Let's talk about endgame. GGG, this concerns you too.

edit: After some feedback, I see that this is mostly a non-HC issue, since it largely concerns impact of the death penalty. That said, I'm still eager to get HC perspectives on endgame!

This isn't a structured post with spoiler tags and sections full of feedback and suggestions. I know, you all love it when I do that and truly you have nothing better to do than read yet another of my mini-novels, but it's fairly obvious why that won't be the case here. I just want to start a conversation, one that I think it's long overdue. It's about a topic I know very little about, but in this case, that's very much the point.

What you need to know, and probably have inferred: I play this game a lot. I have a lifestyle that allows me to play it a lot. I don't play it 'for work' as streamers typically do, so I have no one to impress or attract. I have no impetus to make it to end-game and thus be considered competitive or knowledgable on PoE. But as much as I have played, as much as I do play, I *should* be at least somewhat knowledgable about all aspects of the game, end-game included. If we accept that even level 100 is just a matter of time once you have a character that can grind mid-tier maps, then by all rights I should have multiple 100s by now. But I do not. The highest I've gotten is level 89, and I stopped not out of any sort of challenge but a mixture of boredom and frustration. Boredom at having to do the same 'safe' stuff just to get experience, and frustration that a number of factors, some of them out of my hands, can almost instantly wipe a lot of progress away. I'll come back to these in a bit. Let's focus on those two key words for now.

Boredom and frustration are not two feelings GGG should welcome or encourage in someone who can play their game as much as I do. And the only way I can overcome it is to start over. To get back to the part of the game I do enjoy, not because I am not up to the endgame challenge but because I see no point in it. It is an 'in and of itself' style challenge. Why do it? Because you can. Because it's there. Because people won't even listen to you unless you do it. Any number of reasons. None of them, 'because it's enjoyable'.

I've played the endgame of other games. Some of those games I didn't love anywhere near as much as I love PoE. But if the endgame is engaging and feels meaningful, of course I'll allow myself to be drawn into it. Especially in MMOs, but also in single player RPGs where grinding used to be called just 'levelling up' and often served no purpose other than to be able to face optional side-bosses. By meaningful, I don't necessarily mean story-based either -- I get GGG's attempts to make Maps meaningful by creating a narrative around them, but it didn't work, at least not for me. I've said in the past that I find that story really shoe-horned and trite, but I think the heart of it is it's still wrapped around an endgame model that is 100% uninviting unless you're a completionist, fear being irrelevant in the competitive scene or just really like bigger numbers for the sake of it. There are, to be sure, some very cool boss designs in the endgame. Some really good ideas. But they're tucked away in an endgame that seems almost purposefully designed to engender some very negative experiences in players.

Foremost of these experiences is the sensation of wasted time. *No one* likes to feel like they've wasted their time. And when you die in endgame PoE, you are inevitably presented with that very feeling. You lose experience that you cannot get back in any way. You can only replace it with different experience, which you very likely will get by doing the same thing again, which is itself a form of wasted time if you're expecting to lose it again. So the sensation of wasted time in PoE's endgame is twofold: it's both the feeling of time wasted when you die and of time wasted trying NOT to die but still to progress. Between the two, you're allocating a lot of wasted time to endgame PoE play. It might be punctuated with spikes of enjoyment in the form of a great drop or beating a boss that's given you trouble, but by and large, PoE's endgame is comprised of a lot of wasted time. And to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that wasted time is only of value if you enjoyed it, in which case it's not really time wasted.

Even if you do enjoy PoE's current endgame, I am willing to bet it's with at least some reservations. You enjoy it but. You enjoy it despite. But that's for you to elaborate on, and that's the basis of this conversation I'm trying to start.

Bear with me a little bit more, and then I really do want to hear your angle. And I want GGG to see it. To see that endgame might be how Chris 'gets our souls', but that there are always better ways of doing that. Collectively, no one knows endgame more than you guys.

Okay. Time for some...suggestions. Only a few.

I know some of you have been waiting for me to just come out and say it, so here it is. The experience penalty needs to go. Yeah, I KNOW. Not this fucking thread again. But hear me out. Let me list why the experience penalty isn't doing anyone any good, including GGG.

