This post is to highlight issues that are noticeably affecting long term play between patch cycles. Those issues are specifically regarding the ladder and its lost functionality and worsened state.
Prior to the website revamp last year, community tournaments/events were evolving and making LE enjoyable for sustained periods of time between patches. The ladder’s search functionality filter rules (primary sort by arena waves, secondary sort by level) have since then been lost. It has also become plagued with apparent cheaters and ‘notepad mains’, which is sort of a separate issue I’ll touch on later. But anyway, the point is that ever since this ‘revamp’ the community events/tournaments have been negatively impacted. Some bugs were pointed out early on, but instead of fixing them, the features were removed. (New Website Ladder Search/Submit Button Doesn't Work) Myself and others have also asked about these lost features every once in a while, via Discord or Dev Stream, and we’ve been told EHG is aware, but it’s not a priority. I understand that EHG might want to wait until MP is ready to re-add these features and bolster/maintain the integrity of the leaderboards, but I am asking you to reconsider. Please make this a priority, as it is one of the best ways for us as a community to keep having fun tournaments/events for us to play between each patch. I personally feel like these features being re-added would be a HUGE improvement and prevent players from experiencing burnout shortly after new patches. It’s been a bit disheartening to see those features were lost and never came back and even more so to see how plagued with cheaters the ladder is now too.
So, this is my effort to bring more attention to these problems, or to at least make EHG more aware and hopefully have them reconsider the ladder and its functionality/integrity more of a priority. Bring back the primary and secondary sorts, so we can actually race again, where our level matters. Where that one sneaky player can match you in waves but is 1 level higher, so they win. Bring back the search functionality, so we can track each other’s progress and beat our rivals. Add filters/checks to improve the ladder integrity, weeding out the players who are obviously cheating by using skills not available to their class, jumping from wave 0-1000 in an instant, playing an unplayable class, etc. Pleaaaaassseeeee give this some thought EHG. Thank You!
Having such a limited ladder in terms of functionality is making cheaters negatively impact the experience for the rest of us, because it makes it so much harder to do community races/tournaments.
The game has a ladder for a reason, which I think most of us assume is because ya’ll care about a competitive side to the game. But right now that side of the game feels like it’s just completely ignored (outside of what ya’ll offer up for the community tournaments), and while I’m optimistic that it’ll turn around eventually, right now it just feels pretty annoying.
I’ve seen way too many games act like they care about a competitive side, to then just slowly drift away from it, and I don’t want to see that happen here. I won’t pretend that most of the playerbase really cares about the ladder, or functionality in it to help make community races/tournaments easier. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the playtime put into the game is coming from people who do care about that and want better functionality in it.
Also on the note of cheaters, it’s not a good look for the game when people learn that the top 20-25 on the softcore ladder are all cheaters. I know before this patch (and just after it released) ya’ll removed people cheating from it, to the point of removing people who shouldn’t of been at times. But it really looks like you’ve just given up on this, which really does make it hard to stay optimistic about the competitive side of the game. If you aren’t doing anything about that, or the ladders usefulness, it’s only my hope that keeps me optimistic that the competitive side of the game will actually get attention at some point.
I do have that hope still, but i’m ngl, it’s strained. Like come on, probably 25% of the softcore ladder is cheaters at this point, and most of that is the top of the ladder.
If you read through the posts in here, most of the issue is with ladder not having any real functionality atm, compared to what it use to have. The cheatings annoying, and makes ladder look bad, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have functionality so the community tournaments can be run more easily/without needing to take into account the limitations of the current ladder.
And if you want to argue about how much community tournaments matter or something, take into account that ehg literally fund the prize pool for them.
Alongside all that, the cheating can be dealt with to some degree, as I put in my post they use to remove blatant cheaters from the ladder. That 1) decentivises people to do it, because they’re just gonna get removed and potentially banned from the ladder. and 2) makes the ladder actually useable as something to aim for in the game. Right now there is very little incentive to aim for pushing ladder, because people are just gonna cheat to be above you and not have
anything happen to them.
It doesnt matter until they sort out always onlineas everyones record is dubious anyway
If people are like me they are waiting until EHG actually makes it a proper competition as currently its ultra pointless. once that is done I may compete in my downtime of other games but its extremely toxic for the overall health of your game to have infinite scaling leaderboard/ladder
I competed in Diablo 3 and people rampantly cheated there too so either way this type of gaming is FULL of cheaters, if its not direct hacking it will just be botting 24/7
The only way this ladder works is you get a pre-determined ‘level 90’ character with set gear/skills everyone plays the exact same arena waves/mobs to see how high they get. Otherwise you just have that ‘guy’ (you know who) playing 16 hours a day and theres no point even trying if you dont have 16 HOURS a day to commit to arena runs as the guy with lack of employment will always win
I second this, and my community also agree with this. I really hope something about these issues are done soon. I understand that it will all be fixed when multiplayer comes, but it is disheartening to have a new player ask me why the top build on the ladder is using 5 dps skills and I have to explain it to them.
