The -15% exp penalty is obnoxiously bad outdated design.

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iamstryker wrote:

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Nagisawa wrote:

Which means trying to get the less 'Hardcore' into it. You're argument fails because you have not actually done any research into Dark Souls 2.

My quote honestly has nothing to do with Dark Souls 2. I was talking specifically about Dark Souls 1.

Anyhow. I hate to bring up D3 but I think I need to. It tried to appeal to the most possible and that really didn't pan out for them.

The game should be changed based on the purpose of the change. Death penalties kind of suck but they are there for very good reasons. Honestly I don't find them that bad. Even when your around levels 60-70 if you die you can regain that exp pretty fast. So whats the problem? Are people dieing repeatedly and then getting mad about the death penalty??

If your build isn't ready for where you at then stop playing there.....

D3's problems wasn't that it tried to appeal to casuals, D3 actually did some very nice design changes. The problem with D3, in general, is every step forward it took, it made another 3 steps back

D3's changes to the class system is actually very well though out, and it still gives D3 one of the best (and in my opinion, generally speaking, better than PoE currently) actual gameplay with the way skills are designed. The biggest issues D3 had was that its obvious that it was blatantly rushed. Balance in the game is a terrible, and due to the way they changed itemization with AH (Kripp made a very good youtube video on this) has pretty much killed replayability. D3 in fact should have been thinking hard about how to put in replayability with their new class design, because it didn't work with items since item mods are so limited (People only look for defense or DPS, which can be through stats). With D3, at least from my opinion, the product was just incredibly rushed. There was no PvP (which they stated their would be), they didn't think about the impliciations hard enough with the changes D3 did (and they havn't solved them yet), and don't get me started on the terrible story and the way it was executed. It really seems like <insert Activision Conspiracy> that D3 focused more on releasing early for monetization reasons, which is why also RMAH and AM was released (which also ruined the game), which is what actually ruined the game, and it had little to D3 appealing to casuals any more than D2 does

You have to realize is that Blizzard has also catered to casual games. D2 was catered to casual gamers, Blizzards motto has always been easy to learn hard to master. In its current state, D2 is a lot more casual friendly than PoE. Many more builds are viable in D2 than in PoE, the amount of time investment you needed in D2 to enjoy the game was far smaller, and the penalties for death (which is on topic) was far less extreme

The problem with the exp penalty is it penalizes certain builds (and this is not a separation of good/bad builds, its a separation of what style of gameplay you have) way too much. Certain types of playstyle, such as pure melee, are much more likely to die than other types of classes. The issue with this is, that PoE, unlike D3, your character is only really completed (in design perspective) when you hit almost level 100. If your character in design relies on a few keystones, you may only get some of those at lvl 80+. This is quite contrary to D2, where your character's design was basically finished by around 50-60, and the rest was just improving your character (it was just the way the skill tree in D2 was done).

For the reason above, there are far better ways to put in penalties for death, and in my strong opinion it shouldn't be exp based, but item based. In fact there is a very good argument to not make it so incredibly difficult to reach level 100 due to what I said above (which really wouldn't be an issue because your character would progress through gear, and not through exp, just like it did in D2)

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

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Nagisawa wrote:

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iamstryker wrote:

If the people in this thread were correct about what they are saying then Dark Souls would have been a major failure. It definitely only catered to a hardcore audience.

And this next game they're making in the series? They have been quoted as trying to make it more 'accessible'. Which means they want MORE people to PLAY THEIR game series, Dark Souls.

Which means trying to get the less 'Hardcore' into it. You're argument fails because you have not actually done any research into Dark Souls 2.

Dark Souls was intentionally made for the Hardcore crowd, much like PoE is. Dark Souls 2 however is going mainstream, which is what a lot of people are against with regards to PoE.

Hardcore players need to realize that no game has been successful for just appealing to the hardcore ground (in terms of monetization and longetivity of the game). That doesn't say you ignore hardcore games, but the most successful games cater to both, and its something that Blizzards is famous for.

Even though Dark Souls is a very good game, its difficult nature has meant its sold 1.9 million copies (so far), which may sound like a lot, but a lot of these games often sell for much more, especially if you have a japanese demographic audience (japan has a massive population of gamers that buy locally made JRPG style games), and such games have very large budgets as well. Chrono Trigger, for example, sold 2.6 million copies in just the first couple of years out, and that was like 15 years ago

In fact, the main director of Dark Souls has himself regretted making the game so hard simply because he wanted more people to actually complete it

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Post-release, the game's director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, contemplated adding an easier difficulty level, saying: "Dark Souls is rather difficult and a number of people may hesitate to play. This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete or carefully send all gamers the messages behind our difficult games."[32] Namco Bandai claimed Miyazaki's statement was mistranslated, and should have read "This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about how to make everyone complete the game while maintaining the current difficulty and carefully send all gamers the messages behind it."[33]

PoE is going to run into the same problem with these soughts of design problems

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deteego wrote:

The problem with the exp penalty is it penalizes certain builds (and this is not a separation of good/bad builds, its a separation of what style of gameplay you have) way too much. Certain types of playstyle, such as pure melee, are much more likely to die than other types of classes.

That is not a critique of the exp penalty but more a critique of bad balance between melee vs. ranged play. GGG is already looking into buffing melee somehow so that issue will get better.

I do not view this as a playstyle debate at all. This game simply has to have some form of death penalty or else the problems I mentioned earlier will run rampant. I never said the current death penalty was completely perfect. I am only arguing that death must carry some kind of penalty.

I also do not view this game as only hardcore or whatever. Its an oldschool ARPG thats it. Death penalties are needed regardless of whether its hardcore or not.

