It's time to remove XP loss

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Chill wrote:

Even reasonably tanky characters will occasionally be oneshot in hard content.
And I would like to borrow your crystal ball.

You can hit 100 easily if you are occasionally one shot though

That would make sense in a vacuum where dying is just the result of you being a bad player. It's not.

The experience penalty actively discourages you from doing hard content/boss fights because the risk of losing hours of your progress is too high. Sure, if you want to incentivize people to only do alch & go yellow maps or to get carried in 5 ways/breachstones etc., that's a fair point.

Considering random oneshots are not getting fixed anytime soon, this is the easier solution.

Backwards progression is not fun.

I already wrote this in another thread:
The game is simply not stable and balanced enough to support a penalty in any way.

There are technical factors like server or game performance. You have design factors like odd modifier combinations or effects plainly designed to kill players where you have to be lucky. Or bad visibility of effects. Also even if players die in a way they could have prevented there is no game feedback helping them.

At the end it realy comes down to the argument what the goal of the game and the penalty is.
If PoE is to be seen as a sandbox where you can play like you want than tehre is no room for a penalty and design related deaths wouldnt be a problem.
If PoE is seen as a "dont die" game where you need absolut knowledge to be able to make builds to dont die (what some players seem to like) than tehre is no room for having a sandbox because you will end up with a handful of options anyways.

Iam currently sitting at 98 and trying to get towards 100. I currently get the feeling that on one side the devs would like players to spread out more in terms of skills and playstyle, but on the other side content gets designed without caring or towards the most powerful builds resulting in ohk effects or bad visibility of important things.
In a nutshell iam stuck in a situation where i can either grind the most boring, but safe, content for potentially weeks to progress my character or try out different parts of the game. Both at the same time is not possible and thats a bad game design.

In the end no matter how ppl want to turn it, removing the penalty would have no negative effect on the game. It would just damage some egos along the way, but having more players reaching level 100 and not leaving frustrated because they get stuck wouldnt hurt.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

What I want to know is: have ANY of the people clamoring for a removal of exp loss spent literally any time thinking about how GGG would rebalance this game to compensate?

There is no rebalancing needed. The XP penalty comes from the early stages of the game where you had no content and they needed a hamster wheel to keep players playing. Removing the penalty would have no negative effect at all. It only effects character progression, bosses and content still have their own gates. Balance wise it would even help because you could assume that all players end up on the same base power level and bad designs or issues would not have so much negative impact anymore.

I always see a lot of bad faith arguments in favor of letting the death penatly.

The most common are that it teaches players to play better. How?

Our that they will need to increase the xp power required to level, why?

Our my persuasive favorite. Git gud. What does that mean?

The reality is that the death penatly is a relic of former game design when their was no atlas, the game had much lower dps and defenses. Hell go look at a build guides from 2013 where 30-70k dps was an impossible goal. Six links were a true luxury like a mageblood. The game is different now.

So they should make an ah and remove he death penatly, before it is too late

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roundishcap wrote:

The most common are that it teaches players to play better. How?

The game doesn't teach you anything, not sure why you think it would specifically give you advice about this element.

Some players are faced with XP loss and adapt to overcome it. If all you do is glass cannon shit or follow build guides for poorly developed characters then yes it can be a real problem but you can always follow better guides whereas part of the reason the penalty exists is to make glass cannon worse.

You still regularly see in these threads "the less of a portal is enough" as if the loss of a portal is any real cost lmao. The 6 portal system is pretty generous but the generosity is paid for elsewhere in this case.

Players will find it hard to believe but the XP system now is extremely relaxed compared to how it used to be, your scope to make a character that breezes it is huge if you actually want to.

Hence why it gets summarised as git gud

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Some players are faced with XP loss and adapt to overcome it. If all you do is glass cannon shit or follow build guides for poorly developed characters then yes it can be a real problem

It will always be a problem no matter how well a character is designed. It just appears sooner or later. I also wonder where the time went when you could play games without someone defending an outdated mechanic with "read more guides". If a game cant teach you well enought whats going on than there should be no penalty for it.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

part of the reason the penalty exists is to make glass cannon worse.