For players like me, who are on less than awesome connections and don't play the meta aggressively, the idea of some ping spike eradicating hours if not days of effort is enough to keep me away from 'hardcore' gaming where loss is permanent. And as one poster pointed out in another thread, PoE has a hardcore mode already. Putting something as 'hardcore' as an absolute xp penalty in a 'non-hardcore mode' is overly punitive. The game is hard enough for folks like me without that kick in the teeth while I'm down. Now you could say that I could reduce that loss by playing the meta, which would also mean getting the lost xp back takes less time, but I think that's doing the diversity of GGG's creation a massive disservice. I don't expect my non-meta builds to crush the game at optimal speed but I don't think it's unfair to hope they could, given time and effort, go the distance. Instead they're usually left playing it safe in familiar maps, usually avoiding bosses, which as I said is boring. Remove the xp penalty and I'll be much more content to try anything, safe in the knowledge that I am not wasting my time.

For players who are on great connections and do play the meta aggressively, I have the question: why should you have to play a meta if your connection is great and all possible deaths should be in your own hands? I suspect the answer is because not all possible deaths are in your own hands. There are some nasty one-shot mechanics and inexplicable causes of death in the endgame, placed there simply to hinder your progress. Again: are these fun? Are they challenging? Do you get a sense of achievement when you overcome them, or does it feel like you've just done what the game has told you to do? You overcame the odds, but that's not always an achievement. In the case of PoE's endgame, I figure small victories feel more like a nice change of pace from feeling like the game genuinely hates you. Is that the motivation that keeps you going? To spit in the eye of something that wants you dead? Is that fun? Enjoyable? Not being rhetorical. Moreover, how many of you also play it safe if you want to just level? How many of you can both challenge yourselves and level at the same time?

For GGG: I deeply respect that you want to restore levels 95+ to something much harder to attain, and thus more respected in the community overall. That was your original vision and I think you've every right to stick to it. But right now, that's just not the case. You drastically increased the thresholds for xp required to level at the uppermost ends, which definitely locked more people out but it didn't do it in a way that makes getting those levels any more of an achievement. It's still just a matter of time, of playing safe builds in safe ways. It's just more time now. For even the most dedicated player, the combination of that increased xp requirement and the xp death penalty can only result in an overall feeling of futility most of the time. Overcoming that futility is not an achievement. It's a breath of relief after prolonged torture. The ultimate joy in PoE is not one of real achievement but of almost dying. It's almost cheap, when you look at it that way. Yes, there's a lot of value in the adrenaline rush found on the edge of a blade, in that space between existing and not-existing, but you can't force it on people. All that does is piss them off, and eventually exhaust them. If you're lucky, and you've been very lucky GGG, it will also goad them into defying a challenge that shouldn't exist in the first place. That doesn't even need to exist.

Here's where I think you're misreading players, GGG: we create our own threats and our own tension. You don't need to force it on us with a punitive death experience. In any game, we are programmed from very early on to believe that death *is* punitive. As a brief aside, I currently play a board game called Gloomhaven with the GF and a friend. It's an intense little dungeon crawler where your party almost constantly feels like it's on the edge of defeat, but if you are defeated, all you lose is the chance to get the scripted rewards and progress in the story. You get to keep any earned xp and gold, even if you 'die' (exhaustion is the term used by the game), but you will have wasted all that time in that dungeon because you can't progress to the next area. But was it a waste? Not really. You enjoyed it. You learned about the dungeon. You figure, we'll do better next time. Genuinely, we can't WAIT to get back down there and try again, using what we've learned. That is what real enjoyable compulsion looks like. And here's the kicker, GGG: when we're in that dungeon, we forget that 'death' doesn't really matter. In the moment, we're doing out best not to die. We get upset if we do and we cheer if we don't. If that game had an xp penalty, we wouldn't play it. And that'd be a damn shame, because it's a great game. And in no way is it for casuals, if 'casuals' is a demeaning term. Gloomhaven understands what I think PoE has forgotten: failure is a punishment in and of itself, but it's how gamers learn. We enjoy failing if it results in a net gain. If it is, to coin the old adage, a lesson. The only lesson PoE death teaches us in endgame is: take no risks; do what works; do it over and over again. How can that not sound boring, when I put it that way?

Your game isn't exactly 100% stable, GGG. There are times when that punitive measure hits players and it's absolutely not their fault. That alone should give you pause when considering whether an irretrievable loss of experience on death is a good idea. Combine that with how that fact alone forces so many players to play it safe and you're on a fairly clear path to seeing why a death xp penalty in PoE no longer makes sense. It adds nothing to the game and takes a lot away. You have my wallet and my heart, GGG, but you do not, in Chris' terms, have my soul. Don't you want it? Don't you want your game, even or especially in the end stages, to demand I give it my soul? Instead it sort of looks at my offering, spits on it in ways Greust never could, and makes me feel like my soul isn't good enough just because I'm not willing to get on a seemingly interminable treadmill for it.

