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

I mean, the ability to avoid experience loss completely sure sounds attractive, and broken.

Sure, dying with a 10% experience loss might cause a rage quit and be demoralizing, but I think that is exactly how it is supposed to be. The more you fear death, the more you will work to avoid it.

It does stink that the experience penalty has more significant effects on the more casual and solo players, but I don't think re-engineering the experience loss system is an answer to balance any discrepancy.

Your system would very likely discourage people from playing after dying, and not because they would be mad or upset about dying, but because it would be a smarter use of their time.

Example: You are grinding a high level map with a few buddies. You die 10 minutes in in a moment of carelessness. Now you are like "Well, f*ck guys, my gains are screwed for the next X amount of time. I might as well just log out and continue later."

Your system creates an incentive to not continue to play after dying. You say players would have the option to continue to play through the penalty, but why would they?

Or the system could stay the same and you could stop dying.

"

cas5nq wrote:

"

munkytos wrote:

Or the system could stay the same and you could stop dying.

Can't help it. 90% of the time it's because of lag, a desync, or low frame rate. Also that's not a solution, that's a wish. People are going to make mistakes (or the server could hiccup) and people are going to die as a fact of life. There's no reason the game needs to be so punitive. The lag is annoying enough, without game-imposed punishments for dying to a lag spike that is the game's fault. I already have to wait 2-3 minutes for town to load, 2-3 minutes for my instance to load, and 1-2 minutes to run back to where I died. 5-8 minutes is penalty enough. It's like rubbing salt on our wounds.

Well seeing as how two of those things are out of their hands, they can't be held responsible for it. Maybe you should upgrade your system instead of blaming the existence of XP loss due to dying on GGG. Yes desync sucks to deal with but everyone deals with it and there still needs to remain a reason for people not to go zerging through content like has been already mentioned enough.

I can no longer tell if we are talking about the PoE experience penalty or managerial finance.

But seriously, I don't know.. maybe this is an innovative idea. I can see how it would be possible to reverse the experience penalty from present loss to reduced future gains. Frankly, I like the simplicity of the immediate and flat % loss.

I think the point that Natharias brought up about punishment and its cost on future gameplay is important. Your ideas make it such that, if you die, your present situation does not change, but your future gameplay is diminished in quality due to reduced experience gains. So, rather than just punishing you upfront and getting it over with, your punishment lingers and your future gameplay is less fruitful (and the more times you die, the less fruitful future gameplay becomes). I would just expect people to log off or quit grinding when they die in order to wait out the penalty. I don't see the motivation to keep grinding after dying. Why even bother?

Also, providing a means to completely bypass experience loss is broken, imo. If your system was implemented, I would expect the 'cooldown' part to not exist, and for the game to force players to 'repay their debt' no matter what. So, if you were to die, you would absolutely have slower experience gains until you reach a certain threshold of play, regardless of whether or not you log out or keep playing. You can't let players bypass experience loss. With the assumption of no cooldown, your system could be identical to the current system, but with the penalty playing out in the future rather than immediately. I don't see the point really. It is just repackaging the death experience penalty. Can you imagine staying at <1% experience for an entire day because you died so many times in a row that you essentially can't gain experience? How demoralizing would that be? How demoralizing would it be to be around level 80 but have your experience gains crawling at a rate as if you were level 90 because you have died so many times in a row? The feelings might be comparable to the flat % loss.

"

cas5nq wrote:

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.

Before reading the rest, you at least admit that the "previous" penalty has a bonus when you are at 9% or less into your level, where the penalty really doesn't affect you as much as, say, 25% or 75%. This is a huge advantage as once you level your character has much less of a worry when you die. If your idea of a "future" penalty was implemented, nobody would have this "safe" area that they could die and not have ANY reason to rage quit other than losing a portal to a high level map. This is a much bigger advantage than you may realize, especially when you've had bad luck with maps and must grind core content to level up. That takes many times longer, even with full parties.

Gaining a debt is still losing something, but you have time to pay it off. If you fail to pay it off in that time, you essentially just get hit. It's like a flintlock rifle versus a modern rifle. It's just a delay between the same thing.

"

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.

If the penalty decays with time, hardcore gamers won't try to pay it off, they will switch to another character and farm on that instead. This won't affect them at all unless they are in a specific party that requires the character that has died recently. If this is account wide, they will simply take a break for the duration of the penalty and not have a worry. This actually works to the benefit of hardcore gamers and racers as this gives them a reason to take a break, which some probably neglect.

"

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.

Casual gamers are not likely to take a break, they are likely to try to kill the monster that slew them instead. Casual gamers are, more so than hardcore gamers, personal when it comes to death. They play the game for fun, and when that fun bites them they get mad. Hardcore gamers, as stated previously, would take a break because they know that going back and killing that monster won't help that fifteen minute penalty.

What makes this many times worse than the current penalty is the hit maps would take. Maps are already hard enough for players to get their hands on, penalize you enough by costing one of six portals, and by that the items and experience therein. If you're in a full party, you don't give any care to the penalty but to the portal you lost. You now lost ALL of the experience and items left in the map, which is many times bigger than any death penalty.

"

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 not self-stabilizing. It might benefit hardcore gamers, again for the break, but most players will be hit harder. Everyone that runs maps with full parties won't care, and those who run maps will hate it more.

As to "paying" off the debt, this would be strictly against GGG's policy. There isn't any form of "pay to win" situation in Path of Exile, and GGG won't allow any form of it. This is where some will argue that you can purchase items and power leveling from third parties, but this is beside the point.

"

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.

This made me laugh. Basically all players need to do is wait the timer out and they get their experience back. NO effort is needed to regain it, and this allows players to Zerg content at will without any penalty.

"

Can't help it. 90% of the time it's because of lag, a desync, or low frame rate.

If you can't help YOUR lag, then don't play games that make you rage on their forums to change it because of YOUR problems. I have near top notch internet connection and have no trouble watching a Youtube video while playing POE. The only problem I have is when I play my Facebreaker/Cyclone Marauder, and that's related to the skill. When the game desyncs I just copy and paste the "/oos" into chat and I'm back in within half a second.

Fix your internet connection and learn to /oos, or find another game. GGG isn't going to change the penalty any further than they already have. It used to be 20%, and now it's 10%.

@Perfect_Black:

We are talking about people who have good or better internet connection, deal with desync, and live with the 10% penalty-oh, wait, most of us don't worry about it for obvious reasons-, and those who have bad connections, don't want to deal with desync, and die all the time due to various reasons which they claim most are due to GGG. That is what we're talking about. The sub-topic is removing the death penalty.

I wouldn't want a debt of XP. -1

OP, you managed to take a bad idea and make it worse.

Lets face it; debt is so awesome in life that I want it in a (non-financial) game.

Not.

B.