Unpopular Opinion: League Challenges Should Require Solo Completion

Calling someone out for a private account, low challenges, lack of characters, lack of purchases, and any other metric that is absolutely meaningless without context is the sign of someone with nothing to contribute to ANY conversation. All that you can judge a person on reliably is the post that they write.

For example, I:
1) Have a separate forum account for privacy and security. But I also keep my main 18000 hour account private as well.

2) Have no characters to show on my current private account, which was created mainly to post for PoE 2 (which failed me), and it shows a very recent start date....despite the actual reality of having been here since the Beta.

3) Have been judged for all of the above by many many forum posters.....while the actual post itself went entirely ignored. Seriously? Call out the content of the post, by all means, but if you plan to completely ignore it and point to NOTHING then don't freaking press "submit"


As for challenges: sure....YOUR challenges have no real effect on MY challenges. Ultimately I really don't care what YOU do. However, it just doesn't make sense that a "challenge" can be bought. In any sense of the word "challenge". They SHOULD be solo achievements, as recognition across ALL PLAYERS on an equal playing field, that you have worked hard or done something special to complete. It completely defeats the purpose, idea, and cred that comes with completing more challenges than someone else. The fact that they decided to display challenges next to your forum name as a form of comparison of commitment is completely contrary to the fact that challenges need not actually be earned.

Basically....while the interpersonal nature of "how did you get your challenges" ultimately doesn't really matter....it DOES cheapen challenges as a whole across the entire playerbase to have many of them be purchase-able rather than legitimate challenges won by the player.



Consider two poker players: one wins 5 tournaments using skill and knowledge. The other wins 5 completely separate tournaments, but the tournaments were fixed to let him win. While the two players have never interacted, and neither have a direct effect on the other, the player who "cheated" is ranked as the SAME as the player that actually won. It's ridiculous and it cheapens the entire idea of "tournament wins" as a metric for success and/or skill for EVERYONE.

And considering cred and skill is the only point of challenges existing in the first place.....shouldn't it make sense that they are controlled to identify that?

Buy the gear or buy the win it's about the same. But you can even extend the lack of investment in the game to SSF, pick any meta build guide, stick to it without thinking and you will still be able to check everything besides maybe the uber.

Only complain I have this league is the use X orb of Y, wich where stupidly expensive, and a complete waste for me. It may be an incentive to get to understand how to use it properly but, beside my kikoo mageblood, it was worth twice my gear. So I didn't bother.

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Schadock#0674 wrote:

Buy the gear or buy the win it's about the same.

lol no way....not even slightly the same. A challenge is a status symbol while trading for gear is a core element of gameplay. Challenges exist to "show off" or...challenge yourself...while gear exists to play the game at ANY level.

Plus...having amazing gear that you bought doesn't immediately translate to beating challenging content. An awful player or an awful build will remain awful even with excellent gear. There are few instances where gear can "cover up" inability, but not many. Give a noob an entire sandbox item creator where they can create any item they wish for free.....and they still wouldn't be able to clear most content of the game or achieve many of the challenges.

Similary, if a noob follows a complete guide from start to finish and gets 40 challenges and crafts none of his gear.....he STILL earned those challenges himself, provided he didn't get carried or they were required to be completed solo. It's still more of an achievement and a recognition of effort than buying carries to completely bypass ANY effort.

Trade is a central aspect of the entire game, and a core element of the game loop. Challenges exist as entities entirely SEPARATE from the game, with the game merely being the vehicle.

Yeah it's not exactly the same, so where do you put the gate?

When you buy it?
When you get enough dps to trivialise the fight?
When you go blind and learn it by yourself and your own strat?
When you follow a guide on how to beat the boss?
When you craft and loot your gear from scratch?
When you come up with your own build and setup?
When you don't even look at the wiki and try eveerything by yourself?

You need to engage with the game to an extent even to buy your carry. And you can't really say you did it by all yourself when relying heavily on knowledge gathered by other.

If you put the gate between paying for stuff and a build from someone else and paying other to do it for you, It feel kinda pointless to me.

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Schadock#0674 wrote:

If you put the gate between paying for stuff and a build from someone else and paying other to do it for you, It feel kinda pointless to me.

It’s not pointless if you put in the effort yourself to complete a challenge, rather than paying someone to do it for you. As Cowmoo mentioned, even with the best gear, you may still fail if you lack the skill or knowledge, so it’s about personal growth and accomplishment, not just buying your way through.

Look at players with 40/40 who buy challenges every league and complain that certain things are "too hard" or "over-tuned." The real skill check is bypassed when you’re not actively engaged. Challenges should be about refining your own skill, build, and knowledge, not how much you can pay others to cheese through them by entering a map for auto-completion. These players are often the same ones who get farmed by pixels, unable to survive or adapt to the games environment. In the end, it would show a clear difference between those who earn their challenges and those who, even with perfect gear, can’t complete them because they haven’t put in the effort.

A challenge should test your abilities, not just be a checklist to tick off by paying others. It’s about overcoming obstacles, learning, and improving, without cheese shortcuts.

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Schadock#0674 wrote:

Yeah it's not exactly the same, so where do you put the gate?

There is no gate.....its a challenge. You either physically completed the challenge itself or you skipped the challenge and had someone else complete it. How you created your character is irrelevant, for all the reasons I already wrote about.

A great example of this is Elon Musk's gamergate from earlier this year. The prep work beforehand (in his case, done by someone else entirely) means hardly anything when you yourself have to complete the actual challenge. Because unless you are supplied with a nigh immortal character and gearset...you'll STILL struggle if you aren't good enough.

