Path of Exile 2 Early Access FAQ

As a few other users have stated, the wording in the FAQ about what will happen to characters after the full release is relatively unclear.

You state that they will go to their own league, the Early Access league. That is clear enough, but you also add:

"

... (so they will never be in Standard)...

Does this mean that EA characters cannot ever be migrated to the Standard League? Or does this simply mean that EA characters are considered to have been in the EA league and can migrate out of it to normal Standard? A lot of PoE players do primarily play League to League, and don't play in Standard, but as a veteran of PoE 1 - There is still decent activity in Standard.

This seems highly counter productive. A lot of my friends who are new to PoE 2 are expressing concern to me about this fact, and are unlikely to continue playing if this is the case.

They were hoping to be able to play a combination of Standard and League, and have a starting point already at endgame in Standard since the actual campaign content will be complete before release and it is annoying to be required to spend that time all over again, not to mention the collection of items and resources.

I understand that there will be a lot of balance changes happening during EA, but those also happen after release. Launching the game will, almost certainly, come with a large amount of changes as well - But my understanding of the beta is that those changes would be akin to most other League launches and larger balance patches for PoE 1, which have never caused a fracturing of Standard to its own self-contained branch.

If EA characters can never be brought over to Standard, let alone EA being it's own perpetual 'League', it would simply create a significant friction with more casual players who have been playing Early Access Standard and are interested in playing the supported version of the game, not a weird fork of it that is isolated for some reason.

I don't fully understand the purpose of the fork either. Is it as some kind of snapshot in time or record? Is it so that EA players don't have an economic head start in Standard? It seems strange for this to be the case, since any new player in PoE 1 Standard would have the same disadvantage that a player who didn't play EA but plays at launch would have if EA Standard just became Standard. So why bother with this fork at all? It feels like wasted effort to maintain it as something different.