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

"

toxiitea#5772 wrote:

thanks for telling me you don't even read before you complain.. GG no engaging with this one. cheers bro

It's a common tactic of people with no arguments. Only reply to and attack the parts you can blow out of proportion, and steer the discussion away from actual arguments with sarcasm and ridicule.

People like that are not interested in having a discussion, only in being right and "winning the argument". Pointless to argue with.

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

"

toxiitea#5772 wrote:

thanks for telling me you don't even read before you complain.. GG no engaging with this one. cheers bro

Thanks for convincing me that you didn't play Elden Ring yourself and was probably carried by summons all the way through.

the funny thing is you haven't talked about how brutalizing it is as a player to die. you just keep talking about "getting good"

how do you get good when its your first citadel and then you die to a oneshot? how do I "get good" after I just lost 10% xp and a rng citadel. do you see the difference of "running back to get souls" vs "player automatically loses 2 days progession."

these are completely different things.

also please don't do a bullhead troll comment/ this is a section for feedback or engagement to a topic about xp loss. if you disagree you don't need to shout your "get good" to the void.

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

"

Mouser#2899 wrote:

What about each time you died to a boss in Elden Ring you had to go to another area and farm for half an hour to get a token to allow you to fight again?

Elden Ring can remove ALL of your XP if you fail to retrieve your corpse. Thats hours upon hours of time completely wasted. It is much less forgiving XP penalty system and I find it funny that you're trying to use it as an example of people not appreciating death XP penalties.

That is complete nonsense and shows you lack even the basic understanding of souls games. Rune farming is extremely easy in Elden Ring, especially once you unlock Mohg's palace and can farm the bird by making it fall of the cliff. This can be accessed fairly early on even for a so called casual and requires 0 skill, and this is something FromSoft never patched or changed, so it's accepted. The vast majority of ER's 15-20 million copies sold are casual players and since they don't do NG+, so farming that bird for 2-3mins gives you the same XP as defeating a major end game boss. Once you beat Elden Beast and have the golden sword, you have an even faster farm that gives you 150K+ runes per minute so you don't even care about runes from defeating enemies anymore.

NOBODY in Elden Ring GIVES A SHIT about losing the runes after the first zone or two. Even if you cared, just run back and pick it up. Most people who aren't slow in the head learn to use their runes before a hard boss, especially people who know they aren't that skilled in the game so are going to die a lot. Most people when they reach Caelid are pretty used to have 0 runes when fighting bosses. Anyone who gets to the
mid-game stops caring about runes at all when dying. So stop making false comparisons.

Elden Ring also got rid of almost all the annoying boss runbacks from DS games. Back in DS2 some boss runbacks were so deliberately designed to annoy you and waste your time they would fit right at home with PoE2's alleged design philosophy. ER got rid of all of them. When you die, you actually lose NOTHING and you're encouraged to IMMEDIATELY TRY AGAIN. That's how casuals beat the game, by trying on the same boss for hours, dying dozens of times but LOSE NOTHING when then die, until they finally succeed. I have stopped playing poe2 since Dec 27th because as is it's a pointless waste of time and don't want to feed the forum trolls, but when someone brings up Elden Ring and starts making things up, this warrants a correction.

"

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.

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

"

Orion_3T#9801 wrote:

You can only possibly lose what you were carrying, which if you are sensible will nearly always be less than 1 level of runes. And it's very rare to not get them back unless you are utterly careless.

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.

Your comparison can be used in PoE as well. If you say that losing a corpse in Elden Ring is your own fault, then losing XP in PoE is also your own fault. Learn to play the game more safely.

Well in both game you lose nothing at all if you only play safe boring content.

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.

In Elden Ring you can absolutely engage with it, and are even encouraged to do so because that's where your dropped runes are. Just remember to grab them and/or spend them before you go through a fog gate.

"

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.

Your comparison can be used in PoE as well. If you say that losing a corpse in Elden Ring is your own fault, then losing XP in PoE is also your own fault. Learn to play the game more safely.

Do you actually play? hardcore players use pause macros like their life depended on it and it's even bled it's way into softcore because it's so effective

"

z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

That is complete nonsense and shows you lack even the basic understanding of souls games. Rune farming is extremely easy in Elden Ring, especially once you unlock Mohg's palace and can farm the bird by making it fall of the cliff.

Your argument boils down to: "XP penalty is fine in this other game as long as you farm in this very specific place at very specific time in a very specific way", that is a pointless argument because new players have no way of knowing farm cheese strats without watching walkthroughs. Theres plenty of ways to trivialize XP gain in PoE 1 as well yet people still whine about xp loss.

In Elden Ring you put up and shut up and learned to play around the brutally punishing XP loss mechanic in the game. In PoE 2 you would rather turn the game into a Cookie Clicker than go through that same learning process again.

"

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.

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

How so? If you're playing Softcore, then you can simply do the same thing you're doing in Elden Ring, and level up before a big jump in challenge, that way you don't lose anything if you die. Both XP penalties in both games can be prevented by just farming safer areas until you level up.

You're proving my point.

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

Bosses should require multiple deaths to see all the mechanics and figure them out. Then you have to come up with the plan to overcome them and execute it near flawlessy.

THAT is a challenging game, but the devs can't make that kind of challenge because of all the punishments they've added to dying.

If normal players (not the top 10% playing eight hours a day, and not the bottom 10% logging on for a couple of hours on the weekend) can regulaatrly clear bosses and go ten maps or more without a death, the game is not challenging.

[[Edit: And in games like Elden Ring, once you pay the penalty for dying once, you can fight the boss as many times as you want for free. You aren't punished for every failure.]]

Balancing around hardcore survival makes softcore a much easier game.

One-life play should be a challenge where most players will not reach the endgame on most runs.

Roll a character, play as far as you get, die, restart the loop. Lather, rinse, repeat. Equip the next character with the gear you acquired to make that run a little easier.

Reaching max level in one-life should be a real requiring hundreds of hours to master the game and then many attempts to achieve. It should require exemplary play, great strategy, and at least a little bit of luck.

"

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. 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.

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

"

Mouser#2899 wrote:

The punishment in PoE 2 teaches you to avoid challenging content and stick to maps and modifiers you know you can clear.

How so? If you're playing Softcore, then you can simply do the same thing you're doing in Elden Ring, and level up before a big jump in challenge, that way you don't lose anything if you die. Both XP penalties in both games can be prevented by just farming safer areas until you level up.

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.

In POE2 you are basically forced not to do that. There is no returning to the same encounter at all, and certainly no way to quickly get back what you lost.

There is also a different feeling about ER in that levelling has huge diminishing returns as you start to hit soft caps. Yes POE2 has diminishing returns on the passive tree also as most bonuses are additive but they are still way more impactful than on a high level ER character.

And take longer to get, in most cases.