https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1876697674264813998#m
Yesterday Elon streamed himself playing Path of Exile 2 for around 90 minutes on twitter. His character name was Percy_Verence, currently ranked #22 on the Hardcore Leaderboard.
There is a lot of evidence which indicates that he did not level or gear the character himself.
The account is online almost 24/7 for the past week.
If you try to trade the character in game, the game indicates that the account language is set to Chinese.
If you visit the hideout of the character, it connects you to the Hong Kong realm, indicating that the account is being played from a location near Hong Kong.
On the stream, Elon opens his item stash and it shows a tab named "Elons maps" and a separate tab named "Maps", indicating that someone made a separate stash space of easier maps for Elon to play.
For the whole stream his inventory is full of garbage items. He struggles to pick up items throughout the stream, while his inventory is full of junk for no reason. Inventory management is an important aspect of the game.
He tries to open a map area which he hasn't unlocked yet by clicking it multiple times. You can see that it is not unlocked because it is not lighted up.
He plays the game with no loot filter. In Path of Exile, so many items drop on the ground that you need to create a filter file to highlight good items and hide junk items.
In the stream, he doesn't pick up valuable currency items such as chaos orb, exalted orb, or breach splinters. These are valuable orbs that can be used to craft gear or traded to other players. He didn't notice them because he doesn't have a loot filter.
He only clears around 3 maps for the whole 90+ minute stream, spending 80% of the stream in his hideout talking to chat while not playing.
Near the end of the stream, people ask to see his character's gear. He doesn't understand the gear of the character at all and thinks that high level requirement of an item means that it is better then low level required items. He reads off the level requirements of each gear piece and says things like "I'm level 95 but my ring says requires level 54 so I must need a better one" despite his gear actually being incredibly good. Indicating that someone else geared his character.
He has gloves called Hand of Wisdom and Action (aka HOWA). These are very expensive and powerful and the best gloves in the game for his character class. These gloves only drop from a boss named Xesht, one of the hardest bosses in the game. He tells the stream that he needs a better pair of gloves because the gloves only says requires character level 52.
Link to the ladder below. His character is rank #22 on Hardcore, ie deathless mode. The game currently has around 500k-600k active players. He doesn't know basic things about the game and his character is somehow rank #22 on hHardcore.
https://pathofexile2.com/ladder/Hardcore
Related reddit posts
https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1hwcxmd/clueless_elon_playing_poe2_lmao/
https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elon_caught_faking_his_path_of_exile_2_character/
I fail to see how being the "best in the world" at games like Diablo 4 and PoE 2, where 99.5% of getting to be the "best" is just grinding a shitload, is a flex at all? It just means you spend a lot of time playing video games.
being the best at anything is "grinding". you dont become the best at a musical instrument without tens of thousands of hours of practice and playing it. a lot of that practice is failure. if you arent pushing yourself in practice then you arent progressing
The grinding isn't to build skill, it is to get the right pieces of equipment with a miniscule drop chance.
There is a certain amount of skill that you need to learn in order to be able to do the grind, but the vast majority is just waiting for the random loot generator to give you the right loot.
Seriously I'm still on armour I found in Act 1 at endgame Act 3 just because no approprate armor has dropped. Tons for classes that aren't mine. Still wearing a low level, Act 1, 1 charm slot that doesnt seem to work unique belt. I've not found better than a +2 to all spell skills lvl 7 ice shard staff to compete with. Staffs are almost non existent on trade site which also needs a butt ton of work.
But it's to the point, my paultry armor isn't working well enough to buffer the strong ass bum mobs. So well..it wouldn't live up to the namesake of "Grinding Gear Games" without the grind eh?
There is grinding and then there is "grinding". Sure, you have to "grind" to get better at playing an instrument but you can't be watching a movie while doing so.
You absolutely can. In fact, sometimes working on some technique that just requires repetition it's recommended that you do it while doing other tasks. I learned two different Travis-Picking styles while watching train-hopping videos on YouTube. Learning the style in the beginning requires concentration and focus on getting the right technique locked in. Getting it fluid and natural feeling requires doing it over and over and over and over again only half paying attention so that it becomes something that your body almost does instinctively.
The difference is when you learn to play guitar you're building a skill and getting a consistent (but low) return on your effort and accumulating mastery over time, rather than rolling a 300,000-sided die over and over again until you roll the right number to win the Dio's Variegated Flaming Guitar Pick of Sick Solos
Alas, your drop of Dio’s Variegated Flaming Guitar Pick of Sick Solos had a low roll for the most important stat.
if only
There's certainly a lot of grinding in Path of Exile. The game company is even called Grinding Gear Games. However, being good at Path of Exile is about doing things in unintended ways. The game is very sandbox-like. The best in the world players figure out unintended ways to become unkillable or kill the hardest bosses in 1 hit. The devs have said that they want boss fights to last at least 1-2 minutes. The best players kill the boss in less than 5 seconds because they use clever unintended game mechanics to inflict lots of damage.
Also Elon's character is in Hardcore mode, meaning permanent death. If a character dies in Hardcore mode, it is removed from Hardcore mode. The game is very buggy right now and you can be killed in unexpected ways. Even like the people who played POE 1 hardcore mode competitively for cash prizes are struggling with POE 2 hardcore mode.
Compare Elon's gameplay to the videos on the channel below.
https://www.youtube.com/@Iva_m1/videos
For like the top .01 percent it is about having a good guild and cool theory. That would be cool.
It also need much luck since PoE2 have even more oneshot mechanics than PoE1. So basically a mindset that require trying again 101 time after getting randomly slapped 100 times at the same boss. I don't have that even though i can grind plenty, for example