Death Penalties

If that's the case then creating a proper death penalty becomes a different question entirely.

For example, what should be the "goal" (so to speak) of death?

If there is a weakness debuffed on the player after dying it will discourage that player from continuing. Thus they will stop playing until the debuff wears off.

I just don't find this method very productive to a fun and fluid play experience.

As for losing experience, I feel that this is a very counter-productive measure. If a player losses experience at death, it may simply discourage them to stop playing. Why play if you're never going to progress? I would prefer that GGG not hemorrhage players simply because they die a lot and get frustrated with never progressing.

First and for most this should be a fun game, and losing experience cuts down on that fun. I remember playing Diablo 2 and absolutely hating this mechanic. It did make me want to stop trying to even level and stay at a healthy level 80 or so. But that is exactly why it should not be implemented here.

I guess it comes down to your final goal for death. Durability is a gold sink, yes, it's annoying. But because as you've said, you're using a different system entirely maybe death needs to have a new reason then.

I think having the player simply die is okay. I've played plenty of games where this has never been an issue.

But, I think whatever your currency is for this game, maybe dead players can "pay" a very small sum of money to re-spawn at "check points" within the dungeon area. The other option would be to pay nothing and get teleported to town.

Another possible system is as some others have mentioned is that the player accrues "Death Points." As the players gains these points they're player's model looks worse and worse. There's no "effect" on game-play except that they simply look like they aren't any good.

As time passes these points disappear.

The problem with a death penalty is that it can encourage the player to do something you (the developer) don't actually want them to do. A death penalty if implemented stringently enough could even make the game as a whole suffer in terms of how fun it should be.

It comes back to what you want to accomplish with death.

Are there any major goals you want to accomplish economically and or at the individual play level? Death could help either of these.

I'm sorry I'm being long-winded.

Thanks for the reply Chris, good to know you guys are keeping track of everything and taking feedback into consideration.

I mentioned performance counter in another thread:

http://pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/213/page/4

How about death count affecting quality / quantity of future drops? No EXP or anything lost at death - death counter increases by 1, performance drops by 1. No big penalty on future drops yet, but if player continues to die it can become really nasty - exponential curve. Way to increase performance is easy - play properly for some time.

Death counter should never reset. It should be visible to other players, so it's easy to judge if player might be - and to what extent - threat to party survival.

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tormenta wrote:

I mentioned performance counter in another thread:

http://pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/213/page/4

How about death count affecting quality / quantity of future drops? No EXP or anything lost at death - death counter increases by 1, performance drops by 1. No big penalty on future drops yet, but if player continues to die it can become really nasty - exponential curve. Way to increase performance is easy - play properly for some time.

Death counter should never reset. It should be visible to other players, so it's easy to judge if player might be - and to what extent - threat to party survival.

That makes the problem of continuing to die because you're unable to progress in terms of better gear and so on. Which is a major problem if death penalties prevent you from progressing through the game other than the fact that you gotta walk all the way back to where you died.

In a game like PoE I imagine a large part of survival is having the proper gear, especially in the higher difficulty areas. So it's not really a matter of "playing properly" unless your definition of playing properly is grinding until your heart stops beating in order to get the best gear available... Well, then I wouldn't want the developers to ever listen to you.

Player dies 10 times in a row and end with drop rate reduced by 95% - so what? He hasn't lost any EXP, gold or ended debuffed. On every death, he can chose to respawn on a death location or start from town. He can continue playing right away, but with "reminder" on his incompetence. What is debatable here are exponential curves - how much of drop rate is taken by first and every next death in a row, and how much proper kills / time / something else it takes to undo each "drop rate taken" count - and what happens if such a player, or few, join / form a party.

I like the "drop inventory items not-currently-being-used" idea; it's a penalty that doesn't affect combat effectiveness (unless the game is going to include Diablo II-style charms), and provides incentive for the player to go back and try again with a little more caution.

It might also be interesting to have the player's corpse get back up as a zombie (with analogous-but-lower stats/emphases as the player's class archetype), which the player and/or his friends have to kill to get said non-equipped inventory back.

One further point (in favor of corporeal corpse-fetching mechanics):
In the ARPGs you've played and liked, how often was death due to the area being "too hard", and how often was it due to the area being mostly straightforward except for the one group that caught you unprepared?

