Death Penalties

The purpose of this "Developer Discussion" forum is for us to discuss topics with you that we feel we need feedback on.

We haven't decided on a system for death penalties in Path of Exile. Clearly in specific leagues like hardcore there is a well defined death penalty, but we haven't come up with anything solid for default play.

I understand that this has already been discussed here, but I'd like to build a bigger discussion that hopefully results in some kind of decision.

Currently, when a player dies, they can respawn (with no penalty) in that act's town. We will probably be introducing something like town portals, soon, so we're going to need a more appropriate penalty.

We don't like the idea of dropping an item upon death, because players of the default league have specifically chosen to not suffer permanent loss when they die.

Having an experience penalty is possible, but maybe there's something more interesting we can do.

Do you guys have any ideas for how we can handle this in an interesting way?
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few ideas, maybe someone likes them
besides the basics of:
respawn at a fixed point with the option to revive at ur death spot with a gold/ingame currency cost based on the level/difficulty of the area


-Each time u die, the Monster in a certain area around the death spot recieve a "moral" boost for x amount of time, which stacks the more u die.
Making them harder to kill for the duration of the buff.

-small chance to respawn in the land of death, and have to fight ur way out of it to respawn where u died.
While ur Body and gear is still in the living world, u have to fight ur way out of there without ur standart gear.
Leave some cropses or chests in the starting area, so u get some basic gear.
Dropping everything u picked up into the living world when u respawn there.
Should take around 5 minutes or so.

Last might be a bit to bad when ur playing with a party, but maybe acceptable or even fun when the chances are low enough.



Narf

You could always lose your body when you die. It holds all you weapons and items (only you can pick it up). You also drop all your gold and lose a bit of XP.

Iv never seen this idea in a game before.It would be great to see GGG try it out!
Cheaper than free... Speedtree
Well, it depends how often we are going to die really.

These are a few things that I have seen other MMOs do upon a character's death:

- Loss of EXP
- Weakened character at re-spawn for about 30s-1m or longer
- Monster that kills you gets stronger
- All items dropped upon death and available to anyone
- Having to go through "hell" to come back to life
- Becoming a ghost and having to go all the way to town to get your body back and then going back to your original body
- Option to respawn or wait for a revive

You need to strike a balance of course, whereby people will fear dying but won't be overwhelmed by the penalty.

How independant do you want the players to be?

If there is a high penalty and the monster increases in strength you will encourage player co-operation to recover lost items.

If you wish players to be independant, just give them the option to respawn with some penalties.

Is there an interesting way?

There might be an interesting way, but death will always be something annoying and a chore to recover from, and it should be that way.

Death should have the penalty of time, which is something that no player can buy and therefore a threat throughout the player's career, therefore making death still a threat at high levels.
never been very big on deathpenalties , dying IS the penalty for failure
*and often embarrassing*


the most interesting xp loss method i have seen is what ao used several years back :
- when you die you lose dev#xp
- lost xp goes into an experience recovery pool
- each time you recieve new xp a matching amount of xp is returned from the xp pool to your char xp
- you can only lose actual active xp going toward the next level
- you could not lose levels only active 'to-next' xp
*xp and levels were tiered*

the pool was like limbo for xp , useless while in the pool but re-obtainable .



"
Rustychops wrote:
You could always lose your body when you die. It holds all you weapons and items (only you can pick it up). You also drop all your gold and lose a bit of XP.


everquest featured 'corpse runs' and it was annoying . in daoc you lost 10% of your xp then you could go pray at your deathsite gravestone to get 5% back .
--- .
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Chris wrote:

Currently, when a player dies, they can respawn (with no penalty) in that act's town.


Does this mean that waypoints are quite frequent in PoE? I ask because I am just wondering how long of a journey it is to get back to where you died at. Titan Quest had checkpoints in the form of rebirth fountains, but they were kind of a necessity as dungeons could be very far from the nearest waypoint.
I am a poor freezingly cold soul
So far from where
I intended to go
to start i wanna say that the death penalty should make it so you dont run endlessly into death without care but should also not ruin the game or force you to stop playing for awhile. with that in mind


1. the worst idea ever is making the killing monster stronger. you died because something was difficult so lets go and make it even harder next time. oh you died again well lets make it even harder. talk about a sure fire way to get people to save and exit

2. weakened characters is something other mmo games have used before but has not been perfectly done yet imo. give me a weaker character but instead of slapping just a time stamp on it give me a way to work of the "sickness". something like we are weakened for 30min game time or whatever but each kill takes X amount of time off our penalty. multiple deaths should only reset the time not add onto it

3. corpse runs had their day and no one seems to like them anymore. i am really used to them so i would be fine with them but they are a dying form of penalty

4. xp penalty will always be around but how much depends on the real challenge of the game. some people hate this but to them i say dont die

5. dropping items is a huge no-no imo outside of hardcore. actually seeing as fallen hardcore become normal characters it would not be good there either. dropping items would force people into passworded games and really kill the fun of the game

all in all i cant say for sure what i want. i think the tried and true xp penalty is fine and enough to prevent people from wanting to die. add a weaker char for 5-10 minutes or whatever and people will really hate it. anything beyond that will force people away from the game which is just bad business. one thing i would like to see is a tracker for times killed and possibly by what type of monster. this should be viewable by anyone at anytime. then again like i tell everyone at the diablo site i am a big stat guy so the more stats the better imo
How about a reward for not dying in an area? Increasing your magic find temporarily for example. That would be a good incentive I think :)
i always wondered why they didnt reward you for not dying as opposed to penalizing you for dying. probably harder to implement? i dont know but could be something someone will try
I think the reward for not dying is the ability to play the game...

I personally don't think we should be rewarded for "not dying", the idea just seems a bit silly :P.

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