Please Remove 10% Exp Loss on Death

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Can either of you, or indeed anyone, help me come up with a term to describe the situation core to this thread? What we have is a 100% negative experience that any serious player will encounter at least occasionally -- a loss of gains incurred by not strictly adhering to fairly unspoken rules. In this case, the loss of experience by not playing it safe. And even then, we've seen myriad examples of when even doing that isn't enough. There is no way to recuperate that loss other than by doing the exact same thing that incurred it. This strikes me as just plain bad game design. And yet people have embraced it because they see it as a fundamental part of something they love. At worst they'll put up with it, but we've all seen ardent defenders of it -- even though the totality of their argument is something really flimsy like 'it makes the game challenging' or 'there has to be some repercussion for failure'.

This isn't quite Stockholm Syndrome...

That was a great read. Good analysis. I believe it's the behaviour of cultists.

Some people identify so strongly with the game that any criticism of the game is perceived as somehow criticising them personally. And they react with virtual pitch forks.
Just look at how religous people react to apostates (people who make suggestions to change PoE): They are fought much more violently than people who believe in a different deity (D3) or or even no deity at all (golf, climbing, etc...). It's because they see that other people manage to free themselves of this mental slavery and they hate them for that.

Look at the language of people who are known to be white knights on these forums: Absolutely no compromise. Anyone with a suggestion for what they perceive to be an improvement are obviously saying PoE isn't perfect and that has to be fought off tooth and nail. "They obviously cannot have a clear thought in their head or a benign reason for their mistakes, they are just downright, unacceptably evil."
As though the WK had created the game themselves (or even contributed at all to it) and has to defend his work.

Cultists it is.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Can either of you, or indeed anyone, help me come up with a term to describe the situation core to this thread? What we have is a 100% negative experience that any serious player will encounter at least occasionally -- a loss of gains incurred by not strictly adhering to fairly unspoken rules. In this case, the loss of experience by not playing it safe. And even then, we've seen myriad examples of when even doing that isn't enough. There is no way to recuperate that loss other than by doing the exact same thing that incurred it. This strikes me as just plain bad game design. And yet people have embraced it because they see it as a fundamental part of something they love. At worst they'll put up with it, but we've all seen ardent defenders of it -- even though the totality of their argument is something really flimsy like 'it makes the game challenging' or 'there has to be some repercussion for failure'.

This isn't quite Stockholm Syndrome. If anything, it seems to be closer to the concept of Learned Helplessness, except that LH also stipulates that someone who has developed it won't take the positive path even if it's presented to them. PoE presents no real positive option beyond 'don't do that again, whatever it was'.

It's also a little Pavlovian on a number of levels. Literally -- see that life or ES level drop, prepare for death, maybe alt-f4 or fight it out, and deep down ready yourself for an eradication of the past ten minutes to an hour, depending. And it's Pavlovian in that as soon as someone questions it, suggests there might be a better way, the instant reaction is 'don't attack my game just because you're not good enough' etc. There is no real reasoning with someone who can no longer see alternatives.

So is there a word for this phenomenon? It reminds me of when someone stays with someone abusive because they love other aspects of them, but again that seems to indicate that a person can't just quit the game. Take the bad with the good? That's one way of putting it. I'd like a cleaner, more specific term for what's going on here. I DO think there's an element of abuse to the fact that GGG are very aware that it's going on -- that players are allowing themselves to be conditioned by this death penalty system even though as the developers they could have and should have come up with a better death system by now. The only reason they don't isn't because people aren't complaining -- they/we have been complaining for years. It's because they know for all the complaints, the effort required to address it, to patently improve the game, probably can't be justified in raw financial terms. Creating a better, more intuitive death system would be seriously above and beyond for no real gain at this point, and no one's expecting that of GGG now.

After all: why serve people lobster when you've managed to teach them that eating dry bran cereal is as good as it gets? GGG keep joking that once you're Mapping, they have your soul -- and it's really only Mappers that are affected by any sort of real death penalty. So yeah, they know exactly what they're doing, and what they can get away with.

Is it really so hard to understand that having a negative experience every now and then isn't always a bad thing? Because it's a motivation to do better next time. Why should i bother to improve my builds if i can just suicide my way through hardest content while reaching the highest level? What's even the point of a level system if reaching the highest level is a given? Why not just skip the grind entirely and let people create level 100 chars from the get go?

