The reason why XP penalty exists and why it's not for everyone

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

And in PoE you lose nothing, if you are sensible you will nearly always roll safer map mods and pay attention when you're playing. And its very rare to die unless you're utterly careless. Don't believe me? Look at the Hardcore players.

wait, I just realized you've never even made it to max level and are telling people it's okay to lose xp lol. abysmal

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

What you're saying is to play safer content - ie: Avoid challenge.

If your goal is to get to the next level, yes. How is it the games fault if you're overjuicing a map to the point your build cannot handle it?

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

Except in Elden Ring you can also just keep trying the difficult stuff and pick your runes up every time, which is trivially easy. You could even grab them then homeward bone (or at least the ER equivalent whose name escapes me). Or wear the ring/charm/whateveritis that prevents loss. None of which I have felt the need to do because death really isn't punishing in the slightest in ER.

That heavily depends where you die and how. And again if you make a single mistake when retrieving the corpse, you lose all of your progress. All of it. So Elden Ring is not really a good comparison if you want to argue that XP penalty should not be a thing.

Diablo 2 also used to have a mechanic where you lose 50% of your XP on death but get most of it back if you touch your corpse. If you got torched by Uber-Diablo the moment you stepped through the Town Portal well tough luck, you just lost it all.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Battousai21#8595 wrote:

I see your point, and we can only agree to disagree. Each of us have it's own perception of what will be good for your experience. This is cool.

Thats understandable but just to enforce my point, just take a look at what happened to Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 where people reach the end of the game in less than 8 hours and theres no challenge whatsoever. Its one of those "you think you want that but you actually don't"-kind of things. Any game absolutely needs a penalty on death to keep players on their toes and to prevent unwanted player behaviour.

My favorite modern bad example is Dustborn, that little hipster game. Its not just a walking simulator it actually has combat segments. Except you can't actually lose those combat segments, you can intentionally lose and the punishment you get is a half a second cutscene of you getting back up. As a result nobody cares about the combat segments, they're boring and terrible because you can just win by spamming one button while not even looking at the screen. Because theres no challenge, all the "combat" is just a time wasting chore.

I don't have an input on D3 as I decided to take ARPG seriously (playing it in seasons) starting D4. I can definitely say in D4, it is the lack of content that pushed me to POE 2's direction. Not reaching 100 fast. On the contrary, reaching 100, making them gigachad, made me stay longer as I have freedom to experiment on builds and create new class that I can play on that season. It's just the lack of content that is sorely missing.

It's a bonus that i realized that POE 2 is more visually stunning, but it didn't disappoint (at least to me, as I see people still see otherwise) on the content. Stepping into level 100 can provide players a sense of milestone on the game, so hearing that xp penalty was there to mainly give challenge to the race to 100 seems to be for a specific people that wanted to "race". Hence, circling back again, polls would very much help get the temp on this. If GGG keeps on placing / removing mechanics based only on a small subset of player base, then that is not a good sign. D4 team hears their community, but only on small stuff. A lot has been asking about more content, and although they tried, they have failed to provide. Same thing can happen on ANY live service game -- fail to hear the voice of the majority, and the game will eventually die. Whether that majority falls in your favor or not, it has to be heard and addressed.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

brutally punishing XP loss mechanic

Talk about completely missing the point.

This is your statement, that in Elden Ring you 'lose hours of progress' when you die, and it has brutally punishing XP loss mechanic.

My point is you're making it up, ER has effectively 0 punishment for dying because runes are extremely easy to farm back, and in order to become more accessible it has the shortest/easiest boss runbacks in the entire DS franchise with checkpoints everywhere and in front of every boss room. That's also why ER has summons, to make casuals ENJOY THE GAME. If anything, ER vis-a-vis DS1-3 is the easiest (with summons, which again is a mechanism the game provides players to give them an easier time), least punishing and most accessible game in the series. PoE2 is by far the most punishing and least accessible in the genre.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

That heavily depends where you die and how. And again if you make a single mistake when retrieving the corpse, you lose all of your progress. All of it. So Elden Ring is not really a good comparison if you want to argue that XP penalty should not be a thing.

The reality is that doesn't happen often and only get less frequent as you learn the content. Even if you lose everything, you learned something about the content which you can use to do better next time. In POE2 you rarely learn anything useful and even if you did you can't go and try again.

Also the whole 'death drop' thing is a core mechanic of souls-likes, a defining feature which encourages a certain approach to the game. The XP loss is not remotely a core feature of POE2 - it's not mentioned in GGG's Pillars, and the game is a lot of fun pre-70 without it. The fun in no way increases when the XP loss kicks in, the game is absolutely fine without it.

But I actually agree - I don't think it's a good comparison either way. It's a very different gaming experience and the death mechanics are different. To me they feel much more forgiving, they actively encourage you to re-engage with the challenging content and if you're remotely careful you can heavily mitigate the risk while still having a challenge, if you wish. In POE2 the only way to mitigate the risk is to remove the challenge entirely.

