Quite a bit of reasons why XP Death Penalty has got to go

I believe this is an objective flaw of the endgame experience. In its current state this penalty breaks the game. The possible justifications for it are flawed and the problems it is appears to be intended to solve can be solved in other ways. It greatly contradicts the rest of the design of the game and also the intended vision.

Technical Reasons

The current state of the game is not stable. While this is somewhat to be expected due to it being Early Access, this still means crashes and other unintended surprises are common place. This means that regardless of how well you play the game. If you use a theoretical build that has perfect defense for the Waystone level. And your brain state is at 100% and not prone to mistakes. You will still die to technical problems or balance glitches.

More so. Assuming these issues are dealt with before the first release. One thing that is not going to change is the game's status as an always-online game that needs constant synchronization with an external server. Many aspects outside of both the player and GGG's control can negatively impact the online connection and cause deaths.

"The Vision"

Regardless of what anyone believes of "the vision" or if it is even a thing. We do see the tendency to talk about a the intention for combat to have meaningful steps. Things to be setup and combo-based. The comparison with soulslike is also thrown quite a few of times.

The Death Penalty discourages Meaningful Combat and forces the player towards play based around stats superiority. The more meaningful combat is, the greater the room for making a mistake. When there's a lot of steps that require proper setup and execution, there's more room for screwing up the setups. A solution to this problem is to git good and do perfect setups and executions all of the time. But another solution is to avoid that kind of combat and rely as much as possible on instant executions that don't have such a room for mistake. The XP Loss pushes you towards the former. The risk of an elegant combat technique that requires you to be on your full senses 100% of your time or risk losing a big chunk of progress means you'll play it safer.

In regards to souls comparison. An understated part of souls-like design is the way players are trained to take Death as just part of the game loop. You failed and you just need to try again. I personally believe that this is a mentality that's quite compatible with ARPGs, as that's often how I try to approach them. This is how I approach the game before the endgame. But once the XP Loss is instated, it's impossible to have this outlook anymore. Death cannot be normalized because it can mean losing hours or even days in progress.

Player frustration

XP loss in this implementation feels bad and is demoralizing. For the most part, XP is one of the few things that guarantee an upgrade. If you play for a lot of time and get item drops, there's actually some chance you are just unlucky and won't manage to score a real power boost from those drops. This becomes more and more likely as power increases and items become more difficult to upgrade. This puts a lot of emphasis on XP gain as possibly the only way you'll see a power boost in a while.

Experimentation

An important aspect of progressing in the game is to come up with new builds or changes to your current build. You need to test these things out and see if they actually work. The problem is that these tests cannot be done without risking losing a lot of progress.

- You could go to the Black chambers using a waypoint. But the Black chambers are level 64. After enough progression, level 64 starts to look way too weak versus the level you are currently stuck at.
- Even in the Black Chambers, a random hiccup with your connection or a distraction can cause you to die and lose XP. Specially if you are experimenting a new build which could actually have blind spots.

The result is that Experimentation is discouraged. This has a further effect on player frustration. As you cannot find diversions in your build, you are still heavily dependent on level gain for a power boost.

What's the point of hardcore?

A staple of ARPG is the hardcore mode. But the heavy XP penalties take away from the HC experience.


XP Bar Randomness
In its current design, your XP right after gaining a level versus the XP right before gaining a level make the game feel completely different. The closer you are to the next level the worse it feel to die. This makes the stakes appear random and asymetric.

Build diversity

Related to the point about 'meaningful combat'. Really bad penalties make any sort of risk feel too risky. The global motivator to play safe also applies to builds.

Possible reasons why this exist and how to solve them

It's true that we don't really want death to become meaningless. It should be something that you should actively try to avoid if you want good rewards. This is specially true because of bots. If it's possible to get a sustained XP gain from gameplay that involves dying a lot, then it is easier to bot.

There are other ways to solve this problem. Some include:

* Each death can apply an XP gain penalty on the map you are playing.
* The "bag" approach. Instead of awarding XP inmediately, do it at the end of the map. Deaths remove XP from the bag.
* Keep the XP loss, but cap XP loss so that you can't lost more XP than you've won in the map.

A personal note

I am increasingly confused as to what am I supposed to be doing and what's the correct way to play the game in its current state. Should I low-ball the Waystone levels? The problem with that approach is that XP gain is incredibly slow when playing low level Waystones, and you are still at risk of a random hiccup or mistake causing you to die anyway. Which is a lot more hurtful since, due to the slow XP buildup, this means you've lost a lot of time. A confession, sometimes low level waystones are so boring I fall sleep and die in game and lose XP to them.

