It's time for preleveled/preascended characters to enter the shop or be made available somehow.

Yeah, that's one of the two biggest problems with this idea that I can see.


1. It creates a disincentive for GGG to continue improving the level-up process, and a problematic division of labor within the development team:

Earlier I mentioned making first-time-kill boss drops better, but that's just one small idea for a mostly insignificant change. Gem leveling / requirements, low-level uniques, and passive tree pathing tweaks are all parts of the early-game experience which would be rendered considerably less relevant. Furthermore, they would be relevant only to your first character, for which you could simply choose the fastest-leveling build--and believe me, that's exactly what people would do. So any of the aforementioned gem/unique/passive tweaks would be rendered almost completely irrelevant to the extent that they are not connected to that single fast-leveling build.

This isn't fear-mongering, by the way. It's simple economics of time. Any effort on GGG's part to work on the above would be wasted on anyone choosing to buy their characters instead. It would be foolish in that context for them to do so. Except they need to do so for first-time players. So now their labor is divided into tasks which only serve one part of the community (new players or old players). See the dilemma they've created for themselves?


2. It completely destroys any challenge connected to creating builds which are weak early on but strong once they come into their own:

This is a hallmark of some of the most popular ARPGs. GGG made this dynamic much less painful than that of D2, with the addition of regret orbs and seasonal respecs, but it still exists in PoE, as most would likely agree. You may not personally care about the existence of this dynamic, but many do, and it would doubtless be a casualty of the introduction of such a feature.


Unfortunately for proponents of this idea (and fortunately for its opponents), GGG is likely aware of both of the above issues. So if you really want to make something like this happen, OP and others, you may need to steer the discussion toward figuring out a way to address the above two issues. While there may be other issues I'm not thinking of, the above two by themselves are probably more than enough to deter GGG from implementing characters which can be purchased in any way.

I can think of one way this could be abused... random guy levels an EQ marauder to level 70... oops, now a shavs dropped, how could he have predicted that? Too bad he didn't level as a a low life vaal sparker, oh wait no sweat, we can just buy a level 60 spark witch and go from there now.

I'm telling you man people will FIND A WAY to make this shit ruin the game. Just stop talking about it and hope it never gets implemented already before it turns this into d3.

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When it's taken into consideration that PoE has very few actual fully 'new' players coming around, the whole scenario begins taking on a different look. The majority of players showing up for new leagues/expansions are players who are returning and have 'been there done that' all before, usually multiple times.

There's nothing new to be learned, nothing much that hasn't been seen and the player base may vary in the time they're able to spend in PoE, for the most part will cruise through to level 60 with the same ease.

We all need to face the reality that 99% of the possible playerbase for this niche game has been and left, been and returns for a few weeks during new leagues/expansions OR the few who hang around perpetually.

GGG even went so far as to truncate the zones so that everyone could race up to maps quicker because the 1%ers complained it took too long.

I guess if there actually were hordes of true newbie players coming along all the time, GGG might find it worthwhile to work on the leveling experience some, but there's only few. Less and less as time goes on.

Considering this game is built upon the pyramid economy concept of the lowbies farming currency orbs for the elites in exchange for higher gear, it's a pickle for sure.

How do you have any idea that any of these statistics you have thrown are anywhere close to true? I don't mind people using statistics, but I do expect them to be able to back them up.

I ran my own business for many years, and my father before me, and I remember something he told me when it came to employees. The day one of your employees makes the statement that there is nothing else to be learned, is the day you set them free to prove it.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

I can think of one way this could be abused... random guy levels an EQ marauder to level 70... oops, now a shavs dropped, how could he have predicted that? Too bad he didn't level as a a low life vaal sparker, oh wait no sweat, we can just buy a level 60 spark witch and go from there now.

I'm telling you man people will FIND A WAY to make this shit ruin the game. Just stop talking about it and hope it never gets implemented already before it turns this into d3.

But, sir. This already happens right now.

It only takes a couple of hours for that player to 'buy' his/her way back up there with boosts/bro deals/boss kills/jsp etc.

I'm sure it probably does, just like some people RMT, but that doesn't mean we open a website for cash trades because some shady minority of people are doing it anyways.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

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Legatus1982 wrote:

I can think of one way this could be abused... random guy levels an EQ marauder to level 70... oops, now a shavs dropped, how could he have predicted that? Too bad he didn't level as a a low life vaal sparker, oh wait no sweat, we can just buy a level 60 spark witch and go from there now.

I'm telling you man people will FIND A WAY to make this shit ruin the game. Just stop talking about it and hope it never gets implemented already before it turns this into d3.

But, sir. This already happens right now.

It only takes a couple of hours for that player to 'buy' his/her way back up there with boosts/bro deals/boss kills/jsp etc.

I'm sure it probably does, just like some people RMT, but that doesn't mean we open a website for cash trades because some shady minority of people are doing it anyways.

He wasn't talking about RMT or shady deals. He was talking about people buying help with in game currency or using the existing rush methods to get to 60 asap.

Besides that, it's not "abuse" to start a character at level 60 just because you found a piece of gear that enables a build. That's not any different than starting a new character at level 1 for the same reason, except that the level 60 character skips the bullshit leveling process.

This thread has been alive longer than it should.

Many people - myself included - agree with OP about how mind-blowingly-boring Normal and Cruel are when you don't have any special things to do and simply have to repeat the content 3 times.

But Morbo said it best: we should not go "full-retarded P2W".

So if pre-leveled characters enters the game as a feature, it should be a feature for everyone who "did X", not for everyone who "paid X".

Though I would prefer a certain set of differences in playing through Cruel compared to Normal, and Merciless compared to Cruel.
such that leveling would be somewhat enjoyable, instead of being a race-to-end-game.

Any time a game company decides to "sell" the ability for players to skip game content, they've just destroyed their own incentive to improve that game content. There is no way around this. Selling progress will never work under any circumstances.

If players find certain content boring, the solution is to make that content less boring, not to sell a way to skip it.