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Diablo 2 also used to have a mechanic where you lose 50% of your XP on death but get most of it back if you touch your corpse. If you got torched by Uber-Diablo the moment you stepped through the Town Portal well tough luck, you just lost it all.

Yes, D2 was even worse than both games. It was a bad feature then and it's still a bad feature today.

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Battousai21#8595 wrote:

If GGG keeps on placing / removing mechanics based only on a small subset of player base, then that is not a good sign. D4 team hears their community, but only on small stuff. A lot has been asking about more content, and although they tried, they have failed to provide. Same thing can happen on ANY live service game -- fail to hear the voice of the majority, and the game will eventually die. Whether that majority falls in your favor or not, it has to be heard and addressed.

Reaching level 100 is definitely supposed to be a long-term goal that is mostly unreachable for most players. If you look at PoE 1 characters each League, or even just Diablo 2 you'll notice the average level of players is roughly 92-97 before they quit playing. League after League PoE has gained more and more players despite of that so I don't think its a game-killing issue by any means.

One has to remember PoE is not like D3 where dungeons are infinite. Monster level caps around 81 and you need some extra tricks to make it higher than that. You are going to overlevel the content of the game eventually. The endgame is not infinite, it is finite and it does have an end. But it is very hard to reach the absolute end of that content. IMO thats a much better system than infinitely scaling content where nothing changes, just the numbers go up arbitrarily.

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

The reality is that doesn't happen often and only get less frequent as you learn the content. Even if you lose everything, you learned something about the content which you can use to do better next time. In POE2 you rarely learn anything useful and even if you did you can't go and try again.

But thats simply not true. You learn how to build better, you learn which bosses are more dangerous than others. You learn to prepare for certain encounters that were a big trouble the last time. The exact same learning curve is still there. Your builds gets more refined over the years.

And if you think D2 is terrible, then I'm sorry to say that GGG disagrees. They're a company made entirely out of D2 fanboys. PoE would not exist without D2. D2 design is the core philosophy of PoE and you're just going to have to get used to that because the developers are not going to get rid of their fanboyism of that game.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

But yes, in POE2 you can avoid this awful mechanic by not engaging with fun content and just doing safe boring stuff for hours on end. That is the entire problem right there. It doesn't let you engage with challenging content.

XP penalty does allow you to engage more challenging content in PoE 2 though. I would argue losing progress on the pinnacle boss quest is a much bigger problem and needs some tuning.

Maybe that is even worse, I won't argue about that. It doesn't mean XP loss is good though. You can't justify one bad feature by pointing to a worse one.

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XP penalty has never been a problem, it wasn't a problem in D2, it wasn't a problem in PoE 1, and it isn't a problem here.

Maybe not for you, but the fact is we don't know how much more or less successful they would have been without. There is a very strong case to be made that POE1 would have been more successful earlier on if it had not had this feature. I can anecdotally state for a fact that it is absolutely a problem for me in all three games. Actually least so in POE2 because the rest of the game is so much better than the others.

There is a reason most games don't do it - because most players hate it.

So, if GGG want to limit POE2 to pretty much the same demographic as POE1 that's their choice. But I don't believe so, I believe they want to attract new players, and most of them will not put up with this.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Battousai21#8595 wrote:

If GGG keeps on placing / removing mechanics based only on a small subset of player base, then that is not a good sign. D4 team hears their community, but only on small stuff. A lot has been asking about more content, and although they tried, they have failed to provide. Same thing can happen on ANY live service game -- fail to hear the voice of the majority, and the game will eventually die. Whether that majority falls in your favor or not, it has to be heard and addressed.

Reaching level 100 is definitely supposed to be a long-term goal that is mostly unreachable for most players. If you look at PoE 1 characters each League, or even just Diablo 2 you'll notice the average level of players is roughly 92-97 before they quit playing. League after League PoE has gained more and more players despite of that so I don't think its a game-killing issue by any means.

One has to remember PoE is not like D3 where dungeons are infinite. Monster level caps around 81 and you need some extra tricks to make it higher than that. You are going to overlevel the content of the game eventually. The endgame is not infinite, it is finite and it does have an end. But it is very hard to reach the absolute end of that content. IMO thats a much better system than infinitely scaling content where nothing changes, just the numbers go up arbitrarily.

The way as it is, even without the XP penalty, getting to 100 is much likely 3x to 4x longer than D4. Why is it so taboo for POE players reaching 100? Will it destroy the economy or something? I don't think so. It only caters to those "racers" to 100. Why gatekeep this milestone to other players who doesn't care to race? We go back to basics of gaming where it should provide players some sense of achievement. People will to git gud or be an expert to avoid the xp penalty, the thing is, being an expert on a game usually applies to fighting games, or racing, or FPS shooters.. this is an ARPG in which you just grind to get XP and get great gears.

It's clear that our thoughts and ideas will never meet. Again, let's just agree to disagree. I respect your point on this, and we can just both hope GGG will do what's best for their community.