Suggestion - An orb which instantly completes campaign.

Special note for GGG : The Path of Exile sub-reddits have been compromised and they're run by TFT. Any "advise" obtained there is in the direct benefit of TFT RMT traders. Their goal is to make the game as tedious as possible so they can make more money. They nolife and 99% of the POE players don't. I'm sure you have the stats to see exactly how many "unique" people (with non-repeating IP addresses/network card MAC addresses) manage to beat the endgame bosses. Try not to visit Reddit for any game related feedback/advise and if you do, remember TFT and remember that there are some people who do have an agenda and do have a financial incentive towards offering "selective feedback".

Remember, it's just a video game where 99% of the people have jobs and lives and they only play this game for entertainment. It's not a full time job for normal people and the only people who want it to make it a full time job is RMT'ers from TFT who advocate to make the bosses harder and harder. It's just false propaganda/feedback on Reddit and nothing else. They downright ban anyone who doesn't "concur" with the "TFT way of life". This is the reason why I have to resort to using the official forums to submit my feedback before "it's too late".

This feedback is coming from a casual player who loves the mechanics of POE but absolutely hates the the forced time sinks and the "you must treat this game as a full time job" aspect of the game. I'm sure that both the devs want their players to enjoy the game and not a bunch of RMT'ers who sell entire builds and use guilds for boosting.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


I understand that this has been discussed at length, but I may have a "half-way solution" which meets the design criteria for POE 1 and POE 2. I'm creating this post for POE 2 because of the recent content reveal and because this "possible feature" might benefit POE 2 the most.

Context/background :

Path of Exile franchise has always been designed around the design philosophy of creating multiple characters and "entice" players to make new characters for different content types. And yes, it is a good design philosophy and it is fun to try out new things to overcome new obstacles/challenges. However, it also results in various problems which will be discussed below.

Problem :

Campaigns are a chore. And the design philosophy creates a "forced" problem where the player is pretty much forced to create new characters. Running through the campaign is tedious for both POE 1 as well as POE 2 and it will always remain a tedious task as it's a time sink with literally zero benefits. It's just there to be there.

Now I understand that the devs have invested a lot of time, money and resources into carefully crafting the campaign and it is great, but it quickly loses it's charm if one is forced to play it for literally no benefit and it becomes downright undesirable and even downright sickening and nauseating for one to just having to complete the campaign for the sake of creating new characters for new builds.

This is coming from someone (who had a withdrawal episode) but found out that quitting chain vaping with 50mg of nic salts was way easier than beating the POE campaign in 0.2. Personally, I'd rather go through the withdrawal symptoms all over again or rather quit the league than to create a new character AFTER I've already played the campaign once for a league and leveled my starter to level 80+.

I'm of the opinion that a player should play through the campaign once per league. This way, they get familiarized with the league mechanics and the campaign retains it's charm.

However, in the world of Wraeclast, there's no free lunch and every aspect of POE is designed to have a cost associated with it. And here comes the solution, an orb which when consumed "transports" a new character straight to the endgame.

Solution :

As mentioned earlier, the solution to this problem is for players to use a new currency orb which will complete the campaign for them. It can be an orb or a payment of 20 divine orbs.

The orb can be a rare drop or it can cost around 20 divine orbs.

Me and the vast majority of players would happily pay that much for a new character as we would rather farm 20 divine orbs and/or brick our character with constant respeccing + quit the game instead of creating a new character and running the campaign and waste 6-8 hours for absolutely nothing.

It doesn't even have to be an orb or a payment of 20 divine orbs. It can be something which unlocks after the player completes a specific end game milestone like killing the first faction boss or something similar.

If you'd like, you could take an ingame popup survey or something if it is something the players would like or create a temp league around it.

Conclusion :


I believe this solution would aid the players and the devs massively and would take care of most of the criticisms against the campaign, endgame and the player experience. Players would be incentivised to use the items which they find instead of just downright selling them for ingame currency. I hope the devs would read this before it's too late and in the content reveal video, I did see the dev team trying to "streamline the campaign experience" for veterans and if this solution is acceptable, it could also save some dev bandwidth and generate some revenue for character slots.

Players want to try out new classes and try new mechanics but they also don't want to waste 8-10 hours for a "theory" which may or may not pan out. Frankly, most of the frustrations of this game stem from this specific time sink.