A returning player's F2P, zero research experience: a VERY 'casual' attempt at Sentinel league

Absolutely nailed this very serious problem which seems to get worse all the time. I wouldn't say it's the single biggest problem with the game right now... but it's close; probably in the top 5. Path of Exile can have some very serious performance issues, which can arise unexpectedly in the middle of an area, because the game does not seem to load all of the assets it needs for an entire zone in advance. If there was a box I could check which said, "all load screens are 10 times longer, dynamic loading disabled" I would not hesitate to check that box, and neither would a single person I know. Because while these issues are rare (for me, at least), the nature of the beast means that they are most likely to occur at the worst possible moments.

Example: If I'm running a Beyond map, I hit a Delirium mirror, and then the Eater of Worlds mobs and altars start to spawn in as I proceed into the area, and oh no here comes the Syndicate... that's four different groups of "additional" monsters all suddenly spawning in to attack me, and on certain builds this will momentarily drop my frames, inhibit my ability to react, and give me what feels like an unfair death. Now, I've been around for a while (this account dates back to Rampage I think and it's not my original), so I know that if this happens once every 20 maps it's not that big of a deal. Besides, I personally think it's hilarious when the game itself falls apart because there's too much crap happening. But most players aren't going to react that way, they're more likely to shout some obscenity at their screen and immediately quit playing "this broke AF game."

Put simply, players in Path of Exile are most likely to have performance issues at the instant they are being swarmed by the things most likely to kill them, so performance needs to be improved SPECIFICALLY in those situations to prevent a loss of player agency. And if this is impossible, those situations need to be reworked so that this perfect confluence of Lag and Danger doesn't exist in the first place. By that I mean something along the lines of, "Spawn in fewer but stronger mobs," "rate-limit the number of enemies which can be created per second and queue up the overload," etc. Lots of options there.

I don't think this is an unpopular opinion: I hate having to see other players' MTX. While many of the character effects and armor skins and 3D art items and skill effects look great and fit in with the world... the ones I see the most often are the other ones. It's not hard to understand why this is the case: if you're the kind of person with HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT ME energy, and you have two options for a pet which other people will see next to you in town, which are you going to choose? Do you pick a mangy grey mongrel, more coyote than dog, with some scars and a slight limp from a hard life on the shores of Wraeclast? Or are you going with option B, the GIANT RAINBOW DRAGON which spouts a plume of lime green fire every 10 seconds while making air horn or slot machine sounds?

Now, I know that GGG is a business, and it's just good business to allow these people to buy what they want. And I understand that other players having to see them IS the entire sales pitch. So I'm going to disagree with you here (slightly) Mr. Chan, in that I don't think GGG can or should hide this nonsense from new players. Rather, I'd love the ability to buy for myself an anti-MTX character effect, which I can activate to hide absolutely all cosmetics from other players. If GGG are reading, I'd happily pay up to 50 NZD for this feature. I don't see anyone else's character effects, I don't see their weapon or armor skins, I don't see their pets, I don't see their portals, all of their skills use the default animations on my screen... and you get my money, which is all you really wanted in the first place. I see it as analogous to paying for HBO because commercials are annoying. Think it over?

Feature bloat is, in my opinion, one of the best parts of Path of Exile, but it is incredibly out of place when it shows up in low level areas. You didn't make it to maps on this F2P run but I'm assuming you've heard about the new Atlas tree, which allows you to fine-tune the content you see and disable (most of) the content you don't want to see, personally customizing your endgame experience to maximize your level of enjoyment (or, if you're the kind of person who can't enjoy anything unless it's first validated by a total stranger in a YouTube video, "profitability"). And this entire system is very nearly perfect.

But, of course, this is not at all the case for Act 6, or any other act of the campaign. And the solution I think to this problem is so obvious that it's almost beyond comprehension that GGG didn't do it in the first place: leave all extra content which is not the current league mechanic out of act areas so that players can focus on getting through the story. And I do mean, ALL. Even things like Essences and Strongboxes don't serve any real purpose when you come across them in act 2. Some rogue exiles can be straight up unfair if you encounter them before you have a chance to defend against their specific mechanics; if you're a new player and run into Xandro in the Mud Flats, which is literally before it's even possible to obtain a flask which removes bleeding, you're going to die. And if you respawn and try to finish him off, you're going to die again. You simply do not have access to the tools you need to beat a fast-moving enemy which can inflict both stuns and bleeds on you at this point in the game, unless you're a veteran character who knows exactly how his skills work and can kite him around or ignore him completely.

