I think his point is that you can’t allow or disallow someone to hit max level. All max level represents is an insane time investment. That isn’t a measure of skill or “worthiness”, it’s a measure of free time (and, some would argue, of masochism).
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Exactly, thank you.
So why want it then? Why feeling so distraught when you die and your exp goes down? If this is all it is - a representation of time spent(neither here nor there by the way, people reach it in less than a week) then why care.
I am not talking to you specifically but to anti-death penalty people who seem entitled to get what they want regardless of everything else.
Not to detract from the PoE discussion, but LE does have a masochism mode, and if the rewards for playing masochism mode are worth the damage penalties vs standard mode (higher chance of legendaries, larger xp and gold rewards, etc.), then masochism mode is a good place to test out any death penalties. Besides, we have ladders and HC mode for “serious business” players, especially as HC is a great ladder as those who die are put into SC mode so people aren’t devastated at losing months of grinding when their character dies.
For standard play, though, I wouldn’t recommend anything outside of resetting encounters / monoliths / getting kicked out of Arena and having to reset progress in other end-game systems. Since most great passives are at the top of the class bar, having your exp reset every time would frustrate people who want to see the fruits of their efforts. Harsher penalties for death also discourages players from testing out under-utilized or under-performing class passives, skill nodes, Unique equipment, or skill synergies; we need people testing out many ideas so that the devs can take feedback and provide adjustments that increase build diversity. It should take 6 months of no new content for a metagame to become more optimized / stagnant, not halfway through beta testing. 
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Punishing people for playing a game is a rather old construct. Look at D3 for example… uh I died I need to rep my gear and it costs 500k I still hope my 35 billions of gold will be enough. That’s a joke and could be completely gone.
The only meaningfull way of a death penalty is an XP loss. When I think back to the good ol L2 times i Get the chills. Dieing in high levels set you back about a month. I still think there should be a normal game mode without merits or flaws. If you die you die and get back to the last control point and be done.
There could be a lot of optional gamemodes to care for all players. They want death peneltys? Sure give it to them like loosing 50% of level xp and 10% gold each death but don’t force this on people who just want to play and have a good time. A death penelty is nothing but an artifical grind increase and can be totaly neglected if you build enough tank and that’s it. This has nothing to do with skill it’s simple math.
At the end of the day it’s the devs descission. Do they want to appeal to everyone or do they want to decrease a potential playerbase if they force to harsh stuff on everyone. There is a reason why many games have different game modes and why there is stuff like “Story Mode” or “Very Easy”. At the end of the day I think it’s best to get in as many players as possible.
Best example: I already know 30 people who won’t touch D4 if “open world” PvP is forced on them. On the other hand there are 2 others as well that are more intrested in D4 because of it. At the end of the day I’m still thinking: “Why don’t you make 2 servers? PvP and PvE and everyone is a happy panda?” between all the PvP players want to show ther big e peen and bash everyone who is against PvP for whatever reason ^^.
Just make everyone as happy as possible without surrendering the basic vision of the game and everyone should be fine.
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Just to clarify; modes such as Masochism and Hardcore do not offer any such rewards.
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I think with everything the devs already said About their plans for trading/Bazaar they could really make a difference here with MEANINGFUL economy.
Devs stated that they admire PoE for it’s economy and they want LE to have a similar meaningful economy but with gold instead of “artifical currencies” (like other valueable crafting items like it is the case for PoE)
So while i understand your example that D3 and many other similar games just have stuff like repair costs and other Things were you have to spend marginal amount of Money which makes the system obsolete.
But let’s give the devs a Chance making a meaningful economy.
All of this is invalid of course if devs decide to make a pure exp penalty instead of gold.
But still i find some sort of death penalty appealing. I myself do not play machoism or HC and i think a good tuned death penalty brings more statisfaction to leveling up and EARNING exp/level
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…how is the many modes thing even going to work? This is supposed to be a multiplayer game in the end, right? We can play together, compete on leaderboards, this is not a completely single player game with 5 difficulty modes you can switch on a whim. Everybody should have the same start and progress (except the HC/SC divide of course) Separating the player base over something as meaningless as a death penalty (and trust me, it barely means a thing in PoE) would not be wise considering how many people play Last Epoch.
The problem is, as I’ve said many times in the PoE forum itself, in your heads. You believe that holding you back from achieving the next level is a big deal. Its not. What level you are does not prevent you from playing the game to the fullest, it is a personal achievement you can opt out of completely without losing sleep over it.
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Don’t think we should be too hung up with a single choice of word. Maybe the better word here is “can”.
If we don’t have any leveling penalties, then this is indeed what it would come down to.
I’m totally cool with a death penalty. I just don’t want it to cost me an evening of grind to recoup.
