EXP LOSS POLL

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ACGIFT wrote:

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respon wrote:

Now imagine if there wasn't any xp penalty. You enter location/map kill 3 enemies, die.... and you have made progress still. You want a game where you create character, run bot and come back week later to play your level 95 character? Because that is how you get one.

So... 3 enemies down and you're down a map portal. Good luck sustaining your maps that way.

Between you saying all this and the 8/40 by your name, I think it's safe to assume that what's "hidden" in your profile is that you don't have any characters remotely near 100. So you are defending a system... You've never really experienced yourself.

I've never tried for 100 (my highest character is/was 95) but I don't think that invalidates my opinion. I'm not in favor of totally eliminating the death penalty. I don't think the way it currently works is very rational or logical but I don't want everyone to be able to just zerg their way to 100. Not even me. I think they could use some adjustments, like naked corpse retrieval (my favorite idea) to recoup some lost XP. Little adjustments like that would make it a lot more palatable. I've always felt it was the utter and complete hopelessness associated with the loss of time that causes so much consternation. At least, that's how it is for me. I know that losing XP at 95 is harsh and it only gets much much much much much worse each level after 95. Maybe 4.0 will have new death penalty mechanics to soften the blow.

I think they should make it so you lose all of your experience you have gained that level instead of just 10% if you die. The should also change it so that if you die with less than 10% experience gained that level, you lose a level and the last passive point you allocated.

I think every time you go through a portal or zone change the game should bookmark your XP and use that XP value as the floor for the penalties. That way things like taking on the Betrayal Mastermind or Aul from Delve could be attempted without risking 60% of a level.

The way things are unless you are at the start of an XP level you have to think twice about attempting any interesting or spicy content.

One alternative for XP-loss is a conjunction between the one mentioned by @Astatine and the following:

Instead of directly loosing XP there could be a 'hefty' penalty given which increases until a specific amount of XP is received.

In conjunction with the 'flooring' of XP this would be the following then (example, random numbers):

Imagining we go into a map at lvl 80 and 60% XPm this is our 'floor' for the time. Now... we miss-rolled the map and it has reflect, causing us to die. This leads to 10% of the XP towards the next level being lost usually. In our example though we gain 90% less XP until the equivalent of 15% of the xp for the level has been reached, hence we only gain 1,5% XP instead of 15% in the same duration.
This penalty wouldn't 'punish' people by loosing XP but rather hinder the progression, nonetheless one can always reach lvl 100 and it works well in conjuncture with the ladder. A good player will progress fast while a reckless player will be severely hindered.

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Phaeded wrote:

I don't want everyone to be able to just zerg their way to 100.

People get frustrated and quit on Act 10 Kitava, when they can zerg him just fine.

By contrast, if you're constantly dying in the endgame, you are losing out in content, and will suffer the ability to sustain.

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Phaeded wrote:

I know that losing XP at 95 is harsh and it only gets much much much much much worse each level after 95.

You might be shocked at how bad it can get.

When I'm chastising people for not getting close to 100, it's because the penalty gets exponentially worse the higher up you go: each extra level requires approximately half again the work of the level before, which means the EXP penalty is likewise scaled.

Borrowing from some some calculations on the wiki, Level 95 isn't even 1/4 of the way to level 100; going from 94 to 95 only accounts for 5.47% of the span from 90 to 100; you don't even hit "halfway" until you hit level 98 or so.

It gets to the point to where, at level 99, full-clearing a high-tier red map gives you barely more than 0.1% of your EXP bar.

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Phaeded wrote:

I think they could use some adjustments, like naked corpse retrieval (my favorite idea) to recoup some lost XP. Little adjustments like that would make it a lot more palatable. I've always felt it was the utter and complete hopelessness associated with the loss of time that causes so much consternation. At least, that's how it is for me. Maybe 4.0 will have new death penalty mechanics to soften the blow.

TBH, it needs more than gentle adjustments. While Naked Corpse retrieval would follow with the Diablo 2 theme, it really wouldn't work so well two decades later. (For one, it's VERY build-biased; an RF build without gear still has high life and regen, while a CI build would never succeed)

A substantial re-work of the penalty is necessary; Path of Exile is rather unique amongst games that you can make negative progress in a very short span of time; not that you can just lose what you gained in any particular bit of content, but you can lose what you'd gained in other content as well.

That little bit is what makes the EXP penalty not just a frustration that drives people to anger or quitting the game, (the game is, at best, fully stagnant in playerbase, and really is slowly bleeding out) but fundamentally an example of bad gameplay design.

You see, it doesn't really matter how good you play anymore; a lot of things are so random, that you don't die to prolonged exposure to a bad situation: GGG gave us too much power creep that we can easily correct any such mistakes; if we can't nuke it down instantly, we have flasks to instantly save us, and if all else fails, we just logout. So GGG has resorted to an increasing number of random one-shots to satisfy their need to keep the "deaths per instance" count up.

