Seasonal paragon and leaderboard ideas for the future

General Discussion
1

I have some ideas for reworking the seasonal leaderboards and paragon system that I think would make the game a lot more fun. Curious about the thoughts of the community.

Firstly, a seasonal paragon cap of 5k makes sense to me. I also advocate for a tiered leaderboard (for solo) and/or weekly leaderboard for seasons (for solo and group play)

For example, if you are paragon 1 to 1k, the default solo board you see is the “Hero” leaderboard, 1k to 2k “Slayer”, 2k to 3k “Champion”, 3k to 4k " Destroyer" etc. This would let the casuals (and semi casuals) compete to a greater extent and therefore achieve more satisfaction from the game. To further drive this point home, no leaderboard containing a 5k paragon clear could also show a 1k paragon clear, meaning each tier has its own set of tabs for every individual set leaderboard and weekly leaderboard.

A weekly leaderboard (for solo and groups) during season would spread the glory around and make the game more inviting to play. Of course, at the end of the season it would show the overall leaderboard for the entire season, and not just the final week. At least this would give us some incentive to set goals more regularly and have something to shoot for every week. Imagine reliving the excitement of having an actual chance of seeing that rank 1 badge flash on the screen, even as a casual (with tiered leaderboards), multiple times throughout a season. To me this also isolates botters and puts them in a rather obvious position where it is easier to throw tomatoes (and other assorted fruits and vegetables) at them.

There are two crucial points that would make all the above ideas feel more logical, considering the amount of keys it would take to go for weekly ranks.

  1. Make oreks dream a consumable that can be opened on command at the rift obelisk. (Maybe give us some for clearing the challenge rift, with perhaps more for a better time).

  2. Establish more consistent pylon spawn mechanics for Orek’s dream (pushing mode). For example, guaranteed spawns at 15%, 30%, 50% etc, and/or make sure we get all 5 pylons for Orek’s dream rifts.

Overall, even without tiered or weekly leaderboards, a lot of players are tired of the leaderboard pretty much representing who is the luckiest + who can bot the most. These above ideas aren’t necessarily the perfect solution, but I believe the most balanced solution I can think of in terms of satisfying the majority of players.

What do ya’ll think about this? I think this is also a concept or baseline of leaderboard mechanica for seasons that could also be considered for Diablo IV.

7 Likes
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Not to the no lifers who get 8,000 - 10,000 each season.

1 Like
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All solid suggestions. Although I am not in favour of a paragon cap.

Tiered leaderboards would be so damn cool. I am not huge into leaderboards, rather go for my own personal goal, but it would be real cool to see how you stack up with your “equals”. That also negates the need for capped paragon in my opinion.

2 Likes
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No to any paragon caps nerf etc. All leaderboards except the challenge rifts need to be disabled.

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I object. Even if I’d never reach the cap. I like the 20k cap where it is. The rest seems good.

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Sounds good to me. All good ideas. :+1:

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Having a paragon leaderboard aswell would be cool, so we easily can see cheaters :slight_smile:

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First of all will we going have another season? What we are into 5 months on this season. Plus the way we are going at it. It will be 6 months or more for this season. No news on anything so far. OH well I see this as a normal from now on.

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Are you sure?

2 Likes
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That isn’t a official statement from Blizzard.

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PeZradar is a Blizzard employee who serves (I think) as Blizzard’s Diablo Community Development lead.

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Would require a way to pause your XP gains, you don’t get many solid runs at the lower tier boards before you spill over.

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Have you seen anything in Blue here or anything on battle-net interface on when the the PTR or Season is going to start or end? I don’t listen or read anything on there on the net. About the PTR or season. It has to come from here of the interface before I believe anything.

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PezRadar is a Blue. Did you click on the post that I linked previously?

Under his name, it reads Community Manager and it is a “blue” post. His actual Blizzard position is above Community Manager and the diablo community manager(s) answer to him (I think).

I even will quote his post below. You will notice that it is in blue.

3 Likes
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I wonder why they even post things when some people do not read it and others do not believe it.

  • Hopefully the patch notes this week.
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Bue or Blue…

oopsies… Edited my post.

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Thankfully there are lots of helpful people on the forum. To Davey’s defense the blue post wasn’t a sticky and not easy to see for everyone… especially for people who don’t look further than the tip of their nose… :smiley:

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It must be really difficult for some people to click on the Blizz Tracker link.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/g/blizzard-tracker/activity/posts?category_id=9

1 Like
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I like the idea of splitting the leaderboard up, but I would use different numbers and names…

Paragon 0 - 2,000 Heroboard
Paragon 2,001 - 5,000 Streamerboard
Paragon 5,001 - and up Botboard ( beat the bots!)

1 Like
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Hey Kozmik, nice to see you around these parts again, it’s been a while! How’s it going?

I have a few comments regarding your suggestions…

Just in terms of managing expectations, I’d say that any or all of this has basically a 0% chance of happening in the upcoming patch, unless they have already made some changes like this. At this point the patch is probably pretty close to finalized, and they’re just working out some pre-PTR bugs.

So, I think the soonest we could reasonably see these changes would be the next patch, which might drop around the time D4 launches. That presents a bit of difficulty, because nobody, including Blizzard, really knows what the player base for D3 will look like, post-D4-launch. This game might be kind of a ghost town, or it could still retain some popularity, or, hell, it could be much more popular, if the initial version of D4 doesn’t meet expectations, but still draws a lot of people back to the Diablo franchise.

But if this game is a ghost town, then having separate weekly leaderboards might end up making everything feel… pretty sparse. If D3 is still fairly populous, though, that would probably not be an issue. So it really depends on how many people are still playing this game.

Regarding the separate “tiers” of leaderboard, for different paragon ranges… I think the effect of this would really depend mostly on how some of the top pushers, and botters, choose to react. For the lowest paragon range, for instance, botters would actually have an enormous advantage.

This is because paragon 1000 is such a low number that in order to clear as high as possible while still staying under 1k, you have to do all sorts of unusual stuff, like exiting the game rather than turning in your completed rifts to Orek. Botters can run heaps of bounty bots, which would both allow them to reforge all their gear to perfection, and also no pick up much of the unwanted XP from having to actually run those bounties. Meanwhile, any legit players who tried to perfect their gear by either grinding rifts or running tons of bounties for reforges would bust through the 1k paragon limit pretty quickly. Bottom line: botters would probably have as large an advantage in this paragon range as they do now in higher ranges.

I think 2k-3k and 3k-4k paragon would still have some of the same issues, but overall be much less problematic. So maybe it would be better to have a 0-2000 range, then 2k-3k, 3k-4k, and 4k-5k.

2 Likes