It also doesn't have to be a negative experience, most of the time i don't even care when i die, sometimes it's actually funny and sometimes i realize/learn something from it. The number of times where it actually pisses me off are few and far in between. It's only 100% negative if you consider this game your job and are forced to realize that you are bad at your job.

I am also fairly positive that topics about the death penalty wouldn't get the back lash they get if there weren't 5 per week written in a tone that's more akin to a rage post then to thought out feedback and if they actually presented a better concept instead of just wanting to remove it.

I remember one post that actually provided a very nice alternative aproach to it where dying would give you a 10% xp debuff that you have to "work of" before you can gain XP again. This wouldn't take anything away from the player, just block his progress temporarily while at the same time preventing people from reaching 100 by default. I'd actually wholeheartly agree with a solution like that. But as usual in this forum, it got buried under a montain of trash posts whining that this would still be too much and that the penalty should go for good.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Why should i bother to improve my builds if i can just suicide my way through hardest content while reaching the highest level?

You just can't. You (usually) have 6 tries.. If in 6 tries you can't do anything you will still realize you are missing improvements. IMHO that's way too many tries...

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I remember one post that actually provided a very nice alternative aproach to it where dying would give you a 10% xp debuff that you have to "work of" before you can gain XP again. This wouldn't take anything away from the player, just block his progress temporarily while at the same time preventing people from reaching 100 by default. I'd actually wholeheartly agree with a solution like that. But as usual in this forum, it got buried under a montain of trash posts whining that this would still be too much and that the penalty should go for good.

Unfortunatelly this will continue untill GGG states either that they are looking into solutions or that they are happy with current system and will never change.

That suggestion is gold. More if the 10% debuff is fixed, not cumulative.

@Charan

Awesome post as always.

I've thought about Charan's post.

Let's start with Baharoth15's point

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I am also fairly positive that topics about the death penalty wouldn't get the back lash they get if there weren't 5 per week written in a tone that's more akin to a rage post then to thought out feedback and if they actually presented a better concept instead of just wanting to remove it.

is good. Let me try to put that into my own words. People can get a set idea about a topic seen previously on the forum (or even a previous post within a thread) and react more to that past idea still in their head. It is just human nature.

I think maybe a more direct but general response is that people have their own likes/dislikes, conclusions and ideas. There's a tendency to assume these are correct and objective. The "strength" of this tendency varies greatly between different individuals but is a generally common tendency. When someone says something on the forum that we don't agree with some can take it personally. "Hey they said that but I don't think that so they are saying that I'm wrong!" In reality, I think, both can be correct and differences can be subjective or even a different emphasis.

The previous paragraph was very general. Trying to get a bit more specific but following that general theme.

Dealing with the death penalty in as positive a manner and as best we can, people will likely tell themselves all the things we hear in these threads. "You need to learn from the death." "You need to improve your build." "Well just don't die!" etc. etc. So people have been telling themselves these same things over and over. They have come to believe them and can be bothered when someone else comes along and says, the experience point loss on death bothers me. They don't want to be bothered by the experience point loss themselves and just try to suppress it on the forums the way they do in their own mind.

What Charan was really asking was "what do we call it?" My answer to that is "I don't know." :-)

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frostzor27 wrote:

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I remember one post that actually provided a very nice alternative aproach to it where dying would give you a 10% xp debuff that you have to "work of" before you can gain XP again. This wouldn't take anything away from the player, just block his progress temporarily while at the same time preventing people from reaching 100 by default. I'd actually wholeheartly agree with a solution like that. But as usual in this forum, it got buried under a montain of trash posts whining that this would still be too much and that the penalty should go for good.

Unfortunatelly this will continue untill GGG states either that they are looking into solutions or that they are happy with current system and will never change.

That suggestion is gold. More if the 10% debuff is fixed, not cumulative.

I too like the suggestion. It could be implemented by just making the last 10% section of the experience bar red (or something) that shrinks and disappears as experience is gained but is not added to the end of the experience bar until all the red disappears.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Is it really so hard to understand that having a negative experience every now and then isn't always a bad thing? Because it's a motivation to do better next time. Why should i bother to improve my builds if i can just suicide my way through hardest content while reaching the highest level? What's even the point of a level system if reaching the highest level is a given? Why not just skip the grind entirely and let people create level 100 chars from the get go?(...)

