death penalty, race to 100: philosophical conflicts?

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

lol have you even played on HC back in the day? vast majority of skills were not utilized. at all, well maybe with totems. and even later speed was survability here because its who taps who first.

HC is not really worth mentioning....it is a special beast with its own set of rules. None of these "death penalties" are anywhere remotely near Perma-death HC. And no....once again I disagree with your assertion. Those who truly enjoy HC don't play the same single build every time they play HC: they try tons of DIFFERENT builds to see how far they can get. You might be right in terms of leaderboards, but not overall skill usage. Once again.....a very very small percentage of players, even amongst the already very small HC community.

You cannot, absolutely cannot, have a discussion on death penalties while including HC in the mix. A penalty implies an "after" whereas the entire mode of HC IS the death. Its not a penalty, its just instant game over. The whole playstyle is centered around not dying, because there is no "after death". Whereas non-hardcore is centered around expecting to die, and what you do after it happens.

there is nothing wrong with using HC to illustrate the trend this will create. HC is nothing more but an extreme case of 'what do you after you die'. after HC we had a Soft-core 'path of health nodes' era. it was a trend much like HC but not as extreme. Giving people one go coupled with bricking mechanic for all endgame content with XP penalty doesn't sounds hard/difficult. it sounds like forced HC elements. we have one go content here- delve/lab/sanctum. but we have a choice. this game is notorious for killing you without your fault. Even if they solve this and somehow end up with 95% cases of death being your fault you still have a network quality issue- yes they did mention DCs but you don't always DC, you get lag spikes especially when shit like ritual/deli vomit mobs on your screen. also for some reason this game will keep your connection for up to 40s before determining its a DC. we had a thread about it but nothing was done about it since. But sure lets try the 1 portal+brick+xp penbalty... why not

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

HC is nothing more but an extreme case of 'what do you after you die'.

But its not....and that is what makes all the difference in the world. There is no "after death" in HC. Death is it. Game over. The entire character is in the trash. It is not an extreme case, it is a separate entity altogether. That's like saying a spaceship is simply an extreme version of a car.

Death in "softcore", even with the most strict penalty possible will never ever be hardcore. Bricking a map is incomparable to losing a character. Even if the penalty were dumping all your items after death, it is still incomparable to hardcore. If you continue playing your HC character in softcore after death, you are no longer playing hc...nor were you ever truly playing hardcore. The mode ends with death.

There is a steep steep steep rolloff between what happens in hardcore vs. what would ever happen in softcore, no matter what the penalty may be.

i mean, yeah if you un-install the game after you die. my bad didn't account for that. spaceship is an extreme case of a plane, where an extreme case of a car is a DeLorean, get your analogies straight.

you taking the HC comparison too literally- its about the playstyle hence i mentioned the HP nodes era. its how you approach the game. if you will stop progressing in the game til you adopt no death mentality you will end up with a very similar play style. if you don't understand this i don't think you ever played HC. but don't worry, we all fondly remember farming docks/catacombs instead of mapping because you were either scared to open one or waiting in SC to be 20 levels over Izaro. oddly similar scenarios don't you think? I wonder why that is

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Uhhh dying is definitely learning in this game. Its up to the player should they choose to learn from it or not though.

Learn what, exactly? No floating damage numbers, no death log, no "last 2 seconds of combat" log, sometimes (not always) not even a visual clue to why you've died. In poe1, buckling up one group of resistances still won't save you from another random death in juiced content. And juiced content is the only way to get rewards.

Souls games have no randomized damage on both you and enemies, and even bosses AI logic tree can be memorized if you're really into it. Poe1 is all about randomness, not player actions, which is why is isn't equipped to support steep death penalty.

In race events penalty may be fine, since race is an ego contest to begin with. But enforcing penalty in generic softcore gameplay is just GGG shooting themselves in the leg without a clear benefit in sight. Aside of bringing said ego contest in softcore too. Which is perfectly illustrated by some comments here:)

So far, based on available information, poe2 seems to be heading down the same road as poe1 balance-wise.

