exp penalty
" Another option is (for example) on death, players receive a 50% penalty to experience gains for 10% of a level. This amounts to exactly the same penalty by the time the player gains 10% of a level, but it never results in negative progression and doesn't penalize multiple deaths in a row. I also want to point out that many of the disadvantages you mention on your list of penalty options aren't exclusive to that kind of penalty. For example, the fact that we use the internet and all of it's flaws is damaging to any form of penalty, not just the entry penalty. ... Historically (and I mean 8 bit historically) we can see that most games use a penalty similar to what we have in PoE maps, where you get thrown back to the beginning of the level each time you die, and after dying a certain number of times it's some kind of greater setback like "Game Over". If the purpose of the penalty is to motivate players to survive, it suffices to send people back to a point where the correlation between "all subsequent choices they make leading up to the death" and "the death itself" breaks down. This can be a continue marker, the beginning of the level, or the beginning of the game. Any more penalty than this has no effect on conditioning a player to "survive better" since the point to which they were set back is the beginning of that correlation I was talking about. If a player doesn't survive, they simply don't progress. In standard PoE (aside from limited map portals) we have a penalty system that sends players back in experience to long before the correlation between their death and their choices breaks down. For example, dying when you are high level (say 90) will cost you the experience from many maps that you have done prior to the one in which you died... but you didn't make any error in those fifty prior maps that would have bearing on this one. If the purpose of the penalty is to encourage survivalist play styles, then it is left to be explained how over-penalizing death accomplishes this best. My guess is that the proponents of the current death penalty don't merely want to see survivalist play styles encouraged, they want to see builds that they personally don't like be utterly unable to progress or they enjoy the thrill. Last edited by Khalixxa on Dec 10, 2014, 3:44:54 AM
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" ...and how is it an option if it only penalizes you for one death? The players would simply zerg what content they could. Who cares if you die a third, fourth, or fifth time? " Exactly why you can't base anything on lag, desync, or other things that are not the fault of the player or the game. You cannot assume that there will be connection problems all of the time. The moment you do you lose a huge chuck of quality in gaming. One prime example is the removal of hardcore in games, and that is something many players love. " And that's the experience penalty. But there is currently a rare method to take advantage of it. That's why you put local penalties into other things, like the six entry limit on maps. Nobody cares about the 10% experience when it comes to maps. A high end level map may not give you nearly as much experience as you lost, but the item(s) you could've found would've been far more valuable. " It sounds to me like you're claiming those who don't want the penalty changed, due to the lack of a more efficient penalty, want the flat experience loss because we play builds that would be impossible to progress in with most other penalties. If this is true, you're going down a path you don't want to. It's a personal attack and gets off topic. It'll get nasty. If it's not, then I'd like you to clarify what you did mean. | |
" If a player dies very frequently under a penalty system like I'm describing, they would progress very slowly: 50% experience gains with constant running back. It also treats players the same regardless of how far progressed they are in their current level. If a player chooses a build that dies more frequently than average, in my opinion, they should progress slowly but not backward. The game should be challenging enough to hold players back without needing negative progression. When I've mentioned this before, people have objected with: "But then every crappy build would end up at max level eventually." To this, I have to point out that many people base their definition of "crappy" on how frequently the character tends to die (a "crappy" build dies a lot). Which leads to the following question: What makes a build "punishable"? Death is what triggers the punishment in PoE. So, (for example) if the punishment is intended to discourage "crappy builds" and a crappy build is defined as "a build that dies a lot", then we have a tautology: death intends to punish death. This is why there has to be some other target for the punishment that death is the result of. Jaywalking is not illegal because "it's jaywalking", rather, it's illegal because it endangers everyone on the road. That's what I'm getting at: the underlying reason why death is punished. I'm not implying that there's no reason, but the specifics of the answer to this question must inform the nature of the punishment. " In a previous post I asked the following questions: 1. What is the purpose of the current penalty for death? 2. How effectively does the current penalty serve that purpose? If one's answer to the first question is something like "to encourage survivalist play styles", and to the second question something like "extremely effective" then if you believe what I said in the previous post (about correlation, etc.) there must be some additional unmentioned answer to the first question such as "to prevent the progression of crappy builds". The reason it was important to say this is that the currently punishment is excessive with just the first answer to question without the addendum. Even with the addendum, "crappy builds" still needs to be defined. | |
" Yes, but not nearly as slowly as losing 10% of their experience each time. If someone has more than 10% of their level experience, they'll feel the pain at least twice. Even a fractional loss is painful, especially so at higher levels. But dying once removes all future pain from deaths. Deaths are supposed to hurt individually and cumulatively. Dying once is supposed to hurt, while dying three or more times in a row is supposed to be devastating. Your idea of a single experience gain penalty does not have that. " Yes, but it shouldn't be about builds. It's about death. Players should fear each and every death, and if there is only one penalty there is no reason not to make builds that take advantage of the death system. This is when players would use a Cast on Death + Portal combo to instantly rejoin the battle. There is a reason it's called a penalty. It's losing progress you made, and something must be penalized. Right now the only common factor is experience. " Then let me clarify a few things: 1. Survivable means the build only dies to desync, lag, or poor player control. It's something like an aegis aurora build that can facetank anything and never die. 2. Glass cannon or other similar builds are those that destroy before anything gets to them. In this game, it refers to something that can barely take one hit before dying. All you need is that one shot, and it comes down to who hits first. Almost all the time the player will be hitting first. CWDT/CWS + Frost Wall can drastically help with survivability at almost no cost, allowing you the chance to hit, recover, and continue without dying. 