I have a suggestion, why don’t the dev’s create a thread to vote for skipping campaign or not for alt’s.
I bet the majority will vote for skipping.
I too hate doing campaigns over and over again, even if it takes 2-3 hrs each time. It discourages me to play new classes, unless it’s broken 
I’ve seen a lot of people request a campaign skip but can’t be bothered to do the alt path since it requires learning the mechanics of each of the dungeons.
Most just ask others to power level them which is silly to me since the whole
poiint of the game is to build your character.
I agree that any leaderboards would be effected by the masses moving the meta towards what is efficient. This then, of course, makes me wonder what the masses want more, the ‘friction’ of overcpming content, to quote @Kulze or the payoff? If skipping the campaign became the efficient mandetory according to the meta then that would really only serve to show the priority of the players to achieve the leaderboard over the method of getting there. That said, I can absolutely respect and see how that would spoil the experience for some people who both enjoy the method and strive for the leaderboard. If that meta shift is something EHG would like to avoid, the option to use the campaign could be exclusive to offline characters or could otherwise be seperated from leaderboard content.
The masses always want the payoff.
The informed people always want to have friction implemented.
While it might seem in your mind nice to have results without effort that result becomes mentally worthless though if not achieved through some type of effort, and the higher the effort the higher the perceived value up to a point where the result doesn’t warrant said effort anymore.
This is a well documented mental mechanic even, it’s why one should never offer help for ‘free’ but instead attach a small cost to it of some sort, not only has it a actual value behind it but also causes people not to become depending on someone while at the same time actually spreading word… which does otherwise not happen as often. A marketing strategy which can be used in personal life.
It’s also well documented in therapy that any sort of ‘effortless’ treatments show vastly less results despite the process being identical. The human brain is a very weird thing. We want things to be easy but when they’re ease they loose any value attached to them.
Obviously exceptions apply, but especially in video games this holds true as outside of the story elements (which definitely aren’t the main point of LE) games have always the aspect of ‘overcoming the odds’ attached to it. It’s a complex interaction between serotonin, dopamine and endorphines.
Dopamine is known by many as the one which keeps motivation up, but that one looses the function quickly, it’s the ‘gambling hormone’ as it’s mostly reliant on direct rewards, those loose effect quickly so we need more and more though. Which is why endorphines are important since they’re released when we’re under any form of stress. Pair it together with dopamine release from the outcome and you have a more sustainable system going. Serotonine on the other hand handles how well we feel as a baseline… and is affected by how well we feel in situations too. So if we have more endorphine production for the dopamine rushes it means our base level of serotonine raises which is affecting long-term behavior and mood.
Obviously a very simplified explanation as the interactions are vastly more complex, but it’s a good baseline to work with.
Tldr of it is that only with hurdles through negative aspects does our mind treat positive outcomes with the respective value. If you don’t ‘give away something’ of value to you then the result is as worthless. This counts for time, money or anything else.
The game should not have different features or possibilities in offline or online.
The choice to play one over the other should not become one of I prefer way X of playing, hence I take game mode Y.
Also my example regarding how stuff like this changes how the game is played was not really aimed at leaderboards. Shifts in meta will affect everybody, even casual players that don’t even strive for leaderboards, but if something is the most effecient way or the rest of the community expects people to play a certain way it will shape how people will advice other people playing the game.
Well put, it is obvious you have taken the time to understand your position well, that is really cool 
Of course, despite both of our respective positions and effort to know them well, I doubt we will come to convince the other to change their position. But in a spirit of healthy debating and conversation, I will add to your argument that I believe the level of cost to payoff with the campaign is off as it relates to alts. I also believe the same for the dungeons. The cost to complete either task for the sake of an alt is simply too much in my (and as evident from this forum, other players too) opinion.
That said, you previously brought up a great point about EHG putting in significantly more effort into the campaign versus other aspect of the game, especially the endgame mechanics. In all honesty, while I dont have good examples, I would be fine with doing the campaign for every alt if EHG found a way to make it feel more integral to the development of my character beyond passive points and idols. Best example I can think of would be Skyrim (I know, not even close to the same genre) in that the campaign also nails the sense of adventure and encourages the player to explore which is a core purpose of the game. The LE campaign does not, to me, invite me to grind and hunt for gear. Rather it pushes me to simply keep progressing. The crafting is there but doesn’t feel like a part of the campaign, it feels like just a feature that exists. In the endgame, the gear hunt amd crafting feel much more integral amd meaningful, albeit repetitive.
