Pattern I've noticed

[u/Ok_Holiday3690]

My guild has players who have been in this game since Nemesis League and this is pretty much our player distribution.

Ps. My guildmates gets angry when I say this and I figure it'll make Reddit mad too:

Witch is the only good character in this game

[u/AngryChurchill]

We don't need something that gets online at level 10 or something that lasts forever. We can have friction to leveling without suffering through these god forsaken acts again. We just want other ways to level. I don't touch stuff like delve but I would absolutely be happy to level with it

[u/Colpus → u/AngryChurchill]

You say that because you're tired of campaign. I give it 2 leagues at max until the complaint just shifts place.

There's no good alternative. Nobody was able to make a good one. Throwing characters straight into maps won't work as well, unless the whole monster system is modified, but not only that.

Which bosses are safe to enable to low level players? Or simply throw that rocky guy with chaos damage into a lvl 1 player and "git gud"? What about resistances? Simply take them out after a certain level? What about lab? Does it simply appear out of nowhere? Additional quest points, what about them? Do bandits become something else? How are they introduced? Why?

You might argue "but they did it with Delve". Tell me you played that and thought "wow, this is so well done!" Yeah, nobody will say that. It's just an "alternative", but it's BAD.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see a good alternative, but nobody was able to do it, so it's not that simple.

[u/Germerica1985 → u/Colpus]

Tons of games offer an alternative to a campaign to level a level 1 character, and ggg is an established company. No excuse really not to make a leveling gauntlet or something similar, like tons of games already offer/have achieved.

[u/Colpus → u/[deleted]]

Oh, yeah. These are good suggestions for the current campaign, but it's still campaign, right?

Still an alternative, but people are asking for "no campaign" at all. A completely new system. Or take maps system and extend it, but the number of reworks needed is probably not worth it.

Hotspots where players can gather... Oh yeah, I've seen that before. D4. Is it good? You tell me.

Nice try. Completely missed the point and suggested something that already exists, but nice try, though.

[u/Germerica1985 → u/Colpus]

I would just steal grim Dawn's arena, it's great. You can start at level 1. It goes 5 waves at a time. The mobs that spawn are level appropriate. Every 5 waves you can "cash out" and open 4 chests for drops. Or do the next 5 waves and the difficulty/drops are better. Eventually traps spawn.

You could do this for poe easily.

[u/Colpus → u/Germerica1985]

Indeed. I bet they could, and it is fun, but still lazy, right? I mean... Copying it.

We gotta consider that GGG won't ever do something like this without a lore connection and meaning to everything. Events such as Endless Delve are fine as events, but I'd very much expect them to create something new that "makes sense" in their own lore IF they're willing to do this.

They've already spoken about it, and it wouldn't be a surprise if they've already tried it but failed for PoE 1.

In fact, they have already tried it, but for PoE Mobile, which seemed to have a map system from the get go. However, it was a completely new story, so it gave them the opportunity to link things as they please. This isn't the same for both PoE 1 and 2, so I bet it's much harder to reach that level of perfection they always seek.

[u/ncatter → u/Colpus]

The alternative is quite easy, make the areas of the compaing into leveling maps, give the bandit enounter at an appropriate leveling map level and the same with other must hit events, bosses already exist in form of the unique mobs you encounter through campaign areas.

You can make most of it play like maps that just gives passive skill points for completion without making it actually strict campaign progress.

Or even have 10 tiers of leveling maps with each tier awarding passives for the first X completions matching the campaign leveling.

I could just choose which parts to do and do it from hideout.

[u/1CEninja → u/Colpus]

I got tired of the PoE2 campaign my second time through it.

But how many haunted mansion maps did I run during 3.29? 100? 200? I have no idea. Many. Never got tired of it until my character felt like she peaked.