Solo Self-Found Support in 2.6.0

We plan to add a system to officially record the progress of Solo Self-Found players in Content Update 2.6.0. This manifesto post describes our current plan. We welcome your feedback.

What is Solo Self-Found?

Solo Self-Found (SSF) is common self-enforced playstyle where trading and partying are not allowed. This means that your character's progress is entirely based on your own efforts and cannot be influenced by other players. You can't receive powerful items or help with difficult bosses from other players. Many players choose to play in this mode for the challenge or the bragging rights. Progress through the game is a lot slower (and many feel, more rewarding) when you have to find or craft every item upgrade yourself rather than being tempted to trade for quick power gains.

Until now, SSF was an honour system. Players could claim they got to certain levels without help, but there was no way to know for sure. In Content Update 2.6.0, we plan to formalise this feature that players can opt-in and have the rules enforced automatically. Their progress is tracked on a ladder and they can opt a character out whenever they want to play or trade with other players.

It's important to stress that the expectation is that most SSF characters do turn into regular characters eventually. Some players just last longer than others before they decide to party up or trade. For example, you might play to level 20 before you decide to trade for a rare item that triples your killspeed. Your friend might play all the way to low maps before she wants to start trading. These scores of level 20 and 70 respectively would be recorded on the SSF ladder.

Goals For Implementation:

• To cleanly enforce the SSF ruleset.
• Players can easily opt-out characters or their entire league progress (masters, atlas, etc) at any time that they want to start trading or partying.
• To be an optional mode. For now there are no incentives for playing other than additional challenge and bragging rights.
• We do not want new players to choose SSF unless they know what they're doing. Despite the addition of this mode, Path of Exile is still designed and intended to be multiplayer with partying and trading.

Implementation Plan:
SSF versions of the existing leagues would exist, which are a checkbox on the character creation screen. This option may be hidden until the player has rescued the Scion or something like that.

In these SSF leagues, you can't trade or party with other players. These leagues have their own stashes, master progression, Atlas progress, etc. Multiple characters in the same SSF league on your account can share items via the stash. This is progress that you have earned alone, without help from other players.

The leagues have ladders that track the highest level you got to before moving the character back to regular leagues.

On the character selection screen, there's a button that performs a one-way transfer of a character to the equivalent non-SSF league. After doing this, the character appears on the regular ladder for that league and can trade and party like anyone else. Individual items can be moved over to the regular leagues by creating a temporary mule character that you transfer.

There's also a button that migrates all characters as well as your league-account progress like masters, stash tabs, the atlas, etc. You would be able to migrate it all and then later decide to play more SSF characters if you want.

Challenges are shared between all four challenge leagues (for example, Breach, Breach SSF, Hardcore Breach, Hardcore Breach SSF).

No one knows if you completed the challenges in an SSF league or not, but this is important so that the SSF mode doesn't feel mandatory. If you don't want to play in it, just ignore it and play the regular one! If you do like playing SSF, then this mode will give you the ability to demonstrate your progress in an indisputable way.

With this proposal, SSF characters and regular characters are technically in different leagues and wouldn't be able to see each other in chat. We may have to implement combined global chat channels.

While it may seem that the addition of new leagues for this feature would fracture the economy, it is worth noting that existing SSF characters were already not taking part in the economy.

This post applies to the PC version. No discussion has yet taken place regarding whether this system is being brought to the Xbox One version.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on this system!