Death Penalty System - EXP Loss in particular

agreeeeeeed

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Avaricta#4758 wrote:

2) Removing the XP penalty is a very slippery slop. Because people will always continue whining. First the XP penalty. If that gets removed they cry about waystones being lost on fail. If this gets changed they cry about additional content being lost ... 5 years later everybody has a cheat menu where they can simply spawn in every item in the game. The whining never stops until the game is dead due to the bad changes players requested.

No, it is not a slippery slope. Some features are just bad. This is one of them. If this "feature" wasn't in the game, no one would be asking for it to be put in.

If there were a feature where all bosses and uniques could insta-kill the player on a critical strike, would it start the slippery slope to remove that? What if there was a feature that blacked your monitor out if a mob blinded you? Would that be "whining" to want it removed?

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Avaricta#4758 wrote:

4) Do you not understand, that there needs to be obstacles for the player to overcome in order for them to get a feeling of accomplishment? You are trying to remove this bit by bit. If you continue dying your character is simply not meant to play that difficulty yet. You re meant to farm more currency/better items and levels on a lower difficulty before you proceed to the higher difficulty.

The XP penalty does not add obstacles. It punishes you for attempting to overcome them. As you say, if you keep dying, you know you need to improve somehow. No punishment is necessary.

What removing the death penalty does is let me spend more time facing the challenges, rather than spending more time grinding up XP in between each new attempt. Accomplishment comes from overcoming challenges, not grinding in a "time out" map regaining lost XP.

Removing the XP penalty does NOT make the game easier in any way. It just makes it less punishing and less tedious.

You will still hit those walls and need to improve without death penalties. Everything you said still holds true. It just means you can immediately work on improving your character, rather than spending time grinding to get back to the point you were before.

You are encouraging a playstyle without risks. You can't simply go "Wow, I fought the boss twenty times, then I finally beat it!", because you've lost so much to the penalties. News Flash - that's the way almost all other video games work.

The penalties actually make winning even less of an accomplishment, because you have to go in so over-prepared, over-leveled, and over-geared you remove the challengge (or at least, as much of it as you can).

If they think the xp loss is needed to prevent glass canons rushing waystones let the xploss only effect the waystone you are dying in.

Death in waystone = Lose map and all the xp you got in that waystone.

Its enough punishment to erase your progression when you play to risky in an waypoint. But to punish earlier progression and working backwards by the fixed 10% xp loss is over the top i think.

As already pointed out, this mechanic serves no purpose and is from "the old days". It is a punishment and not hard or difficult but tedious. A game needs challenges and difficultly, loosing exp and grind it back is neither hard nor challenging nor does it prevent me from anything.

But this is something like the auction house feature aka the downfall and bringer of famine. This feature is responsible for so much bad things, it feels like the anti-christ. So we will never get rid of "loosing exp" one of the apocalyptic rider that will bring the end of all and so on and forth ... blah.

There is no argument here. Like respect cost or one portal in mapping. Removing will not change anything in reality but the dev's and this community will behave as if touching/removing it, is like a Thanos snap or worse PoE will transform instantly to D4 also THE CHILDREN.

You don't believe me?
What is the purpose ?
How does it change me or the game?

There is no argument, it is punishment for the sake of it. The exp penalty comes to late and does nothing except taking time in the most annoying way - i myself quit a lot of times at 90+ because the requirement to level up is a joke and not needed (no build i every saw needed points beyond lvl 75) at this point in PoE I.

Xp loss is actually important part of the game.
It means you cant just put some random items together and keep ketting stronger.
Having to stop some times to figure how to make your build better simply makes game better.

Btw I dont care if you have multiple level 100 chars in current poe 1. If you did that 5-6 years ago that actually means something.

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LaNSa#2186 wrote:

Xp loss is actually important part of the game.
It means you cant just put some random items together and keep ketting stronger.
Having to stop some times to figure how to make your build better simply makes game better.

Btw I dont care if you have multiple level 100 chars in current poe 1. If you did that 5-6 years ago that actually means something.

cool.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

No, it is not a slippery slope. Some features are just bad. This is one of them. If this "feature" wasn't in the game, no one would be asking for it to be put in.

If there were a feature where all bosses and uniques could insta-kill the player on a critical strike, would it start the slippery slope to remove that? What if there was a feature that blacked your monitor out if a mob blinded you? Would that be "whining" to want it removed?

I would be asking to put it back in.