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Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

Terrible comparison. Controller support was added for access to play the game. That’s not game design or philosophy, that’s accessibility.


Pleasing, or attempting, to please a broad audience is always riskier and usually a failure. Not just in gaming but in business. Having a more narrow audience or customer base is always a better option, distinguishing oneself is better than being the same as everyone else. This is, again why, D4 fails so miserably, they try to please everyone and end up pleasing nearly no one(as seen by retail WoW as well)

You don’t know what learning a boss will be like yet. You haven’t played the game, much less mapping. So you should hold off whether it’s enjoyable or not until you …. Actually know

the reason d4 fails is absolutely not to cater to a wider audience. d2 was extremely casual friendly. Normal and nightmare are extremely accessible for everyonge. No the reason is they cant stop shoving their ideoligical bullshit , the higher ups hates 90% of their customer base and they hire terrible junior devs to cut corners and make the most amount of profit for the lowest cost possible.
noone can make a good game with these constraints.

there are plenty of games that cater to the masses and are successful.

as for removing the xp penalty, i think the one try map and one try bosses are way way way worse. because it bricks the fun of the game. xp penalty in poe for instance is not a fundamental problem by itself. if you consider 4% per point, it s around 40% more damage that you re lacking. nothing game breaking. Sure those points are sweet. But if your build has a lot of strength, it wont ruin the fun.

[edit] 10 levels at 4%

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

So the talk Jonathan had with gazzy and darth recently it was asked now that dying in a map is very punishing do we need death penalty? i think theres philosophical conflicts here in the design intentions.




jonathan talked about still needing an xp death penalty because of the race to 100, how legit is the race if the person winning it can die 1000 times just zerg running content with mass dps vs making a proper build and playing properly to get there? this was the thinking behind still having the penalty.


the reason for the highly punishing death mechanic in maps is so that you cant run 75% of a rare valuable node, intentionally die and then get to rerun the first 75% of it over and over.

Didn't they say you are locked out of that node and have to path your way around the bricked node now?
This means the guy with proper build won't die and gets to the juicy part of the "Atlas" faster

everybody use
"Cast when Damage Taken Support--More Duration Support--Immortal Call"

The death mechanism definitely has major issues in poe1, such as the lack of feedback during death or the damage mechanics of the monsters. If players are required to copy powerful builds from the NINJA just to defeat all boss, this really needs to be addressed. However, this may not be a problem that can be solved by just fixing the death penalty alone.

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

i mean, yeah if you un-install the game after you die. my bad didn't account for that. spaceship is an extreme case of a plane, where an extreme case of a car is a DeLorean, get your analogies straight.

you taking the HC comparison too literally- its about the playstyle hence i mentioned the HP nodes era. its how you approach the game. if you will stop progressing in the game til you adopt no death mentality you will end up with a very similar play style. if you don't understand this i don't think you ever played HC. but don't worry, we all fondly remember farming docks/catacombs instead of mapping because you were either scared to open one or waiting in SC to be 20 levels over Izaro. oddly similar scenarios don't you think? I wonder why that is

You are describing a very unique kind of player here, while ignoring the thousands of other possibilities that were used back then, and now. Again, using extreme extremes to illustrate a point that doesn't exist. I played back then, I remember the runs. To be honest, I think I remember it a bit better than you....it wasn't "fear of death" that caused players to run docks over and over again. It was enemy density, clear speed, and rewards. That is a separate problem. Early maps were too sparse and offered no better rewards than the docks, so people played docks. Additionally, the "health node" craze existed for a short time because collectively the playerbase wasn't "good enough" yet to glass cannon things, or the benefits to dropping defense and adding attack were negligible at the time. Back then, the changes between full glass and tank were in the single digit percentages, not the 10x/100x differences of today. But I vividly remember less than a year into the full release of the game, the glass cannons beginning to shine. Less than a year. And yet....builds were NOT limited. People chose to play glass cannons just as often as they chose to play tanks, and everything in between. The block tank gladiator was one of the top tier classes, despite it being one of the slowest clears available at the time.

