Remove xp penalty's from death

"

levy42088 wrote:

I came to this game from world of warcraft. I wanted to level up to 100, and make my character the best it could. If new patches come out that have new melee abilities, then I will adapt accordingly, but right now, I hit the max level, got all my masters to 8, running the best in slot items, done most if not all content (not uber atziri because I'm not throwing away 8 ex just to see if i can kill him)

This is exactly my point. Most people won't hit max level, get masters to lvl 8, ever get 1 BIS item, nevermind many, nor will they see all content. You giving game changing feedback based on your playing experience is completely unrealistic to the large majority, especially when you factor most people are playing temp leagues.

"

So in my journey, I found that getting to level 100 gives you a new freedom when it comes to mapping without being super anal and pussy footing around. I wish I could have enjoyed the entire game this way.

So I have been trying to figure out 'Why' I enjoy mapping so much now at level 100. At first thought, I remember weeks and weeks on end, in the middle of level 97-98, when I could not do ANY map that was not pack size due to fear of losing 10% (5 Hours of my treasured time. I have job as well, so 5 hours of my freetime is very treasured to me. And I don't think its fair they can take that time away)

Except that you can do these mods in your 80s and early 90s. You picked out completely optional levels in which you're basically playing HC. Which, in HC people do these mods. Doing them is for 2 reasons, 1. to get more maps, if you have enough why bother? 2. for personal challenge. If you want to challenge yourself on your 98/99, losing exp means you failed. It's not a challenge if failing isn't a factor.

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Yes, can you do every single map, killing 1 monster at a time, taking it very slow? Yes. Why does this game reward those who take things overly slow, super paranoid, no fun.

This is not remotely true for anyone playing these levels. It's mind boggling that it's been said more than once in this thread. When completing a task that's solely a time investment why would someone make it take longer rather than preparing properly? Let me take this shock nova build to 100, which involves very risky play and slow clear speed rather than the hundreds of builds which are better. It's nonsense.

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Thats why at level 100, I get to enjoy myself. I get to do hard maps, double beyond, atziri whenever I want. Of course I still don't want to die, that would waste a port. But if god forbit some crazy shit did go down, its not nearly as Night Ending/Rage Quitting as losing 5 hours of grinding.

See above, you can do these things when it cost less at the cost of having 5-10 less skill points. If your build goes from unviable to invincible from 90-95 to 100, then you have a shitty build and some weird exploit no one knows about.

"

From level 90-100 your character pretty much is at its highest potential. But the risk / chance % of death continues to rise. The 10% xp penalty works the entire game, from level 1 all the way until 85. But GGG DID NOT think how a 10% would be affected by the experience curve being multiplied by thousands. This is the issue.

I explained this point already, quite well actually. The death penalty is actually really smart when you factor how it scales. At early levels it's virtually meaningless, serves more of a warning of shit to come. You die, see the exp lost, know you need to make adjustments, you can do it now or choose to ignore it. When you get into mapping it gets progressively more painful until the point it stops you dead. Options are quit or adjust. Adjusting makes your build better and you better. Quitting accepts that the build is done and/or a failure. Neither is really that bad if you weren't dead set on it hitting 100 in the first place. I probably have 50 builds that fall into that.

As goetz has explained I think 50 or so times, when you reach these really high levels you've gained more skill points, better gear and you've become a better player. Expecting someone with these qualifications to not die is not evil. It's also not something they just overlooked. This is intended from the devs.

You're going into an area of the game the devs want reserved for the truly masochistic. The ones who want to devote ungodly amounts of time to this, want to truly perfect a build and want this accomplishment. No one thinks of max level in WoW as a big deal, here though, everyone sees it as a major accomplishment. In rampage I had very few trades where I wasn't congratulated on my level. There's a reason that first to 100 posts get to the top of reddit when they happen. Changing how this shit works makes it much less to care about. Fuck, your signature wouldn't matter if we looked at 100 like WoW, especially considering the ladder jumbles everyone. If there were 1000 lvl 100s, you could have been the 999th and got lucky to be placed there. But right now it doesn't matter because you're still in the top 100, even with the random nature factored. It's something you should be proud of, and you clearly are.

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I wish others can enjoy maps the way I do, without the fear of the 10% death penalty. I wish there was a switch to turn your xp "OFF" which means for the map, you don't lose xp, but you don't gain xp either.

We do, sure we'll lose something from it, but it doesn't matter to most of us. I can do a psychotic palace in my late 80s and it won't be much different than you at 100 (if our gear is comparable ofc).

"

levy42088 wrote:

From level 90-100 your character pretty much is at its highest potential. But the risk / chance % of death continues to rise. The 10% xp penalty works the entire game, from level 1 all the way until 85. But GGG DID NOT think how a 10% would be affected by the experience curve being multiplied by thousands. This is the issue.

