I’m sure you all know the “problem” of running through the echoes together with your teammates to further explore and unlock the map and at a certain point the paths separate because one goes offline, the second does something else and the third has no more desire.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could continue the echoes on your own and explore the map solo? Only to then discover that the progress within the echoes is not shared with the squad mates and you only explore the echoes of the squad leader. Personally, I would like to see the progress within the map shared with the team when running echoes as a party.
What would you do if your build could only handle 300 corruption but you were doing 600 because your friend’s build is better? Your monolith corruption is now at an unplayable (for that build) level for your solo character, so you’d have to waste some time lowering it. And then, when you played with him, the same thing would happen again.
I’m not talking about sharing the corruption value with others. But if, for example, we run 15 echo levels together (regardless of whether we start together or someone joins later), then I would like that when everyone returns to their own echo, the islands that were completed together are also unlocked for them.
Why make it complicated when it’s easy? We all have a fixed starting point on our echo map. Let’s say we start a new run and do 10-15 islands together. Then the system only has to remember the direction we have travelled from the starting point.
For example, from the starting point, one up, two to the left, one up, three to the right and so on. Of course, the rewards for these islands should also be gone. This allows everyone to continue individually and work on their progress.
At the end of the day, it’s not our job as players to think of how this can be solved, but what we want from the game. In the end, everything is technically feasible.
There are several issues with that.
-First, the directions aren’t all the same. You can have an echo to the right of the starting point and not have it in the next mono.
-Second, you have different types of rewards. If it marks as completed what should it do on the “other” map?
-Third, what would happen if you did a special echo (like map reveal) but you didn’t have the same echo on the other map? Or if you did a normal echo where a map reveal was in another?
Overall, sharing progress is a pain, with many downsides, which is why PoE adopts the same strategy.
Especially because most players are fine with this. And because that would also incentivize not actually playing but getting some other player to do it for you (which would also open the way for RMT).
