they can’t compete with stacked twinks around their paragon level? How is that different than complaining they can’t compete with botters?

These are the questions that the developers would need to address before introducing a paragon filter. Once more, it’s not a bad idea, but without a careful implementation, it won’t be what players want.

The TL;DR of my comment:
An idea with good intentions, is not necessarily a good idea. But there might be a way to adjust such an idea in a clever way to make a good idea. Naively implementing a paragon filter isn’t good, but with some restrictions it might be.