I think Master mechanics are fine to leave in as-is, but a lot of that might just be because they are woven more organically into their respective areas (meeting Niko in the act 4 mine, etc). But even those could be pushed back to maps without the game losing anything of value. That being said, the way Master Mechanics are handled really shows the value in having a character in the game explain to you what's happening when something new and weird is on your screen. Which I'll get more into in a moment. Dumping Expedition, Heist, Delirium, and Abyss on players all at once in Act 6 is probably the worst it gets, but there really is no need for ANY of it to show up before maps. Nobody cares about running level 50 contracts (even weirdos like me who actually like the Heist mechanic skip everything below 67), abyss jewels which can't roll T1 mods are universally garbage, and so on.

So, knowing that "push it all back until maps" is the easy solution which still fulfills 90% of my criteria, what's the S-tier option which is marginally better at the cost of a TON more dev time? Introduce all mechanics with their own fully-guided optional tutorial quest, which is clearly labelled as such in the quest tracker on your screen. The tutorial currently in-game is, unfortunately, not doing its job because new players are not reading it. And making it unskippable is a total non-starter, because it would annoy all returning players. So do the third thing: put a nice big label at the right side of your screen which appears the first time you encounter a system, which gives you an optional quest to talk to someone in town who can then send you to an area where that system is guaranteed to appear and on-screen guidance can give players the information they need in what is explicitly a tutorial setting.

Tutorial quest hypothetical example:

I had honestly forgotten that you haven't played since these were added in Harbinger. God, we're old.

I couldn't find a good header quote for this, but it's something you touched on in a few different areas and it is something I've talked about a lot with friends and guildies. So even for me, this bit is going to be quite long.

A problem, as I see it, is that the difficulty curve of the 10-act story mode is atrocious at present. A worse problem is that I don't think there is a way to fix it. Now, many other issues plaguing Path of Exile (itemization, skill archetype balance, etc) are extremely complicated and I would usually say, "it's pretty bad and I don't know how to fix it." The difficulty curve, though, is the only case I can think of where I'd say "it's very bad and it cannot be fixed." One of the easiest fallacies to fall into, especially for the type of problem solvers PoE tends to attract as its audience, is the classic "I can't do it so it's impossible." And I really do hope that's what I'm doing here, and that some super genius will come up with a way to make the campaign of PoE the proper amount of difficult. But it might literally not exist, because there are a wide range of people playing through the same content who will have radically different experiences. If you got two people of different skill levels together and had them run the exact same quest, their accounts of what they had experienced would be directly contradictory without either of them being wrong.

At present, the story mode of PoE is far too easy for regular (regular as in habitual, not regular as in average) players while simultaneously being insurmountably difficult for a brand new player. To be clear: BOTH of these things are very bad. Most players will fall somewhere between these two extremes, but it's a very small percentage of players for whom the difficulty will hit that Goldilocks sweet spot of "challenging." And this will be the case no matter where you move that curve to: many players will find it too easy and many others will find it too hard. There is no value for this difficulty variable which results in more than a small percentage of players having a fully enjoyable, properly challenging experience.

This is where a version of me transported here from 10 years ago would say, "The **** is Covid? Also, the solution is obvious: use different values for that variable. Give players a difficulty slider which increases experience and/or drops as you make monsters and bosses tougher, so that veteran players can jack that up to keep their Campaign difficult without being penalized for it, and new players can pursue a more casual experience which gave them less experience and worse drops. You couldn't figure that one out, Old Man? God I end up dumb, I need to drink less." And that little **** would have a point, that is the obvious solution to the problem. That's probably why GGG did it.

For newer folks: before the game had maps, it had something called the Maelstrom of Chaos, and it was an unambiguous disaster that almost killed the entire game, because both Younger Me and Krillson (who was also far younger back then I suppose, he even had hair!) failed to anticipate what was incredibly obvious in hindsight. You can't let players freely choose their own difficulty/reward level to that degree, because understanding exactly how good you are at something requires you to be good at it. When the Maelstrom of Chaos was added to the game, here's what happened:

The very best players went to the highest levels to fight the hardest content to get the best rewards.
The pretty good players went to the highest levels to fight the hardest content to occasionally get the best rewards.
The average players went to the highest levels to get killed by the hardest content to very rarely get any rewards.
The mediocre players went to the highest levels to get obliterated by the hardest content.

So players choosing difficulty just doesn't work. And, unfortunately, this also applies to "alternate leveling methods" which get brought up periodically. It sounds so good on paper: let players who have already reached maps skip the campaign and level in Delve or something. Delve is much harder than the story content, after all, so it's hardly an advantage... it's just far more fun for people who have beaten Kitava a thousand times, pure QoL that doesn't hurt anyone. It's an incredibly enticing prospect! But the sad reality is that if campaign were made easier than it currently is to properly balance for newer / worse players, with the understanding that veteran/better players would just level every character after their first by Delving, a huge percentage of the players in the skill range which should take the easier option wouldn't.