Horrible design.

You die somewhere and you lose xp. what do you do? You go grind it somewhere easy.
Basically, all it does is force people to grind.
and currently, because you can't go negative xp, it also promotes grinding for a level, then rushing through the content not caring how many times you die.

Now, some would say that "yay, grinding is fun", but I doubt the majority feels that grinding is good design. So even if you could go negative xp, all you'd do is promote grinding. I hope that even though the game's made by grinding gear games, they don't actually think people find grinding as something enjoyable.

There are much better ways to have people "punished" for dying, ways which do not involve forcing a person to grind. I hope that the people at GGG are as smart as they've shown themselves to be.

and please, no ad hominem fallacious arguments.

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Idioticus wrote:

There are much better ways to have people "punished" for dying, ways which do not involve forcing a person to grind. I hope that the people at GGG are as smart as they've shown themselves to be.

By all means name some of them. I would get behind another idea if it would feasibly work out.

I understand what your saying but really the game is about grinding. We grind for loot and we grind for levels. I think thats much better than the alternative of not caring at all if you die and running around 24/7 in full magic find gear AND leveling....

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iamstryker wrote:

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deteego wrote:

The problem with the exp penalty is it penalizes certain builds (and this is not a separation of good/bad builds, its a separation of what style of gameplay you have) way too much. Certain types of playstyle, such as pure melee, are much more likely to die than other types of classes.

That is not a critique of the exp penalty but more a critique of bad balance between melee vs. ranged play. GGG is already looking into buffing melee somehow so that issue will get better.

I do not view this as a playstyle debate at all. This game simply has to have some form of death penalty or else the problems I mentioned earlier will run rampant. I never said the current death penalty was completely perfect. I am only arguing that death must carry some kind of penalty.

I also do not view this game as only hardcore or whatever. Its an oldschool ARPG thats it. Death penalties are needed regardless of whether its hardcore or not.

I already made my point very clear that I wan't a penalty on death, I think its stupid design not to have one

However I also think the current death penalty is also stupid and bad design and that it should be something else (I was suggesting a penalty that would impact your gear severly, which has much less scaling issues than EXP penalty based death, and a lot less sensitive to build styles)

The thing is, it may be an issue with true melee now, however it can easily turn into something else later. PoE is not going to achieve almost perfect balance for some time (and the evidence is basically that games of this sought take half a decade at least to balance properly), and it just means that most people are going to stop using characters past level 50-60 unless they happen to be FOTM. Single deaths in later hours can literally mean hours wasted, and there is also quite a psychological impact from that as well

The TL system was very good in that it gave you an option in how to be penalized, which helped balance the whole problem that was mentioned above. Its just natural that some builds level faster, while other builds get better gear/money as a consequence of the build itself being less item dependent.

The death penalty is a must have because there must be some sort of time sink, if you die. Not because game has to be hardcore, just because, if there is no penalty, players could suicide bombing for xp. You can talk about options, but thinks like corpse runs for time sink are anoying too.

The problem in the game and with the death penalty is the simply fact, that different gamestyles aren't well balancec. Melee gamestyle (meaning melee gamestyle, not fake melee gamestyle like GS marauding) dies much easier and kills much slower, grinding xp slower.

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Nibori wrote:

The death penalty is a must have because there must be some sort of time sink, if you die. Not because game has to be hardcore, just because, if there is no penalty, players could suicide bombing for xp. You can talk about options, but thinks like corpse runs for time sink are anoying too.

The problem in the game and with the death penalty is the simply fact, that different gamestyles aren't well balancec. Melee gamestyle (meaning melee gamestyle, not fake melee gamestyle like GS marauding) dies much easier and kills much slower, grinding xp slower.

My main point is that this is always going to fluctuate, they may solve melee in some upcoming patch, but then some other balance change may make it that ranged be much more likely to die (or any other type of build), as an example. This will always fluctuate, you can't bank on PoE reaching perfect balance anytime soon, its just not going to happen.

The current system will always penalize builds that don't happen to be FOTM from progressing in later levels

I could be wrong here but I don't think the devs have any intention of achieveing PERFECT balance. Some builds will always be better than others. I think thats fine.

I am currently playing as a pure melee at lvl 60 and have died recently. So I'm not being biased.

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iamstryker wrote:

I could be wrong here but I don't think the devs have any intention of achieveing PERFECT balance. Some builds will always be better than others. I think thats fine.

Oh I completely agree, Im just making the point that there isn't going to be perfect balance, and so the argument that "the issue right now is just with melee" doesn't really apply, because in the future it might be an issue with some other <insert build here>.

The point is, at least for the forseeable issue there will always be an "issue" of this kind

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deteego wrote:

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Nibori wrote:

The death penalty is a must have because there must be some sort of time sink, if you die. Not because game has to be hardcore, just because, if there is no penalty, players could suicide bombing for xp. You can talk about options, but thinks like corpse runs for time sink are anoying too.

The problem in the game and with the death penalty is the simply fact, that different gamestyles aren't well balancec. Melee gamestyle (meaning melee gamestyle, not fake melee gamestyle like GS marauding) dies much easier and kills much slower, grinding xp slower.

My main point is that this is always going to fluctuate, they may solve melee in some upcoming patch, but then some other balance change may make it that ranged be much more likely to die (or any other type of build), as an example. This will always fluctuate, you can't bank on PoE reaching perfect balance anytime soon, its just not going to happen.

The current system will always penalize builds that don't happen to be FOTM from progressing in later levels

At the moment there are worlds between the survivability and kill speed of pure range and pure melee classes. Balancing must not be perfect, if ranges dies easier than melees, they have there kill speed to compensate xp loss.