There have been some good suggestions in this thread. I’m looking forward to seeing what the devs come up with.
…that is obviously not meaningless after all, given the amount of debate/discussion.
No, thank you.
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Well, the discussion on the PoE forums was (I am taking a break right now so I am talking about 6-7 months ago) even more fierce. We are talking hundreds, probably thousands of posts over the years. Nothing happened, the game kept being a huge success and didn’t lose any significant number of players. So I dunno, it seems strange for a much smaller players-wise game to impose such modes while the bigger one didn’t.
Yeah because death peneltys in PoE don’t matter. You need to be a very special person to die in PoE. All you need is to get your defences in your build right and to have enough resis. Mechanicly PoE is like every other ARPG not that much to take care of.
At the end of the day I don’t care because LE is a “Go tank or go home!” game and if the devs want it to be that way everything is fine. After the first couple of build guides noone should have issues anyway.
Still I think a casual gamemode would help certain players and there is no harm done if we get one. If 200 eletists feel alone by themself on their choosen difficulty… well though luck.
Well thats weird. You keep saying how easy it is to not die yet you assume that the majority of the people who would want to play the game will choose easy mode. Which one is it?
Losing exp like in PoE is bad. Like people have already mentioned in this thread it just encourages running content that is really easy instead of actually challenging yourself with hard content. Losing gold like in D2 also sucks. You either lose a large amount like in D2 and it makes gold unreliable as a currency, or you lose so little you just brush it off.
I’m gonna recommend the way Sacred 2 did it. As long as you stayed alive you built up a magic find bonus and it would reset once you died. That way you do want to avoid dying, but you don’t lose progress when you do.
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I beg to differ. My highest level character in PoE is level 99.5. I could have pushed for level 100 but got bored eventually. It was in Delve league and I was running deep delve and tier 16 maps with 8 mods without a problem. Don’t assume all level 100 guys run easy content. You cannot do it fast enough if you don’t take risks.
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I’ve never played Sacred 2, but I really like the sound of something like this. Positive reinforcement is a good thing.
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There is that desert area that summons random wraiths that attack you regardless of where you are on the map or how many enemies you defeated. I have died more than once in that area because I had to get away from my computer and couldn’t get back to realize there were enemies approaching.
People are going to get extremely angry if they die due to a one-shot, difficulty spike, or lag (doubly so for those who play with a controller or other control schemes that people play for ergonomic reasons, such as myself) and lose progress towards wondering if their build concept is even going to work in the first place. Not everybody has gear that attends to their needs, and a significant portion of the playerbase is likely to want to play off-line with no regards to a multiplayer economy. Penalizing them is just going to anger them more than anything, because they’re not the ones that are willing to play for hours and hours just to get back to the place they started. The ones that are willing to do so aren’t going to care that much about it because they’re going to grind regardless. This really is a matter of disregarding multiple segments of the playerbase just to give “the feelz” to the portion of the playerbase that would get affected by these penalties the least. It’s madness.
That is an excellent point that i haven’t thought of. Maybe devs could remove penalty when you die from such sources.
What also could solve such a problem is a pause function (if you are playing singleplayer and no other Player are on your server)
I understand that there are and will be alot of player treating this game as some kind of singleplayer/solo game but if you have the opportunity to use some of the “online” features such as a Bazaar i think even casual player could benefit from a healthy economy, by either trying out some new build ideas and buying some low/medicore items from the bazaar or Maybe if they find themselves a really nice item they have no use for and they can sell it
that sounds like you have a really really harsh penalty in mind, which hasn’t to be the case. Thats what i already said here about “a good tuned penalty”
Wow that sounds also like a really good alternative.
@devs i hope this whole discussion don’t get too much off course because alot of the feedback here is centered around the “possibility” that those death penalties would include gold loss (and we don’t even know if you plan to include that in such a death Penalty)
This has to be at the forefront of any death penalty discussion. It is hubris of game developers to think their game is more important than the humanity of the players. Sometimes we will have real life intrude on us mid fight!
My suggestions is to give players choice over what form their death penalty takes:
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Hate losing XP? No problem, your death can cost you gold and magic find chance for the next 3000 kills.
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Do you want to run some really hard and challenging fights? To prepare, you can run the ‘gauntlet’, an area that if you are successful will reduce your death penalty for the next 5 instances.
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Plan on playing a squishy build? You can spend gold on a death related NPC to make your death penalty change forms or be less punishing. This would, incidentally, make the clearspeed meta more rewarding for tanky builds, who may be able to save more gold than the squishy dying build earns…
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Plan on playing hardcore, but the game still has glitches, lag, unplayable oneshots? Lucky for you, the game now has very expensive items called phoenix stones that burn away an item/large amount of gold/skill points/crafting materials, but otherwise resurrect you at the same level of progress.