It's time for preleveled/preascended characters to enter the shop or be made available somehow.

A statement has been made that being able to buy a pre-leveled level 60 character in a league after one has leveled a character to level 75 in that same league would be some kind of an advantage. The person that starts a new character at level 60 has some kind of an advantage over the person that restarts a new character at level 1. Specifically a pay to win advantage. I'll repeat my questions about this that no one has yet addressed.

What is the advantage? For arguments sake, let's say there is an advantage here (although I don't see one). Now let's say that a third person continued playing their level 75 character all the way for the whole time. Now wouldn't that third person have that type advantage (whatever you say there is?) over both of the players that started new characters?

So it's a two part question. First, what is this mysterious advantage? Second, wouldn't the person that didn't restart any character but instead just continued playing their original character have that advantage over both of the first two players?

EDIT: I thought of a new caveat that should be added to the potential pre-leveled character. That is the preleveled character would not be able to automatically purchase pre-leveled gems from the vendors that are made available after completing quests. That character would need to complete the quest in the game before the gem(s) were made available.

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Casual_Ascent wrote:

I'd say that the tabs are even MORE of an advantage in PoE than buying a leveled character would be. Or at the very least, on par.

They wouldn't give a relevant advantage if they were gated until a month into the league. Both stash tabs and instant level 60s are very much pay to win using any reasonable definition of the term if you get them on day one, though.

All the stuff you can "win" in Path of Exile takes place in a brief window of time at the start of each league. You have the race to 100, the race to 40/40, the race to economy domination, and so on. Some of these translate into real world cash money in the form of things like Twitch viewership, so there's definitely something available to win that actually matters.

Stash tabs aren't going anywhere. We can try to prevent anything else that hurts free players from making it into the game, though. That's why I'm a fan of time gating the instant level 60s. On day one the benefit to MF builds would be huge. In HC there would be the obvious death protection. There are also benefits like making a specialized lab runner much faster than free players, plus I'm sure there are more I can't think of off the top of my head.

One month into the league an instant level 60 is irrelevant to any sort of "winning," since whatever could be won was already won weeks before. Havoc already cashed his Twitch checks and the league's old enough that even casuals have built some wealth. I don't see how anyone could have a reasonable issue with having this option available at that point in the league.

And what about the idea of just unlocking access to it instead of paying for it that I have posted TWICE now? All the p2w nonsense goes right out the window--as it should--because this was never about p2w at all.

The op admits it's an advantage, because he would not allow it in hardcore.

I don't like relying on the 40/40 or lvl 100 for the unlock, because it seems like people who usually do those things might intentionally not, just to mess with it. No, this has to be a condition that relies only on the player in question, and not outside factors. However, the conditions I suggested already put the new characters at a disadvantage compared to the character used to unlock them, so the racers still have a clean race. There's nothing a lvl 60 character could do that they couldn't do faster/earlier with their first character. Even an MF build starting at 60 only shaves off like half a day of play for casual players who go somewhat fast, so a hard time gate wouldn't need to be more than 3 days in total.

You're probably right, but there are people who enjoy fucking with other people more than they enjoy doing their own thing the best they can. A couple certain trolls in this thread have proven that already, lol.