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

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Battousai21#8595 написал:

Thanks for the reply. My comment is based on my work with different clients and that's how they grow their company and expand the offerings they have to their customers or clients. Goal is always to be win-win for both the company and their clients. And to me (I respect if you can't see it), a company would always WANT TO EXPAND THEIR REACH, and for free-to-play games like POE, the only way to do that is make things better and better, else, your game will die. You can't just stop at one point of development and maintain it, else people will get bored. This is why they introduced leagues/seasons. Developing new leagues and further improving and adding contents. We will not have POE 2 right now if POE 1 didn't expand it's player base and the game itself becoming better.

Just don't expand its reach into territory that constantly belittles the product because it wants something entirely different and you're onto a winner

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Battousai21#8595 написал:

I would agree with you, but unfortunately for us, this is a live-service game, which is powered by people playing it.

It's powered by whales, the only difference between the pricing model here and PoE1 is the $30 early access fee and that has wound some people into a right tizzy

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Toforto#2372 написал:

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xpose#1651 написал:

I prefer to keep the penalty because it actually means something to hit 100

- Dedication to the grind
- Consistent build that doesn't die often

Trade league can already bypass everything challenging about this game by either buying carries or the gear to make everything obsolete.

Ok then remove all death penalties from SC Trade but keep them in Hardcore leagues. Problem solved. Nobody cares about lvl100 in Softcore anyway and people will resort to buying carries, just like how they buy carries for ascendancy trials right now because its easier to trade someone 100 exalts than it is to do 4 floors of Sanctum lmao

No need to add it in HC, as death means character is done and done, no trying again. :D

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Toforto#2372 написал:

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xpose#1651 написал:

I prefer to keep the penalty because it actually means something to hit 100

- Dedication to the grind
- Consistent build that doesn't die often

Trade league can already bypass everything challenging about this game by either buying carries or the gear to make everything obsolete.

Ok then remove all death penalties from SC Trade but keep them in Hardcore leagues. Problem solved. Nobody cares about lvl100 in Softcore anyway and people will resort to buying carries, just like how they buy carries for ascendancy trials right now because its easier to trade someone 100 exalts than it is to do 4 floors of Sanctum lmao

They will pay anyway if it’s easier to do, because they aren’t there to make slow progress, their time is too valuable and they want to be lvl 100.

Games with no xp penalty suffer from the same boosting and carry services. You know how blizzard solved that? They started selling wow tokens and lvl boosts. You know what still exists in that game? Bots and carry services

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Strangehill#1736 написал:

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Battousai21#8595 написал:

Thanks for the reply. My comment is based on my work with different clients and that's how they grow their company and expand the offerings they have to their customers or clients. Goal is always to be win-win for both the company and their clients. And to me (I respect if you can't see it), a company would always WANT TO EXPAND THEIR REACH, and for free-to-play games like POE, the only way to do that is make things better and better, else, your game will die. You can't just stop at one point of development and maintain it, else people will get bored. This is why they introduced leagues/seasons. Developing new leagues and further improving and adding contents. We will not have POE 2 right now if POE 1 didn't expand it's player base and the game itself becoming better.

Just don't expand its reach into territory that constantly belittles the product because it wants something entirely different and you're onto a winner

If it's easy to control, then they would for sure. A lot of opinions on the game can be considered by GGG. But ultimately, the final decision would be on their end if they think what most players wanted might not really be good for game in the long run. It would be a gamble for them, but they already have a good base from POE 1 players to fall back on.

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Battousai21#8595 написал:

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Strangehill#1736 написал:

I disagree, I yearn for the more socialist days of games being good and people playing them a bonus rather than as a profit seeking enterprise constantly regressing to the mean

I would agree with you, but unfortunately for us, this is a live-service game, which is powered by people playing it.

jonathan mentioned this in an interview.


he basically said they primarily make games for themselves, thats the philosophy. if you try and make games for someone else you end up making a game for no one, you understand what you want more than anyone else so you make a game for yourself and hopefully other people like it.

obviously theres is a dialogue there and a compromise between the devs and the player base. the game ha to succeed and sustain itself. but theyre not making candy crush for a mobile phone, theyve chosen to make the most complex and hostile action arpg ever primarily for the pc because they loved diablo 2. these are not people trying to maximise profit or reach for its own sake, theyre very much trying to make the best game they possibly can by their own standards, a game they feel proud of.


poe1 was imo the most successful arpg of all time, 12 years of sustained growth, it didnt just survive 12 years it GREW every year. no arpg has done that. this EA is extremely successful. what theyre doing works, they dont really need to bend too far from their own vision of the game they want to make.


a bit of bending is good, what ur saying is also right the game needs players and to some extent you have to meet those players half way, or a little bit of the way at least. but theyve also proven that their philosophy of you make a good game and the people will come works.

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ogmersault#4806 написал:

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Toforto#2372 написал:

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xpose#1651 написал:

I prefer to keep the penalty because it actually means something to hit 100

- Dedication to the grind
- Consistent build that doesn't die often

Trade league can already bypass everything challenging about this game by either buying carries or the gear to make everything obsolete.