Do you not understand that if you die over and over again on the same content, that it is on you? You are doing something that you should not be doing. The game is trying to tell you this by removing XP. You just keep failing to understand this. This is not the games fault. It is yours.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

The XP penalty does not add obstacles. It punishes you for attempting to overcome them. As you say, if you keep dying, you know you need to improve somehow. No punishment is necessary.

The XP loss is not the obstacle, it is the message. The obstacle is the weaker state of your character that needs to be improved.

And your logic can be turned around. If you already understand the message by simply dying, then there will not be much of XP loss. Because then you already understand that you attempted a difficulty beyond your characters current capabilities and will surely switch to a lower difficulty, correct? If you keep pushing a higher difficulty with a weaker character, then it is a conscious decision you take and you will have to live with the consequences of potentially losing XP.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

What removing the death penalty does is let me spend more time facing the challenges, rather than spending more time grinding up XP in between each new attempt. Accomplishment comes from overcoming challenges, not grinding in a "time out" map regaining lost XP.

Do you understand that the biggest part of the game is gearing up and improving your character?

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

Removing the XP penalty does NOT make the game easier in any way. It just makes it less punishing and less tedious.

You will still hit those walls and need to improve without death penalties. Everything you said still holds true. It just means you can immediately work on improving your character, rather than spending time grinding to get back to the point you were before.

You are encouraging a playstyle without risks. You can't simply go "Wow, I fought the boss twenty times, then I finally beat it!", because you've lost so much to the penalties. News Flash - that's the way almost all other video games work.

The penalties actually make winning even less of an accomplishment, because you have to go in so over-prepared, over-leveled, and over-geared you remove the challengge (or at least, as much of it as you can).

Wrong!

You try take this into absolutes on purpose just to bring a wrong point across. You do not need to play without risks. You simply have to manage your risks by deciding what difficulty you choose. And the game gives you all tools necessary to choose the exact difficulty you want. It is 100% up to you.

Also you are mixing different things here. Attempting bosses over and over again applies to pinnacle bosses. Map bosses in the current state just die like rares. Most players that really reach endgame may attempt these a couple of times just for them to beat them and mark them as checked in their mind. As an accomplishment. Here the XP loss is complete irrelevant. If you are already at that stage you should easily be able to farm high tier maps without dying constantly.

Even if you meant map bosses. Even here the game offers you every possibility to reduce your potential loss. You can simply run maps without bosses until you level up. After the level up you can freely die as many times as you want without losing XP. So after a level up you can attempt every map with a boss without worrying about XP loss.

Mapping is the core endgame. It offers a wide variety of difficulty you can freely choose from. If you choose a difficulty that fits the current state of your character you will not continuously die.

Again. If you keep dying over and over again you are doing something wrong. If you play how the game is built, the XP penalty will be irrelevant to you.

People are just complaining about a game mechanic because of their bad decisions.

Out of curiosity, why do you think it works so well for the 98+% of very challenging games that have no death penalty?

Most of those games don't even have any ways for you to improve your character. You die until you "git gud" and succeed. Somehow people manage to overcome the obstacles and feel that sense of accomplishment without being punished.

Your point is "the game is telling you to get stronger" by giving you an XP penalty. The player already got that message by dying. The punishment is just rubbing salt into the wound. Again - losing XP doesn't make killing the boss or clearing the map any harder. It just makes it more of a PITA.

If you aren't dying at least 1 out of 4 attempts, the content isn't challenging. My opinion I know, but that's what forums are for. How fast are you going to be progressing with those XP penalties stacking up?

Even Dark Souls, for all its lauded difficulty, doesn't have that much of a penalty. There, what the game is teaching you is "Don't hoard your souls". Spend them as you can, and you'll never have many to lose. And you can get your corpse back.

Finally, and this is the really tough one, ask yourself how good do you think you are at this game? How much did you play Path of Exile? I see you have one level 100 character. Now try to look at the game through a new player's eyes. Someone who never played Path of Exile (which will true for the majority of PoE 2 players). Do you really think the brutal death penalties are going to help their enjoyment of the game?

The game needs to be challenging. It doesn't need to be punishing. There is a difference.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

Out of curiosity, why do you think it works so well for the 98+% of very challenging games that have no death penalty?

Most of those games don't even have any ways for you to improve your character. You die until you "git gud" and succeed. Somehow people manage to overcome the obstacles and feel that sense of accomplishment without being punished.

What are those ARPG games for which it works so well? To me it sounds like you are comparing an ARPG to another genre of game and using this false comparison as an argument to remove a mechanic.