Not true. Atm the ladder is irrelevevant due to cheaters and chapter 9 monster gambling in arena…thats it. Arena was good, not perfect though.
Before, it was more about game knowledge and personal skill compared to any other arpg.
And i also played competitive in many other games, including your called out d3, which was only about finding that high densitiy zombie rift back in the days. Now we have the same problem. Lets not find anything chapter 9 related to achieve higher waves, otherwise we can altf4 once we see crystal elementals.
Now you can have a char that reached arena wave x +/- 100-150 waves. Before it was +/- 10-20 depending on if you stay focused until the end.
The ladder was useful for the weekly community events/tournaments where the people playing were trusted not to cheat which is what Zeckar was talking about.
What you’re talking about is RNG issues with Arena which is a whole different kettle of fish.
I understand this will probably be corrected or looked at when MP is implemented. I am asking it be prioritized sooner, because many players play LE as a main game, EHG prizes community events, and it would literally add so much value. I am willing to wait, but with no October MP Update and 0.8.4 being release Late Nov. - Mid Dec. I don’t think it will be any time soon. The events are just not the same and something needs to be done. People have been vocal about these issues for over a year. So, it just feels upsetting to have asked about it for so long, expecting it to be done sometime this year and nothing happening to correct it. It just has gotten worse.
I also don’t think adding the currently missing features you mentioned would be a waste of dev time. No matter if online or offline - filter functions would be nice and welcome.
Yeah. I hope this gets addressed next patch. I feel, that it could have used a hotfix already.
Yes, exactly. I am not sure what sort of constraints are preventing them, it’d be nice to know. I’m sure even some of the community members getting access to the API could build out an improved ladder. I am sure they have their reasons for not acting on it, but I feel as if it could be fixed and improved fairly easy. Idk, hope it is addressed soon.
hint Maybe in the next MP Update highlight these issues and point out reasons for delay and/or progress made on rectifying them hint
I believe they just decided to ditch the old way of handling cheaters in ladder which was pretty bad and easy to bypass and plus they are probably rebuilding API from scratch because their current API for ladder is just bad and was either implemented by a student or was written in a haste, the latter is understandable (no offense to devs).
It’ll take a day or two to mimic current ladder functionality that you see on the website, plus add search / sort functions, but it will still be limiting to a hundred entries and no way to filter cheaters.
I appreciate that you are willing to help out with this issue. I won’t specify all the limitations affecting people running the events/tourneys as I am not aware of them all. But, I think the 100 person limit is one of the bigger restrictions to them properly conducting things. I’ll tell Vision to come and respond so he can add more details and explain why. The gist of it is that not being able to see all the players prevents level sort properly from working and removes the race aspect. Also, not being able to search throughout the entirety of players limits actually scoring most of those who participate and don’t get listed or break whatever the minimum is to get placed. (Highest is 261 on SC Sent ladder) Which removes the ranking for majority of those who are participating in any tourney. That being said, I don’t wanna take any of your time, if it doesn’t greatly help those who host these events. Really appreciate that you’d be willing though, thanks Dammitt!
I did a test page back in January for “improved” ladder, but unfortunately it doesn’t fix any issues we currently have with community events. You can only filter players but not search any players who are not in current top100.
I see, so maybe the quickest solution is for EHG to expand the max count for players on the ladder. If they do that, then at least community members can expand and add the other features. I am pretty certain this would alleviate a lot of the issues we are currently having. I don’t expect the integrity issues to disappear any time soon, my main goal is to just have tournaments in the state they were in before the revamp.
So, if any anyone from EHG is taking a look at this thread, how feasible would it be to increase the max count of player entries on the ladder with the current implementation? I feel this is the change that would benefit the community the most currently.
Ah yes, destroy the already small and struggling community by removing the ladder until MP. What a great solution. Counter idea… remove the game all together and release it when it’s finished
I went ahead and asked about this on the Dev Stream, seems we are out of luck and stuck with this for awhile.
My question: “Idk if you’ve seen the post I made regarding ladder functions. I was wondering how feasible it would be to increase the player count for ladder rankings in the current implementation of it? I think this would be a great way for community members to expand and add the old features we used to have (level sort and search function) without putting too much strain on EHG team.”