They absolutely did. Getting to 100 was not intended to be a thing that was achieved in less than years. The issue here is that people cannot seem to shake the notion that because there is a cap, you have to get to cap.

The main philosophy behind their design decisions, as far as I can tell, is to ensure that you could potentially make incremental progress on a character over huge spans of time.

Moos,, just because you died doesn't mean you failed. This game has many strange multiplicative components so really anything could kill you if the circumstances are right. That's why I'm against the xp penalty.

I play a Max block 75/60 + soul taker + Aegis static strike.

Yes, I should be unstoppable. But NOPE!! If you get a volatile flame blood with *30% inc damaged" AND "+99% damage as cold damage"
That would kill anybody, not just me. And that's why the penalty should be lowered. This isn't a question of "how good my build is", it's just a freak accident and 10% is a lot to lose when it's not your builds fault.

I hate hardcore. I am so anti hardcore. Why would I put all this time onto a character just to die at some random point and throw that time out the window.

Standard is NOT hardcore. Dying does NOT equal failing.

That's why I'm not playing hard core. I am playing standard, so please, this convo has no room for your "hardcore" mindset. If I was talking about hard core I would have mentioned it.

If you can have self control, then cool, you can reach level 88 and then stop and play hard maps. But if your part of the die hard end gamer mapping community and your friend dies in your map, everyone in the group will feel terrible for him, he might rage quit, and as a group, that's another 5 hours we have to spend on pack size maps.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

To clarify, if we assume the current penalty isn't too strong, and we want half of XP returned on revenge, then the death penalty would need to be increased to 20% (10% nonrefundable).

If we kept it at 10% and have half back on revenge, that is eqivalent to "we have reduced the death penalty to 5%." It wound be the same as cutting the penalty in half, straight-up.

In other words, your suggestion is smoke and mirrors and changes nothing, except punishing AFKs.

I don't know where you get these assumptions from, but at least you're stating them so it's obvious where you've gone wrong. There is no reason the recovery mechanic would a be guaranteed success. Both of your scenarios revolve around that assumption that anyone who attempts the recovery mechanic must necessarily succeed in obtaining the maximum recovery.

My original suggestion is on page 1 of this topic. Summarized briefly: Upon death you get a 20 minute buff that doubles exp gain, the buff expires at the end of 20 minutes, upon another death, or upon recovery of half the lost exp. The purpose is not to boost L90 exp gain, it is to help newbies.

In WoW, worlds first kill means something, I don't feel the same "racey" feeling in path of exile. Which is why I like it, you play how you like to play. And I know others who play like me, and those are who I'm trying to help with my posts.

I wouldn't feel bad if they lowered the penalty. I knew the whole time while leveling that it was an unfair system that needs rebalancing.

"

levy42088 wrote:

I hate hardcore. I am so anti hardcore. Why would I put all this time onto a character just to die at some random point and throw that time out the window.

Standard is NOT hardcore. Dying does NOT equal failing.

That's why I'm not playing hard core. I am playing standard, so please, this convo has no room for your "hardcore" mindset. If I was talking about hard core I would have mentioned it.

The game is made by HC players and they wanted an experience for other HC players. Standard isn't suddenly casual zone, it's meant to be as punishing without the permanent results.

Again I say, it seems this just isn't a game for your style of play. Which brings me back to something I say often, there's many games that cater to your style of play but few that are similar to POE. I'd prefer if you'd played those rather than ruining something that's almost all but extinct.

If all feedback was scorned based on perceptions of GGG's past or present intent/design goals, we wouldn't necessarily have:
- Permanent allocation
- Option to change allocation default setting
- Greater accessibility to higher level maps (via removal of Labyrinthine/Massive and increase of base map size)
- Greater ease to level masters
- Greater accessibility to max level hideout (via reduction of level requirement)
- Reductions to reflected damage
- Reductions to some Zana map device costs
- Bandit quest respecs
- Maps being allocated to map maker
etc.

I fail to see how a rebuttal/argument based on someone's belief of GGG's preference is relevant or constructive. One of the functions of feedback is to explicitly provide a point of view that might be contrary to initial design.

Did you know that the XP penalty used to be 15% in merciless and 7.5% in cruel?
Did you know that for a while they were considering 8% in merciless and 3% in cruel?

Did you know that when they changed it to 10% and 5%, Chris stated:

"

Chris wrote:

Please note that these values are just for testing purposes - the system can and will change in the future.

GGG has already reduced the death penalty once due to player feedback, and that was back when many of the players providing feedback were below level 80 or even still in cruel (supposedly when, as dissenting players say, the penalty is 'meaningless').

I don't want GGG to remove the death penalty. But after experiencing the scaling at level 95, I do believe it deserves another balance pass. At the highest levels, 10% just becomes too much of a hit.

