Death Penalties

Current death penalty in normal is way to much. It needs to be reworked!

I want to level up when I die!

It's fine the way it is.

It's really sad that companies listen to all these whiny little brats and turn their games into complete crap, cause someone got butthurt they died.

Leave Default the same, just make a new league and call it Hello Kitty's Handholding Adventure Land.

This is a repost from another thread because I think devs actually read this one. Generally speaking, people are extremely against where this idea goes, so I doubt it's suitable for Default League. However, I would really like to see an alternate league -- somewhere between Hardcore and Default -- with a system like this.
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My problem with the current softcore death penalty is not with how severely it punishes, but what it punishes.

The softcore death penalty takes away XP, which is basically a penalty to passive tree development. Dying in softcore is like getting a Negative Passive Point Shard. Consider how OP a Positive Passive Point Shard would be, and ask yourself whether it matters or not exactly how many Negative Passive Point Shards it takes to make one Negative Passive Point.

Unless, of course, people game the system by taking risks right after gaining a level. Then it's essentially no penalty at all.

A better system would attack the player's gear. My inspiration for this is the hardcore death penalty, which effectively removes the player's gearset from the economy upon the player's death. This provides a truly unique item sink...

Most item sinks in games that try to effect durable (non-consumable) items end up catching lots of bad items and never catching good ones. In most ARPGs, that sink is named "vendor," and although PoE does that a little differently than those other games, as a sink it functions the same -- only the worthless stuff goes in. Anything that is perceived to have trade value is stashed and enters the economy; but if it's worthless but "rare," it might become part of a fraction of a Chaos Orb some day. As more items drop, more of those items bypass the vendor and enter the economy, leading to inflation.

The hardcore death sink is relatively unique in that it sinks great gear. For the most part, any hardcore character is wearing the absolute best gear the player has available for that build, and it's exactly that gear that gets removed from the economy. This helps curb inflation for the items that people are actually trading.

The problem, of course, is that hardcore death penalty is much, much too severe for softcore. However, I think the idea should be to take the hardcore death penalty and reduce its severity to the point that it isn't overly harsh, while still maintaining the hardcore death sink's ability to eliminate any worn gear from the game.

So let's try that.
1. Instead of eliminating the entire gear set, up to one random worn item is destroyed. It needs to be able to hit anything (so that it can sink anything), so skill gems and flasks would be included. I say "up to one" because always hitting one would probably be too much of a penalty. I think we can let people get away with it sometimes, as long as the risk is there. (Edit: This was originally a Default League suggestion; if it was an alternate league, hitting you every time might be okay.)
2. An endgame character typically wears about 18-24 skill gems, 5 flasks, 4 pieces of jewelry, 4 pieces of non-shield armour, and one or two things in their hands. If the odds of destruction were even, that would mean a skill gem would be destroyed more than half the time, forcing you to level a new one all the way back up. So we'd have to weigh the randomness with some kind of wacky odds table, with flasks being among the most destroyable gear. Dying would become kind of like crafting with orbs, except out of your control and bad things can happen. I could try to make such a table as a suggestion, but it's too much work and would definitely need some serious alpha testing regardless.
3. Destroying a 6-link armour should be possible, but losing all the gems in it would be adding insult to injury. If an item holding gems is chosen for destruction, the gems would be transferred to the player's inventory, then stash, then on the ground by his corpse, in that order and depending on how full the player's inventory and stash are.
4. The actual chances of a really bad roll could be very, very low and still provide enough incentive to avoid death to be sufficient for softcore purposes. If some piece of gear is worth 12 Exalts, and the chance of its destruction per death is 1 in 800 (just an example!), then the average cost per death for that item is about half an alch by current rates... but the potential for it to actually happen will be enough to keep a lot of people on their toes.
5. You could apply the penalty as early as Act 1 Normal. Characters in the early stages are often wearing relatively worthless stuff anyway, so the penalty doesn't become too harsh until the game progresses to the stage wear progress is quite gear-dependent.

edit: This output is about as soft as a death-based item-sink penalty can be, but it's probably still too harsh for softcore, unless you really nerf the shit out of it. This is why I'm now suggesting it for its own league.

So the undefined thing about that system would be the odds table, and whether or not a chance of no penalty is possible or not.

Positive effects of such a system:
* Death-based item sink to control inflation in the Default economy
* A new, insurance-based item sink. People would play around the new system by keeping backups of their gear in case of destruction. Someone with a Kaom's who finds a Kaom's might keep the second instead of putting it on the market.
* An interesting motivation not to necessarily wear the best gear you have available. There would be interesting new playstyle based around beating the content with the cheap, easily replaceable gear, which would mean a new subculture within the game.
* Assuming you have replacement gear in your stash, you could die and continue playing virtually as if nothing had happened.

