Death Penalties

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Grayer wrote:

May I ask, what is the death penalty atm? in the default league

XP loss:

5% in Cruelty
10% in Ruthless
15% in Merciless

Item Drop would be stupid as you would lose a huge player base to the simple fact if a player would die and drop their items, other people they don't know could just snag them and be off and out of the party.... Be rage everywhere.

Here is what I would do at least for default.

-XP loss (even on normal)
-Your portals to the area are destroyed. If you are the only person in that area and die, the instance resets.
-Perhaps make it so their body in a party stays there until the party is done fighting. If the party is done, the person can respawn back in town, and the other party members can make a portal for their fallen party member to get back. If all party members die, the instance resets and all portals are destroyed.


Another option would be to have some kind of quest the players could do inbetween dying and respawning in town. Perhaps a sort of dream world after life where your spirit has to go through first.

As of now, people can just die with very little exp loss, respawn, teleport right back to where they died, keep fighting, and repeat an infinite amount of times.


In HC, I really wish it would just delete characters on death. 99% of the HC players who die don't go and play on default, they delete those characters and start over.

I think there should be a file in the PoE installation that automatically deletes boot.ini in Windows should you die in Hardcore.

That would be ULTIMATELY ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT because it is MASSIVELY INCONVENIENT TO BE UNABLE TO START YOUR COMPUTER.

In Normal, if you die, your account is PERMANENTLY DELETED. That would also be ULTIMATELY ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT.

After all, all of our lives are so stupifyingly boring that we seek ridiculous challenge to boost our egos because we play a program that is ULTIMATELY ULTIMATE HARDCORE.

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BaneoftheLight wrote:

As of now, people can just die with very little exp loss, respawn, teleport right back to where they died, keep fighting, and repeat an infinite amount of times.

Do you even know how many maps it takes to level past 75?

When you die your potions are all discharged, that way you have to kill mobs to get more potion charges, there could be a discharge debuff for 5mins that when you go to town your potions wont recharge.

How about a temporary exp. loss? Say you die at 90% and instead of loosing experience, it is temporarily removed and can be regained after a set amount of time, or by doing a certain quest?

I don't think it's a good idea to make players feel like they've lost work that they've put into their character. XP loss and anything like that will just make some players go "fuck this" and exit the game.

Aside: As anyone with a lot of experience playing games knows; unless you're really invested in a game, exiting it with negative feelings (frustration or boredom being the most common) can mean that you simply don't pick it back up again. Especially if you've got other games to play (pretty common in this era!). So alienating players is, I think, bad for business.

Instead, players should have to work harder as a consequence of dying.
Corpse runs and being ejected back to town certainly make you invest more time than if you hadn't died, but for the most part that extra time is not actually spent engaging with the game. You're just running back to wherever you were fighting, which is uninteresting at the best of times.

Instead, what I suggest is some kind of a "little black raincloud" debuff that will leave you kicking yourself, but not make you feel like the game has invalidated time and effort you've already put in. Some potential candidates would be temporarily decreased XP gains or loot drops, which don't make the section in which you died more challenging, but do mean that you will have to put in more time than otherwise, without making you feel like something is being taken away.

The game could even signpost the fact that you died; when you kill something, it could show you the potential XP as well as the actual XP gained because you died recently (maybe the normal XP with some amount, in red text subtracted from it?). Or perhaps items that are greyed out, although that's probably too hard to justify in game terms.

Contrary to losing XP on death, while you can see how much XP is received out of the total, you shouldn't feel that you're receiving the total and then losing some of that (even if you received "200 -120 XP" as above, because you're gaining and losing XP simultaneously as opposed to losing it hours later (not to mention the fact that it's a mathematical operation; you should automatically acknowledge that what you're getting is the result, not the parts)).

Something else to consider is that you don't have to do it on a timer; the duration of the debuff could be for a certain number of enemies killed, a certain number of items or a certain total enemy HP destroyed (determined by some combination of player level, dps, health, damage resistance etc).

A really good one for decreased XP gains would be that the debuff lasts until a hidden pool of XP is filled from the potential XP that the player has not recieved as a result of the debuff. That is, if the player only receives 40% XP of the normal XP rewards (say), then 60% will go towards an invisible pool (the size of which will be a percentage of the player's total XP). Once the pool is filled, the debuff wears off. This would would have the same overall effect on the player as a straight-up XP loss, but because the penalty applies to future play as opposed to past play, it would not (necessarily) be perceived as lost work/time and instead be perceived simply as additional work/time. Which will probably sit more easily with most players, because they can't tell exactly how much more hours they need to put into the game to make up for their death. Certainly at higher levels it will be "a lot", but that's probably less soul-crushing than knowing those 3 afternoons you spent playing are gone and you have nothing to show for it. As well as that, if you can't just quantify your death as X number of minutes/hours/days, I think that makes it a lot more scary. Sure, you could calculate the effective XP and time lost, but you're probably not gonna do that. You don't really want to know that.

EDIT
One thing I'd like to add is that XP loss as a percentage of total character XP is not a good idea if the rate of XP gain doesn't increase in proportion to level. Because the result is that higher level players have to spend a lot of time to make up for their deaths. Maybe they should have somewhat more of a time investment, but nothing like it is right now. I can't see much wrong with a level 30 and a level 90 having to spend the same amount of time to make up for a death. After all, time flows just as quickly whatever level your character might be.

Although that being said, low-level players should probably have some kind of a safety net to account for inexperience. So time spent as a punishment for death should start small and reach a plateau fairly early in the level progression.

I think you should be able to lose a level from the -xp and not stick to 0%.

Oh, yeah when I say lose XP, I mean from the total including levels. Not just XP towards the next level. Because, obviously if players only go down to 0% of XP to the next level, that creates a situation where dying no longer has consequences.

On that note though, whether the death consequence is an XP loss or a debuff, it should diminish in effect with each subsequent death in a given time interval. So the overall XP lost / length of debuff will be greater, but the amount of XP lost / time increased will get smaller with each death, say, within 10 minutes of a previous death. This way players aren't punished too much for having trouble with a particular boss, but death is never inconsequential.