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.

In Bestiary, crafting was arcane and confusing. Many of the recipes were sorta garbage, and interacting with the league mechanic was never terribly intuitive. It wasn't always clear where to find beasts you needed for your recipes, and so half your time was spent skimming the wiki for the appropriate combinations, then going to places where they should be and hopefully catching something. Maybe. In Essence, you run across a monster, battle it, and then use the item to create a useful piece of gear. Easy! The in-game currency is available at the professional online gaming house. The interested gamers can buy chaos orbs from those professional online gaming houses in the most affordable cost.

In Bestiary, you had to fumble around with nets, risking killing things before even seeing them. They did add in the necro nets later, but we all know how unpopular those were. Now, in Essence, monsters are held in stasis before you meet them, so you never have to worry about offscreening them. This is especially nice since it allows you to take a moment to look at the monster's mods, instead of risking your life trying to read them in the middle of a hectic encounter. Furthermore, instead of messing with nets, you just kill the beastie, they drop the item, and you use it. Very intuitive and convenient!

I know I'm bashing Bestiary a lot here, but I didn't hate the league. It introduced some neat concepts and you could tell there were some good ideas hidden in there. I'm just glad they took those concepts and refined them for Essence. It really feels like "Bestiary 2.0" and I'm really looking forward to playing it for the next few months!

We're all still here shitposting instead of just moving on to a different game. At the end of the day, PoE's a good game made by good people. Even a bad PoE league is better than most other games.

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game.