Pros and Cons - Death Penalty

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aphfid wrote:

so, for example, if you were 70% of the way through a level, and you died 7 times, you would still be 70% of the way through the level, but your xp gain would be significantly reduced for a while until you worked off the red line.

City of Heroes/Villains had a similar system where dying would add "EXP Debt" to your bar. For all I know, it could have been just the same in the end as PoE, numerically speaking, but the difference is that EXP Debt felt better. There's a psychological difference between "I just lost a shitload of progress" and "I just have to work harder for my next level now." There are a lot of psychological tricks in games to make harsh systems more palatable, but for some reason GGG refuses to use any of them.

I'm also pretty sure EXP Debt had a cap, so that was probably a factor, preventing you from being buried by it if you had to Zerg a boss or something.

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DER_PSYCHOPATH wrote:

Pros:
-Teaches you to improve on your flaws instead of ignoring them.
-The equilibrium you reach between experience and death penalty permanently keeping you from leveling further is indicative of the practical quality of your build.
-Has a small but distinctive influence on the number and extent of glass cannons played.
-Indicates a level of difficulty and challenge.

I could go through other threads and find more, but I hope it's not necessary.

You can say that learning is possible , but the game offers no feedback about what exactly killed you to learn from. Sometimes it is obvious what killed you, othertimes it is not so black and white and there is no learning as you just continue to run in the endless cycle of gain some % then lose it all to a random mob thats powerlevel is much higher then anything else in the map.

Truth be told, the penalty is not fun without it also having a cap.
The game should encourage having fun , and pushing your builds - rather then reward you for doing low content.
The current system actually rewards running a glass cannon style as clearing a lower level map as quick as possible is optimal to running harder content.

Death penalty does not indicate a level of difficulty and challenge, it simply forces you to avoid any challenging content. You either choose to have fun doing crazy maps, or you choose to level doing easy areas.

In my opinion - the penalty needs to be revisted to ensure it is fun.
Some ideas could be a combo of the following:
1) vastly increase boss experience - possibly give lost exp to the boss pool for the individual player.
2) add a secondary bar to regain lost experience from a death to be regained at no experience penalty due to lvl difference.
3) add a currency sink vendor recipe to regain loss experience at a cost of 100 regrets.
4) add a cap to amount of experience lost per level at 50% or 100% so that you can eventually progress. People who do not die will still level much faster.

These would

This again? With the proper build you can do crazy maps without fear of dying. Or delving below 300 once again without fear of dying. You cant create builds that can do that? Your loss.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

This again? With the proper build you can do crazy maps without fear of dying. Or delving below 300 once again without fear of dying. You cant create builds that can do that? Your loss.

Again your post are so enlightening , tyvm :)

There are serious problems with the leveling system past 90, including a lack of risk-reward correlation (an issue which has been present ever since launch), serious build imbalances regarding exp/hour (any fast screen-clearing ranger gains more than a slow boss-killer), and the fact that a lot of deaths in PoE seem kind of "random." There are more problems with exp, leveling, etc. but those are the ones that I can think of off the top of my head.

THAT'S what people who want to remove the exp penalty seem to be complaining about. But removing the penalty won't actually solve those problems.

Essentially, there needs to be a rework of the whole exp gain system at high levels that effectively rewards good builds, skill, and running difficult content, and IMO an abandonment of the pointless principle that level 100 has to take forever (you could cut the time it takes in half and it'd still be incredibly tough for the vast majority for players; there's SO much wiggle room with the numbers right now without getting anywhere close to trivializing things).

If you cut the penalty and don't fix the rest of the system, this game just becomes mind-numbingly boring because there's nothing for me to work towards. I'm a crappy player with crappy non-meta characters (well, with a few exceptions) who die every once in a while - I want there to be consequences so that I can see some measure of their improvement as I slowly work at them.

If nothing happens when they die, why would I bother to do this work? 5k hp and 100k dps and I could just crawl my way through any content with little motivation to improve things (and those are pathetic stats even by my relatively low standards). Yawn.

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nadakuu wrote:

Pros: In my opinion - the penalty needs to be revisted to ensure it is fun.

lol, 'a fun penalty'. What an oxymoron.

There is nothing fun in penalties by definition. More generally, normal people do not play video games for having a punishment. That's why there usually also is 'save a game' option in most games nowadays. Game developers learned that people liked to save their progress instead of starting over from zero. They already figured out these basic points at the 90's.

Strangely, advocates of DP see it as a litmus test of skill, even though the concept of punishing people for playing a video game more broadly is a failed philosophical point -unless you specifically aim to drive people away, which aforementioned parties have explicitly stated to be their goal here.

I agree with demon9675 that problem mainly involve levels 90+. It's not that DP in anyway feels bad before those levels, after which player is de facto forced to play HC. It isn't a question of player skill -I could for example play HC and be really bad at it, still enjoying what I'm doing- it's about the game mode I chose to play.

@vmt80 I don't know, I don't see punishments in games all that damning in and of themselves. But they do need a carrot for the stick. The carrot for the stick in the death penalties case is the abuse of having no xp to lose. Basically, there are times when deaths do not matter and that is a pretty big carrot. Unfortunately, getting there when you're level 90+ is a serious investment of time.

Yeah. I am a bit biased since most of my deaths are due to disconnect/lag. I edited my post after your reply, so just to clarify: personally I only see levels 90+ to be problematic regarding DP.

I am now trying to learn the Uber Elder fight as it is probably the only "regular content" i haven't done yet.
Went in with 1/3 of my bar knowing i will end up with 0
Failed 6 times, 3 of those were instagibs who god knows what.

Loosing 10% xp per portal seems quite bad at lvl 93. If i had any will to level up further (my all time highest char is 95) i would grind some easy red maps instead and avoid bossing all together.

Is that the way GGG meant for PoE to be played, or is that adaptation of the player to the system in place? Death Penalty is there for a reason, the loss of 60c per attempt is harsh enough for casual like me :)

pro: nothing

con: everything

you know how I finally got from 92 to 93? shaping tier 5 maps. even there the fucking spider (arakali or whatever) one-shot me somehow. only NOW I can complete red and unique maps I gained in the meantime (maybe 10 days for that level?). how about fucking letting me play the game in the first place!!! how come levelling is a completely different task as beating new maps and bosses?!! what fucking kind of game design is that! xp penalty is a cancer and aids combined, it needs to go and so does chris wilson!