Here's another quote from when the death penalty was changed to 10% and 5%:

"

Chris wrote:

The main reason for having a death penalty is so that players aren't able to attrition their way through every fight. We're okay with the strategy of throwing yourself at a boss several times if it's a little too hard for you (which allows us to have pretty challenging mandatory boss fights), but there needs to be a penalty so that this doesn't become a dominant strategy.

We (and many of our more hardcore players) are worried that a lower death penalty may reduce the importance of building characters correctly and playing carefully. However, there are hardcore leagues for players who want deaths to be extremely meaningful. The new values do still strongly discourage dying.

If a death penalty at level 80 eliminates 30 minutes of play time, and if that's sufficient to strongly discourage dying, why does the death penalty need to eliminate multiple days of play time (and 70+ exalts in map cost) at level 99? Characters who reach level 95-99 are obviously built correctly and played carefully (relative to lower level characters), so what goals are being satisfied by maintaining a blanket 10% penalty irrespective of upper level scaling? [if one goal is to extend the time it takes to cap, then the death penalty is functioning poorly in that endeavor because people are reaching cap in 1 month in new leagues].

In addition to the extreme time/currency cost, the problem we have now is that since the death penalty scales so high at the upper levels, players reach a point where they consciously forego further XP progression. Once a build completing level is obtained (generally level 85-90), the dominant strategy then becomes wearing IIR/IIQ/maxDPS and throwing yourself at everything without fear of death. Has any more thought been given to the death penalty since 0.11.3?

"

Vhlad wrote:

If all feedback was scorned based on perceptions of GGG's past or present intent/design goals, we wouldn't necessarily have:
- Permanent allocation
- Option to change allocation default setting
- Greater accessibility to higher level maps (via removal of Labyrinthine/Massive and increase of base map size)
- Greater ease to level masters
- Greater accessibility to max level hideout (via reduction of level requirement)
- Reductions to reflected damage
- Reductions to some Zana map device costs
- Bandit quest respecs
- Maps being allocated to map maker
etc.

I was going to let this thread die but I can't just let this shit go unchecked.

PA loot is the ONLY thing on that list that goes against their design philosophy. Which that was a contested topic from when I started playing and it was a few months until they finally made it happen. Safe to say it was an issue for a year or more and the megathread was over 1k pages when the community was only a few thousand people itself. There hasn't been a topic since that has been nearly screamed for as much. Even these collected QoL threads which get a ton of responses don't match it and they cover 50-100 different topics.

The rest of what you listed were fine tuning on things recently introduced. They are put into the temp leagues in a relatively rough state and they watch feedback to adjust them to a spot that's better. Also it's a list of QoL things. They don't go against any core beliefs, they just make annoying situations a little better.

The only one that might be on the edge is reflect damage which was adjusted multiple times to find a spot where it was an actual issue (when I started playing reflect was a non-factor) but wasn't nearly impossible to overcome (after the initial buff it made crit almost unplayable as VP didn't exist and crit multi scaled about 2-3x higher than currently). If reflect was removed you'd have a point, not it being fine tuned.

"

I fail to see how a rebuttal/argument based on someone's belief of GGG's preference is relevant or constructive. One of the functions of feedback is to explicitly provide a point of view that might be contrary to initial design.

Did you know that the XP penalty used to be 15% in merciless and 7.5% in cruel?
Did you know that for a while they were considering 8% in merciless and 3% in cruel?

Same point as reflect. Fine tuning something is MUCH different than asking for it's outright removal like the OP is asking and many people in this thread are asking.

"

In addition to the extreme time/currency cost, the problem we have now is that since the death penalty scales so high at the upper levels, players reach a point where they consciously forego further XP progression. Once a build completing level is obtained (generally level 85-90), the dominant strategy then becomes wearing IIR/IIQ/maxDPS and throwing yourself at everything without fear of death. Has any more thought been given to the death penalty since 0.11.3?

Here's also where you guys are way off base. You think that the death penalty is being scaled around high levels when really GGG does not balance around optional content like that. If they did high lvl maps would be easier to come by and cheaper. It wouldn't cost 70+ ex (which if you're saying that's the cost of one death you're WAY out there). Again, you guys look to the death penalty as if it's the only reason people don't make the trip. Are you REALLY saying you stopped playing at 95 just because you didn't want to die anymore? You are incapable of making your build able to handle this content? You are incapable of avoiding things that might kill you? How about be honest, you got to the levels where it takes a week or more depending on how often you play and said fuck this after dying. The "fuck this" response was because that 10% was 1/2 to 2 days of work just gone. You gave up because the idea of having to do this all for 1-5 more passives seems insane. The death penalty just woke you up to how crazy this climb really is.