Negative effects of such a system:
* Forced exposure to potentially extreme RNG. Currently players who dislike the RNG of Orbs can always trade them away instead, yet we still see many complainers in the forums. The unlucky ones bit hardest by this penalty would scream bloody murder.
* The risk of being too hardcore. Item destruction on death is a pretty scary prospect, and might disgust some ultra-casuals too much for them to continue interest in the game.

I personally think the pros outweigh the cons, but I'd have to actually play with the game under the effects of the weighted table to know for sure... improperly executed, changes like this could make the game miserable, so the trick would be to have a flawless execution.

TL;DR Their should be an option for a death penalty that hits items, not experience... but isn't as harsh as Hardcore.

"TL;DR The softcore death penalty should hit items, not experience... and it shouldn't be too harsh about it."

This part confuses me a lot. So having a 6 linked item randomly destroyed is not harsh? So say you put 100 chaos, 500 jewelers and 1500 fusings into it.....yeah completely unreasonable.

I'd expect there to be a mass exodus from PoE if an idea like this was ever put into place.

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iamstryker wrote:

Bump, since this is the main thread and people apparently are still very adament to discuss it.

If that were true you wouldn't have to bump it...just sayin'.

D'oh! I bumped it.

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Biovital wrote:

"TL;DR The softcore death penalty should hit items, not experience... and it shouldn't be too harsh about it."

This part confuses me a lot. So having a 6 linked item randomly destroyed is not harsh? So say you put 100 chaos, 500 jewelers and 1500 fusings into it.....yeah completely unreasonable.

First off, I included a little preface saying that this penalty should probably apply to its own league, something between hardcore and default. I guess if you don't edit things into the TL;DR, people don't read it, at all. *goes back to edit TL;DR*

Still... yes, you can make any penalty weak enough on average if you make the chance of actual enforcement low enough. Let's say the chance of it taking your chest was 0.1%. The average cost per death for that item would be 0.1 Chaos, 0.5 Jewelers, and 1.5 Fusings (equivalent to about 1 stack of Chromatics)... if you made that into a flat "repair cost" every time, it would end up averaging out exactly the same, given enough deaths... that's arguably less severe than 15% XP hit the type of levels where you'd be wearing something like that.

The problem with this is you'd have about a 0.1-1% chance of losing any one particular piece of gear on each death, and like a 90% chance of nothing happening. Which is lame; it would create a feeling of not really being penalized at all, and people would actually get confused when it did happen. Which is why I'm suggesting it for a new league, where it would happen consistently.

Guys, I play HC only.

I should level up to 100 and get God gear when I die.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

For the five millionith time, I've died to sync. While grinding in the completely harmless Cove zone. This isn't even counting my derpy idea to be "safe" in a party, and have my computer and guy choke to death on the lightspam.

My character is a solid 2 or 3 levels behind where she should be by this point.

The EXP penalty has the following effects:

* Grind grind grind. In boring safe areas.

* Don't have fun unless you have nothing to lose. Want to have fun today? Too bad. Should have had it yesterday when you had the chance.


Whatever. I reject it completely. If I wanted to play like I was in hardcore, I'd be playing hardcore. If there were another option out there nearly as good, this one thing would be enough to make me move on.

Add a death tax (50% less exp for the next 15%. Oh mah gawd it'd matter if you died at 0%) if you must, but the death theft is wrong.

QFT, softcore league should be really a softcore. As i wrote in the another thread, all people dont have +6 hours to play everyday nor are the best players ever. I believe the xp penalty can even drive people away because it can be so frustrating to novice players. Besides if there was no death penalty(or something smaller) the SC league would even allow people to build some really interesting and fun new glass cannony builds and stuff that would actually differ from HC builds. I myself use other peoples HC builds or something similar with 300% hp on SC. Why? because i dont want to die. So how is SC different from HC? I dont know, and i neither see any reason to play on HC unless you are going for top10. Also, again, if you arent the best player ever, the strategy is following; on merciless you farm ledge forever, then you try to progress in the quest line, get few bars of xp, die and decide to go to the ledge again to get the rest of the level, and this happens over, and over, and over again.

This is 2013 and gaming community has changed, before no one whined about anything because everyone were so amazed how awesome this new type of game is.
If you are a hardcore player, play hardcore. Dont think the talk about xp penaly should concern any players who play on HC aka. stop mocking people who want to get different gaming experience from SC.

the actual death penalty is kinda big, the game is already kinda ''very hard mode on'' which

on top of that, losing 15% xp is really a big headshot especially when u actively doing maps...

some mods are just insanely effective and when u reached lvl 75 +++ xp starting to be kinda

hard to get especially if u hardly get 70+ maps.

i propose scaling the xp penalty from the total xp gained in that level (player level)to a maximum of 10%.

i actually loved the repairing system that diablo 2 has, but instead of gold, maybe u can

whetstones and armorer scraps to repai??? even getting a 1% quality penalty on one piece of armor???

or maybe shards ????