Campaign already feels tad bit long; three ways to shorten it without cutting content

For context, I've now played through the campaign maybe 6 or 7 times since launch. I also play solely on HC, which means slightly lower pace as you don't want to risk dying especially after the first act or two; though, I imagine there's SC players as well for feel this.

IMO the campaign is tad bit lengthy. I'm not sure if it's really longer than PoE1's, but at least it feels like it, perhaps due to the lack of movement skills.

Part of the feeling of length comes, I think, from that while you are setting up a build, you commonly use the same couple of skills, either because they are the better option during leveling or because the skills you want to use are locked behind levels.

The PoE2 campaign is also much harder than PoE1's campaign and it's a fair bit rippier, so you have to maintain more concentration while playing. Which is taxing in its own right.

If content or area size is not cut - though I really think some areas are unnecessarily big, and some optional guests feel like busywork - I think there's still some ways how the campaign experience could be shortened for players who have already finished it. Here's three of them:

Skip token as a reward for campaign completion

Someone suggested this on the forum some time ago, and I see some potential in the idea.

In this model, when you finish the campaign, you'd get a consumable that allows you to skip it on another character. I don't know whether the character should automatically get levels or if it was better that you still need to level up them at your own pace in the campaign areas. These tokens could also potentially be tradeable; I am not sure if that's a good idea or not.

The pro is that lifting up an alt to the maps would be faster and you'd only strictly need to play through the campaign once per league. This means that players on the trade league are still producing at least some gear for lower levels to buy.

There are cons, of course. Players might end up just burning out faster in the maps and thus quitting the league earlier. And there would be fewer lower-level items available in trade.

And the campaign still needs to be played through at least once per league. This could be partially amended by those consumables being tradeable and players could wait to buy a token, but then there's the risk of real-money trading buying people to maps.

Reveal waypoints to characters on accounts that have finished the campaign at least once

This would simply somewhat shorten the duration of acts by cutting on the time players spend exploring to find the route to the next area or to unlock a waypoint. Naturally, waypoints in areas that need to be opened via progress in guests would remain inactive and only be active once you have progressed in the story.

To me, this feels like somewhat of a better way than the skip consumable. It would have fairly minimal potential for negative effect in terms of trade for those who play trade, and it wouldn't have a similar risk of burning players out faster.

It would also be helpful if this affected the account on all leagues. At least I feel like I prolly would not want to play the campaign through even once every league, so I'll prolly skip some leagues if the campaign experience remains as it is. (That, too, is of course totally fine, and doesn't mean I disliked the game)

Allow players who have finished an Act choose 2-3 quests to skip on new characters entering that Act

The final alternative in my three suggestions. In this model, once you have finished an Act, on the next playthrough, you can choose a couple of the guests to be instantly finished, granting you the rewards and the waypoints associated with them.

The good thing about this would be that if there are guests or areas that a player finds particularly uninteresting or even annoying to do, they could choose to skip those exact ones. It would also indirectly add some variation and longetivity to the campaign; you could choose to skip different guests on different playthroughs, thus making the experience slightly more variable.

I'd again see this as something that would be permanently unlocked for an account, rather than require a playthrough per league.

The downsides are largely like in the previous suggestion. There's some impact on trade with fewer pieces of lower-level gear ending up to the trade.

An additional potential problem for trade and the overall economy is that with veteran players finishing the campaign even faster, the gap between veterans and completely new players increases even further. I'd not see this as a particularly big problem though, as the top players are regardless finishing the campaign so much faster than the mid tier and the new players.

Finally, I understand that adding any of these during EA might not be a good idea, as the EA also works for discovering bugs and getting a better grasp of the nuances of balance design in PoE2. Still, in the long term, I think the game would benefit from some kind of a way to shorten the campaign experience for veteran players. The campaign is good and fun, but when you've played it through many times, I just find it to not feel great to go through it in full.

I would like to add some other things that could be done to make it less repetitive, while also providing a challenge.

1) Let us challenge the big act boss at any time, and upon completion, we can skip to the next act (with all permanent act rewards freely given).

This lets us pace our own campaign by letting us try a hand at beating the boss, which could make for a nice challenge to those that wish to try it while severely underleveled / undergeared. This could make by now formulaic battles thrilling once again, as long time players will probably wish to fight it as soon as possible, making the fight feel fresh in new ways - and this is all about keeping the content fresh, right?

Failure is not a big problem, since you can just go back to the campaign, level more / gear more and try again at any point.

2) If that is too much, just give us all permanent buffs on Act completion. That way, we are not punished from skipping some side quests / fetch quests that really grinds on our gears.

3) Another alternative: make an adventurer mode like in Diablo 3. Seasonal stuff could even be implemented as part of the bounty / investigation quests.

4) If any suggestion seems too easy, then put in an extra mob "miniboss" inside each act boss's chamber to make those encounters more challenging for anyone that wishes to take the shortcut.

The campaign has 4 acts now, but will end up with 6 in the end. It will be way, way too long for a seasonal structure for players that wish to experiment new characters.

We've had this conversation every year since 2011. There are plenty of viable things to try in order to let people skip or shorten the campaigns, the devs don't want to do it because everything proposed is less fun and less effective than the campaign for helping people level and gear.

It's part of the genre to play the campaign each time, they don't want to you to play maps/endgame until you reach lvl 60+, there's a lot of dev time put into it and also the fact that 2 more acts are coming, you also get important quests rewards that are not worth skipping.

I don't believe they will introduce a skip but they will probably gonna make it faster/smoother/etc when Act 5 and 6 will be introduced.