For that matter, if the area's "too hard", why are you there in the first place?

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Skivverus wrote:

I like the "drop inventory items not-currently-being-used" idea; it's a penalty that doesn't affect combat effectiveness (unless the game is going to include Diablo II-style charms), and provides incentive for the player to go back and try again with a little more caution.

I agree. The player would only lose the stuff they just going to sell off anyway when they got back to town. There could even be a small subset of the inventory (10 blocks?) that wouldn't be dropped so that no one has any reason to complain.

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Skivverus wrote:

It might also be interesting to have the player's corpse get back up as a zombie (with analogous-but-lower stats/emphases as the player's class archetype), which the player and/or his friends have to kill to get said non-equipped inventory back.

This could be fun. Your body could turn into a champion zombie or something. Of course the zombie's name would be the same as yours. However, the system would have to check where you died. If you were in a normal area then the zombie would be somewhere near your body. If you died fighting a boss then the game should move the zombie to somewhere else (probably on your way back from town). It could be pretty funny.

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Skivverus wrote:

One further point (in favor of corporeal corpse-fetching mechanics):
In the ARPGs you've played and liked, how often was death due to the area being "too hard", and how often was it due to the area being mostly straightforward except for the one group that caught you unprepared?

This is very true. Most of the times I died are because I did something stupid and got myself surrounded or something.

I don't think that making players lose their items in their inventory is a good idea.

I imagine that this practice would be especially harsh if loot is dropped in a FFA fashion.

You really don't want to over-frustrate players, and creating a death penalty that requires the player to essentially be a hardcore player is a bit extreme.

Basically by making the player's hard-earned items drop (and thus stolen by other players) it really becomes a self-defeating purpose. What's the real reason of losing items at death except to tell the player that they shouldn't even be playing, unless it's by themselves? Because at least by themselves they'll be able to recover lost items.

The essence of this death penalty creates the dilemma of lost effort. Why even kill enemies to collect loot if a small slip-up is going to make you lose the gear and items you've gained throughout the play period?

It would also eventually cause players to intermittently return to town to remove their items simply in fear of losing them on a possible death. I just don't think it sounds fun or productive.

As to how death can be productive? Well it could be in two ways, either economically, or through game-play necessities.

By economically I mean, the player could spend money (as a choice) to gain some kind of instant-revive. Obviously a very expensive choice. They could spend money to re-spawn at a check point, or pay nothing and go back to town. In this way it acts as a gold sink that the player can choose and decide what they can afford.

By game-play necessities, this is a little more challenging to come up with because I simply do not know the full breadth of the game and what things are either easy or hard for the player. Death could make things that are easy for the player a little harder. That's about as in-depth as I think it really needs to be. What is easy, I don't know, but I'm sure the Dev's know and could think of a proper death penalty to compensate for it's easiness.

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Silver wrote:

The essence of this death penalty creates the dilemma of lost effort. Why even kill enemies to collect loot if a small slip-up is going to make you lose the gear and items you've gained throughout the play period?

Why even venture out into the wilderness if dying is just going to make you spawn back in town? Why even play the game if you know you're going to stop playing it eventually? Why even leave your house every morning if you're just going to die one day?

If people don't enjoy the death penalty then it's probably a good penalty. Death is not supposed to be something you enjoy. It's supposed be a reprimand with consequences.

If you aren't going to be penalized in any significant way for dying then why even have the mechanic of death at all? Maybe everyone should be invincible. That should satisfy everyone, right?

Everyone is going on and on about how they don't like this or that death penalty. There's a good reason for that. It's because they are a penalties and they're called that for a reason. They're not called death benefits (which seems to be what some of you would like to turn them into).

Maybe the devs should find the penalty that the most people on this thread have complained about and implement that. Maybe then death will actually mean something in the game.

Making a death penalty too harsh can cause the over-all game to be less fun. I think your argument that it's not something you enjoy is pretty null and void.

Death by its virtue is never enjoyed, adding on additional penalties is a difficult task that could make death even more painful. Which can cause new behaviors in players that are not intended by the original design of the penalty.

On top of that it could truly ruin one's experience to have a particularly harsh punishment incurred on a situation that was a simple mistake on the player's part.