Death Penalties

My 2 cents are... after you die for the next X min (x been 1/2 your current lvl) you can not gain Exp, or till you have fed the ghost enough exp( 1/4 your lvl as a % of the total exp you need to lvl).

The ghost can bring you to life in exchange for exp you gain.

say a lvl 10 player dies, for the next 5 min he cant gain exp, or till he has fed the ghost 2.5% of the required exp till he lvls

or

say a lvl 20 player dies, for the next 10 min he cant gain exp, or till he has fed the ghost 5% of the required exp till he lvls

this way teaches you not to die and higher lvl players should know not to die, an punishes people that are higher lvl the same % as lower lvl people.


and you can choose to pay for a blessing the removes the ghost (this would be a good $$ sink to help keep the economy stable).

As it has been repeated many times over in this extremely long thread, timed penalties just result in people sitting around idle for that amount of time...

An experience percentage loss and having to run all the way back to the place you died should be enough. (Although, I still like the idea of fighting a 'zombified' version of yourself.)

I've seen limbo based systems before where you have to do a task to leave... like fight yourself or do quests in the underworld, and while they are interesting the first time or ten, by the time you've died dozens or hundreds of times it's the worst thing in the world.

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Tertium_Quid wrote:

As it has been repeated many times over in this extremely long thread, timed penalties just result in people sitting around idle for that amount of time...

you have a choice in what i was saying. sit out the time, kill it off, or pay it off, if you dont want to have take the time penalty pay to get it removed, you can choose to take it, or pay to have it removed or work it off.

Your formula was extremely flawed and quickly becomes too burdensome, second xp debt has been shown to be equivalent to xp loss over time. I prefer the debt system so you don't ever see yourself going backwards.

Paying off xp debt with items I think has also been discussed.

Any timer based system is a no go. You should never get a benefit from not playing the game.

yea you have a point. y not just lose 3% of the current lvl exp you have and you can just buy it back? that way you can choose to take the exp hit or $$ hit. while keeping a good $$ sink hole (the $$ sink hole will be needed to stop prices sky rocketing, thus hindering a low lvl player while not been a big problem for the high lvl players)

the penalties need to be big enough to stop people from wanting to die while small enough to not make people rage quit if they do die. have a lower penalty on the easy difficulty lvls. that way if you start to die a lot on a harder difficulty lvl you can go to a place will a low penalty.

the game is meant to be cut throat, so a soft fluffy death penalty for all the care bears is going to go away from the games stile, there needs to be a good deterrent for death, while not been so big as to ruin the games fun... (it is a game so it has to be fun and not like a job) still you should be punished for stupidity like death. death = stupid. one extreme is if you die you need to start again from lvl 1, or you lose a lvl upon a death, that would force people to not play, grind easy in a easy level, and maybe ruin the game

If the waypoints are far enough away from the goal, it's possible that the run back at high levels might be devastating if the best items are still far away... particularly if there are respawns.

That said, the end can only be so far if they don't want to cater to only people with 6 hour blocks of time to play.

So I'm not sure how to deal with that. To me the death penalty of xp loss is not as important as preventing people from getting the best items if they die... that way you can still have fun with the content, but you are only moving forward so much by leveling.

If you are losing out on better items AND losing out on more content via running AND losing out on character progress... to me that starts to get brutal enough to stop playing, which is what many players will do.

yea you dont want such a harsh penalty that people stop playing. the item drop-rate decrease is really harsh as i hope the top item are very rear to drop. that you could have in the higher difficulty lvls, having a buy back exp system is all good as it only cost you a small amount of money, this will scale with the player lvl and how much money you can make as a lvl 50 item will NPC for more then a lvl 10 item, so a lvl 50 player will have to pay more to get there exp back. thus giving the game a nice fair money sink hole, keeping the economy stable.

what do you think? only loss is of money or exp if the player chooses not to buy it back, and the time it take to get back o/c


what's your thoughts on this

dont forget, PoE wont have Gold, money or any currency of that kind.
( http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency )

just thought i should throw it in.


as i said earyler in this topic, i would still prefer to see a reward for staying alive, then a death penalty. Since death itself is already a penalty (shame+way back)

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Narfi wrote:

dont forget, PoE wont have Gold, money or any currency of that kind.
( http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency )

just thought i should throw it in.


as i said earyler in this topic, i would still prefer to see a reward for staying alive, then a death penalty. Since death itself is already a penalty (shame+way back)

I just assumed he was talking about effectiveness as a measurement of 'cost.'

I think I posed some issues with reward systems that were never defended... so I guess I'll pose the one that pops right out at me.

In a reward system, how would you propose doing it such that it doesn't essentially force a player to restart the instance? Or that it's so easy to lose that nobody really cares about the bonus?

Reward systems seem to only work in my mind if the spawn point is VERY far from the goal. Forcing a player to restart due to the loss being greater than starting over is detrimental to overall play... so the zones would have to be huge to justify it, cuz then by leaving you are sacrificing a lot of search time for valuable bosses such that losing the boss kill > gaining the bonus back + search time

I'd also suggest that any reward system should be tiered, so if you die once you don't lose all bonuses. There could be 5 tiers of rewards from magic find to offense/defense, xp boost, etc. You could lose a tier or parts of tiers per death.

On the flip side if not done right, most of these 'rewards' translate directly to 'penalties' on the other side of the coin. Not getting an xp bonus is the exact same thing as getting an xp debt penalty... etc. It's just another name for the exact same thing because if the "delta" is the same (first derivative) then the thing is effectively the same.

So when making death penalty suggestions it's important to understand what types of things are actually the same thing said in a different way.