Leveling Time

This game takes far too long to level to maps. The amount of time required just to get to maps for a casual player is absurd, and GGG has plans to make it more and more difficult over time. For what purpose?

Why not make it easier for people to level characters to maps. The end game is where PoE really shines. It would be so much more enjoyable to at least be able to start playing the end game. Instead you waste your life leveling through the same old content you've been playing for years only for it to be meaningless once you reach maps.

This direction of making leveling and the acts more difficult is not the correct direction to go in.

Quick question: on average, how long does it take YOU to get to maps?

These videos might be helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VPGwRlzqog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MDhrLqTZ_c


Honestly, this game is fun because leveling feels like you're getting more powerful through your gear & equipment and passive points. I love it for that, but then I get to maps and I'm already bored. It just depends on how you want to improve your playtime.

GGG tends to balance everything around the people who do things optimally rather than around the people who just want to have fun with the game. The people who do things optimally and for example stream the game for a living can skip through the campaign in like 4 hours. The people who just want to play will spend 15-25 hours in the campaign and feel very over-leveled and unrewarded by the end.

Too long? That's just blatant trolling. People are in maps in the first 4 hours of a new league.

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th13f wrote:

This game takes far too long to level to maps. The amount of time required just to get to maps for a casual player is absurd, and GGG has plans to make it more and more difficult over time. For what purpose?

If you're efficient at levelling it takes 4 hours regardless of whether you're a casual or hardcore player, maybe try not spending 75% of your game time afking in town?

You cant be serious. Even people who never played PoE and went into it blindly reached maps in like 8-10h.
This is "too long"?

... and here is one of the core problems with the game and why GGG just cannot win.

If you take advantage of every efficiency available within the game, you already have your build mapped out, you trade for gear and gems that aren't instantly accessible to your character, you skip as much content as possible, you already memorized all the level layouts and you play an efficient build, then you get through the campaign in a few hours.

If you're an average player that interacts with most things, uses what you find or self craft and chooses a build that is sub-optimal during levelling, then you're in the campaign for days and it feels like a tedious grind (because it is). I'm currently 30 hours in and still in the campaign.

Scanning the above comments and you can see representatives of both camps, as well as the typical lack of understanding prevalent on, well I was going to say these forums, then I was going to say gaming in general, but I think at this stage we might as well extend that to the internet as a whole.

This is the Jekyll and Hyde personae that GGG heartily embraces, designing game elements that want you to engage with them in depth, then implementing a reward system that values efficiency and the player ignoring all those design elements as much as possible.

The current direction of the game typifies this issue with efficient players who maximise trading being able to get to end game in a week and be finished with the game, while others just get shat on by a game that is balanced toward the top power levels of the game.

Now GGG could easily implement a campaign skip mode but I suspect they are honestly afraid to do so. While there would be a group of players that would happily play through it, a significant number would skip it, making irrelevant all their efforts to make the campaign compelling when it just isn't to a lot of people. They briefly experimented with this for Endless Delve and there were so many positive comments about not having to do Lab, no wonder they haven't revisited it.

Particularly when they are investing so much company capital in revising the entire campaign for PoE 2.0 which is now just a simmering mess of sunk cost fallacy. GGG have gone full meta with this approach, trying to squeeze a new game inside their current game. It's like trying to put a new chassis on your old car motor, it might look stylish but it's going to perform like shit.

Anyway, like a wayward self-driving car I've veered needlessly off course. Could GGG do this and would it be a good idea? Absolutely yes to both of those! Will they do it though? That's a resounding no, because of design hubris and their metrics which demonstrate that the campaign encourages the addictive behaviour that results in better revenue for their company.

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Aldora_the_Summoner wrote:

Now GGG could easily implement a campaign skip mode but I suspect they are honestly afraid to do so. While there would be a group of players that would happily play through it, a significant number would skip it, making irrelevant all their efforts to make the campaign compelling when it just isn't to a lot of people. They briefly experimented with this for Endless Delve and there were so many positive comments about not having to do Lab, no wonder they haven't revisited it.

Particularly when they are investing so much company capital in revising the entire campaign for PoE 2.0 which is now just a simmering mess of sunk cost fallacy. GGG have gone full meta with this approach, trying to squeeze a new game inside their current game. It's like trying to put a new chassis on your old car motor, it might look stylish but it's going to perform like shit.

Edit. my response turned into a rant. So I apologize ahead. Ahem. Anyways.

The thing is, arpg genre games are plain more fun for me -and I suspect, to many others, too- when they are more streamlined. It's not that I asked for more and more minigames spread into every map through league system. The common response of 'just skip content you don't like' feels extremely silly to me. Why the hell should a game be designed so that I'd skip the content? Due to reward system, skipping content is bad, and even worse if you go SSF (which actually is another way for a player to try have a more streamlined gameplay experience, more of it later).

It's just... there's so much sillyness about this game. So many people don't like lab, but you need to plow through it for finishing your build. Every league introduces another minigame into the core game, which should basically be about killing monsters and looting stuff, as in action game. That's the part I fell in love with PoE, killing and smashing. I'm not saying nobody doesn't enjoy the game how it is, I just feel delve for example was some of the more streamlined content, which places it on top of most leagues. To be fair, I loved the feel of endless dungeon with ever deepening routes underneath earth. It feels terrible when with other leagues you have to google for spreadsheets, tables and crafting. None of it is mandatory to make a fun arpg game. Sure, some depth is fun and nice, but layer upon layer upon layer of obscure mechanics and scale-tipped rng kills it so bad. And as a cherry on top, the often given excuse of making trade an intentionally bad and clunky experience for game balance reasons is so silly, it leaves me speechless. No you don't make bad playing experience with the reasoning of balance. No you don't. Don't be silly. I'll rather have a good than bad gameplay experience. It's a goddamn single player game.


Balance would be another talking point, so I won't go to it here much. It's not that we are dry on ideas how to make the actual gameplay more balanced as dealing with the monsters, but honestly, so much silly stuff has been defended on the basis of balance, that I had to throw it out here.

If balance was so important, how come they tune skill gems for years and years, up and down, without still achieving any resemblance on balance? There are so many occasions when I really can't buy the argument of balance, but skill gems is just one small example.

Maps aren't much different to the Acts, most people rush to maps to get a head start in making currency, those players like me who, even if they got to maps in four hours, wouldn't know how to take advantage of getting to them in the first place. Those players who get to maps before the majority know how to reap the benefits.

If you take a long time to reach maps you're not alone, many players take twelve hours plus. Those players who get to maps after the best players you can take advantage of the cheaper prices of decent gear. Personally I don't mind the Acts at all, I get a better sense of progression levelling than I do in maps. Maps are rewarding even if you reach them later than the rest but they don't provide a better gameplay experience to the Acts, you kill mobs from level 1 to 100.

10-12h to reach maps? I can see that, It used to take me around 10h at the league starts. 30h tho? You either afk half of that or its your first time playing PoE and have literally no idea what you are doing and you slowly exploring/testing new things.