Death Penalties

Certainly the bosses shouldn't be a cakewalk, but their difficulty should be established in some other way than just simply giving them attacks the player is unable to respond to, despite being otherwise adequate level for the area. Instead of a one-shot attack, give them a series of, say, four smaller attacks, each dealing 25% of the one-shot damage. At least then you'd have a chance to use a flask after a hit, throw in some skills or whatever.

It was pretty demotivating to walk into that room after dying, then before I even saw the boss again, I was greeted by an insta-kill laser of doom.

Basically, I'd suggest that high-damage attacks should be slow and dodge-able manually. Low-damage attacks on the other hand could be harder to dodge or even be certain hits, to establish some sort of requirement for DPS and defense to be able to defeat the boss.

Then again, it would suck to be caught in a bad-build limbo, unable to meet the DPS/armor requirement in a sensible timeframe to get past the boss. Making Orb of Regrets a bit more common drop could help with this. Right now if your build simply sucks, and you have no respec points and no way to trade for orb of regrets, you could need to spend hours just to get one respec point. That's not fast enough for anyone to honestly bother with, since a notice-able build tweak would likely require 10-20 respec points at least. Why would I spend like 20 hours grinding respec points so that I MAYBE can beat the boss I'm stuck at. I'm not gonna start a new character until I know I can actually get past the part I'm stuck at.

That's my view anyways, as a casual player. And honestly, I do like the fact that the passive skill tree isn't completely respec-able at any time, like in many other games. There's an actual need to think it out before choosing skills. On the other hand, it should be a little bit more forgiving of bad choices.

Just now I died and lost about 20 minutes worth of exp, to something I had absolutely no control over. I was getting surrounded by the bird enemies at the ship graveyard, noticed I was taking a bit too much damage and proceeded to escape using Whirling Blades, I continued using the skill rapidly (due to high attack speed) and had used the skill about 4 or 5 times and was a good distance away from the enemies. Then I suddenly get teleported back in the middle of the enemies and pretty much die instantly.

Stuff like this alone is reason enough to NOT punish the PLAYER for what just happened. It's like just arbitrarily showing a popup on the screen saying "Random event! You lose experience."

While fixing lag issues is certainly important, there will always be players with connection issues, so you can't count on that solving this problem. Losing experience is a bad idea!

Honestly, if this happens to me again, I won't bother with the game for the foreseeable future. No matter how awesome the rest of the game design is (and it really is!), it's not worth wasting time over while potentially losing stuff instead of gaining it for the invested time.

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HitmanN wrote:

Honestly, if this happens to me again, I won't bother with the game for the foreseeable future. No matter how awesome the rest of the game design is (and it really is!), it's not worth wasting time over while potentially losing stuff instead of gaining it for the invested time.

Doesn't it occour to you that it may have been a sync problem because of a lag spike, and you actually never got out there?, so it may have not been a problem of the server, but mainly yours?
Or maybe it was the otherway arround, but still, if i'd be a supporter or even without being a supported i'd never quit a game like this one for that reason, because it minimal compared to the entire awesomeness of the game.

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Vold316 wrote:

Doesn't it occour to you that it may have been a sync problem because of a lag spike, and you actually never got out there?, so it may have not been a problem of the server, but mainly yours?
Or maybe it was the otherway arround

That completely misses the point. I still don't see what the reasoning is to take exp away from me for something I did have no control over. No other game on this machine has any connection issues whatsoever either, so we can just conclude the game has problems with synching. Until that's fixed, I'd like to keep my exp, thank you.

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Vold316 wrote:

i'd never quit a game like this one for that reason, because it minimal compared to the entire awesomeness of the game.

Being unable to level up a character in the game because the game arbitrarily takes away your experience is 'minimal'? Spending hour upon hour on the game and constantly having your experience reset is 'minimal'? That's what's happening here at worst, and it keeps gettings worse the further I progress in the game.

Seriously, this game is so awesome on so many levels, but loss of exp, being unable to progress and lag spike deaths, all things I can't affect in any way, make it completely unplayable and unenjoyable at the moment.

I honestly didn't bother playing today, because I didn't want to spend an hour with the fear that any moment I could be forced to die and lose all the exp I managed to gain during that hour.

I'm not quitting the game, but I'm stopping playing it until either the synching issues are fixed or exp penalties are removed, so that I can actually progress in it, and thus enjoy it again. Had a blast until the lag spikes started popping up around ruthless difficulty! Totally love the massive skill tree.

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Vold316 wrote:

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HitmanN wrote:

Honestly, if this happens to me again, I won't bother with the game for the foreseeable future. No matter how awesome the rest of the game design is (and it really is!), it's not worth wasting time over while potentially losing stuff instead of gaining it for the invested time.

Doesn't it occour to you that it may have been a sync problem because of a lag spike, and you actually never got out there?, so it may have not been a problem of the server, but mainly yours?
Or maybe it was the otherway arround, but still, if i'd be a supporter or even without being a supported i'd never quit a game like this one for that reason, because it minimal compared to the entire awesomeness of the game.

maybe you don't see the bigger picture here.
If a player level 70+ loses exp this is too much for him to the point some high level players says this is mostly like 3 hours of grind.

And I'm not even level 50 yet, and it's already frustrating. :(

I'm just bummed that I can't enjoy the game anymore. I was totally hooked on it for the first 30 or so levels. Getting skill points is already so slow that it kills some of the fun of skill expansion on the skill tree, even without exp loss.

To me the fun of those 30 first levels was how regularly I got to do stuff on the passive skill tree. Now progress is mostly about loot and skill gem level grinding, which isn't as entertaining in comparison. As an example, I'd rather have twice as many nodes on the passive skill tree, with half the bonuses, but get skill points twice as often. That's just my preference though, but anyways, that's how much I enjoy that feature alone. I know leveling up gets slower in just about every RPG type game, but I wish the skill point accumulation rate for invested time would stay about the same.

I'm derailing the topic a bit here, so errmm... anyways, exp loss totally kills the remaining fun for me. That's all.

yes i think so too

With this rubber banding issues dying and losing x amount xp worth of hour or less just makes the game unjoyable at least we should get our certain amount of xp back when we reach our death spot(like in titan quest or such).

Question for GGG.

Right now the penalty is 0%-normal, 5%-Cruel, 10%-Ruthless, and 15%-Merciless.

What is the plan when Merciless goes away?

Will it just be: 0%-normal, 5%-Cruel, 10%-Ruthless?

If so I think this would solve a LOT of the issues I see brought up here... That and fixing the rubber banding.

As it sits I cannot get motivated to play my LvL64 because of the 15% loss at death. Currently that is my major reason for playing new builds/alts.

I think that there should be an other league for people that gets frustrated over it, because those who like it as it is will probably leave if it becomes unchallenging.