Death Penalty Adjustment Discussion

The idea is, you need some incentive to play carefully. At least you can't go back in levels, that would be "hardcore".
Removing it would be stupid, people already run way harder content than the hardcore leagues, without the penalty you won't have any incentive to learn boss mechanics. I've died quite a lot on some bosses and I'm happy that this has forced me to learn the mechanics properly and now I can kill them without dying. There is also the "achievement" of completing a crazy rolled map without dying.

My proposal: add a new league without the penalty and with other features to make it easier than standard, more enjoyable for noobs and casual players, while keeping standard league as it is now.

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ammenz wrote:

My proposal: add a new league without the penalty and with other features to make it easier than standard, more enjoyable for noobs and casual players, while keeping standard league as it is now.

Your proposal has already likely been mentioned in this thread.


Why should GGG design the game in such a way where SC players and HC players play so differently? The game was originally designed with a HC mentality behind it, but with a "less punishing" softcore league available, the key here is "less punishing", not no punishing, less.

Not only does the game not need another perm league, it doesn't need any reason to further split the playerbase. Now if GGG were to add the paid leagues and pitch this idea, I could care less, its a paid league, where you pay to participate and play whatever the mods are, would GGG add a league that was easier or had better drops then regular poe, probably not.



SC players should be playing the game game HC players do, without as harsh of a penalty that they "suffer" with. Removing the penalty or reducing it just allows for players to grind\zerg levels significantly faster and overall adds NOTHING to the gameplay, just encourages builds and playstyles that are not in line with the game design.

Yeah, in my opinion they should remove the death xp penalty by removing softcore leagues, seems to me it's the easiest solution.

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Dawmz wrote:

Yeah, in my opinion they should remove the death xp penalty by removing softcore leagues, seems to me it's the easiest solution.

Naw I rather them keep the SC leagues, the economy in those leagues get so dominated by flippers and stuff, keep those people out of HC as much as possible ^_^

It's weird how players have changed compared to the days of D2:LoD.

No one questioned the XP penalty back then. Having something to lose if you die made the game much more enjoyable.

Giving everyone a guarantee to reach level 100 eventually no matter how much they screw up would completely ruin PoE because no one would have to care about survivability.

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gesichtspalme wrote:

It's weird how players have changed compared to the days of D2:LoD.

No one questioned the XP penalty back then. Having something to lose if you die made the game much more enjoyable.

Giving everyone a guarantee to reach level 100 eventually no matter how much they screw up would completely ruin PoE because no one would have to care about survivability.

Not sure about completely ruin, but it doesn't align with the design of the game.


If I had to wager, I would suspect most people that want it removed or reduced are younger "hold your hand" type gamers that aren't used to the "punishment" we had (and enjoyed) when we played games like D2.

I think there is a parallel between the death penalty and map sustainment. In both cases, when players get stuck, they recognize the only way to access higher content is to grind something easier for a while. People don't like grinding easier stuff to access harder stuff, whether it is to compensate for deaths or to build a deeper map pool.

I'm not arguing for a change to either of those systems, just offering some insight into why the death penalty gets complained about so much. It's like the newbie version of getting stuck in low/mid maps.

Eh, the thing is, the death penalty isn't making the game any more hardcore than if it didn't have a death penalty (or it had something else)

With the death penalty, builds are forced to focus on defenses and party play is emphasized (that plus alt+f4). There is a reason why stuff like LC is so prevalent (and we had the history of Khaoms, block/evasion etc etc). You could argue that a death penalty means that people have to invest in defence, I would argue that death penalty dumbs down the game where people have to invest in defence (i.e. the famous Path of Life nodes remarks)

Without the death penalty, you would probably have glass cannons running around. Then again, I have played glass cannons in ARG's that don't have a death penalty, and it gets boring real fast, so that shouldn't be a penalty in itself. But then again, PoE has an economy to sustain, so thats not really an option

Personally the biggest issue with the death penalty is that its just really bad design from a psychological perspective. The worst thing you could do in a game is make it feel like you have complete wasted hours of time

If you want to prevent zergin/give an indicator of build strength, a much smarter system would be something along the lines of "lose additively 5% of all stats/defences for every death, up to 50%, stacking 5 minutes each time" or something like that. That would actually further penalize you if your build is bad (if you are running around with -50% of defenses on an already bad build, well you would pretty much constantly die). On the other hand, it would stop the whole "got stuck in mobs and died, lost 3 hours of gameplay since I am lvl 90+" problem

@gotezjam Regarding hiding behind Chris's words when he says the death penalty is fine, Chris (or PoE) has been "wrong" on so many counts, that I wouldn't stick to that (loot allocation changes, desync, bartering, eternals, introduction of deterministic crafting are many examples, I am sure there are more). A lot of those things were part of the game design, so I wouldn't use that argument, its historically a losing one.

Also I don't see how maps has anything to do with this. You reach a certain point in the game where you get 2-3 tabs full of maps, and as long as you know what you are doing in regards to crafting, you are not going to run into sustainability issues

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gesichtspalme wrote:

It's weird how players have changed compared to the days of D2:LoD.

No one questioned the XP penalty back then. Having something to lose if you die made the game much more enjoyable.

Giving everyone a guarantee to reach level 100 eventually no matter how much they screw up would completely ruin PoE because no one would have to care about survivability.

The amount was so much lower, you could also regain it by visiting your corpse

Also the defense mechanics in PoE are much more punishing in PoE than D2, there are a lot more ways to die in PoE