Experience loss driving some players away?

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Zeekin wrote:

POE's death penalty is just a lazy cut+paste from D2.

In D2 the death penalty made sense since it was _very_ easy to get a character to level 90+ in a short period of time, not so in POE, but for some reason they still think such a steep penalty makes the game 'harder'.

This. A death penalty makes the game NO harder. It is applied AFTER you die as a fuck you.

I'm not even against the idea of a penalty, but an XP penalty is the wrong kind for this game. It's already very grind heavy and the best penalty they can come up with is...you have to grind more? Sad.

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TheSwampDog wrote:

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Zeekin wrote:

POE's death penalty is just a lazy cut+paste from D2.

In D2 the death penalty made sense since it was _very_ easy to get a character to level 90+ in a short period of time, not so in POE, but for some reason they still think such a steep penalty makes the game 'harder'.

This. A death penalty makes the game NO harder. It is applied AFTER you die as a fuck you.

I'm not even against the idea of a penalty, but an XP penalty is the wrong kind for this game. It's already very grind heavy and the best penalty they can come up with is...you have to grind more? Sad.

So, what penalty would you suggest as an alternative?

in reply to the OP...

there is a reason modern games have done away with the experience loss mechanic, and it's almost completely just to cater to, or appeal, to those types of gamers.

It's a very bad thing for those of us who like there to be elements of risk to our games, as there are almost no games released nowadays to actually give us what we want.

I for one am glad GGG went this route, it adds risk to your playstyle and your build, and can ultimately decide whether you failed or succeeded in the end.

I could support Moog's idea to allow a player to regain a portion of XP by slaying thr monster that killed you. Titan quest had a tombstone system where you could get back a portion but if you died again before reaching your tombstone you lost the first tombstone. This could work because then the bad luck single deaths wouldnt be as punishing but you still wouldnt want to just throw yourself repeatedly against a boss and not care if you die 10 times.

Another point to bring up relative to the fundamental flaw with the existing penalty system is as you progress and become more powerful, you take fewer risks. This amounts to less fun. When you hit 85+ you no longer do crazy fun things; instead you play it safe in everything you do. No more leaping into rooms, going after certain bosses for fun, or venturing to areas (or doing maps) that have tough mobs and mods.

This takes away from the gaming experience, and funnels high level players into safe and boring mode. There is no adventure anymore. This is a big problem.

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Bushido74 wrote:

If GGG wants to see any investors they will eliminate the XP penalty in default

This would be the worst thing that they could possibly do. This is the one thing that would get me extremely bored with the game right away.

If they do that then please tell them to also make everyone invincible. Death would be meaningless so may as well eliminate it completely. I would be fascinated to see who could stand to actually play the game like that.

Edit: The portal system for maps is not enough of a loss for dieing. If I am not using my magic find character I rarely ever use more than one or two portals anyway. I could easily die 4 or 5 times and not care at all without a death penalty.

People are somehow expecting GGG to cater to everyone, thankfully that's not going to happen. Maybe one day, when the player base is huge enough, they could make a no penalty league or whatever, but I guess that's not going to happen in the near future.

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Mooginator wrote:

Another point to bring up relative to the fundamental flaw with the existing penalty system is as you progress and become more powerful, you take fewer risks. This amounts to less fun. When you hit 85+ you no longer do crazy fun things; instead you play it safe in everything you do. No more leaping into rooms, going after certain bosses for fun, or venturing to areas (or doing maps) that have tough mobs and mods.

This takes away from the gaming experience, and funnels high level players into safe and boring mode. There is no adventure anymore. This is a big problem.

You've pretty much kept repeating yourself, I'm getting the feeling you're just trying to bump your own thread.

This thread is not going anywhere. There will definitely not be a removal of the exp penalty, if it hasn't occurred to you in your thick brain yet, GGG doesn't cater to randoms complaining on the forums. Stop this madness.

I dumped my melee character and went ranged.

Didn't play poe for a week as I contemplated if I should reroll adter making 2 physical damage melee characters that are affected by desync and have survivability issues, preventing me from leveling past 75 no matter how much armor or life nodes I could grab, or just quit, since I never liked playing ranged characters.


Rolled a ranged char 3 days ago, lvl 50 now, didn't grab a single life node until I hit cruel A2, started farming lvl 53 catacombs at lvl 42. 11 levels of difference. I remember I couldn't farm that zone 8 levels higher than lvl53 as melee.

I honestly would have preferred they just make a hardcap of lvl 100 (that takes a very, very long time to get) and no xp loss for softcore; if they do this then no one would care about desync and the state of the game for melee, as much. I'd go back to playing my melee characters then. So I understand if people quit because of xp loss, I felt their pain.


ps - shoutout to the people that have played dark/demon souls..one of my fav games of all time right there, but you cant compare apples to oranges. You could get your corpse back and regain your souls, offline meant 0 desync and melee is just as good as ranged; plus it was kinda easier to find ppl to play with. Bulletin board of softcore merciless mode, you have to scroll through 20+ games of "WTS or WTB" people that use it for trading(aint nobody got time for dat!)..its literally just a trading spam board now, no one does publicgames.., and its watered down right now from 4 different leagues on top.

XP loss as a penalty for dieing is very easy to understand for everybody, logic and in my opinion necessary for game balance, builts and playstyles.

Removing it from the game would not do any good.
There would be no reason left to play anything else then glass canons.
Dieing once every 30 minutes? Who cares as long as you get overall faster exp?

Removing death penalty and adding an alternative to it like the orbs mentioned by OP would not improve the system.
It would just complicate it.
Orbs are less easy to understand, less intuitive and would not change a thing really.

The same people that complain against exp loss on death could also use the same arguments against any alternative. "I do not want to loose my 10 stacked orb bonus when i die etc..."