Death Penalties

Good points there.

The very moment you die, you know about it. Even if theres no penalty at all except respawning somewhere.
The whole party knows you died and if you do it often enough. People will think you suck.
Nobody wants to feel like theyre not good enough.

That feeling alone isnt quite enough of a punishment for dying. The minor xp loss is a way to punish players for dying, but doesnt annoy them too much.


Xp loss would be tweakable. If players are ragequiting because the xp loss is too high, its not gonna be a big drama to fix.
Its easy to understand. Infact when you first play and ARPG, you expect an xp loss when you die.

The problem with xp loss being the sole death penalty is that it's actually very hard to determine what is too much and what doesn't matter at all, mostly because it's impossible to tell if someone will die 1 time or 100 times.

On the other hand xp loss always has the potential to cause losses of many hours of progress, which is against rule 5. 1 death might only be 3 minutes, but it's relatively easy to rack up an hour of losses.

I don't think casual players should ever go in reverse, which is why I don't believe xp loss is the way to go. I think slowing down forward progress is better than going in reverse and is easier to modulate without the potential to totally screw someone over.

Because of lag and other unexpected connectivity issues I'm not a fan of hardcore mode as a straight deletion and would support large xp loss as a way to pay for resurrection in those modes. I simply don't believe that there is room for permanent loss when there is a high probability of death from an external source.
Another possibility for harsher modes is durability loss, if they add durability from the other discussion about getting rid of high end items.

If you die and loose 1/10th of a level each time you die, and you die twice in a row, thats 2/10ths of that lvl gone.

If you just achieved lvl 30 and your xp says 0 out of 20k. As long as you cant de-level, your only ever going to go back to the start of that level if you die 100 times.

That means if your in a slump and your having a hard time moving forwards, you could keep playing and get some currency to trade for better items. Once you have better items, your less likely to die.
Or you could join a guild and get them to help you.

Now if you keep dying, your eventually going to get to a point where your gear is very good for your level and you wont have much trouble with dying.

The way I see it, its better to go backwards a little bit (assuming you can only go back to the start of your current level), than die a few times and be forced to wait 30minutes before your debuff wears off so you dont die even more.

The last thing you want is players being so scared of dying that they just run away from a big battle and maybe even quickly quit to save themselves from the death penalty.

Changing the percentage of xp lost on death wouldnt be that difficult to change.
The % of xp lost could even slowly decrease as your level gets higher. (or the other way around if you want to make leveling harder as part of a certain league)

I believe the xp loss system is a good way to remind players that dying isnt good. It encourages players to not die and play smarter. It gives players an opertunity to get better gear when it isnt quite good enough for their level. Yes this does slow down leveling a little bit, but it doesnt stop players from getting better gear and currency.

Dying doesnt need to be interesting. It needs to remind players that dying isnt a good thing.

Death penalty in PvE should be fierce, stunning and be a nightmare in a player's dream. It must provoke players to \emoragequit and then return to game after long moral recovery. The value of life does not deserve to be worth "oh, I just lost small amount of gametime". For other cases we have Farmville, etc.

@ zeto

Man you are implying that exp death penalty will be oppressing/overwhelming/annoying and then you are proposing item drop from inventory on ppl death.
Think a while plz...

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zeto wrote:

6. Capping the total death penalty over time. I feel that a bad player should only be screwed so hard before you don't want to penalize them anymore. A good death penalty system should ameliorate RAGEQUIT at the extremes. Nobody wants to get into a situation where they've lost a ton and even if they leave and come back they've still lost a ton. Unfortunately time here is the only factor I think will work, but time should heal all wounds as they say... nobody wants to come back to the same misery they left with.

In D2 such cap was called level.
You couldn't lvl down.
Similar system will be employed in POE afaik.

Exp penalty should be working on HIGHEST LVLs only.
On middle ones (say lvls 50-80 of 100) it should be barely felt and easy to overcome. Like few minutes of playing.
But on high lvls it should progressively kicks ass.
Higher lvl higher penalty.

So if you caring that much about "bad players", you know bad players shouldn't be able to advance their chars to high lvl unless they become at least decent skillwise.

Every multiplayer game that has anything like ladder or some else way to DIVIDE players, demands some fundamental things to learn if you want to advance further.
You can't be good in quake if you don't know how perform rocket jumps/bunny hops or circle jumps. And practice your aim with most weapons.
You can't be good in W3/SC2 if you don't know what to do and when (macro) and how do this (micro).
So in every multi game you have to learn some things and till you don't learn it you can't advance further (you are losing more than winning) on the ladder or some other matchmaking system. Since in clickfest like POE you don't compete directly against other ppl then it must be some other way to distinguish those who play good and those who not.
I think players lvl is the most obvious.
Only question is whether it should be done as exp gained penalty, or further exp gain penalty.

I think comparing tactics-based games (RTS) to ARPGs is going a bit far... D2 had a ladder and the amount of "skill" required (where to click and when [macro] and how to make a good build [micro]) is nowhere near that required for RTS games. Granted, making good builds requires some thought, but that doesn't even have anything to do with death penalties.

After all, in this game you point and click, then you move on.

Sure, Amount or set of skills to reach the top is not comparable between them but the way ladder works could be pretty much the same.

Ofc it could also divide ppl just by playing time like it was done in D2LOD.
I find it crap tho, and imo there is no point in creating any ladder if it works that way.

Haven´t read the whole thread.

But what about some different combinations.
You can balance a big negative effect with a positive one.

For ex:
- xp-debuff: 30minutes you won´t gain xp, but you get a little +xx,xx%per level magic find. Could result in "lets farm deadly hard envoirments for items"

- loose items: but be able to resummon them if you sacrifice a valuable item on the blacksmith. Result: Removement of midlvl-uniqes from the market.

- (Hellgate) teleport back to town, but be able to teleport back to start of your instance where you died for the price of some currency

Can't really give boosts imo. There shouldn't ever be a reason you'd want to die.

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zeto wrote:

Can't really give boosts imo. There shouldn't ever be a reason you'd want to die.

I don't think a combination of sweet and sour should be ruled out.

Repeatedly dying isn't much fun. If you are stuck on a quest boss that rolled a bad combination of attributes or happens to be hard for your build what do you do?

Give up and re-roll the boss - sucks.
Get someone bigger to help you beat him - sucks.
Give up and go get some more levels and equipment - semi sucks.

Overall death must carry a penalty but I think some kind of revenge perk which gives you a boost against what killed you or in the area you were killed could be a nice feature. Incentive to try again rather than quit seems like a good idea to me.