Should I play higher level waystones? The XP gain in this case is fast. But the chances of death rise quite a bit. And it's really easy to get a point where the deaths reset all your progress quickly. To make matters worse, some Bosses and enemies can be greatly more powerful than other bosses and enemies. Making it feel more like a roulette.

+1

As someone who has been stuck at level 97 for 5 months, the idea of XP loss being removed seems great. I'm sure many players can agree that losing XP feels awfully demoralizing. With that being said, I still think that the goal is to ensure that reaching level 100 remains an impressive feat. If XP loss is gone, the value of a level 100 character significantly decreases. Those who have managed to get to 100 would surely not be happy about it, and I don't blame them.

I'm 50/50 on this one personally.

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LargeHairyMan#4219 が発言:

As someone who has been stuck at level 97 for 5 months, the idea of XP loss being removed seems great. I'm sure many players can agree that losing XP feels awfully demoralizing. With that being said, I still think that the goal is to ensure that reaching level 100 remains an impressive feat. If XP loss is gone, the value of a level 100 character significantly decreases. Those who have managed to get to 100 would surely not be happy about it, and I don't blame them.

I'm 50/50 on this one personally.

This is absolutely untrue, there is no skill involved in reaching lvl 100, its pure grind, you xannot do a lvl 1 naked run in poe.

There is nothing impressive in reaching lvl 100 except that its an ardous grind and the value doesn't diminish with removing xp loss. This is a very delusional take from many people who have been used to this abusive system. People run to 5-way system in poe1 because its such a huge tiring grind. after more than 2 months how many players reach 100? 17, utterly ridiculous.

XP loss serves one thing and only one thing, to absolutely waste your time, you know this. You are not suddenly playing better after your death, you just play slower and in a more boring way. Your penalty already exist from losing your maps and loot, stop abusing yourself with the notion that xp loss has any value.

If you want value then why don't we remove more than xp loss? Why not keep the previous mapping system as well where you lose everything upon a single death? They change it because players can see the stupid abuse that is huge fucking waste of time and resources and complained. The miserable experience is because ggg is fixated that you MUST be punished for something when failing a map, regardless whether it's by skill, accident, unseen effects or disconnect.

Stop abusing yourself by defending the arbitary value of xp loss, your time deserve to be respected.

You have many good points, and I agree with most of them. I do think that there's a balance when it comes to the penalty for dying. Losing everything is one end of the spectrum, losing nothing is on the other end.

I've always felt that it should be gold loss on death, with the amount of gold scaling with the level. Once the player dies so much that they run out of gold, then XP loss begins, which is a clear indicator that the player needs to go back to the drawing board and reassess their build.

If you're focused on xp in endgame...you're gonna have a bad time.

Any build, in my view, should basically be completed and able to do all end game content around 90. Anything after that is just the icing on the cake.

I also don't focus on level in endgame but just grinding to get better gear/currency.

I don't mind XP loss like in poe 1. By all means keep the XP loss, it is meant to be a stopper for bad builds, for builds with 1hp, for people rushing in and dying constantly.

But leveling in poe 2 is insanely bad, it is very slow in campaign, it is extremely slow in mapping.


But after lvl 90 it is pure death snoozefest boring grind.


People who reached lvl 100 in poe 2 do not have any achievement under their belt, they have acquired permanent physical and mental damage. I truly pity these guys.

You can play 500 hours and not even reach lvl 99, this is stupid.

This game is seasonal. People should be able to hit lvl 100 in a month.

XP gain should be gradually doubled throughout the game, and 10-20-30x in 95+ levels.

It just does not feel good to level up in this game, what makes it worse is terrible/weak passive tree, so that passive point you gain after arduruous horrible endless grind, means literally nothing.

Also remove EXP nodes from maps/towers/tablets/atlas tree it feels stupid and non-rewarding.


For those who want to level up endless and like endless grind, adding prestige levels, that take 10x the EXP required, and give some formal/irrelevant buffs like a title/achievement or a +1 random stat, would be alright.

I want even more xp loss.

Ha, countered.

Not reaching level 100 is fine.

If the bar goes down my enjoyment goes as well and I log off for good, reason enough.
Friends of mine had it happen twice and uninstalled because it is disrespectful towards their time.

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BK2710#6123 が発言:

If the bar goes down my enjoyment goes as well and I log off for good, reason enough.
Friends of mine had it happen twice and uninstalled because it is disrespectful towards their time.

Ok, bye.

I don't want to play games that disrespect my time by making everything so braindead easy that there's no point in playing. Games you want exist, you can play them just as I am here playing ones that are what I want.