Edit:
Maybe I should not say ARPG. Maybe it would be better for me to say PoE like game. The term ARPG could be interpreted extremely broadly. So games where you have a character with the main focus on improving this characters equipment/passives/skills and obliterate tons of enemies over and over again. And optionally kill some pinnacle bosses.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

Your point is "the game is telling you to get stronger" by giving you an XP penalty. The player already got that message by dying. The punishment is just rubbing salt into the wound. Again - losing XP doesn't make killing the boss or clearing the map any harder. It just makes it more of a PITA.

Ok, for me there are two possibilities.

1) The player really gets the message by dying once or a few times. The player lowers the difficulty or improves their character.
Good. Only a small XP loss. No big deal. XP loss can stay in the game.

2) The player does not get the message and keeps dying repeatedly without improving his character or adapting the difficulty.
Here the XP penalty is needed in order to amplify the message the player is clearly not understanding. The message being: Improve your character or lower the difficulty.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

If you aren't dying at least 1 out of 4 attempts, the content isn't challenging. My opinion I know, but that's what forums are for. How fast are you going to be progressing with those XP penalties stacking up?

Even Dark Souls, for all its lauded difficulty, doesn't have that much of a penalty. There, what the game is teaching you is "Don't hoard your souls". Spend them as you can, and you'll never have many to lose. And you can get your corpse back.

Once again. I think you are just not understanding what type of game this is. Improving your build/character is the main activity. Everything evolves around this. Maps are here for farming. Not for challenges. A map is something you open to mindlessly farm currency/equipment for your build. If you want a challenge you attempt a pinnacle boss.

Absolutely nobody says: I want a challenge. Lets open a map.

If you die in 1 out of 4 maps, you most definitely are doing something wrong. I would expect to maybe die once in a 100 maps. Or maybe even less.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

Finally, and this is the really tough one, ask yourself how good do you think you are at this game? How much did you play Path of Exile? I see you have one level 100 character. Now try to look at the game through a new player's eyes. Someone who never played Path of Exile (which will true for the majority of PoE 2 players). Do you really think the brutal death penalties are going to help their enjoyment of the game?

The game needs to be challenging. It doesn't need to be punishing. There is a difference.

Me? I am a bad player. I am exceptionally bad at mechanics. That is why I play a game like PoE, or in my younger years Diablo 2. Because in these type of games you can overcome your own shortcomings as a player by simply farming better gear and out gearing the content you play.

Some of the best players in PoE 1 can defeat pinnacle bosses with almost no gear and at level 50 or something, because they are just that good. For me these are a real challenge and I have to build a very strong character to have a chance. But it is doable.

Do you think that just because there is a certain type of content in the game, that every single player is expected to clear it? Or just because there is a max level of 100 that every player is expected to reach it? If so, that is simply a misconception and we would have found the issue for this discussion.

This is not a game like Dark Souls, Horizon Zero Dawn or something similar where you play through every bit of content on your first play through. Some good, dedicated new players might. But most players won't.

It took me maybe 3 years before I killed my first real boss in PoE 1. I usually play the current league and at some point I simply lose interest for this league, stop playing and wait for the next league to start over. If I lose interest in mid tier maps, well then I won't see much of the endgame in that league. The only reason I have even this one level 100 character is because it was a goal of mine to get one. So I built a tankier character and was a bit more selective with the content I ran to get to 100 faster.

Everything is player decision.

You just wrote that GGG can't remove the EXP penalty because people would demand to remove other stuff until they have a cheat system to spawn their items...

Nice idea... Did you ever hear that an argument can be turned around?

Why is it okay to add more penalties and make it even harder but it's not okay to lower it? Right now we lose the Map, the Mod, the Orbs required for crafting the Map and last but not least the EXP. If I could pick one I would remove the EXP loss. See, it can go both ways.

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Me? I am a bad player. I am exceptionally bad at mechanics. That is why I play a game like PoE, or in my younger years Diablo 2. Because in these type of games you can overcome your own shortcomings as a player by simply farming better gear and out gearing the content you play.

PoE like most ARPG games are simple grind games. It's all about the grind. Orbs, EXP, Items...

But being forced to grind in a location where I have not the slightest of challenge - just to not die and lose EXP - gets boring. Hence my question for the Devs in my initial post. What was their goal with the way they designed PoE and what is their goal for the EXP penalty.

Yes, you do not open a Map because you want a challenge. Again: both ways. I want to farm shit WHILE having challenging gameplay.

