Since I already mentioned this in my other comment and above, I decided to include it here as well and lay out why I think that the current paragon system is the worst problem we currently have when it comes to leaderboards. As I have explained, most of the factors that come with bots, cheats and exploits prove to have little influence on the leaderboards, so little in fact that even as someone who obviously cares a lot about them, I'm not really mad that those things exist in the first place (as they can still be countered by playing better). However, when it comes to paragons, I see a lot of issues that prevent fair competiton.
Right now, there is no way of knowing if you're ever going to get the item upgrade you seek, but you can calculate exactly how much more damage you will deal after X hours of farming experience. Upgrading an nonancient to an ancient armor item will yield a 150-250 dexterity increase, which is about 1 to 2% damage. At paragon 1000, you can get the same just by farming experience for about one day, even at paragon 1500 it's about two days, but with the RNG involved you'll never be able to reach the same even if you could still use the bloodshard exploit. This is how broken paragons are right now, and it encourages all the top players to spend most of their time playing boring farming content instead of actually innovating new builds or pushing higher tiers, which is a lot more interesting to do and watch. We can even see some players with more play time on their leech characters than their respective main classes (including all the leveling, farming, gem upgrading and GR pushing) right now.
Obviously, as a grinding-oriented game like Diablo, people should be rewarded by playing more, and there is no harm in having someone who plays more (and more efficiently) than others has a stronger character overall. Many drops are about RNG, however you can estimate the required time investment to get to a specific point in character strength quite nicely because it all averages out. The issue arises when trying to compete on the leaderboards becomes futile because others have progressed so far ahead that there is literally no way you are ever going to beat them, no matter how well you play or how good of a rift you get. The paragon progression has become out of hand starting in season 2 and especially now in season 3, with certain players at the top having easily 30-40% more damage just because they have more mainstat even compared to players that already have high paragons (like 1000 and up). They are several tiers ahead just because of their mainstat, and there is no way to ever catch up with them because the required experience scales linearly after paragon 750, thus increasing the time investment per paragon only very slowly after that.
The thing is, the endless paragon progression system was designed back in a world where top end experience gains range between 2 and 6 billion XP per hour. Nowadays, people are getting 100-150b per hour, more or less 20-50 times more than that. It's quite obvious that this is bound to cause problems, as have been seeing for the last couple of months and basically the entire season 3. Paragon beats everything. There's no point in equipping your main character, just leech experience on a Crus or Monk all day and try to snap any crappy lootshared item you can get, it will be a better way to gear up your character no matter what. Not only that, but you can also use those paragons on other classes and not just the one you're trying to equip, effectively multiplying the fact if you are a multiclasser. There's no point in farming bloodshards, materials, leveling up gems, farm Hellfire amulets or do anything else besides leeching in speedrifts. Paragons beat it all.
We are already heading into the right direction with patch 2.3, however without any further changes this is still likely going to make the problem worse without further changes. Paragon imbalances will be curbed a little by sharing experience between all party members and forcing players into T6-10. No more key recycling will definitely help, but the experience gains are still very high, perhaps even higher than currently in spite of that. We're likely going to be speedfarming something like tier 53-58, where the shared experience for all will be more or less what a leecher gets now in 42-47, paired with 50% longer rifts and no trials the need to farm more T6-10 it will turn out to be not much of an hindrance for crazy experience farm. What's more, it we combine this with the implementation of the new Kanai's Cube, we can easily acquire very good gear and especially weapons now (100 rerolls via "reforge legendary" will yield 10 ancients on average, which should be good enough to get a weapon that is at least in an acceptable range of best-in-slot. 500 materials of all acts can be farmed in about 10 hours, 5000 forgotten souls can be farmed in 50-80 hours, 5000 death's breath can be farmed in 5-12 hours, with most of these times overlapping, and forgotten souls being generated passively). That's a very good change, because it evens out the playing field (just like we have seen with the DH leaderboards back in season 2, when everyone could craft a perfect weapon and didn't require many good rolls on top of that to compete). The priority from gambling weapons will most likely shift towards jewelry or set pieces, and thus making it easy to acquire next to best-in-slot of basically every slot. Now, though, the new problem arises: The end result will be that those players that have super high paragon but maybe not super crazy items right now will have both in 2.3, because they can easily reroll their ancient weapons to a very good one, and acquire the rest passively. These means that even with the new balance between leech and dps, those that play more will still have a ridiculously high damage advantage in greater rifts.
All of this is likely going to widen the gap even further instead of closing it. The only way to counter it is going to reduce the expected gains by paragons. Without a big rework of the entire system (which I expect to happen in the next expansion), this whole problem could be easily solved by changing the mainstat gain per paragon from 5 to 2. It would still allow a reasonable path of endless progression via mainstat gains, but it would definitely make the leaderboards a much more even playing field for everyone, and would encourage many more (not just top high end) players to compete on the leaderboards. In the past seasons, the paragons weren't that much of an issue because the overall paragon levels were a lot lower for everyone, with many people barely even reaching 800 in S1 and S2. Now, the leaderboards are completely getting wrecked by players that have 400+ more paragons than anyone else because they deal so much more damage. Even with only 2 mainstat per level, a 400 paragon advantage would still net 800 mainstat, which is more or less 6-7% damage, or half a tier. To me, this seems just about right by rewardung players with a lot of time investment adequately (on top of giving them better gear and more chances for getting a good rift), and still keeping the possibility for lower paragon players to keep competing."
This is the stupidest thing I've read in a long ass time. Especially concerning a game which is meant to be GRINDED like D3. The paragon system is designed to be IMBALANCED to players who can reach the highest level possible, its the reward for the TIME. Not for the "I'm more skilled than Y, I deserve number 1, *cry* *cry*"
You are saying;
- A player who plays 10 hours a week and gets lucky enough on drops and is more skilled as a player should be pretty much equal to a player who spends 1000s of hours grinding exp but is not as skilled, which is insane to even think that.
This is retarded, by almost any game you can play. If blizzard changed it, what would be the point of playing more?
TLDR; Time > skill is the way the game is currently designed and it is the correct method. Time is money friends.
Glad to see they are trying to improve the game, but it's far to late for me. Unless they do some drastic changes, I don't think I can ever like D3 again.
Also, SC2:HotS. Waited couple years for this! Woot woot!
2
This is the stupidest thing I've read in a long ass time. Especially concerning a game which is meant to be GRINDED like D3. The paragon system is designed to be IMBALANCED to players who can reach the highest level possible, its the reward for the TIME. Not for the "I'm more skilled than Y, I deserve number 1, *cry* *cry*"
You are saying;
- A player who plays 10 hours a week and gets lucky enough on drops and is more skilled as a player should be pretty much equal to a player who spends 1000s of hours grinding exp but is not as skilled, which is insane to even think that.
This is retarded, by almost any game you can play. If blizzard changed it, what would be the point of playing more?
TLDR; Time > skill is the way the game is currently designed and it is the correct method. Time is money friends.
1
Also, SC2:HotS. Waited couple years for this! Woot woot!