I mean, I'd have been happy to take a break from maps to steam roll the new content. That'd have suited me just fine. It's what I expected, not this cluster fuck. I think that's a lesser evil than being like "the solution to the problem we created is too complicated, so, screw these guys. Make them start over if they want to experience this huge thing we're super proud of in its entirety." It may be the only game expansion I"ve played where the game itself was like "Nah, you don't need to see any of this."
I feel like programmatically they could have come up with a better solution to this but didn't leave themselves the time and, as they often do, hand waved a bad solution and standard bore the brunt of it. Shit I'd almost rather have ground through the expansion entirely to reclaim my points just like everyone else, and actually be invested, than just to have the expansion treated like it didn't matter to my account. This isn't the first time these kinds of issues have cropped up for std players and I'm just annoyed that, this time, it came with basically needing to restart the game to appreciate anything besides the zones and the Pantheon buff in the update. I've never had to do that in PoE to appreciate a content addition, and it's irritating to be told that's my only recourse now. (I don't want to replay the whole game again even if it has a new structure. I've played enough Acts 1 - 4 to last me a life time.)
I'm not sure how they'd actually replace 2 difficulties of repeated content with 6 acts of mixed new/old content without screwing up the league that only changes when the game itself changes around it, nenjin.
How has any other game solved this issue? Shit, you play Warframe. How many retroactive bullshitty things have we had to go through over the years, because we've put tons of hours in and suddenly they introduce a newbie tutorial and lock some new (or existing!) features to it? We do the content......and then it's done. When they reworked the Solar System the last time so it's all progression unlocks, what did we see when we were in there? We had access to everything but we
still had to do the objectives and unlock the relays. They skipped the dumb stuff like "Build a Mastery Rank 5 weapon" by applying our progress, because there's not much to experience in building something from a blueprint. But still made us fill out the missing objectives and unlock the relays, which was like the big key note feature of that update to the system. The story, you might almost say.
How PoE treated std players in the FoO update I think speaks to their continued weakness on the backend of the game, that they still run in to problems like this. This is like the third time in my memory my standard progression has gotten all fucky because of something they've done. That's why they love leagues so fucking much, honestly. They work with a set of assumptions that anything that is a problem in a previous build with characters can just get flushed with the new league and re-written, we're it not for those DAMNED standard players. So we'll just jank with their data. Why can't they just fuck off and play leagues, so we don't have to write sound code! This is the first time, however, where I feel like I've ever missed out on anything as a standard player, where I actually felt my sense of entitlement flare up. They care so little I couldn't even walk through the story on my standard character.
Shit, one new column in the character database, "Act4Vet", True/False. If true, you get no skill points for the quest you completed, and the game skips the reward window on quest completion. If false, it's a post 3.0 character, and shit works as normal. The solution they came up with seems far, far less sensible. No one would have cared they weren't getting rewards for 90% of the quests. Hell they could have swapped in books of regret if they really thought getting rewarded was that important part of the process. Clearly not since most of the rewards for me in the expansion was just relcaiming my existing points (and about 10 respec points or so.)
In the end I just can't thumbs up an expansion which didn't seem to want me to play it as a standard character. I hate that this distinction even exists in PoE and all the drama it causes, and I don't really have anyone to blame except GGG.
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Topic: Path of Exile - Betrayal (Read 245102 times)