Is it me, or is racing unbalanced?

"no carto, no untainted paradise, pure skill"

A quote from Zenocide genius in his most recent podcast

When I talk to players or read forums and the word skill appears in the conversation, it's always with reticence that I keep on talking, I usually stop and it's hard for me to express how I feel about this whole thing. The most recent was with a friend who told me that the most skilled player in the game was the one in standard with the biggest amount of exalts in stash tabs. I started talking about pvp as a counterpoint and how you can categorize certains aspect of the game where one player is shining but right as the words left my mouth there was no heart behind it because of the disbelief I was in.

It was a concept I never thought of and it was at this point that I realized of much of a schism there is between MMO players and ... normal ones ?


Before PoE, I played a bit of Rift for relief, because my previous game was starcraft II. While I started SC2 badly by spending all of my time in random 2v2 playing random, I finally started playing 1v1 (still random) after 6 months and this is where I discovered that I wasn't good. Here's a picture http://i.imgur.com/yrVO31y.png which represents how I feel about the ranking in that game and how being good (high master KR) is far from enough.


Young it was easy to be "the best" at home or in the neighborhood, in mmorpgs or arpg the only requirement for being "top guild EU-NA" is not being retarded and play the fotm, but starcraft 2 while being known for being accessible mechanically was the first game where It required actual effort to win. How relevant was it to be 1 of 100 000 when you have to play (at first I wanted to use compete but being slaughtered would be closer to the truth) against koreans and be the first amongst millions where the mentality to push for competition is present. More recently, I watched the smash brothers documentary and caught on the competitive scene, and it's only strenghtened my point of view. Skill is a word used to represent a wall of effort, talent, power of will and mental discipline that you can't evaluate the height until you're good enough to reach the clouds of competition, but it's still going up. And have that word thrown away for leveling the fastest in a game where you optimize your right click just does't feel right.


Path of exile is not a game where players push its limits, "competition" in leagues relies on luck and playing safe aka avoiding any hard content and you play it for fun. There's nothing wrong with that but don't bring skill into the discussion, the only part of the game which could be qualified as somewhat competitive mostly relies on knowledge identifying layouts and even then it's plagued by cheating just like the regular game.