Problem : Brand New Players think Ruthless is the default game mode

I had played ruthless for a couple leagues now and been a Poe player 7 ish years now. This league I have turn on global because I league started trade ruthless and encountered the following problem: a lot of brand new players to poe that had started to hear about Poe 2, have ended creating their characters in ruthless, and when asked why the majority of them think the default game mode is ruthless.
The interface to choose the league for a brand new player is not very clear. I made a new account and there was no option to even start in Solo self found. They feel they need to select the little circle to start playing the game and they are not reading the warning screen about this mode. Only a couple will stick around after realizing because they had played other arpgs like d2, but a lot of this brand new players I have not seen log back in or they don't even understand the difference of this mode . As Poe 2 approaches and get more steam even more people will come try poe1 and I worry there will be more ending up in the wrong mode and pushing themselves out and being disappointed about what Poe is. can we have a better and clearer method , like a complete new tab for ruthless? Some new players have thought ruthless was the season or that it offered better rewards.

Easiest solution is to have it blocked like SSF is for new accounts.
For me this is not very good because I think new players would actually like to start ssf. A better solotion would be to have a little banner cut off at the end that clearly state OPTIONAL MODES:
()SOLO SELF FOUND
()RUTHLESS

And when you cursor over them it will explain briefly what they are.

They don't "think" it is the default mode. A person that has common sense will know that ticking an extra setting cannot be 'default', because if it was the default it would already be ticked.

Further, there's a tooltip explaining that Ruthless is way more difficult than the regular game and using language like 'extreme'.

If anything, a new player will just click it because "why not" and end up in Ruthless, and while it does happen every once in a while it doesn't happen that much either.

Most of those stray players will join a global chat, find out that they picked the wrong mode and leave before people in global chat finished arguing whether Ruthless is great for new players or not (which is cringe every time lol)

But to your point: I think the warning shouldn't just be a tooltip when hovering over the checkbox, but be a text highlighted in yellow or red below the banner when the box is ticked. It should be more visible

hot take if you're not a meta gamer, ruthless is literally the best mode to learn the game without being assaulted by dumpsters full of loot, league mechanics raining down on you and a billion different crafting choices most of which are a disaster if chosen. Its a game, figuring it out at a pace that feels sane and reasonable is not wrong.

Its interesting that Johnathan also said as much recently, forget if it was in the podcast or the krip interview probably the latter.

The outcome oriented people who view anything less than Uber bosses down on their first character as an unacceptable "failure" will ofc disagree.

when you click on the little circle you get a check mark that can be interpreted as go to go. There's a reason SSF will not show to new accounts in this spot and the same care should apply to ruthless in service of new and returning players. POE needs to be clear from the first impression we already have a bad rep of being " too hard" and "complicated".

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alhazred70 wrote:

hot take if you're not a meta gamer, ruthless is literally the best mode to learn the game without being assaulted by dumpsters full of loot, league mechanics raining down on you and a billion different crafting choices most of which are a disaster if chosen. Its a game, figuring it out at a pace that feels sane and reasonable is not wrong.

Its interesting that Johnathan also said as much recently, forget if it was in the podcast or the krip interview probably the latter.

The outcome oriented people who view anything less than Uber bosses down on their first character as an unacceptable "failure" will ofc disagree.

From a loot perspective, I can agree with this. But everything else that ruthless does to you....not so much. I would argue that 90% of this game is learning how to use skill gems and support gems. Ruthless does not provide you with these and therefore does not allow you to learn. Instead, you have to rely on RNG just to get your SKILLS up and running. This is antithetical to "learning" how to play PoE.

What?

No, they don't.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

What?

No, they don't.

Most of my newer friends either end up in standard or SSF variant of the league if in the off chance they don't somehow enter the right one.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

What?

No, they don't.

No one is saying that hordes of new players end up in Ruthless by accident, but it happens frequently enough

I can see how they may reach that conclusion.
GGG could maybe add some scary gothic text styling to "Ruthless" as a clearer visual indicator that if you don't know what you are doing not to click it lol.

There is literally a big text box that comes up saying 'ruthless is a special mode and it's really hard, are you sure you want to play this?'