All that being said, there SHOULD be a level of fear around tackling new and harder content. Otherwise, all the game becomes is an auto-battler. Death shows you that your character is "not ready" for something. But death alone has been proven to not have the desired effect in arpgs because of "corpse-running". Thus, a penalty associated with death becomes necessary to actually drive home the idea that you cannot brute force your way through all levels of difficulty in the game.

Through the development of PoE 1, it has been shown that 6 portals and 10% exp simply did not have the desired effect of deterring glass cannon no-defense builds. It certainly wasn't just the penalties that weighed into this, but they definitely played a role. You can still farm too much with a gimped character. So they are making the punishments harsher. So sure, perhaps this limits build diversity insomuch as requiring builds to think more about balance in passives and gearing, but it almost certainly won't limit skill usage.

The reason why hardcore is not worth mentioning in this argument is, again, that there is nothing after death. Corpse running is not an issue. Heck, penalties and reinforcement plays no role. Because when you are dead, you are DEAD. This will never be the case in non-hc. It is a completely different game, with a different set of rules and approaches. Death penalty + hardcore is completely incompatible in a reasonable argument.

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

Souls games have no randomized damage on both you and enemies, and even bosses AI logic tree can be memorized if you're really into it. Poe1 is all about randomness, not player actions, which is why is isn't equipped to support steep death penalty.

souls games can have two dogs combo lock you with circumstantial frame timing because you ended up in a corner, its no different to PoE.

If you think there is nothing to be learned from character death in PoE its because you aren't looking not because there isn't anything to learn - you can and should learn how to play HC from dying, iterating, improving then dying again.

This is why when shown a clip an overwhelming majority of the time experienced players, and i'm including SC players in this, can tell what killed the player in said clip. You get really challenging ones usually to do with desynch on previous skills but only the toughest make it to forums to be questioned anyway.

A vast majority will be an instantaneous answer, usually before the death has even happened.

My stance on this has changed somewhat. I was in the "anti death penalty" camp before, but having played more builds and experimented more I have analyzed why I felt like 95-100 felt both this important AND frustrating at the same time.

Important, because mostly of "damn, I want to fit another jewel" or "ah, there's a juicy +20% of whatever" node I want to reach, and at 99 or 100 I could do it.

Frustrating, because there was this point of "diminishing endgame enjoyability" when trying to race to 100 - my last proper character, an RF chieftain, I could have pushed, but it would have been a boring process, because it would have meant "play it safe for endless hours".

Having spoken to my therapist (yes, this came up in one of our sessions, because he knows how important gaming is for me) I was able to reframe it.

1. The last 1-2 nodes are a reward for playing REALLY well, something I aspire to of course, but I'm not there yet - and I need to measure my progress as a player of PoE by my own toons being better with each league I participate in and stop comparing myself to the top 1%

2. It is NOT boring, when I stop expecting something, instead I go where my current skills take me (94 is easy for me, 98 is doable) and from there seize the opportunity to learn to "game the game", adopt a more "Larian-y" style of playing this game in the future (meaning: in Larian games a lot of the fun comes from seizing sometimes crazy opportunities and using your wits and ability to think outside of the box and thereby exploit synergies, instead of brute forcing) and stop playing this game as a grind machine like "Diablo 3" (where I originally came from)

Ok, so I'm mostly a noob in this game but I can reach 98 now without it feeling like a chore.

One day 99 will be within my reach before the pain is stronger than the joy.

And everyone has their own approach and speed. I may never be like the great guy who invented the RF builds (khazzy?), but I will grow with every season towards what MY best PoE gaming ability is.