Any tips on how to get my friends to try out Path of Exile?

For me it always was like: "Here is your shit, grab your shit and beat some shit out of those shit-heads".
IRL friends stayed: 1
Internet buddies stayed: 0
Something gone wrong I guess...

I'm new (playing for 2 weeks now) and I don't think the game is TOO unforgiving to new players. A lot of build guides do a good job at spelling everything out for a beginner. Everything in normal difficulty dies instantly, to pretty much anything. I mean, it's pretty much just as easy as Diablo 3's normal, so I definitely don't think its the crushing difficulty that does it necessarily.

Before I started playing though, there were rumors being thrown around about this game that turned me off to it. One was the rumor that you are forced to trade regularly to progress in this game. While true to an extent, particularly near the end of the game, I found that this was heavily exaggerated. I'm up to tier 11 maps now and I'm sure I could push a little higher, and all I traded for so far are maps and some badly needed upgrades to my boots. I was worried at first because I wasn't good at playing the economy in multiplayer games, but I learned that if you just save up in PoE, and learn just a little about good stat rolls on gear, the money comes rolling in to buy most things you need to progress.

The only thing I can say that legitimately kicked my ass so far was merciless Daresso. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Anyways, if your friends are concerned with the trading aspect (perhaps they fear how the old auction house worked in D3), then tell them they don't have too much to fear. However, you could also have a friend like mine who quit because they had to use their HP and mana flasks a bit in the early levels. Those types of people were beyond hope anyways though.

Well it's hard to answer i tried multiple times to bring friends ( IRL and internet from my previous multigaming, i was advertising a bit around Path of Exile in Open bêta, on website and so on ) and it has been really different reactions from each of them.

Let's say a large part were mostly competitive players on others games, including few pro players, and others were more or less passionate video games players since 1990/2000.

Only a few were ARPG fans or regular ARPG players and that's the only ones that stayed a bit more than a day.

On all these players only a few decided to give a try to Path of Exile and there were a lot of reasons;
From a native english speaker perspective translations are not required for others in a game because now-a-days everybody is supposed to understand english.
From my non native speaker perspective they are wrong to think that. Translations are REALLY important, for immersion, quality of life in a game that require a lot of searching / reading trought wiki and so on.

I hope you can understand aswell English is teached with very variable levels in most of EU countries for example. And generaly from a city to another. A school to another one and so on. Beeing in a countrie where you can learn English doesn't mean you will know how to speak and understand english at the end. It just mean you will be able to have few basis to work on it later on.

That's the main thing that slowed them down on Path of Exile or made them not willing to give it even a try.

The second reason was more or less the nature of ARPG: Click - drop 99% trash loot - Repeat. It's quite true for Path of Exile the game has way more than that to offer but the reality is people don't give a shit about that, reputation of ARPG is more or less set in stone.

Some others random reasons. Some of them stayed a bit, some others decided to pass on it. ( can just remember those ones sorry ):

- Leveling was OK. Till i noticed my char was trash and i had to level again trought all these acts. Bored ===> Uninstall.

- Graphics and ambience. That's subjective personaly i love it, but you know how it is there is a " quality " race that started few years ago ... for the largest part of PC players that's it, if you are not using the best engine available and so on ... You are dead.

- Desync. No comment.

- Nothing competitive in. Not hard to understand, assuming players i asked to give a try to PoE were mostly in a competitive mindset.

- Too time consuming. Way too much time consuming. That's from a player that actualy played a bit more than 100 hours and felt he achieved nothing at all.

- Popularity of the game. You know how it is some players play only on big titles that's it ^^

- It's all about items. Nothing about skill. ( this is refering to ARPG nature ). I think it can be discussed i'm quite agree with this one, it does require some knowledges but i do agree once you are well geared there arn't much content that require " skill ".

There are a lot of others reasons of course, more or less about well known troubles new player have to understand the basic gameplay but they has been discussed in so many threads i'm not sure it's good to start again here.

In all cases you can't expect your friends to all give a try to Path of Exile, it depend a lot of their personality, how they want to spend their time for a hobbie, if they are open minded or not.
If i can give you one argue you can put in just tell them if you are playing it so much it's not for nothing. And that they could be surprized over all they are thinking about it :)

Second thing is i think it's a bad idea to play with them from the begin. You should let them try alone first then answer questions later :) Let them think by themselves and building their own opinion.

Good luck to bring your friends to PoE.