3. Cast on Death builds. Builds that specifically gear for death and pour all of their effort into damage. They abuse the current CoD gem and simply use CoD + Portal to continue on. Only thing that stops them are loading screens. Penalties are supposed to stop the second and third. Glass cannons can still be played, but those players need to be extremely careful and expect to die, especially at bosses. So when someone says that crappy builds would be able to progress, they refer to the second and third. " The death penalty is meant to discourage lack of survivability, which leads to death. If your character cannot deal with incoming damage, you are meant to die. The penalty is supposed to force players to get survivability. So death does not punish death. As I said, glass cannon builds are capable of playing, but the player should expect deaths for various reasons, some of which they cannot be ready for. Lagging for a few seconds while moving can be lethal. | |
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Remove Exp Penalty on loss. And remove the Alt F4/ logout scripts. If there was a flat 10 second delay for logouts i think the game would be better
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" If survivability is the avoidance of death, and the death penalty is meant to discourage the lack of survivability (the failure to avoid death), this is the same as the example tautology: "Death is meant to punish death." If you want to extend this to "Death is meant to punish the choices that lead to death" or "Death is meant to punish recklessness" this still doesn't break the loop if "choices that lead to death" and "recklessness" can't be defined or measured without "death". The reason I'm belaboring the definition is because without some underlying reason for the death penalty, then it's just arbitrary. But I hope we can all agree that the risk/reward system for a game (death penalty included) is not a trivial thing. It can make or break. Do we want to discourage glass cannon builds so badly that we are willing to eat all of the negatives that come along while doing nothing to discourage the builds that ignore damage and face tank everything? What about the single button drain tanks that one shot bosses? Personally, I'd rather see more glass cannon builds that rely on teamwork to stay alive rather than more of those other kinds. We have to put this death penalty in perspective. Game developers have the right to punish and reward whatever they want, but if their goal is to create a specific type of game environment, then they've made a hypothesis that can now be questioned. If some players are excessively frustrated by something in the game, it can be questioned. That's why I posed those initial two questions. Last edited by Khalixxa on Dec 10, 2014, 9:03:48 PM
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" Well said... I would much rather see a game that supports all different kinds of creative builds. I really don't like being pigeon-holed into a build progression. Especially a progression that is only viable with certain Rare or Unique items. Obviously surviving as a "Glass-Canon" is very self-satisfying and with that said there must be some form of punishment that comes from your eventuall demise *smiles*... This is a tough question. I've re-done my Shadow build at-least twice because of this (i.e., too heavy on DPS) and I've learned that it was fun and challenging during the re-design. I did expect to die quite a bit and was prepared for that but it did frustrate me. Now I approach each area much more carefully and think through each encounter. I still die but after re-design; I am much more confident of my chances. Without the penalty / EXP loss, I wouldn't have re-designed my build and accepted the deaths and just whittled away at the boss / encounters. In my case I liked the fact that there is an EXP penalty. I helped me focus and get better. | |
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I don't think anybody wants penalties completely removed, just changed.
Last edited by Khalixxa on Dec 10, 2014, 11:08:32 PM
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" Yes. Because glass cannons are about killing things so quickly that you don't need survivability. Your survivability is your offensive power. The moment a glass cannon becomes viable, no survivable build will be used. The top players will swarm on glass cannon builds and abuse their greater ability to clear faster. They'll literally just take the effort into survivability and put it into movement speed, letting them clear so much faster than other builds. Drops will have to be nerfed due to the faster clearing speeds. This makes survivable builds far less interesting as drop rates are futher useless for them. " Puncture. We already have it. " Right now there's currently no reason to play in parties unless your build is not survivable. Survivable builds can get six full inventories full of items from maps, while parties are lucky to get more than one. This is a huge advantage. This is one reason I don't want glass cannons to be viable, as you'd completely remove the need for party play. " Yes, and I'm sure they're reading all of this. But they aren't likely to change it unless a new and more efficient death penalty comes up. | |
" Diablo 3 is not the most balanced game by any means, but if you were to look at its leaderboards, all of the farthest progressing teams have at least one tank. This obviously isn't due to any penalty. I bring this up as an example of how team makeups can be diverse due to the raw difficulty of the game holding them back, rather than a negatively progressive penalty for death. If a "glass cannon" is true to its namesake, it will die more often than a balanced build. This means that it would (with a 50% penalty to experience gains for 10% of a level on death) gain less experience per kill. Nobody can say whether some glass cannon build would still be able to solo and gain more experience despite the penalty, but perhaps that threshold would be a good one by which to tune it. " Isn't this a bad thing? Don't we want to encourage people to play with one another? " Wait. Wouldn't a glass cannon build be a "not survivable" build? We're touching on another issue here: the fact that the game is so easy and button-mashy that we even have to worry about glass cannons getting ahead in the first place. If the game were challenging enough so that glass cannons get held back by the raw difficulty of the game, there would be no worry. The current death penalty simply can't exist simultaneously with most challenges, since players are forced to avoid challenges (things that threaten to kill them) if they plan on leveling. At sufficiently high level, even dying once every 100 maps can mean zero or negative progression. |
