I want to love POE... please let me be a filthy casual.

I adore POE. It is by far one of my favorite games of all time. But every time I install it I uninstall it. I know the contentious topic of skill resets is a big problem here. Everyone whines that it takes the game and makes it pointless... and that's perfectly fine... except people like me who have kids and little time can't simply restart a character every time I screw up a passive tree choice.

I'm begging the developers to create a filthy casual league. I want to love this game again but without this option is just not feasible to EVER play this game again. Please don't come in and whine about orbs being an option. Even acquiring enough orbs to do a reset is infeasible as the amount of time you need to invest to achieve this is unrealistic for a player like me.

I know the entire forum is going to come in and say the same old things: "DEVS WILL NEVER DO THIS YOU'RE STUPID AND YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND", "STOP COMPLAINING AND PLAY THE GAME THE WAY I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME", "SHUT UP AND GO HOME FILTHY CASUAL, ITS FINE EXACTLY AS IT IS".

As a developer myself I understand wanting the game to be played the way I intend it, but I also understand catering to more audiences as well. I don't think that a change like this affects anyone if you leave us all in the crummy casual league. I also don't see a problem of people who want to use this league to test out builds before working towards them in other leagues. It still means that to achieve said passive target that you need to take the right path to ensure you can even survive to get your intended final result.

I really wish that someone on the dev team would read this and understand that this has been a request since day 1. Please don't come in here and scream at me for having a differing opinion.

I WANT to love this game again. I WANT to play this game again. I simply do not have the time to play it the way the hardcore community does.

In before: qq

There is a free global respec with every major change you know?

Assuming you don't have a lot of time to play these should feel rather rapid in appearance compared to people that play continuously over months.

And there is standard league where you can play at your own pace and just enjoy the game for what it is, building a character over multiple months.(instead of the development of the character being locked in a 3 month schedule)

Peace,

-Boem-

There's complete reset of the tree "offered" with each major patch; something like every 3 months or so... take a build in the list and play. You'll not get more from GGG.
even for a casual, having a pool of mid-high level characters is not hard at all.

As everybody else mentioned, there's a free reset every 3 months, so you can put the character you've messed up aside and play another one until you can respec the passive tree of the first.

There are also 18 respec points as quest rewards all trough the game. And you should get at least some regret orb drops while playing.

Also: you can always plan a character in advance! Offline or on your smartphone even!

I understand your frustration and it was difficult for me to get used to PoE's system, but the system itself makes choices matter.
If there was no respec penalty, your choices wouldn't matter. At all. And you could respec for certain boss encounters, etc, etc, which is detrimental to the end-game.

Edit: There's a free skill-tree reset coming on March 3d, with 2.6, btw!

I think you lack some game knowledge.

In a new league without any leveling items it takes a 12 hours to reach dried lake act 4 merciless if you are fairly slow. Fast players go faster than that (with leveling items you can do it 5 hours - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLsf0JB_Xy8).

So buy some good leveling items (they are dirt cheap in standard league) and level faster.

The reason I mention this is because your highest level character is lvl 58. With good leveling items you could almost level a new lvl 58 duelist by the time it took you to write this post ;)

Also you get 24 reset points while leveling (8 per difficulty) and scouring / regret orbs are fairly common drops.

My highest level character took a long damn time to get him there, FYI. I am an awful player who still loves to play.

It drives me mad when I offer reasons for this to exist and everyone immediately offers options that aren't really options. A reset every 3 months does nothing to alleviate this problem. It is a sorry excuse from a group of people who are simply more hardcore than the group of people that contains me.

The defense of "it makes choices matter" is fantastic, but as a developer myself both in gaming as well as spending a good amount of time in creating tools for the stuff I create I understand that just because I intend a game or tool to be used one way does not mean that everyone wants to use it that way. It's perfectly acceptable for these two styles of game play to live alongside one another.

This is the part I will never understand. I am not asking anyone to sacrifice that option. The regular league is perfectly fine to work this way. I absolutely see the merit of this style of gameplay. That doesn't mean that there can't be a league that I have described as well.

Enough with this "it's only a few hours" because it is not. For a player like me, not only is it unlikely that I'm good enough to level that fast, it is also unlikely I can find that kind of time to play. Please stop trying to defend the game in that way, not everyone plays that way or is able to do so.

Does this make me a sucky gamer? Yes, absolutely! But to argue "YOU SHOULDN'T PLAY OUR GAME" is ludicrous.

So basically there is nothing anyone can say that you will accept, or even entertain unless it is 100% in agreement with your points? You say you want to love PoE, but fundamentally it is NOT a game designed with your playstyle in mind. The no-lifer/"hardcore arpg nerd"/whatever you want to call it IS the intended audience.

As a super casual player, who will take a long time to build a character, Standard League exists. You will never be forced to finish a character in a set amount of time, because it isn't going anywhere. You never lose anything. Currency, items, whatever just accumulate. This includes Regret orbs that are what you need more of it sounds like.

There are plenty of players that knows how to play efficiently but doesn't throw in a massive amount of hours. You could be one of those players if you wanted to. All it takes is watching a few youtube video's and planning a bit ahead.

You can be a casual (and by casual I mean someone that doesn't throw in many hours on a weekly basis) and play this game just fine.

Correct: your opinion doesn't affect my opinion. Why would it? The difference is I know and understand your point. I don't disagree... having a game that has consequences is fantastic and for people who want to play that way: power to you!

I have been playing POE on and off since its inception. I am not new to the game. However, this has been something that has been addressed time and time again. Yes, I understand that's not the people they WANT it to focus on. But give me a valid reason why people who want to play the game that way are not allowed to do so?

Also... to the one calling this a "troll thread"... you do realize you sound precisely like Trump? IT'S FAKE NEWS. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean other people don't. This is a topic that has come up since the game began.

I don't want to invest 20 hours into a character only to find I screwed him up and need to spend 20 more hours atoning for those mistakes. I also don't want to run through someone's random build just so I can play the game. I don't want to spend 20 hours researching HOW to play the game in order to play the game.

The argument that the game is designed this way doesn't mean that that's the way it needs to remain. The design of a game doesn't always dictate the way that people play it. And absolutely this style appears to be sustainable as there appears to be enough support that they continue to create new content which is absolutely fantastic. But opening it up with something like this makes it more accessible.

These forums have always been littered with elitists whose argument is simply "if you don't like it leave". Well, no. I won't leave. I am not the only player who holds this opinion. So, why not open it up? Give me a reason beyond "we don't want it".