There’s at least Undecember. This whole thread started with the OP suggesting paying to go to end of time at level 55 with rare gear. Which is something you can do in Undecember.
There are some threads that have a legitimate request for a campaign alternative. This thread isn’t one of them. It’s a thread about implementing a level skip as long as you pay.
Yeah, that’s gross. Monetization should only be for cosmetic items and pets. maybe character slots, but only if there’s a healthy amount (enough for 1 of every possible class) by default, but even then I’d prefer just unlimited character slots for free lol
Why? What does it take away from your own enjoyment of the game?
I know this is a very common reaction, and selling a level jump would be commercial suicide for EHG. Big time. That’s not even worth considering.
But I never found it rational at all. Yes, some people have higher level characters than me. So what? I just don’t get it.
I remember seeing a post on Steam (or was it Reddit?) a while ago, some guy asking “Is Undecember still PTW? Or shall I start playing it?”.
Nonsense, but socially fascinating: the game is free to play, but instead of trying it for themselves and see, some people need a social validation first.
It would be ass to start on level 50. I just want to remove the slog that makes you stroll away from the MSQ so you get from A-B faster. Add dungeons to it and you are through the MSQ in 2-3h and can start blasting Monoliths. If this is asked to much to do then I don’t why people even touch hack and slash games where braindead repetition is the main goal of the game.
Is this sarcasm or your oppinion? I’m a bit lost here ^^.
LE has a economic environment, hence a indirect competition which means value return from content will be worse the later you do it… since supply for lower-tier items is massive and demand non-existent.
Given that the pace at which we already progress through that stage it means the disparity between your income form gameplay and the available upgrades make it vastly harder for someone starting late to get in LE. Someone up top in a decently fresh cycle will get the same gear after 10 hours of playing where someone starting late will need 200 hours since the early one can sell a substantial amount of items for a decent gold-price still.
So, with a method to skip the campaign and hence create a character directly into the range of end-game (or very very close to it) there is no opportunity cost for creating a new character with a different focus anymore, just a resource blockade.
This means that you get more experienced (or long-playing players) snowball away from everyone else in the community even quicker then already is the case. Also it brings problem long-term as more and more content is brought into the game, making individual builds less likely to deal with all of it at the same level, rather being better at ‘Mechanic A’ while being not very good at ‘Mechanic B’ (We can see it in PoE very well that for example a Delve character is vastly different from a bosing or clearing character).
So that would also take away the weight of the decision into which aspect to go first. Because basically… you can do everything at once.
This is generally a bad position for a live-service game as it causes replay-value to sink drastically when you have access to ‘everything’ at the same level at every time without any major obstacles to overcome.
LE has a problem with longevity already, would be nice to improve that rather then decrease it 
Oh boy… If someone I trust told me undecember wasn’t P2W anyomre and there is a fresh start server I would be all over the game again because the first time I tried it it was fun but it was obviously designed with P2W aspects in mind so I avoid like the plague because I don’t play P2W games.
Where is the fascinating part in this? Where is someone asking for social validation? Most people don’t want to waste their time on a P2W product if there are many others without P2W and still have intrest in the P2W title if there wasn’t P2W involved anymore.
Prime example makeing a mountain out of a molehill.
Many people care a lot about stuff i don’t get. Me not getting it isn’t invaldiating their care about something. I don’t even try to get it but to accept it that people care about the strangest things for my taste.
Besides the inherent competitive elements an ARPG has, like Kulze pointed out, there is the issue of game design/identity. Most P2W games are designed in a way that introduce barriers for you to overcome and the only solution they provide for it is real money.
A great example for this are mobile games where you have to build stuff that takes 8h or 24h to finish. And the only way to avoid this wait time is paying them. You reach a point where you start your game, play for 30 minutes and then have to wait a full day until you can do anything again.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but it’s common to the design of P2W games. They introduce annoying mechanics designed to massively increase the friction you feel when playing so that you feel more inclined to spend money to get rid of it.
So the biggest problem with P2W is that they deliberately introduce bad designs so they can sell you the solution for them.
Skip campaign? Yes.
Monetized? Hell no.
Specifically level boosts being monetized? Nothing. But it’s a very slippery slope. First it’s level boosts, then it’s mastery respecs, then it’s pets with drop chance buffs.
