On March 13, 2020, Patch 3.10 started the new delirium league in Path of Exile and the action RPG from Grinding Gear Games seems to be becoming more popular with every new update.
However, the new league mechanics, in which you dive into foggy nightmares, currently cloud the fun of many players.
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Path of Exile breaks its own player record
While Wolcen lost almost 90 percent of its players within just one month, Path of Exile is currently more popular than ever: According to SteamDB, logs were short on the day Patch 3.10 was released over 133,000 players into the action RPG – the previous record of simultaneous players was around 123,000 players and dates from December 2018.
The number of players has remained relatively constant since then, and the daily player peak was around 115,000 simultaneous players on Saturday and Sunday.
Delirium frustrates players with backtracking and one-shot kills
But even if the number of players is outstanding – apparently it is not yet the new league mechanics.
This is how the league works: In delirium, each zone houses a so-called delirium level. As soon as we walk through it, the entire area is shrouded in fog, strengthening existing enemies and letting new monsters appear.
The more monsters we shoot, the bigger the reward – since the fog disappears after a while, we have to be fast. But here's the problem: In contrast to many previous league mechanics (e.g. Incursion, Delve, Synthesis, Blight, Metamorph), where the rewards are dropped at the end of an event, the opponents drop their prey in the fog where they are die – we only get the event rewards at the end.
However, since speed is so important, players have no time to pick up their loot during the fog and then have to comb through the entire area again after the event – which eats up a lot of time without anything exciting happening.
this is something everyone loves doing in videogames, right? from r / pathofexile
For example, Reddit user HumbleOgre writes:
"The whole damn day. I baked each of my maps for seven hours. Instead of leveling, I still hang at level 83 because I have to run every single map twice – also for fear of dying from a one shot if I ever do stop to pick up an item. "
In his comment, he describes another big problem: In delirium, many of the new opponents explode after their death. So we have to keep moving so as not to prematurely bless the timing because many of these explosions are one-shot kills and in most cases kill you with just one hit.
Developer promises improvement
The delirium mechanics are not the first to cause frustration among the players. In the past, adjustments to the new league mechanics have often been made, which has improved the quality of life of the players.
Most recently this happened at Path of Exile: Metamorph, when the developers automated the annoying lifting of the body parts for many players.
Community manager Bex now promises improvement on Twitter: She states that she has compiled a list of the biggest player concerns and has already discussed them with the team.
We've spent a bunch of time looking over everyone's concerns and we're preparing a manifesto for tomorrow.
– Bex (@bexchangewords) March 16, 2020
A result of the discussion will be published tomorrow in the form of a manifesto. If the developers react here as quickly as with Metamorph, the second weekend with the new Delirium League will be much more relaxed for many players.
