Ascendancy Services - Trivializing the game?

Ascendancy trials are meant to be challenging experiences that push players to their limits and allow them to unlock significant, game-changing, build-defining powers. That was my experience, as well as that of every other normal player.

However, now it’s all about paying 10 ex, 30 ex, and standing AFK while some currency farmer one-shots the boss, thereby unlocking all the ascendancies for a group of people.

Can this not be forbidden? Is this the right game design that allows players to skip gameplay and challenge by purchasing ascendancy points?

Ascendancy trials have already been nerfed into the ground and are now easy; most people won’t even bother dying on them.

+1

Its fine for me to put ascendency behind a skill or power gate the players have to overcome. but a currency gate is beyond bad and shouldn't be allowed.

this has existed forever in poe it will not be forbidden lol infact its a part or the trading experience since ascendancies came out ppl were selling lab carries, people buy all sorts of carries bosses for league challenges and so on you cannot change that its the way its been for ever basically

Services like this are a longstanding part of PoE. People bought Lab runs all the time in the first game - not necessarily because they're incapable of doing them, but because the players doing the buying simply detest the Labyrinth. they also generally only did so on second+ characters, after they've accrued tons of wealth and would rather just throw some money at the issue than grind content they strongly dislike for essential progression.

Grinding Gear isn't going to ban selling runs/services like this, primarily because they can't. People will find a way to trade currency for progress regardless of what GGG does. Frankly it'd be better for them to develop a tool or system to make such trades safer for both parties, so runners don't get screwed out of their payment and run-ees don't get screwed out of their service. Something like an escrow system where the game accepts currency from players and releases it to the original runner only after completion of a concrete, verifiable objective like "Defeats the boss of the third floor of Sanctum". If the runner dies before doing so, the payments are instead dispersed back to the players who made them.

It'd probably take a lot of massaging to make a system like that both reliable enough to trust and flexible enough to allow service sellers to sell most of the services they offer through it, but much like the real world, safely regulating something people are going to do regardless is a better way than trying to ban and block it and forcing people to simply do so with extra danger involved.

Carries in any game system should be eliminated at all cost.

Imagine the old days trying something like this

Walk up to a stranger and hand them your PlayStation/Nintendo/Xbox and be like “beat this for me since I’m incapable”

It shouldn’t be a thing and it’s one of these “new age gaming” bs behaviors.

I guess it depends on who PoE2 is for. If it's only for gamers with excellent pattern recognizition, good processing & reaction speeds, that are SMART, WISE, and willing to grind then that's one thing. Make it crystal clear who the game is for AND THEN act accordingly.


If the Devs intend to also cater to the casual player that doesn't want to be bothered by T3 or T4 trials or that has never killed Maven deathless [or an Uber deathless] then that is yet another thing and the Devs should design around that style of group.


What bugs me is I'm not sure if GGG wants their cake and eat it too. I think they want all of the D1, D2, Souls, "Ruthless" players but they also want the casuals that can't be bothered with such things. This might explain why the game gets EASIER the further along you go.


IIRC I was dieing to a stiff breeze early campaign ; in "cruel" I cut my deaths by a factor of 7x. I haven't died any times in maps that I wasn't deliberately pushing the envelope beyond what I already knew that I could handle.

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Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Carries in any game system should be eliminated at all cost.

Imagine the old days trying something like this

Walk up to a stranger and hand them your PlayStation/Nintendo/Xbox and be like “beat this for me since I’m incapable”

It shouldn’t be a thing and it’s one of these “new age gaming” bs behaviors.

Why are you insisting on telling people how to play the game? If they want someone else to play a part for them, let them. How is it affecting you? Just don't participate and focus on your own experience.

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Victini#7730 wrote:

this has existed forever in poe it will not be forbidden lol infact its a part or the trading experience since ascendancies came out ppl were selling lab carries, people buy all sorts of carries bosses for league challenges and so on you cannot change that its the way its been for ever basically

thats true. but gating gem lvls to acts and player lvl and making it possible to gain all 8 ascendancy points at once with lvl 20 is a bit weird, trivializes everything, skips a whole part of character progression and makes everyone not doing it into an idiot.
if there is an "uber-trial" carry again, i dont mind. was fine for me in poe1 too. my problem is on all 8 points at once with lvl 20.

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Ankh_13#4218 wrote:

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Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Carries in any game system should be eliminated at all cost.

Imagine the old days trying something like this

Walk up to a stranger and hand them your PlayStation/Nintendo/Xbox and be like “beat this for me since I’m incapable”

It shouldn’t be a thing and it’s one of these “new age gaming” bs behaviors.

Why are you insisting on telling people how to play the game? If they want someone else to play a part for them, let them. How is it affecting you? Just don't participate and focus on your own experience.

This guy is all over forums trolling, hes a dark souls fart sniffer so anything less than that and he wants it gone. (For clarity sake im talking poewarrior guy)

Dont worry about how other people want to play.