There's no way to balance the death penalty around these high levels without making it trivial at lower levels. The only way I see is to make an overly complicated one like many suggested. A time related one, which has been suggested and GGG has said they don't like it because it just encourages people to play other characters/accounts to wait out the punishment (or walk away altogether which is WAY worse than the current punishment). Or you put a special reduction at an randomly picked higher level where the penalty is lower. Which as you can get back exp in merci play in 5-20 mins, how do you possibly scale that correctly between 90 and 99 for example? What, 1% at 90 and .001% at 99? So it's fair?

I promise you when they are looking at how to balance the death penalty they aren't focusing on how to make it fair for people in their 90s, but those from 80s and down. The achievement for high lvl is called "diminishing returns" ffs. Have you looked around the forums to see how annoyed people are for the challenge this league for leveling being 3 characters to 85? 90+ is optional and should always be looked upon as such. You guys blatantly ignore this argument and push forward as if a mid-90's play experience should be as balanced as someone in their 70s. Unless GGG plans to forego their philosophy that 100 should be a grind, this will not happen. I also suspect at that point is when they start catering to casuals rather than HC players and will be the beginning of the end. As POE trying to directly compete with D3 makes no sense, the game works better as a niche off branch trying to get the people who liked D2 for the grind rather than the ease of killing shit and getting great loot all the time. D3 is built for people with the mindset you guys bring, POE is built for guys like me. Stop trying to make this game into something it's not just because you don't want to do what's required to get something completely unnecessary.

"

Vhlad wrote:

If all feedback was scorned based on perceptions of GGG's past or present intent/design goals, we wouldn't necessarily have:
- Permanent allocation
- Option to change allocation default setting
- Greater accessibility to higher level maps (via removal of Labyrinthine/Massive and increase of base map size)
- Greater ease to level masters
- Greater accessibility to max level hideout (via reduction of level requirement)
- Reductions to reflected damage
- Reductions to some Zana map device costs
- Bandit quest respecs
- Maps being allocated to map maker
etc.

I fail to see how a rebuttal/argument based on someone's belief of GGG's preference is relevant or constructive. One of the functions of feedback is to explicitly provide a point of view that might be contrary to initial design.

Did you know that the XP penalty used to be 15% in merciless and 7.5% in cruel?
Did you know that for a while they were considering 8% in merciless and 3% in cruel?

Did you know that when they changed it to 10% and 5%, Chris stated:

"

Chris wrote:

Please note that these values are just for testing purposes - the system can and will change in the future.

GGG has already reduced the death penalty once due to player feedback, and that was back when many of the players providing feedback were below level 80 or even still in cruel (supposedly when, as dissenting players say, the penalty is 'meaningless').

I don't want GGG to remove the death penalty. But after experiencing the scaling at level 95, I do believe it deserves another balance pass. At the highest levels, 10% just becomes too much of a hit.

Here's another quote from when the death penalty was changed to 10% and 5%:

"

Chris wrote:

The main reason for having a death penalty is so that players aren't able to attrition their way through every fight. We're okay with the strategy of throwing yourself at a boss several times if it's a little too hard for you (which allows us to have pretty challenging mandatory boss fights), but there needs to be a penalty so that this doesn't become a dominant strategy.

We (and many of our more hardcore players) are worried that a lower death penalty may reduce the importance of building characters correctly and playing carefully. However, there are hardcore leagues for players who want deaths to be extremely meaningful. The new values do still strongly discourage dying.

If a death penalty at level 80 eliminates 30 minutes of play time, and if that's sufficient to strongly discourage dying, why does the death penalty need to eliminate multiple days of play time (and 70+ exalts in map cost) at level 99? Characters who reach level 95-99 are obviously built correctly and played carefully (relative to lower level characters), so what goals are being satisfied by maintaining a blanket 10% penalty irrespective of upper level scaling? [if one goal is to extend the time it takes to cap, then the death penalty is functioning poorly in that endeavor because people are reaching cap in 1 month in new leagues].

In addition to the extreme time/currency cost, the problem we have now is that since the death penalty scales so high at the upper levels, players reach a point where they consciously forego further XP progression. Once a build completing level is obtained (generally level 85-90), the dominant strategy then becomes wearing IIR/IIQ/maxDPS and throwing yourself at everything without fear of death. Has any more thought been given to the death penalty since 0.11.3?

VLAD!!! +1 Welcome back, you were missed. Great list of features that would not be in this game if not for Feedback.

Feedback is for the players to tell the makers what is wrong with the game.

@Moos.
You said "Same point as reflect. Fine tuning something is MUCH different than asking for it's outright removal like the OP is asking and many people in this thread are asking. "

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this whole discussion hasn't once asked to totally remove anything. It is discussing how we can "Tune" The xp penalty to be fair for even the higher level players