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

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cynic1984#0395 wrote:

do all the hardcore enjoyers just over level and play it safe and never take risks or have any fun? honest question

Anyone of them not playing some meta OP build, Yes, they literally run logout macros, avoid most map suffixes and boss nodes that can one shot you

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

It's also a fallacy to claim there is a correct way to play.

Yes, THERE IS a correct way to play the game : by not dying. In most video games that is the basic norm. I don't care if you play low levels, mid, high tiers of difficulties, with glasscanons, tanks, summoners, or whatever ; as long as you don't die, you are doing something correctly : as in, playing the game in its intended form.

Saying otherwise, as in : "people should be able to die as much as they want - while still progressing and having fun" is wrong on so many levels.

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Robotukas#1808 wrote:

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Rivance#3976 wrote:

"This game is the dark souls of the arpg genre! It's so hard and fun!!!" and "Never, ever do aspirational content where you risk dying." certainly go together like peanut butter and jelly for some of you folks. You can't have it both ways. Either it's a hard game and pushing yourself should be rewarding, or it's an easy game and choosing to do content that might actually kill you is a mistake.

Go to play hardcore mode. What are you doing in softcore mode?

I don't think you understood the point Robotukas was trying to make.

They are rightly pointing out that many people argue that people only want rid of the XP loss because they don't want to be challenged. And POE2 is supposed to be a challenging game. They then explain that the way to avoid the XP loss is to play easy content where you won't die.

Those arguments are contradictory because playing easy content removes the gameplay challenge, it doesn't add to it.

Unless you are only referring to your capacity to spend time and be patient as a challenge. Which it may well be, but not a particularly enjoyable one for many players.

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InvRnd#4436 wrote:

Sometimes you will die no matter what you do. And when you do, you loose days of progression, that sucks a bag of cocks. Which part doesn't get through your forehead?

You say that as there's a High level hardcore players so you are objectively wrong as they have put in hundreds if not close to a thousand hours of not dieing to get to where they are

You most likely die because you took risky mods that you believed you could handle or faced a boss that you didn't think could one shot you

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dwqrf#0717 wrote:

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

It's also a fallacy to claim there is a correct way to play.

Yes, THERE IS a correct way to play the game : by not dying. In most video games that is the basic norm. I don't care if you play low levels, mid, high tiers of difficulties, with glasscanons, tanks, summoners, or whatever ; as long as you don't die, you are doing something correctly : as in, playing the game in its intended form.

I wasn't referring to the gameplay element but the overall approach to playing a game. Of choosing what difficulty of content they find gives a good balance between being enjoyable and being efficient. There is a difference between not dying too often and not dying at all. I thought that was obvious but perhaps not.

Not dying because you only play easy content is different from not dying because you are skillful and can complete challenging content. Most games challenge players to achieve something difficult without dying. POE2 endgame 'challenges' players to spend lots of time doing something easy without dying.

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Saying otherwise, as in : "people should be able to die as much as they want - while still progressing and having fun" is wrong on so many levels.

Saying people should be able to choose to play more challenging content with an exciting gameplay challenge is not the same as saying people should be able to "die as much as they want" which implies successfully completing content is rare.

It's a strawman - nobody is going to only attempt content they cannot even complete at least some of the time. Not because pretty much nobody finds that fun, but because there are other better systems in place which make it unsustainable - namely waystones. Which some find difficult to sustain even if rarely dying.

But honestly, even if I were to grant that some people would literally fail everything they tried, why should it bother anyone else that they are still getting some small trickle of XP? It's never going to be efficient, they are never going to win any race this way. They might eventually get to 100 if they are suckers for punishment, but if they do it will have taken them orders of magnitude more time to do so.

And again, there are other better disincentives in the game. There is no need to worry that 'dying all the time' will ever become an efficient strategy for success. Even in games with very little punishment for dying, dying 'all the time' is still not a successful strategy.

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

Saying people should be able to choose to play more challenging content with an exciting gameplay challenge is not the same as saying people should be able to "die as much as they want" which implies successfully completing content is rare.

It is exactly the same and you keep arguing this in circles because you're upset that when you take a risk you might actually get punished for it. Simple fact is you only want high rewards with zero risks and the proof is that you're trying to argue that risks should not exist in the game.

Juicing a map is designed to be dangerous. You are taking a conscious, willing risk of getting amazing rewards for the risk of extra hard difficulty. If theres no penalty for dying, then there is no risk whatsoever with juicing and the best way to play the game becomes kamikaze gameplay where you die 2000 times in ultra-juiced maps per hour.

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xpose#1651 wrote:

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cynic1984#0395 wrote:

do all the hardcore enjoyers just over level and play it safe and never take risks or have any fun? honest question

Anyone of them not playing some meta OP build, Yes, they literally run logout macros, avoid most map suffixes and boss nodes that can one shot you

So you mean being careful with their choices as they're meant to. Playing smart, knowing your build's strengths and weaknesses, knowing what you can or cannot do IS the only challenge in the game. Once you're in a map, it's just one button gameplay and sometimes you just die and the only way for you to avoid dying was to NOT run this map with these affixes. By saying "remove XP penalty" you don't want challenge because there's no challenge, you want to play risky content without actually taking any risks.

