Unpopular Opinion: League Challenges Should Require Solo Completion

You have to play the game to pay for the carry though.

Its messy, are aurabots playing the game? I've always personally felt like no they aren't what are you gonna do about them?

If they are challenges it needs to be a meritocracy if its a meritocracy merit has to actually have some acceptable values, players pretending EE trickster facetank is some measure of merit is daft there isn't any challenge there which is why so many go for it.

Hence why its fine to just cut out the middle man and buy it, its very mercenary but frankly it is already.

Again I fundamentally agree with you i'm just exploring this from the design perspective because this is one of those features that in GGG's place I wouldn't change. I'd only change it if I was making a game for me. Buying challenges is 100% coherent with the rest of the game and how its played (if you don't RMT that is a separate issue)

Edit: If they had unskippable challenges for bosses that had to be done solo i'd probably be in for that anyway. By that i mean "defeat exarch without hitting any balls" for example the issue is you have to make it so the fights can't just be instagibbed or players will just buy it that way instead.

It'll be worse for retention though so again they won't do it :p

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Draegnarrr#2823 wrote:

Its messy, are aurabots playing the game? I've always personally felt like no they aren't what are you gonna do about them?

You add Mercenaries to the core game and let aura bots have fun with their carry mercs.

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Celestriad#0304 wrote:

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Draegnarrr#2823 wrote:

Its messy, are aurabots playing the game? I've always personally felt like no they aren't what are you gonna do about them?

You add Mercenaries to the core game and let aura bots have fun with their carry mercs.

A good answer tbh, I hope they are keeping them.

Challenges don't mean anything though. You said they used to but they never have. It's just a way to track your progress and maybe have something else to focus on during the league. Not really there to hold over who you would consider "zhp" as that is irrelevant. People play a variety of builds and it's what makes PoE great. Limiting people to play a certain way to meet some FOMO expectation would be a horrible way to design any part of the game.

Also, all I play is Solo, most leagues SSF, so this wouldn't impact me at all. This isn't coming from a group player, but rather someone who mainly plays solo. Challenge system is good imo and should stay the way it is.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

The former is skipping the game, while the latter is at the very least still PLAYING the game. Challenges are not meant to be, nor should they be, achievable for people refusing to engage in the content being "tested".

But putting a build together is a part of the game. And if you want it to be able to kill a uber, I think it takes far more investment than learning to deal with it's mechanics for 5 minutes.

From my point of view, someone who got 6 div without looking at any guide and buy a boss kill is more deserving than someone who got his kill following one of Ziz build.

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

This debate is being turned on its head by many people in here.

We do have an SSF variant of the game. There, your challenges are your own achievement and no one can take that away from you. There's no "cheating" in SSF. If you want to be proud of your challenge count, head over there.

In trade league, it doesn't really matter how you design challenges, as you can trade your way to practically invincibility. Is it a challenge to do X if you're practically invincible? Not at all, it's just a matter of time. Why is buying power to do X more of a challenge than paying someone else to do X for you? Both involve you trading for some sort of progression.

So, what do challenges in trade league tell us? Nothing. Some people will always brag about them, while others will downplay them. And it would be the same if they were solo only, because you'd still be able to trade your way to be able to do them. If you want challenges to matter, SSF is the place - or better yet, SSF R.

Yea, no. We do have SSF, but that doesn’t fix the problem. Challenges are still designed around trade, and in SSF something like “Use X Orbs”, which are rare as hell, leading people to transfer an alt with currency into trade just to finish them. Don't think that's the whole purpose of "just play ssf.

SSF also has no unique badges and still suffers from the fact the game is built around trade. And suggesting “play SSF Ruthless” is just low-quality bait, we both know it’s a failed meme mode close to nobody actually cares about.

It’d be great if SSF got its own badges and more SSF-friendly challenges, but even without that, removing currency checks and carry runs would help both trade and ssf without the need to design separate challenges.

PoE has more than enough content to make 40 challenges that don’t boil down to “spend rare crafting currency” or “hop into a carry.”

A simple check to see if more than one player entered an instance would work wonders, if the check counted more than one player, it could simply ignore the challenge or mark it as failed, just like failing a boss fight under specific conditions.
This way they can keep all the boss-specific fights, conditionals, etc., just with the change that players have to actually engage with and complete the content themselves.

And for the rest like currency-spending or meme filler like vendor recipes they could come up with new ideas. It’s no longer 2015 with “too little content to design fun and meaningful challenges” as an excuse.

And let’s be real, buying gear in trade league doesn’t make someone good. You can hand a player a perfect build guide and infinite resources, and they’ll still hit a wall without skill and experience.

If someone can’t clear certain content themselves even after playing for leagues, they don’t deserve the privilege of having that challenge ticked off by someone else, just to own something they really don’t deserve to own.

Based and will never happen but it's time to just nuke trade entirely and balance the game purely around ssf. D3 and Last epoch are a good example that games can be fun without actedious trade friction and trade focused/balanced drop rates.

I'm sure lots of certain individuals would fume if they suddenly lose access to carry runs, trade as indirect item editor and the forbidden dark side of trade lol

But +1 to the topic, this should have already happened years ago.

D3 and Last Epoch have same game loop everytime and get boring pretty fast even without trading.

I don't see the problem with people buying challenge services. If they have currency to invest in losing fun, why stop them?

The issue is: the GGG take on the challenges.

Instead of making them interesting, they make them overgrindy (who could have thought that Grinding Gear Games would do that) and boring.