I meant simply that even for people that return every season, the majority still only does only the campaign and only low maps. Which is why you always have a bunch of people dropping every day. There are many casuals that return regularly.
This is the league with most players so far for PoE but in 2 weeks almost 100k people already left. These are mostly the casuals.
As long as the alternative for leveling isn’t so efficient that it becomes mandatory, I have no issues with it. I have issues when that’s clearly not the case, such as what D3 and D4 did.
Personally, when I’m leveling alts I usually just follow the campaign until 25-ish or 30-ish and then start doing monos. When I’m around 50-60-ish I go back to clear the campaign.
So I pretty much already skip most of the campaign for leveling already.
Skipping the story to get straight to the end game is one thing and paying for convenience in a game you’ve already bought with box price is another thing completely.
-An option put in to skip to end game is fine, use it if you want, don’t if you don’t.
-Saying you’ll pay for a game feature is ridiculous and is why the games industry in a corporate capacity is failing and demoralizing gamers. How about you just ask for it for free. It takes time and effort to complete sure, but they wouldn’t really have to make anything new and it would fall under the expected costs of player retention.
You don’t need to bribe a game studio into making a good game. A game studio makes a game good because they play the game too and want it to be good.
The only issue with this is, the moment the whole “skip to end game” thing turns to be a more efficient way of playing the game, it will no longer be an “option” anymore, it will be the norm.
I’m of the mind that per cycle the campaign needs to be mandatory for 1 character.
Why? You start ‘fresh’ a ‘0 played account’ in terms of a cycle. You should hence experience it as such.
Otherwise a new player will be slower then someone not picking the campaign and that leads to downsides at MG given the market changes over time (functioning MG or not, happens either way since supply/demand changes simply until a equilibrium is reached).
For a second character in a cycle? Absolutely! Skip it! That’s the whole point for this setup anyway, the first time shouldn’t even be a discussion, it’s a part of the game progression to go through and it’s not badly done. For a first character a absolutely ok experience for a cycle.
So if you’re saying ‘make the campaign fully optional at any situation’ then I’ll say ‘hard no’ to that.
If you’re asking for a full-skip with a second character I’ll say ‘sure, why not’.
I personally have nothing against skipping the campaign.
I just don’t think it will ever happen in the way people are often asking (i.e. create an alt, it will be level 50~ with access to monolith and all passive points/idols unlocked).
See, from EHG’s POV, it makes no sense implementing a campaign skip with mentioned functionality, if they’re not willing to make class respec a thing. It would probably only lead to people creating multiple alts just so they can “respec” and try other classes, instead of actually playing the game, don’t you think?
Yes, that’s why I’m saying that not only should the campaign ‘level with you’ but not in the lazy scaling way but rather difficulty levels which can be chosen as well as corruption being added to it, that alone raises replay value for it. But also to implement unique outcomes for higher difficulty levels there similar to empowered drop-tables for monoliths.
What can be done though is to provide a streamlined side-mechanic that allows people to access only after the campaign has been finished once during a playthrough. Similar to hopw factions are accessed. Get to the first town and then head into that instead of doing story. Gets you levels, doesn’t have the quest hassle and backtracking. Solved the core problem.
If it’s solely about faster progression then it’s not sensible anyway, that is a balancing aspect and not the content’s fault.
I’m bumping this as the question gets asked every week on Mike’s stream and he responded again this week. He stated something along the lines of “we don’t want to just add a campaign skip if there are other solutions to why players want them”.
This sounds fine at first but then you realize that the time and resources spent trying to quantify and address the multitude of reasons why people want it, dwarfs what’s required to add campaign skip functionality.
Some of the reasons why people want a campaign skip simply can’t be solved by forcing them to redo the campaign. POE claims to be addressing the issue in POE 2 by adding much more randomness to the campaign. I’m skeptical this will work long term but my guess is that EHG would prefer to tackle it this way as well. But that is a very time intensive solution that will not even work for a certain percentage of players.
POE 1 has had campaign skips in short delve only events and I much preferred leveling that way as there was actual choice while playing it. D3 has it with adventure mode that is probably the easiest way to implement it.
LE does address it somewhat well with geared alts and dungeons. But not everyone wants to level via the campaign every time a new season launches.
I think they are overthinking the issue and seem very stubborn in their design philosophy here. But I do agree that the campaign could do with some improving and making it feel less like a todo list with preset paths and requirements. But I can see this effort lasting years with people asking about skips every week on stream.
It’s not overthinking it, it’s just that they don’t really want people to skip the campaign like D3 allows for. It is being stubborn, but that’s their prerogative, we don’t have to agree with it.
I’m reluctant to call it stubbornness although it may feel that way. I stopped playing POE the last few years in no small part due to not wanting to do the campaign ever again.
I just want to kill stuff and feel like have have some agency over where I go and what I do while leveling. I don’t really care about lore or story when leveling in seasonal ARPGs. I just want to progress my character and have a choice of where to go.
Do what Titan quest did. Each campaign is broken into easy, normal and hard. Each one starts at higher lvl, has a few uniques bosses and drops. And allows you to skip to lvl 70? With the newest expansion.
Then you can redo the old areas on high lvl or buy loot orbs to start your new char almost instant. It’s a easy solution to allow us to skip character past campaign.
Skipping campaign puts you into normal maps all start at lvl 65. Then hard mode would start at lvl 100. Add around 30 new bosses per campaign difficulty and a ton of uniques
and your done.
