Death Penalties

Give characters a record sheet that is viewable by other players that includes cool little stats including how often the character has died.

maybe if you have to play some sort of randomly generated min game or leave and if you get to the end and win you get the stuff in your inventory that you would have losed. so basically a way to fight back to live and keep the things you lost.

Hard to jump in on a forum 70 pages long, but has anyone discussed something like disorientation? For instance, when you die you have some kind of screen effects like blurring or haziness for a period of time.

Or if your character took a permanent mark like scarring to their facial icons. So when interacting with others your profile would show some of your skill level by how undamaged your picture is. Or maybe too many scars damages your interaction with NPCs so if you die a lot you have to spend extra money on items to improve your appearance so you can continue to buy items in a store etc. Or perhaps as your appearance goes down your barter rates get worse.

Neither of these really makes the game that much harder while still making death an inconvenience that it should be.

A simple timer with a % drop in abilitys and stats might work, die again before timer runs out and even suffer a larger penalty maybe.

I personally feel the best course of action is to put in a very minor penalty that encourages you to not die but doesn't make the game directly harder when you do.

I have to agree with some earlier posts. Reward staying alive instead of punishing death. There would be a number of ways to do that.

The variables would be the trigger and the reward.

The easiest trigger seems to be either damage dealt or monsters killed. You could do time in game, but that might result in people leaving their games on overnight for the +.

The reward could be a small XP boost or a small increase in your chance to find currency/rares

This would obviously need a cap. I feel like an avg investment of 1 hour would be a good cap.

I think an XP penalty of some kind is the way to go, really. There's a couple of ways to do that:

1: Die and XP is removed from your character sheet. Maybe you can even lose a level. That one's pretty harsh.

2: Die and you receive some kind of "negative XP." which must be worked off by killing monsters before you can add more XP to your character sheet. There would have to be some kind of cap.

3: Same as 2, but instead of all the XP you would earn going to work off your "debt" half of it (or some other fraction) is used to pay off the "debt." The other half is added to the character sheet and contributes to your next level-up normally.

Regarding the earning a reward for not dying: It's probably not as harsh a penalty, depending on what the bonus is and how high it can go, but if you've just died and had your bonus removed you've really got no motivator to prevent you from making a series of suicide runs into whatever situation got you killed just now.

From what I've seen currency penalties don't make sense in Path of Exile, what with the game being pretty-well currency-less.

The idea of reduced stats on a timer, or making the player do a lot of running and waste a lot of time to get back to where they were doesn't do it for me. There needs to be a penalty, but not one that stops you from playing by enforcing "downtime"

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Tamaranis wrote:

Regarding the earning a reward for not dying: It's probably not as harsh a penalty, depending on what the bonus is and how high it can go, but if you've just died and had your bonus removed you've really got no motivator to prevent you from making a series of suicide runs into whatever situation got you killed just now.

Unless you will not loose the complete buff on dying, but only 1 or 2 levels (out of the max 5).

Ofcourse when the bonus reaches 0 you are right ... but what will those suicide runs bring you :)

In my Opinion, the Death Penalty approach of Demon's Souls was a great idea, in the realisation like its specified in that game not realy fitting to PoE but it looks like this:

If you die you get respawned as a "Soul". In Soul Mode, you got a Penalty on your Life, Mana, Drop-Luck and such, for example like 20%.(there its queit more complex in cause of several dependencies which would make the penalty stronger or weaker, there its pretty fitting, but in PoE it would be kind of oversized.)

If you Kill a Boss, use a special "revive" consumable Item oder if you win a PVP-Challenge against a Player without that Penalty, you are "Resurrected".

The great advantage i see in this system is that you have to be carefull. In games Like Guild Wars, where Penaltys Lower over Time by killing monsters or Named guys, or if you return to the Base, you have not the need to be that carefull, because you just can start from scratch at any time.

With this penalty you need to do something more difficult (at least you can be helped by your mates so its not too hard) whats getting even more Difficult by the Penalty, or you have to pay with your gold for beeing resurrected (some kind of Hospital style, huh? (; ).

Edit: ah I see, there already are some of those (in germany pretty) rare Demon's Souls Players! Already Like you Guy ! :D

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That Benefit life-approach where someone gets kind of Buffed, when staying alive is also interresting!

Some Kind of "Rage"-Barometer, which increases the efficiency of your Character a bit and which gets reset when dying... Cool Stuff! Maybe something like +5% dmg/def per killed Boss, up to a maximum of +15-20% Base Damage(general damage would be kind of heavy buff IMHO).

But here i dont know how to make it scalable enough to power up casters/fighters/Summoners etc. enough to get buffed equivalent. An AoE-Damage Buff of 20% scales kind of more as 20% on a single-target close combat attack...

Hey Guys. I still need to get a Beta key But! I have some suggestions for death penalties. 1. Deteriation of armor like durability, Not so much deteriation on impact like in other games but only whe you die. 2. Loss of small ammounts of xp or gold or whatever the currency is "since i havnt got the beta". And Finally 3. *This isnt a penalty but more like a good thing* A De-Buff that make you invunerable to damage for 15 secs because its always annoying when your spawn killed, also make it so you regen life faster for 5 secs or so. Thanks guys for reading and i hope i healped in a little way :)