The thing is, most of us do agree that having a "negative" experience every now and then isn't a bad thing.
For example, if I have a level 100 character (or a character of another level, with 0% XP), and fail a boss fight, I can try it again later, and improve my recognition of the boss's pattern, alter slightly my build, etc... Even if it took me a few hours of grind to get to the boss.
On the other hand, if I die to something while grinding XP, and find myself losing hours of that grind, I am definitely not going to try that thing again, or at least not without being certain that I am not going to lose hours of grind to it again.

In the first case, the attempt is its own goal, so I haven't actually lost the hours of grinding. In the second case, the attempt is entirely separate from the goal, so I am definitely not going anywhere near that again, and that itself is very bad game design.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Can either of you, or indeed anyone, help me come up with a term to describe the situation core to this thread? What we have is a 100% negative experience that any serious player will encounter at least occasionally -- a loss of gains incurred by not strictly adhering to fairly unspoken rules. In this case, the loss of experience by not playing it safe. And even then, we've seen myriad examples of when even doing that isn't enough. There is no way to recuperate that loss other than by doing the exact same thing that incurred it. This strikes me as just plain bad game design. And yet people have embraced it because they see it as a fundamental part of something they love. At worst they'll put up with it, but we've all seen ardent defenders of it -- even though the totality of their argument is something really flimsy like 'it makes the game challenging' or 'there has to be some repercussion for failure'.

I feel we are missing the point of the death penalty here.

The points of the death penalty aren't just to punish you. It's there to preserve certain premises to/in the game. It's far from "100% negative", if we look at what it does indirectly. For once, it's a balance measure in the scale between defenses and offenses. Secondly, it prevents you from portal-cheesing your way through high level content that's supposed to be hard/difficult. Thridly, it prolongs the knowledge curve; if you die repeatedly, you have areas to improve on, be that skills, build or other sources of knowledge.

For me, the death penalty has never been about the XP you lose, but rather the reasons why it's there. The bottom line is; it forces you to proactively care about your choices of skills, build and what content to face - and when to face it, all of which should be instrumental in every RPG.

I know for a fact that I wouldn't care as much as I currenty do about my build or choices if we had no death penalty. I wouldn't care if I died 5 times to a boss. I wouldn't care about my defenses. I wouldn't care as much about what content to run or when. And I WANT to care.

Edit: I do however like the D2 version of the death penalty better, where you could (if I remember correctly) retrieve your corpse and get (some of?) the XP back. This would give us more risk versus reward, and a reason to try the challenge again.

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Phrazz wrote:

(...)

All the points you brought up seem very good intentions for the penalty. Yet, stop trying to level up, and all those intentions are rendered moot. The penalty is terrible at its job if any of what you said is its intended job.
I am of the opinion that zerging should be addressed properly (like D3 did), rather than through a system that has massive drawbacks.


PS :
Please don't attack me on the fact that I think that D3 did one thing correctly. It can have some things done properly without being a game that I enjoy.

This argument that without the 10% experience point loss death penalty players would just zerge everything is not true. For example, I don't recall a death penalty on Diablo3. (Maybe there was one but I don't remember one.) I never saw any Diablo3 build ignoring defenses. I don't think that I've seen anyone arguing that there should be no death penalty. I think the 10% experience point loss is bothersome to people because the game is taking away something that was earned.

First of all, this is to everyone: I am not calling for 'no death penalty', and I can't respond to people who are basing their argument off this misinterpretation. I am, and have always been, calling for a death penalty worthy of the top ARPG of 2020 and the past handful of years, not one that has stuck around like a bad smell since 2011. Death SHOULD be a negative experience, absolutely. But this is also a game, not real life. There is room for a negative experience that is, ideally, also a learning one. At any rate, I'll go into this a bit further down. Improve the death experience=/=no death penalty.

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SisterBlister wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Can either of you, or indeed anyone, help me come up with a term to describe the situation core to this thread? What we have is a 100% negative experience that any serious player will encounter at least occasionally -- a loss of gains incurred by not strictly adhering to fairly unspoken rules. In this case, the loss of experience by not playing it safe. And even then, we've seen myriad examples of when even doing that isn't enough. There is no way to recuperate that loss other than by doing the exact same thing that incurred it. This strikes me as just plain bad game design. And yet people have embraced it because they see it as a fundamental part of something they love. At worst they'll put up with it, but we've all seen ardent defenders of it -- even though the totality of their argument is something really flimsy like 'it makes the game challenging' or 'there has to be some repercussion for failure'.