Another example: I KNOW how the Maven memory game works. I know how to beat it. I know how to build a character. I trade for my gear. Yet I still die all the freaking time to that goddamn memory game because I am simply not visually and mechanically capable of beating that fight regularly with decent accuracy. Even with near-perfect min/maxed builds....I would fail a challenge repeatedly that asks me to beat the Maven without dying once. Someone else with less experience would fail far more of the challenges, regardless of any other factors simply because they need to practice and master the content itself.

Everything you listed is entirely irrelevant, because all those are functional ways of playing the game yourself. Some prefer easy mode by following a guide, but they still have to actually make it happen themselves. And frankly, they are still gaining experience that way and deserve the challenges. Some prefer heavily trading, farming currency to trade with instead of crafting, but they still need to know what works and then functionally use it correctly. In every single scenario, YOU the player had to complete the challenge and not someone else. Challenges can be easier or harder, depending on your experience and how you approach them, but if they were solo...YOU are still completing them no matter what anyone says. If you TRULY want to show off your talents from the ground up, then people will see your SSF character with 40/40. But that shouldn't ever mean that 40/40 in trade is meaningless (which it currently is).

Sure...you might still get idiots that pre-judge you and try to "assume" you only followed a guide and didn't earn them, but the idea of not earning them at all would be significantly (if not completely) reduced, and that (40) next to your name would mean something no matter HOW you earned them.

Everything you wrote is more a criticism on what the challenges themselves ARE rather than how you should complete them. There are challenges that can be designed where gear acquisition and nearly everything you listed becomes irrelevant. And some of them exist already: things like beating content within a certain set of conditions. In an ideal world, all the challenges would be in that vein rather than simple grinds or general passage of content. But even if they aren't, nothing you listed is remotely a concern.

Even a player explicitly following a guide on how to complete a challenge is still....completing that challenge. But a player that pays someone else to, example, kill Maven....can't say that THEY have killed the Maven. No matter what, these two scenarios are diametrically opposed: either you fought the maven.....or you sat there and didn't. Nothing else matters. I would say 99% of us have had to look up information on how to do something or optimal setups at least once in our existence in this game. Getting help in some shape and form in the process of the game is part of the game; just not entirely SKIPPING the game.



By all means, let "carries" still exist for other purposes like 6th slot or voidstones.....but they shouldn't exist at all for "challenges" that are definitively supposed to be completed solo, unless they are specifically designed "team challenges".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUuuyIrJAO8

Oh yes, so much skill and knowledge needed

About what "personal growth and accomplishment" are you talking guys, if most of the challenges looks like "peddler produce" or "complete x map with mercenary". It's not the stuff that you can be proud of, or say "i am better than you because i complete more chals"

For GGG challenges allow to people spend more time in game => more profit.
For players it is a way to earn cool cosmetic items. And try some new content in between. For example because of challenges i tried to fight uber bosses this league.

But if i complete 5 challenges, and other guy complete 40, it doesn't mean that he is better than me in any way. If he has 10x time more dps than me and make his build himself, without guides. Than i say, wow, you are really cool player. But 40 challeges, who cares.

And i personally have the opposite opinion. Challenges should requre party completion. Because playing in party, and communicating with people in general brings more emotions. So i think chals like "kill Maven while in party with another 2 guys" would be cool.

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Schadock#0674 wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUuuyIrJAO8

Oh yes, so much skill and knowledge needed

Looking at the build you shared, it does take skill and knowledge to put something like that together. But let’s be real: the average carry buyer can barely put together a decent, durable build on their own. They’re getting farmed by pixels, spending whatever currency they can scrape together on a carry just to grab a 'free' seasonal skin instead of improving their character.
So, I’m really not sure what the point of your link is, are we supposed to be impressed by someone testing out their min-maxed standard build?

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felix0808#2550 wrote:

About what "personal growth and accomplishment" are you talking guys, if most of the challenges looks like "peddler produce" or "complete x map with mercenary". It's not the stuff that you can be proud of, or say "i am better than you because i complete more chals"

We’re talking about the repetitive challenges that carry services push each league, not the basic, uninspired ones. Honestly, vendor recipes could be removed while we’re at it, they’re neither fun nor challenging.

Removing trade bottleneck based completions would also be a good start. The real goal should be to overhaul challenges into something engaging and carefully designed so they can’t just be cheesed by a carry. So yes, we can talk about personal growth and accomplishment, especially when you're not hopping from one seller to the next to pay for a checkmark. Real growth comes when you start tackling challenges yourself, instead of relying on buying Voidstones, Ubers, or T17 clears, and whatnot every league.
That’s the personal growth and accomplishment we’re talking about.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

Removing trade bottleneck based completions would also be a good start.

Buying a carry is fun. Seeing other chars in action is a good thing. You start thinking "wow, how this guy has such dmg?". And you also can sell challenges later to other people and earn some currency.

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So yes, we can talk about personal growth and accomplishment, especially when you're not hopping from one seller to the next to pay for a checkmark. Real growth comes when you start tackling challenges yourself, instead of relying on buying Voidstones, Ubers, or T17 clears, and whatnot every league.

You are talking about thing, which is already exists - SSF mode. If you able to beat game in SSF, then i agree it is "personal growth and accomplishment".

But challenges for GGG is for increase amount of time players spending in game. And for players - way to communicate between each other and to earn cool cosmetic items.