Talk to anyone that farmed the hell out of Legion, and they'll tell you that even with safe builds, they still encountered freak deaths farming Glacier, a Tier 2 map. (Legion mobs were so badly tuned; Maraketh could one-shot you from out of screen, while the highly-telegraphed "wall of death" some Vaal did hardly scratched you; there was zero sync between visible threat and actual danger)

Yes, this has also had a marked effect on how the game is played... I mean, has no one noticed that we went from "Hardcore is the only legit way for players, let alone streamers," to where now... Hardly any streamers touch HC anymore? Last I did a quick check on the ladder listings, level-for-level Legion SC outnumbered Legion HC by approaching 20:1.

The truth is, the way the game is balanced, the "smarter play" the penalty encourages is... Players just avoid risky content altogether unless they have nothing to lose. This is doubly bad when the game always has some examples of super-easy content that has the best EXP/hr. (e.g, pure breachstones, 4 & 5-way domains, Beachhead maps) So if you want to hit level 100, you... Just skip all the rest of the content and do those until you hit 100.

This also gets me to my last thing on why I am partly dismissive of anyone whose not hit 100. It's not merely the feel of how bad a loss can feel at level 98 or 99... But how trivial a lot of it feels once you hit 100. Once you feel that, you really get to see how bad the penalty is in terms of restricting how the game is played. It gives a totally different perspective over the whole thing.

With a level 100 character, I suddenly don't have to worry about any real risk on content; like... What's the worst that can happen, I lose a Shaper or Mortal Set? Those are things I could replace FAR quicker and easier than that experience... And more cheaply. For reference, at 99, 10% requires about 8 Pure Chayula breachstones (about 32 exa total) or 5x 5-way sets (15-20 exa) or 3-4 (9-16 exa) if you're a carry. Vs... 1/12 of an exa per death @Uber Atziri.

In short: the death penalty, as-is, doesn't encourage better play, and merely pushes players to ignore game content entirely. This is a bad thing, and it should be reworked.

Now, there are a lot of potential ways it could be reworked; I won't really say I've settled on any one being the "best" as each has its own merits... A number (if not all) have already been discussed in this thread, but all of them work for something, be it the level of frustration, or to break the current meta of "you can either spam tedious stuff and level, or you do interesting content, and you can't switch halfway."

• Scale down the penalty at higher levels. Anyone can tell you that the higher your level, the stiffer that penalty gets... But it gets downright crazy as you get to the last couple of levels. GGG has made repeated nerfs (directly and indirectly) towards EXP gains at the tail end of the progression, while the penalty for dying hasn't changed to match. E.g, if you gain about 1/10th the EXP at level 99 you do at 91, then you'd scale it; past 91 the penalty would drop down from 10%, reaching just 1% at level 99. Granted, this wouldn't really solve the fundamental EXP meta, but would make things a tad less frustrating for those simply trying to level and avoid "interesting" content.
  
  
• Make there more "floors" than just "0%;" for instance, dying in maps would simply send you down to the nearest multiple of 10%, and it'd be as impenetrable a backline as 0% is now. This would be probably the easiest to implement, but also the least effective; it wouldn't truly eliminate that "tedious & leveling vs. dangerous & interesting" dichotomy, but it'd definitely cap that "lose days' worth of progress in 5 minutes" thing with dangerous encounters.
  
  
• Simply prevent players from losing EXP they didn't gain in the current content. In this case, starting a new map/zone would "save" the current EXP at the start, and any death would only set them back to the beginning. This would utterly dismantle the terrible EXP meta.
  
  
• Focus less on deleting EXP already earned, and instead penalize further gain. For instance, dying might impose a 2-hour penalty where all EXP gains on that character are halved. (Further deaths would add another 2 hours each to that timer) This not only eliminates the risk of losing everything for deciding to switch track, but also better targets those trying to race for 100; when you're doing nothing but sinking top-EXP/hr content, losing 29.5/31.8M exp for a single random death isn't that huge, but if suddenly the next two hours you go from "I'll make 150-200M" (yes, that's a perfectly legit 2-hour gain for level 99) to "I'll make 75-100M less," it becomes devastating for their ladder placement.
  
  
• Eliminate EXP penalties in certain zones. In some cases, dying carries its own penalties, so deleting EXP earned beforehand feels redundant. One good example is the Labyrinth; dying already means that Offering's lost, along with any efforts you put to get keys. Similarly, dying in a delve means you just lost whatever sulphite you spent. In these situations, it'd perhaps make sense to just eliminate the EXP penalty.

Remove exp loss on death, period. A players invested time should never be taken away. Solve it some other way, its not normal that im shouting "F**K" so my wife get scared every time my character gets killed due to reasons beyond my control.