Why losing experience on death in Path of Exile 2 is Beneficial

XP penalties are neither necessary nor beneficial. XP penalties are a design decision born from a philosophy of opportunity costs, which GGG unfortunately follows almost slavishly.

I personally strongly dislike that design philosophy, because ultimately, it's lazy and uninspired. It's giving designers unconstrained choice over risks and rewards, which leads to snap decision making, because in the end, you can always "balance" some over-tuned reward with severe risk and punishment. Or simply "increase difficulty" by upping the punishment.

Just look at maps, the atlas tree, uniques. Benefits balanced with penalties. That's just much easier to do than actually thinking about something interesting and positive.

Constraints breed creativity. Constraining yourself to only allow player benefits forces you to think about ways to make things more interesting without disadvantaging the player. GGG is just not good at that.

In the end, it's a matter of taste. There are no inherent benefits to XP penalties. But there are risks. Risks you see in the forums, risks you know because you wrote this post. Risks like players losing interest and leaving. You cannot tell players why punishment is necessary. They either accept it naturally or don't.

Punishment in games always has to be treated very delicately: Too much, and players feel their time not being valued, abandoning a game, most likely forever. No amount of marketing for XP penalties will change that.

I think PoE would be a better game without XP penalties. Not because it makes the game "easier" (PoE is not a difficult game mechanics-wise anyway, stop flattering yourselves), but because it forces GGG to create new designs. To make the game more interesting.

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Losing XP when you die is great because it makes the player abandon the game and save money on microtansations. I uninstalled the game and now I have money left to spend on the competing game.

This won't make Tencent happy if they read this haha )

I don't like people trying to downplay the insanity which are the death penalties, i have many hours in souls games and many more in roguelikes where you lose everything - nearly everything on death and the way POE2 handles dying is horrendous

Currently you lose 10% exp which can add upto hours of playtime, all the current items invested into the level + the time it took to get to said level and all items you stand to gain from the level and if you are fighting a rare boss which can have only attempt how many times? so even more time and effort wasted.

So lets go over the points "Encouraging player skill and growth."

I simply do not see this most people who experience death in this game currently have a very negative reaction to dying as it never feels justified its also an explosion you cant see ground dot or some other garbage that doesn't give the player adequate choices or chance to react to, when i play roguelikes and souls games and die there is always a feeling that i could have won and from what i see most players do not feel that way about this game.

Then you have bosses that give the player few attempts do you know what this encourages players to do? google it, watch other people kill it, learning its attacks without the game present, the best system for bossing is going again and getting better with each and every time you fight it not this restricted attempt shit.

"Maintaining a Sense of Risk and Reward."

All of the risk with no reward POE isn't very good at rewarding players it rewards luck and finding rare drops you can pawn off to other players to get the shit you actually want, there is simply too many things to roll in most cases you are probably going to be able to get by and find decent gear but going beyond that is a very tiring process specially with how crafting exists atm, a single rare drop can amount to more gained than all of the previous work someone could put into a character.

"Preventing Over-Leveling and Preserving Challenge."

I don't understand why levels themselves have to be gated behind skill that isn't and normally never the point of a level system as its "experience" with time you get experience so level goes up and with a level cap and diminished sources of experience i don't get this, players will naturally get better as time goes on but there is only so much a player can do when their enemy is the game itself sometimes, i also find alot of the points in this funny because the most played builds in the game are designed to skip all challenge and clear the game as fast as possible because game interaction isn't good currently.

"Reinforcing the Importance of Defensive Investment."

This game has currently done the opposite unless your ES defensive stats have felt useless because you still get 1 shot with maxed out defences i understand the incentive but what is the point of defence if you still die at the same rate.

The insane death penalties in the game feel more like POE2 is only designed around hardcore play which is going to push alot of players away, i like hard games but i don't like hard games that waste my time and remove more progress than i seem to make, i honestly still find it funny souls games have a more encouraging and rewarding death mechanic than this and it takes less time to clear an entire souls game than to get 6 attempts at a boss fight in this one.

No one is asking for the game to be easy we want it to not be so infuriating.

XP lose should only be a penalty for the map you are doing, die and you lose the map, XP etc. not retroactive removing XP from previously completed content.

Until something like that is implemented I will not be returning to the game.

With that in mind and the current system in place I can only agree with the OP's premise that the XP loss on death is benefical.

BENIFICAL FOR MY WALLET... as GGG have lost a customer and source of revenue

By the way, a few numbers.

At what point does the experience penalty start to annoy you?

I'll take it from level 90 (although actually later).

A Level 100 character is at most 11% stronger than a level 90 character.

In fact, this is not the case: at 90 you can already have all the ascendancies, have all the best items, and there is no content level higher than 90 (82 if I'm not mistaken is the maximum).

So most likely, the difference in the strength of level 90 and level 100 for the same builds is less than 5%.

Only discovered it on maps as campaign gameplay doesnt have such a mechanic and there (to me) was no hint that there was one.

Its like 2 different games, campaign fun engaging trying to make my build work. endgame just terrible repedative meta build grind

The point is it feels terrible, it doesnt respect my time or teach me anything. No point in elaborating too much.

I'm fine with a penaltly but stealing time from me from successfully completed content.
thats stealing my progress not halting it because i died. actually stealing my time, time that may have been a from previous gameplay session......well NO that is not reasonable.

GGG have this F2P mentality.. make it as grindy as possible with absurb inventory/stashspace tons of currency, modifier items, waystones, gems etc

I get it make us buy tabs thats the model..but they forgot that if the game feels unfair then ppl will just abandon the game

lossing players means lossing revenue..

I predict if things stay the same you will have a niche game for only diehard fans with no broad appeal

This is a troll post, right? Right?

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NeoCyrus#3728 a écrit :

This is a troll post, right? Right?

yes looks like the very definition of a troll post.
Care to add anything to the discussion sir?

Path of Exile 2 is not Diablo 2. POE2 is so unbalanced.. Why you think people complain? Oh, let me guess cheap one shots leading to hours worth of experience loss because the developers don't address balancing issues.

I really don't even care if I lose experience but I can relate when the game get's stupid. This game has some serious funk and I cannot stand people who praise it where it doesn't shine. Say it how it is or get out.

u guys keeping going on this trying to be hardcore, it needs to change. lets try to remember other games that went hardcore that don't exist anymore. one i played was wildstar, was supposed be kill wow with harder raiding. anyone still see that game around? NOPE, it died about 2-3 years after it came out because ppl went back to wow. only the top ~5% of ppl want hardcore stuff most want stuff they can play normally and play when they can get to it.