Thats what you get the portals or entry cost for.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

You still regularly see in these threads "the less of a portal is enough" as if the loss of a portal is any real cost lmao. The 6 portal system is pretty generous but the generosity is paid for elsewhere in this case.

the portals are a requirement to allow players freedom in gameplay. Sure if you always play the latest and greatest in close to OP builds it might be of no concern, but ppl seem to forget that not everyone wants to always follow the latest guide to opness and that some players simply want to play and need the portals to try out and get better in the first place.

The core issue is, after level 91, the xp gain drops off big time and the 10% xp loss is just a giant FU because of the xp gain drop off. You cruise along until you hit the xp wall. 10% loss is offset by the fact that you can gain a level every hour or so until 91. After 91, 10% becomes more and more of a loss. At lv 95, 10% (for the casual player) can be 3 hours of work.

This becomes more of a deterrent the higher level you get and frankly, you have to just stop caring about advancement once you reach the 90s. After a while, it just isn't fun anymore and people go play games that offer actual fun at high levels.

This is why there is such a HUGE dropoff in player retention. The model just doesn't sustain viability. It is kinda funny, the game could have such a higher fan base, if not for the Vision™.

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Xebov wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

What I want to know is: have ANY of the people clamoring for a removal of exp loss spent literally any time thinking about how GGG would rebalance this game to compensate?

There is no rebalancing needed.

So no, you haven't spent time thinking about this because you're completely in denial about the reality of the situation.

So I'll say it again, as plainly as it is possible for me to say it:

GGG wants level 100 to be a difficult milestone that average/casual players do not achieve within the course of a 3 month league. If there is no experience penalty, the only possible way to maintain this design goal is to tremendously increase the experience needed to reach higher levels.

You seem to think that players being unable to gain levels easily at 95+ is an accidental by-product of spaghetti code, and not a deliberate choice made by the game developers. This is what I meant in my first post re: Cause and Effect relationships, by the way.

GGG wants level 100 to be a difficult milestone that average/casual players do not achieve within the course of a 3 month league.

Never understand why the devs WANT this. Why create something that you don't want people to achieve? I admit, i am not the most amazing player, but I stil like to succeed. It just seems exclusionary and elitist to me, something that is bad, but hey, the vision.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

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Xebov wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

What I want to know is: have ANY of the people clamoring for a removal of exp loss spent literally any time thinking about how GGG would rebalance this game to compensate?

There is no rebalancing needed.

So no, you haven't spent time thinking about this because you're completely in denial about the reality of the situation.

So I'll say it again, as plainly as it is possible for me to say it:

GGG wants level 100 to be a difficult milestone that average/casual players do not achieve within the course of a 3 month league. If there is no experience penalty, the only possible way to maintain this design goal is to tremendously increase the experience needed to reach higher levels.

You seem to think that players being unable to gain levels easily at 95+ is an accidental by-product of spaghetti code, and not a deliberate choice made by the game developers. This is what I meant in my first post re: Cause and Effect relationships, by the way.

I know fully well that the penalty is not some byproduct but an active design choice. But its a design choice made 10 years ago when the game had no end game and no maps and they needed some hamster wheel to keep players playing. These times are long gone and the game has alot of content in various difficulties. So there is no rebalancing needed on this. Just throw it into the garbage can of history.

By now iam arguing that this design does more harm than good. It creates enough frustration with players to frequently cause threads and discussions about it. It forces players to make a choice between advancing their character or trying content and is also likely causing players to simply quit.

To speak for myself, this design choice is the only reason i always quit the game after some time. Knowing that no matter how well i build a character iam always at odds with terrible design, bad luck and tech difficulties of the game and being penalized for simply stumbling into them.