As for the rationale of why it’s an issue, I personally don’t care if Johnny Whale pays for items that let him walk through the game and one-shot everything with 1,000x drop rates, as I play almost exclusively true offline. But many p2w cash shop options absolutely destroy any in-game economy and level boosts w/ campaign skip + gear allows people with more money than me and/or people who are willing to whale to completely dominate the market with just their wallets.
Imagine you, a non-whale, want to get into farming to make money on the market to gear out a meta build for pushing. You have to create a character, play through the campaign, get some starter gear to get to empowered mono’s, then start farming. Hope you planned it out and picked a build that was a good farming build. Otherwise you have to restart on a different Mastery and do it all over again. Meanwhile, Johnny Whale has 4 characters at end game with a click of a “check out” option in the Cash Shop, one for mono farming, one for bossing, one for arena, and one for pushing. While you’re leveling your second character, he’s already using the starter gear to farm and sell any high price items and inflating the market along with every other whale. This is a very basic example, but it’s incredibly unhealthy for an online game to sell anything for real money that offers an advantage (including time spent) over other players.
It’s more than just the economy.
If Johny Whale gets to buy his 1000x drop rate pet, he’s gonna be sitting in near-biS loot within a week. He then gets bored with the game because there is no challenge.
Meanwhile, Billy Broke is barely starting empowered monoliths.
Now EHG has to decide if they nerf drop rates so Johny Whale keeps playing (and spending money) or if Billy Broke is just gonna have to farm 3 months to see a drop of the Common unique he wants, eventually making him quit because there is no progress for him.
(It’s actually why I quit playing PoE. I prefer SSF and the drop rate just wasn’t balanced for that. It’s why I think the CoF/MG factions was such a winner)
And then it’s going even further.
Imagine ohne Johny Whale gets the prime idea of actually botting. Now, what better way can you imagine then doing that through paying money to the company to get your bot set up without wasting any time! You can pay for 10…20…50…100 of them! If half get snatched and banned you don’t care, the others made back 10 times the measly amount you spent after all, people who use RMT services buy items for fairly substantial prices after all. You only need to see them staying alive for a week at best… if even!
And all of that without having the bot run from start to finish like a completely new character, ‘wasting’ time in the short short lifecycle it has to get to a position to even begin getting usable items to cash out wtih.
Oh, and bots are the prime way to inflate a online-player economy since they’re usually magnitudes better then a player is, simply because the downtime isn’t there which most people have. So it brings in the amount of items 20-50 common players would in the same timespan (not top-tier players).
Gratulations, your campaign skip just made the life of everyone even worse then the already broken market implementation with all the not-yet solved issues already does for MG players.
I am ALL for campaign skips if you cleared the campaign once. I don’t give any damn about a story in a loot arpg. All I want is to have fun, grind and level. Campaigns are just annoying as hell, especially if you played it for 50+ times. Thanks to multiple ARPGs that reset every few months this hatred against campaigns, for me, is at an absolute peak at the moment.
I can not enjoy any online based ARPG anymore, one of the biggest parts is the story.
While I dislike D3 and D4 they did one single thing super right: Story skip after you’ve done it once. I love this. I can instantly just go level, do some random maps (aka rifts) and just do my thing and I wished hard that all aRPGs would follow this one simple thing. It would make all games so much more enjoyable again.
But for a new char and a new season each time depeding on the game 6 to 40 hours of story mode… no… And because of being so hard annoyed by visiting a story for the 500th time, I get slower and slower with each char because I am just more and more annoyed and just want to get over it but can’t easily because the story is annoying.
But paid? HELL F-Word no!
Pre-Leveled Char? Hell no!
Pre-Geared Char? Hell no!
Just level 1 at random Monolith Levels or story, player choses.
Oh absolutely! That’s part of the slippery slope. I was trying to keep my “what-if?” based on solely the campaign skip being monetized though. Once you get into Mastery respecs alone it already becomes a massive advantage over other players because you can level with a good leveling Mastery, pay for a swap to a good farming Mastery, pay for a swap to your bossing Mastery once you got your gear. Everyone who doesnt pay is stuck leveling 3 characters to end game the “hard” way (aka, actually playing the game). Then if we get into drop rate pets that many Korean games include you have your scenario and it’s awful.
Keep pets w/o stats and keep cash shops to cosmetics only!