You said it yourself: "and out gearing the content you play" I simply refuse to believe that this was the intention of the developer once they came up with PoE. "Play content that's far below you level until you find items to play the content that's less far below your level to farm items to play content that's still below you level because there is no way to reach a point where it's safe to play content that's on an equal level because after farming so much content below your level you reach lv 90 and dying on lv 90 will waste days or weeks of the time invested." We are talking about standard, not season...

At this point GGG could describe their game like: "You either have an OP build copied from someone else because as inexperienced ARPG player you can make a valid endgame build yourself due to our complexity and if you want to keep playing one character and finish leveling it, you have to run on levels that have no challenge at all"

Would you even bother trying a game like this? Because that's what it currently is. 3 people from my steam friendlist stopped playing between lv 75 and 85. The reason for all of them is the EXP loss. Another one created his 3 character but is annoyed that he can't manage to get 1 character even remotely close to 90.

And YES!!!!! He wouldn't get to 100 even without the EXP loss unless working on the character build. But he would still be encouraged to continue trying and farming. And if we run out of maps because we were dying to much we can always start to farm new maps or buy them from the vendor to craft them up or buy them from the market. So the cycle you love so much will come at one point or the other. Regardless if there is a EXP loss or not. And this is not an opinion. It's a solid fact you can't deny. And believe it or not but farming in a low level area without any chance to test your limit without losing tons of time invested doesn't do the trick. And while being able to test my limits after a level up, that's nothing that comes around every 2 days after a certain point. Imagine you have a life, job, family and can only spend 1-2 hours a day on the PC. Playing 12 low level no brainer maps for 2 hours doesn't do the trick either.

For me, personally, the EXP loss is a heavy emotional trigger as I see my character grow with every attempt, every nice item, every orb I find, every skill I upgrade or change. Seeing my invested time go to waste because I want a some more challenging experience simply sucks. I want to farm... I want to farm hundreds of Maps. I could do this all day long if I have the time. The EXP per level can be increased 10 times - I don't mind. I would play a character to the end if I like it. And if I die a few times on a Tier 7 map I would automatically go back to tier 6. But once I beat like 10 tier 6 maps in a row I will try another tier 7. And once I upgraded enough to clear 20 Tier 7 maps I want to try tier 8. But I am simply not allowed to unless my build is bullet prove for this difficulty. But how can I know that it is? Keep farming low maps to level up and try one tier higher with 0% EXP? I just don't want the EXP go to waste for nothing.

Last night I died in a Tier 5 map on a boss :-D It was my own fault... I became tired and fall into a split second sleep... I could laugh about it if there wasn't the EXP loss. This was my last Tier 5 Map. Now I have to run tier 3 maps or craft them up to Tier 4. That's fine for me. I hit "the obstacle" by not being able to continue tier 5 maps and I won't waste Tier 6 or 7 now. So I play 3 maps Tier 3 in the hopes I find some Tier 4 or even Tier 5 maps.

This is the natural gameplay cycle I know from many other games that doesn't have such a harsh system of punishment.

All I want is for the EXP penalty to go away as it causes to much stress.

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Do you think that just because there is a certain type of content in the game, that every single player is expected to clear it? Or just because there is a max level of 100 that every player is expected to reach it? If so, that is simply a misconception and we would have found the issue for this discussion.

I go as far and say one of the issue that require such a discussion are players like you who eat every shit they have been served. Sorry for the wording... I really don't want to offend you but this is the way you try to defend it. At what point would you say it's enough punishment? Losing an entire level on death? Losing Items from the inventory on death? Loosing items on your character on death? Losing random stuff from your storage on death? What does it require for you to complain about any punishment game mechanics? I mean you even defend the EXP Loss regarding game caused deaths due to bugs that basically exist for year and are not fixed. 1 hit kills with unreasonable damage were a thing in PoE 1 already. Since they copied large chunks of the source code, they also copied this bug. There are videos out on Youtube showing white basic monster 1 hit a lv 90+ character.

No, not everyone expects to reach level 100.... I doubt that much more people will after the EXP loss is removed. But I am 100% sure many more people will spend much more time playing. This automatically mean more potential income from micromanagement.

Like I said... I was about to toss 100 € in just 30 minutes before I learned that EXP loss is still a thing. So I do not spend more money because I know at some point I will get angry and stop playing again. And this makes me quite sad because I love the way PoE 1 and 2 are working. None of the ARPG I played getting close to PoE in terms of freedom and complexity but followed by this freedom and complexity comes the penalty to lose progress if you are not the perfect careful player who stick with out geared content rather than having some ACTION Role Play gaming experienced.