As for the Dungeons, the main issue here is balance, in my opinion. They are simply too difficult for the payoff. They require twink gear from a main which further time gates the player out of starting alts. I dont really want to discuss this point of Dungeons much further because that discussion is far too subjective.
All in all, I think a campaign skip is an easy way to allow the player to move to content that feels more meamingful to their progress of gear/build making and item hunting. I am open to the idea of the campain getting rework to bring that meaningfulness into itself rather than being primarily found in the endgame.
I want to understand your point more as it seems I missed it partially as you mention the campaign skip effecting more than just leaderboards. I see you say it would effect how the game is taught and perceived but how is this a negative effect? I am not asking rhetorically.
I can agree that online and offline having different modes is not a great solution, I mentioned it more to showcase that with some creativity I am sure EHG could find a solution that is unique and works well with their vision for their game and the playerbase.
The part that hangs me up when it is suggested that the option to skip the campaign effects how those who dont want it is that outside of the leaderboards it is entirely left to choice how a person interacts with the skip option. If we remove leaderboards from the equation, I fail to see how having the campaign skip would negatively impact a players experience who doesnt want a campaign skip. I understand it would bring about a more efficient leveling process and would change advice from the community, but is that actually bad for the games health? Personally, I see the core of the game as gear farming and build making. Currently when I read guides and look up information for LE I dont see guides on how to build or find gear during the campaign, I see guides on how to fly through the campaign as quickly as possible to get to endgame. Or I see guides on how to twink gear out your alts… to fly through the campaign. I dont see many guides on the campaign at all. Essentially from what I see on the community, it seems the meta is to get through the campaign as quickly as possible anyways, so why not just give the skip option? Especially since this is a point that makes some players less incline to expand their gametime (as shown by this forum).
All that said, I really am curious to see your perspective on this, as if the devs were to happen upon this post I am sure your point would be a good data point to help inspire their creativity (all sides of a problem should be seen before making a solution).
I would make the argument that people will then complain even more about the state of Monolith.
If you coudl skip the campaign you will spend even more time in the endgame mode, that you are already spending the most time in anyway. The campaign adds somekind of build up during the character development, because it makes oyu play something “different”.
Even though at the end of the day you are going from one zone to the next while killing monsters.
I just don’t think a campaign skip is the magical solution a lot of people think it will be.
If they would add it, there needs to be some major rebalancing or some toned down version of early monoliths, which will also require effort and dev time.
And I simply don’t think that is worth that dev time. I don’t enjoy the campaign as well that much after having it done for hundreds of times, but at the end of the day I don’t mind it that much, simply because what I am doing, especially early on, doesn’t really matter as long as the pace of progression (level ups, passives, skill points, skill spec slots, mastery choice etc) comes frequently. And the pace of progression in LE is the best among all ARPG’s IMO.
Options aren’t always a good thing. They can change a game’s identity. For example, imagine a new player that comes to D4 (because they already have a campaign skip) and they’re the type of player that likes doing the campaign. Normally, if there was no option to skip, he would do the campaign over and over and be quite happy about it. However, because the campaign skip option exists, he will see everywhere that it’s more effective to skip the campaign for any alt and that it should always be done.
This will lead to that player either ending up skipping the campaign due to peer pressure/a sense of optimization, because that’s what everyone says must be done, or doing the campaign anyway but with a feeling of wasting his time.
It would effectively detract from his fun, even though it was just an option.
Likewise, if you don’t have a campaign skip, there are players that don’t like to do it over and over again and that will detract from their fun.
So no matter which option you choose, you run the risk of losing players. At that point, the option is mostly which players you want to retain.
D4 lets you skip the whole campaign, PoE doesn’t let you skip it. LE currently is sort of in between where it doesn’t really let you skip the campaign, just large parts of it.
Personally I think this is a good balance. Players that like the campaign will do it (experienced ones will usually do monos to level up at level 30ish and speed run the campaign after leveling) and players that don’t can usually be done with the campaign or the idol/passives quests in 2-3h at most, while still leveling up.
And if EHG balances dungeons for low level characters and gives alternative ways to get the idols/passives, like they said they might, I think most people will be happy. Because skipping the campaign might become optimal at that point, but not by much (an experienced player can speed run the whole campaign in 5h or less).