But you may ask, how do we slow players down if we get rid of the death penalty? That's not really mine to answer, but here's the other suggestion: more intrinsically link endgame character progress with end-game content. In the absence of a death penalty, you absolutely can and should make it MUCH harder to gain levels after 90. Hell, make it harder after 80. 75 even. Remove the ability to grind content too easy for a character. Make it so that only map bosses give any experience at all. Add a distinct sense of achievement to Atlas progression tied to character level. I'm not talking about level requirements to enter certain maps, although that might not be a bad idea. I'm talking more about making it clear that if someone is level 95, you can tell at a glance that they've beaten THIS BOSS and THAT MAP. Not that it simply means they might have grinded through mid-tier for a year or whatever.

If you want to make 95-100 venerated and desired, that's how to do it. Kill the death penalty so that more people go for it, but make the challenges/obstacles to get there so difficult and punitive that only the most dedicated *and skilled* players get there, and they do it with a lot of trial and error. Level 100 should not be a matter of time, but a matter of PoE expertise and practice. In truth, I should NOT with my current PoE skillset and knowledge be able to get level 95-100, as I know right now I could. With as much as I've played the game, my skillset and knowledge should be much higher...I wish PoE was the sort of game that encouraged and rewarded that.

Under such a system, quite a few of my builds would probably be hard-capped earlier than they are now. Despite what you might think, I wouldn't dislike that. It wouldn't be a negative experience for me. It would just be a case of the game being far more honest with me than it currently is. A hard cap would tell me: this build isn't very good and you can't pussyfoot your way to 90+ with it. It's a level 75-80 build. Maybe if you get your shit together, it can push to 85. Maybe.

I think gamers understand hard caps because they're decisive and can't be disputed; if you want to do better, do something else. Improve. They give us a sense of an ending, and thus of clear achievement. And devs should like them because they're much easier to balance and regulate than soft ones.

As far as I'm concerned, even hard-caps would be better than what we have now, which is typically PoE: vague, inexplicable, deceptively open-ended and occasionally just outright rage-inducing in its mercilessness.

'Merciless' is, after all, a term the game has overtly outgrown. It's cute in concept but in practice it needs to be tempered with an appropriate concession that it's still just a game and its primary intention is to be enjoyable, even at the uppermost levels of challenge.

___

Okay, I've said enough.

How do you approach endgame? What do you like about it, what do you not like? Do you not even approach it at all? Do you like the death penalty? Do you think it is a good thing? A bad thing?

What sort of endgame would PoE need to have for you to enjoy it more often? Or do you just love it exactly as it is?

Funnily enough, you raise some points that I've been meaning to make threads about for a while now. I may still do, but here's my thoughts on the death penalty for now.

The main problem with the current death penalty is that it discourages exploration. At 90+, you will never ever do anything even remotely dangerous or unfamiliar unless you've given up on gaining XP.

A better system would be: when you die, you don't lose XP, instead you accrue an XP debt (10%, like now). From then on, gaining XP goes towards clearing the debt. And here's the kicker: if you die with debt left, it just resets to 10%, it doesn't accumulate.

So you still can't gain XP if you die semi-regularly, because you'll just keep resetting your debt. BUT, dying multiple times in the same map or same bossfight is the same as just dying once. Once you died, you're free to experiment with whatever dangerous content you want, and when you're ready to get back to leveling, you just work off the 10% debt and pick up right where you left off.

If GGG are willing to rework the punitive xp system, then that's great. I suspect at this point they're not. We'd just as likely be able to convince them to get rid of it altogether with the qualification that the endgame gets *much* harder, gives less experience and whatever else is required to 'slow' players down.

Personally, i finish a toon usually once i get to maps then i make a new build, always hated mapping, pure grind for levels, slow and boring as hell.
Skill point rewards for killing bosses on atlas would make it at least a bit more interesting, wouldn't make you feel like "all right, whats left is brainless grind".

Experience from bosses only is a bad idea, can see everyone just speed-running to bosses skipping everything. Making it so bosses give like 50%~70% of whole map experience would be nice.

I cant say i like the idea of getting rid of death penalty, i do play hc only so i might be speaking out of my ass a little bit but it would kind of piss me off if you didnt lose anything on sc after dying. Lessen it, maybe.

"

Satan_Assembler wrote:

I cant say i like the idea of getting rid of death penalty, i do play hc only so i might be speaking out of my ass a little bit but it would kind of piss me off if you didnt lose anything on sc after dying. Lessen it, maybe.

I appreciate your perspective! Why would it piss you off if softcore players lost nothing on dying? It's your choice to play HC and mine to play wusscore. We're no better than each other; we just choose to play differently. If I'm reading you right, then you believe that the punishment for dying in HC should somehow be reflected in a weaker sense in SC. I don't agree with that.