But the difficulty of the campaign being impossible to simultaneously balance for both new and returning players doesn't in any way mean that certain specific mechanics can't be tweaked to be less abusive toward the new kids in class. I think your idea about Books of Regret giving more than 2 respec points is brilliant, since veteran players don't do those quests anyway. If I decide some jank build I'm playing isn't working out and I want to reroll it, and I need to refund 60 skill points, I just grab 60 regret orbs out of my stash; no force in the universe can compel me to waste my time with the Golden Hand to save 1c. What I'd honestly like to see implemented is a single-use full passive tree reset as a reward from Lilly for the A6 Twilight Strand. So the new player experience at that point would be, get to A6, gain access to every skill gem in the game, get told you can fully reset your tree if you'd like, for free, this one time only. Then new players can grab a bunch of different skills, try stuff out, and if they decide they want to stop being an archer to become a fire mage... done. Zero impact on anyone who figured out their skill tree in advance (or are copying one), and massive QoL improvement for new people and those doing a more experimental passive tree. And on a far less important note, I'd personally love seeing what kind of shakeup a free respec around level 50 would have on the racing meta.

This is where we are going to disagree the most, I think, although it really depends on what is meant by "expected." So let's just talk about that "need" first.

I am, according to whatever metric you want to use, pretty good at Path of Exile. So I am aware that my experience does not at all represent an "average" player's, much less a new player's, which is why "expected" is a really grey area. Need is easier, for me, because I can say with 100% conviction that players absolutely do not need to play a remotely meta build to make it through the story mode, in the current patch of Path of Exile.

How can I be so confident? Well, it's not because I've reached endgame and killed pinnacle bosses this league by playing Ethereal Knives (0.2% usage skill), Consecrated Path (0.1%) and am currently plowing through T16 maps on Shield Crush (0.1%). I have been known to play jank builds from time to time, and most of my friends are the same way. So one night when my buddy and I were playing Chicken Horse, good natured ribbing and smack talk escalated into a game of PoE chicken/horse: we'd both play through the game, at least from levels 40-80, under very specific challenge conditions.

One condition, really:


The rules were simple: we had to equip the Trypanon as soon as we could, and we had to be attacking with it to deal damage: that is to say, cast on crit etc were fine, but you can't just hold a tryp and throw traps or something. The attack speed had to be a factor.

He played a triggercast spectral helix berserker, I went all in and played pulverize fist of war Tawhoa gigaslam chieftain so that I could formally invite Kitava to the Space Jam.

I had less than one attack per 2 seconds, but I was one-shotting rares and chaining stuns on bosses like a very, very slow god. I wish I'd saved the build in PoB, but alas I rerolled the build to something actually good so it is gone.
My buddy still has his, though (this is a POB pastebin link).

Gaze upon his works, ye mighty, and despair. This terrible build beat the campaign. This godawful meme nonsense loaded out with absolute garbage could clear yellow maps and equivalent delves. This towering monument to Jank reached level 80. You can do anything, kids.

Okay, so now let's stop talking about PoE for a moment, and talk about a game I love more than most of my family members. Let's talk about Factorio.

You can break the gameplay of Factorio down into three parts which are all happening more or less continuously: Designing, Building, and Combat. The first part is where you come up with solutions to puzzles or problems, i.e. "I need to figure out how to get a large amount of steel to this exact spot." Building is where you apply those designs to the game. Combat is where you defend yourself and your factory from local wildlife, or clear them out of a resource rich area you wish to expand into.

Players have cheat options for removing any/all of these three game components: you can turn off all hostile wildlife so that you never engage in combat, you can use editor mode to have infinite resources and never need to worry about actually building anything, and you can copy-paste blueprints made by other players into the game to circumvent all Design parts of the game.

I have never been able to understand why anyone would want to do any of these things, though.

Solving problems is the game. Defending your base from constantly escalating threats is the game. Expanding your base to find and secure new sources of copper or stone is the game. It's very much a "journey before destination" mentality I suppose, but aren't games supposed to be about the journey? Work is about the destination for most people, it's why they get paid to do it, but games are optional by definition. Cheapening the experience for yourself by skipping over a huge part of something you chose to invest your free time in is just tragic.

Which brings us back to Path of Exile, and the "expected to copy a meta build" question. I don't know what percentage of players are just copying a build from start to finish, but whatever that number is I'm certain I would say it's too high. Not because I care about someone else "earning" a victory. I just think that actually creating a character, making it your own, and figuring out all the little ways to tweak it for incremental gains in damage or defense... I mean, that is the game. People who are just copying builds from streamers or youtube or whatever, league after league... I genuinely feel sorry for them, because they're only playing half of the game.

Mr Chan wins, about 4100 to 3800.