Path of Exile - Why Should I Be Forced To Trade for Maps?

Map Tier Progression should be gated by the power of your character, it's an ARPG after all. If a map is too hard for you, you're gonna die therefore you keep doing lower ones until you get stronger. It's so damn annoying how PoE had become something like an MMORPG where you should kill lv 1 Boars for hours and pray for getting a key that allows you to kill lv 2 Dinos and pray to RNGesus for they drop the next key. It is very important to take the time to level up at the beginning of the game. Whenever you need to buy poe items, you can turn to U4GM for help. We has cheap poe items for sale.

The big issue that we faced when the end-game was in this state was staleness of the final areas. Players who wanted to find the best items and earn the most experience were forced to repeat the same few areas over and over. While the random levels were doing a lot of work, we needed a lot more variety. In the 0.8.6 patch, we added a special end-game called the Maelstrom of Chaos. This was a set of consecutive areas that tapered upwards in difficulty level, with random monsters and random tilesets.

While this improved the boredom issue of people playing the same areas over and over, it created an entirely new problem that we hadn't seen before: content difficulty entitlement.

Players would finish the Merciless difficulty level and were excited to play in the Maelstrom of Chaos. Because the areas were connected together, they could easily skip the first ones by running through them to get to the harder content. This was fine when the players were able to handle the harder content, but it failed in reality. Players would watch streamers and get the impression that everyone was farming the hardest Maelstrom areas, so they'd rush there themselves and fail to kill anything. Many players expressed vocal concerns that the game was so unforgiving and difficult, despite the fact that there were easier areas to play while working up to the hard ones. For comparison, it'd be like players nowadays finishing Act Ten and expecting to immediately conquer red maps, being angry that the content killed them instantly.

I vividly remember the meeting we had where we first discussed this idea of content difficulty entitlement. The word "entitlement" usually has massively negative connotations, but it is a very accurate description of the situation that was occurring. It was quite frustrating, watching people intentionally sabotage their own progression and then getting angry about it. Eventually we realised the truth: the game design was at fault and needed to change. We needed to find a system that made players feel good about playing at the right level for their progression.