If you play, say, Europa Universalis, you don't complain that AI can take your provinces as a result of a war that you started, a stupid and archaic mechanic that just prevents you from starting risky wars.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

Saying people should be able to choose to play more challenging content with an exciting gameplay challenge is not the same as saying people should be able to "die as much as they want" which implies successfully completing content is rare.

It is exactly the same and you keep arguing this in circles because you're upset that when you take a risk you might actually get punished for it. Simple fact is you only want high rewards with zero risks and the proof is that you're trying to argue that risks should not exist in the game.

Absolutely not what I am arguing for - I don't want zero risk, I don't care about the rewards I care about the gameplay, and I'm not 'upset'. Thinking that losing XP from previous successes is a bad feature isn't remotely the same as saying there should be zero risk. Lots of other things are at risk:

- Your time, even just that required to open a new map
- Your waystones
- Your precursor mods
- Map mechanics (Delirium etc)
- Loot on the floor

I haven't argued against any of those things, so to strawman me as "you only want high rewards for zero risk" is at best a complete misunderstanding and at worst disingenuous. I think most likely you are conflating me with someone else. To avoid this I would suggest only arguing against the actual content of the post you are partially quoting.

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Juicing a map is designed to be dangerous. You are taking a conscious, willing risk of getting amazing rewards for the risk of extra hard difficulty. If theres no penalty for dying, then there is no risk whatsoever with juicing and the best way to play the game becomes kamikaze gameplay where you die 2000 times in ultra-juiced maps per hour.

Of course there's a risk - you lose all of the above and if you die early in the map all that juicing and setup was for nothing. Wasted tablet mods, wasted waystone mods and any currency you used to modify them, loss of the map mechanics etc.

There may be people who argue for removal of all those things as well as the XP loss, I'm not one of them.

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

Absolutely not what I am arguing for - I don't want zero risk, I don't care about the rewards I care about the gameplay, and I'm not 'upset'. Thinking that losing XP from previous successes is a bad feature isn't remotely the same as saying there should be zero risk. Lots of other things are at risk:

- Your time, even just that required to open a new map
- Your waystones
- Your precursor mods
- Map mechanics (Delirium etc)
- Loot on the floor

With current drop rates thats not punishment enough. With your suggestion GGG would have to severely nerf Waypoint sustain so that you would be extremely lucky to get to highest tier maps at all. That has already been a thing back when Atlas was first introduced and nobody liked being stuck on the same low tier maps for a long time.

Watch the patch interview again. Jonathan points out the XP penalty system is there to discourage people from rushing into maps their builds cannot handle. Without that system you will immediatly rush to high tier maps to die repeatedly because you end up with more xp and loot anyway.

This already happened back in Path of Exile 1 Alpha when map system didn't even exist and endgame was a bunch of connected levels with doorways to next Tier. Every single player just immediatly rushed to the highest tier only to die repeatedly and then complain here how the game is too difficult. Nobody even thought of spending more time in lower tier areas first until their builds were ready for higher tier ones.

You keep arguing that its not true with an excuse that penalty for dying is "not fun gameplay". Everyone with half of a brain disagrees because insufficient penalties for failure mean that the game does not have any real challenge at all. To get rid of XP penalty would mean GGG would have to nerf loot drop rates to oblivion and make all monsters and bosses ten times more difficult than they are right now.

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Gang5ter15#1071 wrote:

I cant emphasize enough how wrong this is for POE 2 in the current game. Youre premis is that you can outscale the enemies in POE 2. You cant.
People with Level 99 in the hardcore Ladder are dying. You wanna tell me those people did not outscale the enemies? They are almost 20 Levels above the enemy they have some of the best equipment possible, but they are dying. They achieved the so called win condition.

Again some people are blaming the XP penalty when your real complaint is poor balance at endgame (they threw it together in a couple months by their own admission)

POE2 is supposed to have good "time til death" design by "at least double that of POE1" according to Johnathan. So anywhere thats not true is just a failing on GGG's part to balance the game properly. I would support Feedback about bad TTD balance.

I'm not going to get into what level 99 is like in HC because I don't have personal experience with my internet and certainly wouldn't be that high up even if I did. I'm not a good enough player for that mode, so I don't play it. I just accept my time/skill/attention span short comings. The same way that I do when I get XP penalty more than once or twice, and go grind instead of bashing my face into a wall of XP penalty.

But I doubt the top HC players would agree with your take. Watching Alk try to make a 8,000 Life Stacker Gemling with a corrupted 5 socket version of that chest a couple days back, and I've seen 18,000-20,000 ES HC characters. So I seriously doubt it can't be out-scaled not going to go look at the ladder to see if there's any 100's yet when thats besides the point.

Even if thats the case, it's a balance issue. I'm sure life based builds die all the time in HC endgame because that eHP strategy is terribly designed by GGG and is mostly trash. I would be very surprised if high ES and EV builds can't out scale HC.

Regardless Removing the consequences for bad design just makes it easier for GGG to ignore those mistakes (or not recognize them as mistakes, which is a consistent problem GGG displays over and over again). It does not lead to a better game. Just a game with less consequences.