Ok then remove all death penalties from SC Trade but keep them in Hardcore leagues. Problem solved. Nobody cares about lvl100 in Softcore anyway and people will resort to buying carries, just like how they buy carries for ascendancy trials right now because its easier to trade someone 100 exalts than it is to do 4 floors of Sanctum lmao

They will pay anyway if it’s easier to do, because they aren’t there to make slow progress, their time is too valuable and they want to be lvl 100.

Games with no xp penalty suffer from the same boosting and carry services. You know how blizzard solved that? They started selling wow tokens and lvl boosts. You know what still exists in that game? Bots and carry services

Let's kill party XP then :)

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Snorkle_uk#0761 написал:

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Battousai21#8595 написал:

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Strangehill#1736 написал:

I disagree, I yearn for the more socialist days of games being good and people playing them a bonus rather than as a profit seeking enterprise constantly regressing to the mean

I would agree with you, but unfortunately for us, this is a live-service game, which is powered by people playing it.

jonathan mentioned this in an interview.


he basically said they primarily make games for themselves, thats the philosophy. if you try and make games for someone else you end up making a game for no one, you understand what you want more than anyone else so you make a game for yourself and hopefully other people like it.

obviously theres is a dialogue there and a compromise between the devs and the player base. the game ha to succeed and sustain itself. but theyre not making candy crush for a mobile phone, theyve chosen to make the most complex and hostile action arpg ever primarily for the pc because they loved diablo 2. these are not people trying to maximise profit or reach for its own sake, theyre very much trying to make the best game they possibly can by their own standards, a game they feel proud of.


poe1 was imo the most successful arpg of all time, 12 years of sustained growth, it didnt just survive 12 years it GREW every year. no arpg has done that. this EA is extremely successful. what theyre doing works, they dont really need to bend too far from their own vision of the game they want to make.


a bit of bending is good, what ur saying is also right the game needs players and to some extent you have to meet those players half way, or a little bit of the way at least. but theyve also proven that their philosophy of you make a good game and the people will come works.

Yeah, i think I saw that interview. It's a great philosophy and vision for the game, but I don't think it was entirely the mantra they followed throughout the lifespan of POE 1. It was a good game when they launched it, but player base only grew over time because of the improvement they add regularly to the game, which I believe is mostly driven by player feedback.

Every time I see a thread trying to justify one BS "design decision" or other, I'm being reminded of what the most loyal PoE fanbase is (© Tim Buckley for the original image):

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MEITTI#3999 написал:

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.

youve made a lot of posts in this thread m8 and i do think you make a lot of compelling arguments for the xp penalty.

i think overall i am kind of swayed to the idea that it needs to exist in some form.

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Mouser#2899 написал:

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

i do also think this line of reasoning is true tho, there is a lot to it. and there is something to the idea that a lot of deaths in poe always have been and always will be bullshit deaths because of screen clutter, unbalanced mechanics, bad performance, and i dont think the utopia of "well lets fix those things" can ever actually exist.


i do think there is a psychological aspect too where some people will feel like losing their xp gained in previous maps is a bit like having their items or their time taken away. i dont think everyone has a uniform emotional reaction to this kind of xp loss.

i have ADHD right, theres things that trigger the fk out of me and live rent free in my head that dont trigger most normal people and vice versa. different people are probably psychologically impacted way more than other people when it comes to this kind of thing so i think a lot of the conflict in these threads is maybe us not all feeling the same thing when it happens.







personally i dont like the current situation, but i could live with it. i do however think its too triggering to too many people.

the 2 ideas i like are the one jonathan himself spitballed where they push the xp penalty back to lvl90+. us vets will think 90 is trivial anyway xp doesnt matter before that, but were a minority here. let people get to 90, let them learn by mistakes, let them do challenging stuff and test themselves.

then 90+ is the championship rounds, thats the softcap, you get there and yeah ur gonna have to fix up and get good, the vets are gonna gatekeep you, learn it and earn it.







i also like the idea of losing the xp from the map itself. this means ur not disincentivised to try bosses and hard content, but you dont gain anything from it and lose the content if you cant complete it properly.

weve seen in other games the idea of you having the xp bar, say its 50% full with a yellow bar. when you go in a map the xp earned in the map then is a different colour chunk on the end, when you complete the map by killing all the rares and the boss that xp then becomes permanent and joins the yellow bar, but if you die before completing the map you lose that chunk along with the map, all the juice on the node etc.

but you are not punished for trying harder content, you just lose the content and you dont get the rewards from the content, you dont lose something you had before you went in apart from the ability to access that content.

weve seen this suggestion many times over the years in various forms and honestly im really leaning towards this now. i think the people suggesting it make a good case.

[removed by Support]

Current build of PoE2 is not entertaining, it feels like a tedious job. It's not challenging, because you can simply trade for quality gear and one-button faceroll any and all content with a copypasta FOMO build. And it's not rewarding, since the devs "balanced" it around having to trade through a website, of all things and your drops are either currency of just sh1t.

On top of it all, it is unreasonably punishing in more ways than one, pushing people away from risk and excitement. Damn right I'm willing to ridicule white knights who think this is "the right way".

Granted, this is how PoE1 was most of the time, but I guess I was naive enough to hope PoE2 could become a proper game and not a sweatshop+stock exchange simulator with a built-in diablo clone minigame it currently is.