Why stop at that? Let’s make threads with polls on whether to:
I’m sure the majority will vote yes. The point here is that the majority will always look to make the game as easy as possible, even though it might hurt the game in the long run. It will also shift their audience to super casual players who will demand more and more easy gameplay, to the point of this becoming a mobile game where you send your character on a monolith farming and a few hours later collect the rewards (that have to be in the form of loot boxes with flashy effects).
I think the devs might identify some points that make many players feel bad, but try to adjust them in a way that doesn’t hurt the identity of the game.
For example: some players don’t enjoy campaign - make it closer to monoliths, with each campaign area generated with a random element, maybe some enemies are different, have different modifiers, maybe you can even choose which modifiers to pick for each area. That way campaign will become less repetitive, and also serve as an intro to monoliths.
This is also lore-friendly, like the current timeline is becoming unstable due to player’s character messing with Epoch’s powers or something.
Many players dislike legendary farming? Allow to choose what affixes to slam, but make valuable legendaries drop rate extremely rare, and limit LP on the more powerful uniques to 2 and to 1 on the most powerful ones, so that uniques are sought after due to their unique modifiers, and not to be just better version of an exalted item with extra stats.
To be clear, the uniques paragraph is off-topic, and I don’t really care what they do with them, this is just an example of how to make some frustrating things less frustrating, while also not making the game more casual.
Yes, and I can absolutely agree to this!
Hence why to alleviate it the experience of how the progression is scaled there needs to be adjusted.
Between Act 4 and the end of Act 8 nothing at all happens. Story-wise your character just gets thrown around, it solely present the player with what is happening but having no actual impact on the timeline. Mechanically nothing happens either.
Act 1-3 are well made by now, Act 1 is a good intro on how the game works, Act 2 is a great intro into the main story and that there’s a variety of timelines and Act 3 also brings it all to a climax by opening up the end of time.
Then all bosses are mostly mind numbingly boring ones without any major improvements on the mechanical aspect of the game before at the end of Act 8 you get thrown against Lagon, which is a major frustration as the game never prepared you for it at all.
So yes, the time investment related to it is nonsensical, it’s barely functioning the first time and the second it’s just awful. Which validates a re-work of Act 4-7 mostly and not a alternative setup for progression at the current state.
Yes, and that’s the major point.
Idol points and passives are nice and all… but unlocking unique mechanics regularly, which means more end-game content or… side content that can advance while you play the game and provides a breather from the main story to keep people engaged.
Think about thing like parallel mechanics (Delve in poE for example is one such thing) or minigames like the gold saucer in FF14. Those provide variety and alternative ways to spend your time and enjoy yourself and hence causing the time investment to be cut up into smaller portions… which makes each of them far more likely to be deemed as ‘valuable enough’ to warrant going through.
It puts emphasis on the monolith mechanics which gets a decent chunk of engagement-time solely from the fact that there’s already a chunk of time spent beforehand, a form of ‘sunken cost fallacy’. The former time investment which was often decent but not ‘fantastic’ turns the monoliths into a great mechanic as the game opens up.
Now take away the campaign though and you’re left with a very simplistic repetitive game that has some fantastic in-depth crafting and itemization systems compared to the competition… and that’s all. It doesn’t hold people a lot.
Which means we need more end-game and that’s in the making currently as priority 1, 1.1 is related majorly to bolstering that. We can hope 1.2 is reworks and Act 10 (because until Act 12 is in there I’ll not see this game as ‘released’. Currently I can’t recommend it with that tag attached to it to anyone sadly.)
15 classes but only 5 of them are worth playing
10 alpha state classes
Chiming in, as a player who never, ever skips anything, in any game.
As a rule, I usually don’t care whether a game has a campaign skip or not. Doesn’t impact me in any way.
Yes, I am aware I am less “efficient” than people skipping, but I don’t give a hoot, I play for fun, always looking for efficiency sounds boring to me.
However, in LE specific case, I would have one concern if a campaign skip was implemented.
Namely: what would happen of the campaign?
It needs work. A lot of work, to be honest.
Three missing chapters, for a start (I agree with Kulze, a game with 9/12 chapters is a beta. A 1.0 beta version, but still a beta).
And a massive rewriting. While chapter 9, released in 2021, had decent cutscenes and voice acting, the new cutscenes between each act look and feel pathetic, more like an afterthought quickly executed at the last minute.
Pretty much all the story, including side quests, is actually quite interesting, but really poorly written. This should be an easy-ish fix with the proper staff, but is it going to happen?
I fear that if most players start skipping the campaign, the (already extremely small) resources and efforts put in the campaign would disappear completely.
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