To all legit players

edit: I normally wouldn't do this so long after posting, but in the interest of not causing undue fuss I've come back and changed my wording slightly.

Some of us had been concerned recently about the use of certain shady leveling tactics in races. Call it a multi-loader, or boosting, or whatever other name you have for it. The biggest cause for concern was that GGG staff hadn't taken a clear stance on the issue.

Chris was kind enough to respond to my inquiry, and also gave me permission to discuss his response with you all. In summary, he acknowledges that these abuses of the system are unfair. He assured me that a number of solutions are being discussed, and that by the time open beta releases boosting and multi-loading should quite simply not be worth the effort.

If you're not entirely sure what I'm talking about, well then, you're also playing the game as intended. And the playing field will be more level in the future. Rejoice!

edit2: No more speculation. Load a second character into an instance with your second game key. Purposefully hide him in a corner so XP doesn't share. We are calling this practice "boosting," and the whole thing could be automated by something known as a "scripted loader." A loader, if it comes scripted, is a rudimentary bot, and so also a black-and-white cheat - these haven't become common, but knowing history, it'll happen. Boosting, on the other hand, is just a clever use of game mechanics, and it's pretty straightforward. These have already been on the forum in gory detail. Boosting (without automation) has become just widespread enough to make longer races unfair. Trying to keep it a secret is quite simply counter-productive and impossible; it's already pretty common knowledge, so there's no longer any benefit to avoiding the topic. Perhaps an unfortunate part of the current meta-game, but something we will live with until a change is made. Boosting carries a few pretty significant costs that mean it's in fact only worth doing in a few isolated situations. If devs make the proper adjustments to game mechanics and boosting becomes too costly, we'll never see a complete scripted multi-loader for PoE.

Please limit discussion to implications for gameplay, and possible solutions. We're not here to gripe about fairness, but really to purposefully spill the beans and discuss the bad smell. My personal goal is to see this game improve, and that this is being confronted now signals some hope. PoE multiplayer will not go into the same garbage heap as D2LoD.

so up until they decide to fix it races are pointless

cool story.

If I understand this well http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Partying it would mean that the game encourages a Diablo 2 approach to leveling - having multiple filler characters idle at the entrance of an instance while you farm the level outside of exp sharing zone (2 screens from fillers) for more items and experience (50% bonus to both per filler) at the expense of having to kill tougher monsters (which can be handled by good builds).

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

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kolton wrote:

If I understand this well http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Partying it would mean that the game encourages a Diablo 2 approach to leveling - having multiple filler characters idle at the entrance of an instance while you farm the level outside of exp sharing zone (2 screens from fillers) for more items and experience (50% bonus to both per filler) at the expense of having to kill tougher monsters (which can be handled by good builds).

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

That was never encouraged it was a bug. Level 1 characters were never supposed to get to hell and when they did it was to power level not for making it harder as a 'filler'. I dont know anyone who had 7 cd keys laying around to do that crap.

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Ascendic wrote:

"

kolton wrote:

If I understand this well http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Partying it would mean that the game encourages a Diablo 2 approach to leveling - having multiple filler characters idle at the entrance of an instance while you farm the level outside of exp sharing zone (2 screens from fillers) for more items and experience (50% bonus to both per filler) at the expense of having to kill tougher monsters (which can be handled by good builds).

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

That was never encouraged it was a bug. Level 1 characters were never supposed to get to hell and when they did it was to power level not for making it harder as a 'filler'. I dont know anyone who had 7 cd keys laying around to do that crap.

It wasn't a bug and it actually was encouraged.

Single player had a command to imitate having more players in the game (/players x). You could have up to 7 fake players + yourself. The only reason the command didn't exist in battle.net is because of technical issues such as having a battle of players setting it to different numbers and players joining that game after having it set to a certain number.

Personally, I often went in pvp/trading games to do cow levels/boss runs alone to imitate that feature that was present in single player.


Now, you may argue that it's unfair in PoE and you might have a point but having more players = slower progression which isn't exactly the best in many case. Races where you aren't allowed to party can't even have this "problem".

To what end did you make this thread? You haven't really left any open ends to discuss, wrapping everything up in your OP. Including calling this exploiting, when just a sentence earlier acknowledging Chris only said it was unfair.

Multiboxing is clearly not an intended function. Instance boosting is a debatable one. If you are doing this, your enemies still have the extra hp, so they take extra long to kill and give extra xp. It seams hardly fair to come straight out and call that an exploit. Unfair, yes, unintended, maybe.

When there are seven people involved in the decision making process, even choosing the right course of action won't happen immediately. But think about this logically - the fix will have to come soon. If I had to guess, I'd say at least a stop-gap fix (at least one of which is very easy to implement) should come before the next race. But I can't see the future.

Why even bring it up? It's news, and fairly important news at that. The rumor mill was saying GGG simply didn't care about this, which as it turns out was completely false. That rumor does more harm than confronting the issue head-on. People avoid talking about it for fear of spreading knowledge. This will be the last hurrah for such shenenigans, so the information is harmless now. I have faith in that, anyway. Wish I could be more convincing. Even if there's a delay, talking about it now prevents it from becoming mainstream during (ugh god forbid) open beta. That'd be so much worse than talking about it openly here and now.

@Duolc - Yeah, my wording in the opening could have been a bit more even-handed. I suppose it reflects my personal feelings. What we're talking about here could be done completely legitimately. I've made a very late post-edit to reflect this (something I'm not particularly fond of doing, usually). The intention was to open and close this thread as quickly as possible, and hopefully just fall off the end of page 1 without any fuss. It may have been a stretch; if it's clear that won't work, there's only one constructive direction I can steer a discussion into.

No more speculation, please. I'm offering the information to anyone that asks; that's to deflect speculation.

I understand where you're coming from for sure, there are a lot of problems with the game which cause imbalance in races, they will be fixed and we just work with them for now.

The party I will be playing with this weekend discuss instance boosting as a serious part of the strategy, we don't necessarily agree with it's legitimacy but accept that at the moment it's a part of the game which is silly to moral police. I'd happily debate that part of beta testing is to abuse this aspect and see how much of an advantage it really is.

Furthermore, we've had heated debates about when it's actually advantageous to instance boost. To me it seems far from a black and white exploit.

And, see, that's constructive. I can accept that and that's worth discussing. Thanks for helping steer this thread away from the direction it started in. I'm not entirely sure boosting is worthwhile in the early game, but your experiment might prove me wrong. I'd always figured it favored the end game.

The group I ran with in the last week race made it seem like they might be boosting this time around. That ruins the race for me (reminiscent of D2 days), and there was some ego involved in the exchange, so I'm not racing this week. Still, that they're doing this has exposed a few more reasons why boosting offers an advantage. They'll let us know soonish how it affected their race.

I think placing level requirements on completion of key quests would make the cost of this practice much higher for short events. Probably nobody would do it anymore except in a much longer league.

Other solutions have also been suggested. If you want to discuss solutions, feel free to do so.