Do all the XP penalty complainers just body brigade through the game? Honest question

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The_Song#4903 wrote:

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

Playing well in an ARPG mostly means killing things for loot until you're powerful and not dying. Unlike a souls game or a platformer or a strategy game, here the entire goal of the game is to outscale the content with a powerful character.

Based on that description, an "arpg" has no "a".
Action.
Action means utilizing player ability to actually engage with mechanics, legitimately having to play the game.
Dodging enemy attacks, having to aim your attacks, pulling off combos, so on and so forth exercising skill to defeat enemies you can't simply overpower without effort.

If all I'm doing is outscaling the enemies to the point I don't have to do the above because of the power difference, there's no action. That's not an action game, ergo not an arpg.
The kind of game where you just make your character powerful, so you can win by virtue of stats, is just an rpg, without the "a".
If you want to add the "a", there better be actual action. Skill utilization that victory depends on no matter how powerful you've made the character.

Aside from that many of the people making the complaints you're thread responds to aren't just slamming themselves into the next thing endlessly without trying to progress their character first.
There's an xp penalty if you try to go back to weaker areas, so they would not progress by doing so, and the areas these people are in causing the complaints are exactly the areas they're supposed to be in at the time.

There's no need to twist the definition of the word "A" (Action) in ARPG to suit your argument.
Here's the actual definition of the ARPG in Wiki.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game.

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Action role-playing games emphasize real-time combat where the player has direct control over the characters as opposed to turn or menu-based combat while still having a focus on character's stats in order to determine relative strength and abilities.

The A (Action) stands for real-time combat, to differentiate it from the other genre of RPG such as Turn-based RPG. It has nothing to do with overpowering your enemies or your power level.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Farming exp to level 100 isn't skilful, it's monotonous. Especially since the game punishes you for trying to have fun with the rest of the game outside of easy to farm maps.

You're basically asking for rewards with no risks. Diablo 4 is more of a game for you.

Where do you guys get this stuff from? When you die in maps, you already lost your time (probably the most significant aspect for me, if I'm being honest -- I have other hobbies and like other games too), the map and its bonuses/modifiers, the waystone itself, and, currently, also XP. Nothing in any Souls game ever punishes you this severely.

This game would still be plenty punishing if you didn't lose XP and lost the map/waystone from 1 death or if you did lose XP but had more than 1 death to attempt the map. It really doesn't need both of those forms of punishment at the same time. I love Souls-likes (not just From Software's games, but also Nioh 1/2, Lies of P, Mortal Shell, and other standouts in the genre) and difficult games, in general, but punishment like this just feels disrespectful, IMO. Is the goal for the game to be only for streamers or a very niche audience who doesn't work for a living, doesn't have friends/family in real life, doesn't play any other games, etc. and just has infinite time to play POE and only POE? Isn't POE 1 already for those people? Is POE 2 trying to be even more niche?

I understand why it's done. Diablo-style isometric ARPGs do not have the same level of mechanical skill involved as Souls-likes. They are games primarily about stats and gear. So, they can not balance the combat in the same way. They can't provide the same feeling of accomplishment via in-the-moment reflexes and mechanical skill. It's more about time invested. But a lot of people simply don't like difficulty that just boils down to a long, drawn out slog. Progression is already incredibly slow in the game after about level 77-78 or so. There's no need to erase hours of progress with XP deletion on top of all of the other punishments. Or, at least, do what Souls does and give us some kind of opportunity to recover the lost XP before it's gone for good. Or cap the XP loss to only whatever was earned on that map instead of allowing it to drop below where you started on that map. Something....

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Farming exp to level 100 isn't skilful, it's monotonous. Especially since the game punishes you for trying to have fun with the rest of the game outside of easy to farm maps.

You're basically asking for rewards with no risks. Diablo 4 is more of a game for you.

I have done no such thing. That's your paranoia speaking.

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

I have done no such thing. That's your paranoia speaking.

Really? So what is your proposition for penalty on dying in the game then? Maps alone are not enough.

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avastcosmicarena#5899 wrote:

I love Souls-likes (not just From Software's games, but also Nioh 1/2, Lies of P, Mortal Shell, and other standouts in the genre) and difficult games, in general, but punishment like this just feels disrespectful, IMO.

Bringing up Souls and Nioh games feels strange, given how in those games if you fail to retrieve your body once after your death, you don't merely lose a little bit of your xp like in PoE, you lose ALL of it. Those games are much less forgiving when it comes to XP penalties yet you seem fine with that.

You have to understand the motivation of most of the "xp loss is gud" POE01 Vets. They had their little business in POE01 labeled "5 way carry".

There vision for POE02 is to establish those carry services here too. But if there are no more, by xp loss, frustrated "casuals" who seek their service, their whole businessmodel is in danger.

This has nothing to do with "body brigading". In the state the game is in right now, there are too many ways that you can die from without you really being responsible for it. And so for now the XP penalty is too harsh.

There are better ways to handle the XP penalty. With all the penalties that there are right now for dying in a map, losing all the XP points that you made in the current map would be enough. There could also be breakpoints in the XP scale that once you reach them, you cannot fall below them again. Your death just sets you back to the previous breakpoint. There are segments in the scale already - just make them a little wider and is should be fine. I'd like the idea of smaller progress inside the bigger progress of the XP scale.

I find over-leveling content boring, play SSF-style (in trade to guild with friends, but i never buy anything), and I enjoy the XP penalty.

I've died about 130 times on my 86 monk since level 1, probably 10-15 of those were post 70 and resulted in an XP penalty... Some strategicly occured when I had little XP in a new level, while others where just oops moments.

The XP penalty makes me reevaluate, and think about how I can play the game differently and/or gear differently to stop dying. If there was no XP penalty, people would be just headbutting into content and chain-dying while sill making progress -- which makes a very different feeling game.

I very much like that this XP penalty injects a bit of careful play to softcore, without anything like the HC penalty of full death.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Farming exp to level 100 isn't skillful, it's monotonous. Especially since the game punishes you for trying to have fun with the rest of the game outside of easy to farm maps.

You're basically asking for rewards with no risks. Diablo 4 is more of a game for you.

As pointed out time and again in this thread, no one is asking for this. This specific punishment (lets be serious, its not upping the "risk v reward" factor, it just punishes mistakes) just reduces enjoyment and replayability. People have offered a bunch of alternate death penalties, stop pretending like the only two options are "xp loss" or "game that is pathetically easy". There's so many options for a more fun middle ground. Its not the 00's anymore, we don't have to use outdated mechanics just cause they have always been used. XP debt alone fixes the biggest issue, that it makes you feel like you wasted hours for 0 progression.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Elden ring and all the souls games can be beaten in the dumbest ways imaginable if you got the skill.

Yeah, if you "got the skill". People who whine about challenge being boring are not very skilled players.

The current system encourages less skill, not more. Because it encourages over leveling, and slow play everyone who hits 100 just looks like they had tons of free time and nothing better to do. It makes you look less skillful, not more.

Also, need I remind everyone that Fromsoft games only got praised and truly popular when Bloodborne came out. You know, the game that removed shields and encourages aggressive, skillful play?