But you raise a good point -- removing the death penalty is a 100% 'buff' to SC and if the offset is making the game harder, then it's a 100% 'nerf' to HC. I apologise for not considering that. Perhaps HC xp could remain as is, but SC gets massive hits to xp gain in endgame?

This way, HC becomes a sort of 'fast paced high risk high reward' experience, while SC is more honestly a case of 'go much slower but don't lose anything' 'casual' experience.

(I place casual in inverted commas because even at its most casual, PoE could never be a casual game by modern standards. Ever.)

"

Satan_Assembler wrote:

Experience from bosses only is a bad idea, can see everyone just speed-running to bosses skipping everything. Making it so bosses give like 50%~70% of whole map experience would be nice.

I've seen this argument elsewhere, as long as people just buying boss kills. How that differs from people buying other things like lab runs is beyond me, but that's a side point. What this would do is change how people perceive bosses. What if there were areas that was *just* the boss? No content to skip, just a full-on raid-style monstrosity? Pass or fail, proceed or die. Again, this would only work in a no-xp death penalty environment where it's safe to learn by trial and error. I'm getting a bit bothered by how my perspective is so non-HC centric here, but I've already clarified why I don't/can't play HC. I don't think it's a viable solution to the death penalty conundrum.

But sure, weighting the boss xp much higher also works.

While I have you: as a HC player, do you feel you're even more under the yoke of 'playing it safe'? Unlike SC players, you don't have that new level threshold safety net. Is it something you enjoy? Are the risks worth the rewards? Why do you play HC in a game so prone to deaths that are outside of your control? Or do you have a crazy awesome connection and enjoy playing safe builds? Just curious!

I do know you are right that it shouldnt really concern anyone playing hc, might be just me, might be more than just me. There is quite a lot of hc vs sc stuff around so even die-hard sc guys might not be ok with losing one of their solid points in that fight haha.

Discard my objections to 100% exp from bosses, people would still do mobs since everyone needs more map drops, maybe aside the richest.

It's about the thrill, i started poe out in hc telling myself i will continue in sc after i die, never happened, so i died and died since i had no experience in the game made me angry and frustrated quite a bit, but now i just laugh when i die and i laugh when others die, its entertaining.
Playing support toons is also quite fun in hc, gives me that feeling that you are keeping people live and ticking or simply ticking if they got no damage, depending on what kind of support you play.
I do try to do everything myself until i get bored, tried making some naked toons as well, only weapon/jewels/belt to make stuff more interesting.
Cant wave around much mapping achievements im losing interest too fast.

"Under the yoke of playing it safe?"
I think most hc players have this mindset of "balanced, real builds" that are just necessary to play hc and are used to grinding before attempting so it loosens up the yoke, even though lots of people do skip bosses, mostly cause its just not worth the trouble drop wise, they are useless to kill more than once. The only thing that makes you play safe is a bad reward for risk.

Most important is probably that you have to respect those that killed something while having only 1 life. I know i do, log macro (which is a skill in itself) or not.

I tend to think of my builds being complete at level 90. Sometimes I make it higher but I think 93 is my max. I both like and dislike the idea of a death penalty. I like that it penalizes bad play. But I don't like that it encourages playing it safe rather than pushing your limits. I do think it is too punishing at higher levels. I was trying to think of how it would be to make it a progressive penalty. First death in a level would cost you more experience than subsequent deaths. Sticking with the 10% for the first death, make the next one 9%, then 8%, etc. Something like that. But I guess with the way you can't go below 0xp people would just kill themselves a bunch of times at the start of each level to make the penalty as low as possible.

I do think experience should be more of a risk/reward situation. Map mods should give xp bonuses instead of (or in addition to) item quantity. In a similar vein, maybe the death penalty could depend on the monster that killed you. How's this? White monsters cost you 10%; magic monsters 7%; rare monsters 4%; and map bosses 2%. I'd even go so far as making realm bosses like Shaper 1%. It's stupid that I would not attempt a hard side boss like that Until after I leveled. Also remove the floor so that the penalty still applies even if you just leveled. You wouldn't lose the level though.

If death has no penalty, what's the point of being able to die?

The game you're describing isn't PoE. Some issues you mentioned do exist, but unlike usually your post is being far from realistic. Powercreep, meta, respeccing, partying... All of these (and probably more) make any sort of hard cap impossible to achieve. Not to mention it'd mean revising pretty much the entire game at this point.

You speak of "player skill" several times. Here's a question: what do you consider to be measurement of skill in PoE? From where I'm looking at it, there's very little skill involved in this game outside of crafting builds, trading and playing solo glass cannon builds to high levels.