This isn't quite Stockholm Syndrome...

That was a great read. Good analysis. I believe it's the behaviour of cultists.

Some people identify so strongly with the game that any criticism of the game is perceived as somehow criticising them personally. And they react with virtual pitch forks.
Just look at how religous people react to apostates (people who make suggestions to change PoE): They are fought much more violently than people who believe in a different deity (D3) or or even no deity at all (golf, climbing, etc...). It's because they see that other people manage to free themselves of this mental slavery and they hate them for that.

Look at the language of people who are known to be white knights on these forums: Absolutely no compromise. Anyone with a suggestion for what they perceive to be an improvement are obviously saying PoE isn't perfect and that has to be fought off tooth and nail. "They obviously cannot have a clear thought in their head or a benign reason for their mistakes, they are just downright, unacceptably evil."
As though the WK had created the game themselves (or even contributed at all to it) and has to defend his work.

Cultists it is.

That's taking the easy way out (not that I blame you here), but I suppose it helps get a little closer to the core of the matter. What is the psychology that drives cultists then, and can it be equated to what we're observing here? I don't think so, at least not to the same level. I don't see people selling their houses or putting family members' lives at risk for PoE. I don't see Exiles moving together because the outside world doesn't 'get it'. That's a much deeper commitment, but it's also what we associate with 'cults'. So while there are similarities to the mindset, I think it's a dangerous comparison to make. Not only that, it outright alienates those about whom we are talking, which was not and never will be my intention. I want to genuinely understand how people can reach this point of tolerance for something that by all rights shouldn't be tolerated. How they came to be convinced that this is the best solution and that any other would be somehow inferior or broken. My gut instinct is that the players defending the death penalty are as lazy and nonchalant about it as GGG themselves -- the only difference is players have no power in the relationship. Even if they WANTED a better death penalty, they'd have to convince GGG that it's worth doing. And I think I've sufficiently shown why that's not going to happen. So maybe what you call 'cultism' I see simply as 'resignation' for the most part. And resignation can very easily then become a form of belief. This is how a lot of people get sucked into fringe groups: not out of zeal but out of perceived helplessness.

__

But damn, this is a heavy way of looking at it, eh? I mean, I wasn't expecting to get a direct answer from one of the believers so quickly, and yet there it is. Possibly two. And bless you guys for responding to them and saving me from having to point out the obvious. I was not baiting such a response, and definitely didn't want it. At no point did I say that negative experiences in games are bad; what, is having to trudge back to your corpse naked or trying to retrieve your lost souls from a group of monsters somehow 'positive'? The distinction is that PoE's death experience is entirely negative with no recourse beyond 'don't die'. And that's fine in a game where things are much clearer, much easier to make out. Don't fall in that pit; don't alert that monster; don't dodge that attack when you should have blocked. But in PoE, when death can be so sudden and is at least sometimes out of the user's hands, an entirely negative experience is just that.

(un)Fortunately, I'm running out of steam here because I know this is all just piss in the wind. I've made clear enough why that is the case.

And we're still not much closer to a nice term describing the phenomenon at hand (being acceptance of a clearly inferior system as the best possible one, and any attempt to change that directly affecting all the 'good' parts of the game). I can make analogy after analogy, real life comparisons aplenty...but a unifying term? Nothing more solid than 'cult-like behaviour'. Ugh. I will think about it, maybe do some reading about the psychology of resignation and people putting up with abuse out of some misconstrued belief that you can't have good things without that abuse. I have a feeling this is going to take me to some dark places. Yipee.


PS Do I also need to point out that in a lot of games, the limited number of attempts to complete an area/boss would be challenge enough? I'm not sure why people are worried about 'zerging' when we have a mechanism in place to prevent that. If anything, an interesting approach might be to imagine no death penalty and then come up with ways to make the portal limit the true challenge. Portals into Maps as the difficulty scale alone would be more thematic than some arbitrary 'hey you died so you've forgotten what you learned for the past hour or so, dumbass' system. See, you can't even justify the lame 10% death penalty system from a world-building perspective. (This is, of course, because it preceded much in the way of PoE's world-building.)