XP loss leads to player count loss.

We lose 4 hours of our xp bar, think we are staying to play for 4 more hours. Nope.

"See ya! Wouldn't wanna be ya!"

This design is 1999. It's time to get rid of it.

People want to BEAT a game. You set a bar at level 100. They realize it is not possible. Consumer is unsatisfied because they could not get the value out of game. You see they do not know that they are actually playing the game for currency, which is the real end game. They think they bought a video game to beat. My thought is you think that "They will stay until they get 100 no matter how hard it is." Which is not how the world works. There are 1000x more video game releases every day. They are gone, you cannot get them back. Ever.

My question to GGG would be: "Are you willing to die on this sword?" The player count is not showing this game to be a life changing ARPG. So you either give or our patience gives. It's going to be that simple for most of us.

I say this while full heartedly believing it has a place in PoE 1 (it's old). PoE 2. Nope not a chance. Not with this 1 portal garbage. Not if we are trying to EVOLVE ARPGs.'

I want to see this game have 1 million players. Even if I am not one of them. XP penalty alone will keep SO MANY players from staying and funding the game. Fact.

I quit PoE 1 several times due to this punishment. This means I left your game to give other companies money DIRECTLY due to xp loss. There is already a mental punishment to dying in a game. Yet you want to take it further. It's not how games are in 2025. They just aren't. So I really hope you can unplug parts of the vision for the health of the game. The mental health of it's players, and the only thing that matters to a business. The healthy amount of players (consumers). Let them all hit 100. No one thinks some streamer is cool because they can hit 100 and he cannot. There is no incentive except to punish the people funding the game.

Imagine dying on Call of Duty and they just straight take away your guns and revert your time spent getting them. TIME SPENT. That is what we are being robbed of here. A mechanic that makes people LOG OUT.

TLDR: Title

If you read this thanks. My interest in Path of Exile 2 would be 100 fold more if it was a game everyone got to 100 in. With a healthy player base. XP loss is not the way to that.

Yeah, I would attribute this ONE issue with the entirety of the player loss, but GGG has had a very strange fascination with making level 100 very difficult to hit.

The only official justification I've seen given from GGG is that tanks need some kind of advantage or everyone would just build zoom, but in the PoE 2 environment this doesn't really apply anymore.

They did a similar bad thing when they nerfed xp from 5-ways in PoE 1. It didn't change anything, just made it more expensive and time consuming to 5-way to 100.

Then they had the super fun shrine blasting strat, and they destroyed the scarabs and shrines that made that work too.

It's like they are obsessed with punishing you for doing challenging content that pushes the limits of your build with xp losses that are HOURS of farming per death.

It makes even less sense in PoE 2 where there are other consequences for dying such as losing the map, losing loot, losing events etc...

It seems like such an easy problem to fix by nerfing the loss or somehow mitigating the punishment, but that seems to be out of line with "the Vision"

Pretty sure "the Vision" will have this game dead by season 3 at this point, but I guess we'll see.

Yeah I agree with your thoughts as well. Such a shame this genre isn't evolving. Really thought this was going to be THE GAME. Like I really thought this was going to pull Lost Ark numbers. Then to see it die so fast. Sheesh. Sadness. Even worse how much I dislike the game as a whole. Just not worth finding fun if I am losing XP to things I can't ever see.

The punishing mechanics need toned down even after the patch. There are too many to list. There is a fine line between making the game hard and but rewarding versus just punishing players and driving them away. Right now for the majority of players the game is far too punishing and not remotely rewarding enough for the time invested in the game.

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Renegade_Archer#1313 wrote:

The punishing mechanics need toned down even after the patch. There are too many to list. There is a fine line between making the game hard and but rewarding versus just punishing players and driving them away. Right now for the majority of players the game is far too punishing and not remotely rewarding enough for the time invested in the game.

I beat Elden Ring this morning for the first time. That game had the best difficulty. Because you can see what you are against. So no matter how hard it is I have a chance. My favorite open world ARPG since Morrowind.
Then you have this game. No clue why I die. EVER. Totally clueless. Half my deaths I do not even have a mob on screen. It's crazy.

I know why I die in:

PoE 1 (75% of the time)
Grim Dawn (100% of the time)
D4 (100% of the time)
Last Epoch (90% of the time)
PoE 2 (10% of the time)

I don’t know what they were thinking but +1

This has not even been addressed during the patch stream

I want to see this game have 1 million players. Even if I am not one of them. XP penalty alone will keep SO MANY players from staying and funding the game. Fact.

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HeroEvermore#0498 wrote:

I want to see this game have 1 million players. Even if I am not one of them. XP penalty alone will keep SO MANY players from staying and funding the game. Fact.

Just wait until 150000 gamer dads who haven't beaten act 3 yet figure out their character gets deleted when the next season hits lol

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Gkek#1581 wrote:

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HeroEvermore#0498 wrote:

I want to see this game have 1 million players. Even if I am not one of them. XP penalty alone will keep SO MANY players from staying and funding the game. Fact.

Just wait until 150000 gamer dads who haven't beaten act 3 yet figure out their character gets deleted when the next season hits lol

I saw 10 in chat asking daily before I quit haha! When we told them there would be a wipe they called us liars. They think they bought a game to get to level 100 and beat. They have no idea what they bought. Heck I didn't either.

+1 this was a problem for me in POE 1 too. The game is the best in its class until you get to around 80 or so, then when you start losing hours of play time due to one death its VERY frustrating. Today I got close to 85 three times only to have a string of bad luck and died back to 84.5. No drops I could use and no progress. Its punishing enough to lose the resources you need to do maps high enough to level at all. It also makes me not want to try to take on extra content in the maps, because I am worried about the possibility of death. Please remove this barrier to fun at high levels.

If this is not an option can you at least make it so that each subsequent death is LESS punishing? For instance the first death might cost 15% xp but the next 10 and so on until its free, then when you get to the next level reset it to 15 again. At least this way those of us that do die alot can still make progress.

Thank you for making great games.