For those of you who don’t know, Path of Exile is a free-to-play online action RPG.
I first started playing it back in January, 2016.
I created a Ranger who was good at using a bow and started playing in the Standard league.
The Standard league, for the unacquainted, allows the character to be resurrected in
the last town if they die.
There is no limit to this, so my Ranger died literally 100 or more times before I was able
to finish the game.
After finishing the game, your character would be allowed to start the game again, except
at a much higher difficulty level (that is, at the Cruel and Merciless difficulties).
These difficulty levels have since been abandoned in Path of Exile 3.0 – Fall of Oriath.
They have been replaced with six new acts instead.
Anyway, after completing the game on Normal, I found that I had become bored with my Ranger,
and I didn’t really want to play through the game again on Cruel.
So I stopped playing Path of Exile, at least for a while.
In June of 2016, a new challenge league was released titled, “Prophecy”.
Challenge leagues are temporary leagues that usually run for a few months or so.
They’re a way for the developers to test new content, as well as to allow users to
make a fresh start with a fresh economy.
I decided to give Prophecy a go and created a Duelist.
I found the Standard league quite boring, so made the decision to only play in the Hardcore
league.
A character who dies in Hardcore does not resurrect.
They are permanently moved to the Standard league.
So Hardcore felt like a real challenge to me.
Anyway, very quickly my Duelist died, so I made a Shadow.
My Shadow got a bit further in the game, but also died.
I then tried a Witch, and she died as well.
My characters were typically dying from the new content in Prophecy, that is, the actual
prophecies themselves.
Prophecies are granted by a non-player character named Navali who dishes them out for a cost
of one Silver Coin.
Prophecies can basically change game areas to generate different encounters or to force
various outcomes to occur.
They were generally fairly easy to overcome, except for a couple which ultimately would
kill my character.
Over a period of about two months, I went on to make many, many characters.
Maybe about 20 or 30 or so.
By the end of it, I was exhausted.
I felt like I was wasting my time and had very little to show for the hundreds of hours
I had invested.
So I had a break from the game.
It wasn’t until August 2017, upon the arrival of Path of Exile 3.0 and the new challenge
league “Harbinger”, that I decided to give the game another go.
This time, I decided to make a character that I knew would survive.
I created a Marauder in the Harbinger Hardcore league who used a mace and shield, and relied
on the totem “Ancestral Warchief”.
Yeah, he was quite boring to play, but I was surviving!
All I wanted to do was get to the new game content, the first being Act V. I managed
to gain the Ascendancy class, “Juggernaut”, for my Marauder.
He felt unstoppable.
I was smashing through hordes of beasts.
Nothing was getting in my way.
And then what happened somewhere in the middle of Act V?
I died at the hands of a Harbinger and his minions.
I felt so disappointed.
I felt like deleting the game right there and then, but I didn’t.
I went on to play a couple of more characters.
A Shadow who focused on inflicting huge amounts of damage, but he died at level 30 due to
a lack of defences.
I also made a Duelist who reached level 34, and a Scion who reached level 29.
Both of these characters are still alive.
So why am I not playing any more?
Well, I did a quick calculation of how many hours I had invested in Path of Exile.
A conservative estimate is around 500 to 1000 hours.
Now that’s probably lightweight compared to some hardcore POE fans, but for me, that
felt like a real waste of time.
I remembered the times my five-year-old son would be asking me to play Lego with him,
and me replying, “Just wait till I get to the next area!”.
I was spending most of my free-time playing a silly game.
What did I have to show for it?
About 4000 Scrolls of Wisdom – the cheapest of the in-game currency.
Yeah, sure, I had other currency as well.
But what could I do with it?
Nothing, that’s what.
It was all fictional.
If I had invested my 1000 hours in practising the piano, I’d probably be very good at
playing the piano by now.
Anyway, there was only one option.
I deleted Path of Exile 3.0 and all it’s subdirectories.
The game was consuming too much of my life.
That’s not to say that I think Path of Exile is a bad game, not at all!
But obviously the developers have a financial incentive to keep players playing.
The more hours people clock, the more likely they are willing to fork out cold hard cash
to buy some extra stash space, or a cosmetic upgrade.
Personally, I only spent about $14 Australian dollars on getting some extra storage space.
But quite frankly, I’m happy to throw that away knowing that I won’t ever have to waste
my life again playing POE.
Time with my family is worth a lot more than collecting some fictional Orbs of Alchemy
or Glassblower's Baubles.
Goodbye Path of Exile.
I must leave you now.
I’m sorry, but there is no other way.