You don't want to be punished for dying. Like you said, this has been discussed for too many times already, and starting a new discussion about it is pointless. Instead of going "here's the problem guys, what do we do about it" you should've gone for "here's the problem boys, and here's my suggestion to solve it. What do you think?". And no, removing exp penalty isn't a valid solution. At that point the only point of dying is to lose one of the six ports to a map which is equal to no fucks given. Like it or not, the existence of a "death penalty" is mandatory; what is your suggestion for replacing exp penalty in case it got removed?

As for running only safe content end game etc. - Probably working as intended. See, it hit me when I saw the new Hierophant nodes, 4-5 totems with absolutely no downsides whatsoever: this isn't an issue of balancing anymore. Anyone with a bit of PoE knowledge and common sense can see how stupidly broken this will be. It got me thinking, what if GGG in actuality isn't absolutely fucking awful at balancing their game? What if powercreep, screenwide clearspeed meta, five second mapping, easy godmode, new broken meta after every big patch, what if all these things aren't mistakes but a part of GGG's vision of how PoE will be in the future? Is GGG REALLY unable to fix these 'issues' if they wanted to? The more I thought about it, the more it started to look like the current state of the game is something that GGG intentionally went for. I've no idea what their vision of a 'complete' PoE is, but I feel like the gap between that and the early versions will be a LOT bigger than what the gap of early versions and now is.

Thanks mark1030. Your input is always valued.

I really like your idea of a targeted xp loss system. Dying to a white mob versus dying to a boss should be a different 'experience', for sure.

Removing the floor without level loss is interesting. So we'd technically be able to get negative experience for the character level. I wonder how players would feel about that. I think it'd be overall a bit too crushing to see a negative value so low (high?) that you just know the character is never getting another level again. I suppose that's another not-so-soft cap, but I think it'd be more dissuading than anything.

So far it's clear that people are in favour of at least a review of the death penalty system and people do agree the current one is doing more harm than good.

"

Anonymous1749704 wrote:

If death has no penalty, what's the point of being able to die?

The game you're describing isn't PoE. Some issues you mentioned do exist, but unlike usually your post is being far from realistic. Powercreep, meta, respeccing, partying... All of these (and probably more) make any sort of hard cap impossible to achieve. Not to mention it'd mean revising pretty much the entire game at this point.

You speak of "player skill" several times. Here's a question: what do you consider to be measurement of skill in PoE? From where I'm looking at it, there's very little skill involved in this game outside of crafting builds, trading and playing solo glass cannon builds to high levels.

You don't want to be punished for dying. Like you said, this has been discussed for too many times already, and starting a new discussion about it is pointless. Instead of going "here's the problem guys, what do we do about it" you should've gone for "here's the problem boys, and here's my suggestion to solve it. What do you think?". And no, removing exp penalty isn't a valid solution. At that point the only point of dying is to lose one of the six ports to a map which is equal to no fucks given. Like it or not, the existence of a "death penalty" is mandatory; what is your suggestion for replacing exp penalty in case it got removed?

As for running only safe content end game etc. - Probably working as intended. See, it hit me when I saw the new Hierophant nodes, 4-5 totems with absolutely no downsides whatsoever: this isn't an issue of balancing anymore. Anyone with a bit of PoE knowledge and common sense can see how stupidly broken this will be. It got me thinking, what if GGG in actuality isn't absolutely fucking awful at balancing their game? What if powercreep, screenwide clearspeed meta, five second mapping, easy godmode, new broken meta after every big patch, what if all these things aren't mistakes but a part of GGG's vision of how PoE will be in the future? Is GGG REALLY unable to fix these 'issues' if they wanted to? The more I thought about it, the more it started to look like the current state of the game is something that GGG intentionally went for. I've no idea what their vision of a 'complete' PoE is, but I feel like the gap between that and the early versions will be a LOT bigger than what the gap of early versions and now is.

Fair enough. And I agree, this isn't the PoE everyone knows I'm talking about.

As for skill, you answered your own question. Obviously I don't mean what you're describing. Which is indeed the current situation. You seem resistant to the basic idea that PoE can be something other than what it is. That's me, most of the time. Today, not so much. Today I want to imagine a PoE that isn't beyond salvation in regards to how much 'skill' it takes a player to get by.

I do not have the experience or knowledge to provide a solution. That's why I posed this as a community discussion. I wanted to see if a solution is even necessary, and if so, what people would propose. I did say this would be unlike most of my other posts, right?

And if GGG are on track, and this current PoE is what they always wanted, then they willingly sold us early whales a bridge. I need to believe that isn't the case.