Death Penalty Adjustment Discussion

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SaiyanZ wrote:

My feeling is that removing the death penalty will make people get bored of the game. There will be no sense of levelling reward if there is not a chance of failure and anguish. Removing the penalty will kill all feelings of relief and joy when you grind that last bit of xp to hit lvl96 since there will also be another 10k people that will have done it with their eyes closed.

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Turtledove wrote:

It dawns on me that if we were in a society where masochism was very common and someone started a thread saying maybe the world wouldn't be so bad if people didn't beat me so much that he would probably catch grief for making such an obvious statement? :-)

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Mooginator wrote:

As most players are aware, the penalty is a loss of 10% of experience in merciless. How does a single death impact progress at end-game? First we have to understand there’s a wide variation of gaming experiences all different based on the player and the build. Some people are fast map runners, some take it more slowly, some builds are designed to map run, others not so much (but are fun to play). Some people have a great map pool, others have terrible luck and are stuck running lower level maps. It’s quite variable to say how much time a level 80+ player loses upon death because everyone’s experience of how quickly they progress is different. My experience at level 88 given my map pool is a single death can cause roughly an hour of gametime loss. My buddy (who just dinged 91) timed his map runs at 90 and found he received roughly 3% experience on a level 76 map with +Pack Size and +Magic Monsters. It takes him roughly 20 minutes to clear a map. This means one death is more than an hour of running 76 maps. This value compounds each level above 90. At 95 the level 76 map that gave 37% experience now gives 9%. This means a death is more than 4 hours of gameplay time at 95 (realistically probably closer to 6 hours).

Map pools are everything, and at 88 I find I have a hard time keeping a pool of maps >73. This means I’m usually stuck running 72-73 (on average), but I can clear them in ~10m. I get nearly double experience on a 74 as I do on a 72, so that factor makes a huge difference. But the reality is dying takes a good hour or more of gameplay away, even at 88. I’m sure a number of hardcore PoE players can talk about how you can run 77 maps in 5 minutes and keep a vast pool and they almost never die, etc. They represent the vast minority of players. We must keep in mind the average player experience relative to this discussion.

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Mooginator wrote:

One very important point nobody has mentioned here is the league design of the game and how it's supportive of "trying new things". While so many cry about the sky falling if the death penalty was removed (or adjusted) from the core game, the simple fact is we can only find out what the impact of an adjusted or removed penalty is by seeing it in action.

GGG should create a 3-month league to try this out. As a matter of fact, I think it would be an excellent test. Watch the metrics of leveling, the number of players that continue playing (and don't quit a character or the game after death at high level), and compare those metrics to the other/prior leagues with the current mechanics. Heck, to protect the economy they can even wipe characters at the end rather than migrate them to standard (if they're worried about imbalance from it). I would certainly play that league, as would my friends who quit due to the penalty. Heck, my wife would probably try it out as well.

After the league, GGG can then determine if they want to change the mechanic for the rest of the game.

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Testing things and observing the results answers more questions and does so more effectively than any amount of speculation could ever dream of or will ever achieve.

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I_NO wrote:

The fuck is this? It is very VERY unlikely the penalty is going to change STOP it.

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Telzen wrote:

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I_NO wrote:

The fuck is this? It is very VERY unlikely the penalty is going to change STOP it.

Aren't you going to quit playing when you find a different game? So why do you even care? I think a quantity/rarity survival bonus like sacred has would be plenty a deterrent from dying. Would be interesting if they tried it out during a league.