Replace XP penalty on death with a penalty to future XP gained

Rather than take away previously hard-earned experience, which is frustrating and can sometimes lead to quitting the game, why not implement a more elegant penalty: penalize future xp earned. Here's how it works:

1) When a player dies, they accrue a charge which reduces future experience gained by X%.
2) Charges stack multiplicatively. So if each charge reduces experience gained by 50%, then two charges reduces by 75%, 3 charges by 87.5%, etc.
3) Each charge should probably expire on its own cooldown, and not have its cooldown reset by accruing an additional charge, like how Endurance/Frenzy/Power charges work. Otherwise, the player could get trapped with too many charges that never go away.


The elegance of this system is that it still imposes a penalty for dying, but now the penalty is future-oriented rather than past-oriented. Past achievements are locked in, so the player doesn't feel that demoralizing loss of progress. Hardcore powerlevelers are punished, while the casual player who wants to take a break can simply wait out the penalty or spend time in town trading. If you're doing a quest, you can still continue the quest without losing experience, but won't gain much new experience. The charges stack, so the effect of the first charge is not significant by itself, but if the player continues to make mistakes and die, their experience gain will be penalized harshly enough to act as an incentive to not die. Still, the blow is softened by not taking away past experience. This system seems more fair, balanced, and superior in every way to the present system.

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Natharias wrote:

This is worse than the current system. Here's why:

The current system is a flat loss. You lose 10% of your current experience. The only time this is not a disadvantage is when you are at 10% or less in your experience bar, which means you can easily Zerg any material without worrying about further experience loss. The only problem with this system is that players can still Zerg content.

The point of a death penalty is to prevent players from Zerging content and punishing them for dying, but not at the cost of gameplay. Because this subtracts what you already had, it does not affect the future. This means all you do in the future is fully gained.

With this suggestion, players would wait the timer out and then play, which means that players could lose about fifteen minutes of gameplay. This is the normal duration for such a penalty. This is even more discouraging for players than losing 10% of their experience, especially if they just opened a map. You've lost a portal AND x% of the map's experience you would've gained. Even less if you die again and again.

As you can see, it's much worse in the case of maps. Now imagine the penalty for opening a level 78 map and dying twice. Two portals and X x 2% less experience gained. The player would likely uninstall the game.

None of your arguments are backed by logic and don't explain how the current system is less demoralizing that my system.

With a future xp penalty, players still have a disincentive to die. The benefit of a future xp penalty is it doesn't take away past achievement, when is very demoralizing. And there's nothing wrong with players voluntarily choosing to wait out the timer and play, or just play anyway at decreased xp gain rates, if that is their choice. Give casual players a break. I would much rather have my past xp locked in, and then simply gain future xp at a slightly lower rate, than to lose 3 hours of past grinding.

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Perfect_Black wrote:

I think the future experience penalty you describe would incentivize people to log out upon death, in order to wait out the timer/cooldown and avoid slower experience gains. Anything that could potentially incentivize less playing is a bad thing, imo. Also, having the ability to bypass experience loss is just dumb. Quit playing to avoid experience loss? Alright.. Furthermore, why would anyone keep playing at a reduced experience gain rate? Isn't gaining experience a big goal of playing PoE? Again, reduced experience gain and the ability to fully bypass experience loss incentivizes logging out and waiting. Not good.

The punishing loss of experience is necessary to cause fear-of-death, imo. Also, experience loss gives players a reason to keep gaining experience, to regain what was lost. Players don't want to lose progress. If progress is lost, then players might feel like they need to keep playing to at least get back to square-one. Motivating playing is a good thing.

With your proposal, players wouldn't need to fear death at all really, and they would have two obvious reasons to just log out upon death: reduced experience gains and the ability to fully bypass experience loss.

Big, fat, -1.
I think I just got trolled.

No, here is the problem. With a past xp penalty, I have just as much a disincentive to play as I do a future xp penalty. Because I know that if I play, then die, I will lose all my achievement. Whereas with a future xp penalty, past experience is at least locked in, and then I can either chose to (a) take a break, or (b) continue grinding through the penalty. The long run effect is the same, and can be balanced accordingly.

If the penalty is 10% for 10 minutes, that's not enough to make someone log off. Or maybe they hang out in town for a while and trade. But losing 10% of past xp because of one death is very demoralizing and is more likely to make someone log off. I'm just not convinced a future xp penalty is more demoralizing than a past xp penalty. Past xp penalty is far more demoralizing.

Players still fear death because it reduces their future xp gains. If they do log out on death, that's their choice. Why do we want players to fear death that badly? This way, the hardcore players who grind continously will fear death , because they want to keep grinding through the penalty, whereas casual players can chill out, take a break, rethink their build, and not feel the effects as much. The system is more balanced than the present system. In the present system, hardcore players can make up the 10% loss in less time than the casual player who might grind 10x slower. Also, by making it a time-based penalty, the hardcore player loses more potential xp than the casual player. In essence, this system is better because it makes xp farming more equitable because the most hardcore players are punished the most.

If you sit down and think it through, my system is actually better than the present system. Stop trying to find faults in it and consider it for a moment and you will see it.

The way it is is just fine, i think the penalty should never have been reduced because now people think it could be removed one day which it wont.

I just had a better idea in a flash of insight:

Take the amount of experience that would have been lost and add it to an "experience debt." The debt is repaid by gaining experience, but experience goes towards the debt before it increases your own experience. This has the exact same long-run effect, except there's no benefit for being in the 0-10% xp range. But you could always make it so the debt can't be more than your experience into the level.

This way, players don't feel like they've lost anything, they've just gained a 'debt' that has to be repaid. Now if the mechanism is identical, and the effect is the same, why be different at all? Here's the twist:

The xp debt naturally decays with time. It could be either linear decay or exponential decay. Probably exponential.

Let's see how each gamer is affected by the debt:

Hardcore gamers who seek to maximize their xp gain per hour will try to pay off the debt as fast as possible so they can resume grinding at normal rates.

Casual gamers can either take a break or continue to grind through the debt. But since they grind at a slower rate than hardcore gamers, their debt will be paid off mostly through time depreciation. This means they are penalized less than the hardcore gamer, but only because they have less to lose. Think of it as a proportional income tax versus a head tax. The current system is a head tax, which is highly regressive and disproportionately burdens the poorest citizens. A proportional tax is far more equitable. Progressive taxes start to skew things, so proportional is best.

The system is self-stabilizing. Both types of players can see the positive aspect. Most importantly, accruing a debt which pays itself off with time or can be paid off manually is far less demoralizing than losing past achievements.

The system is also robust because it is not sensitive to bad luck. If the player has a string of bad luck and loses 90% of their experience in debt, then they can simply log off and wait for the debt to go away on its own. They do not have to start back from the beginning of the level. This is very important as the player gets to lvl 80+ where each xp bar can represent an hour or more of tedious grinding.