Show of hands, who "likes" the death penalty?

Only like 30ish

A vocal majority on the forums does not equal “most players.”

edit And I’ve seen plenty of people complain, they just get drowned out and can’t all agree on how they would change it.

Even most of my complaints are because of buggy deaths.

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I was hoping more players didn’t want a penalty but only those who do or don’t have an opinion replied. My death penalty aversion comes from playing games like Everquest where you can grind for 6 hours and LOSE progress.

So it’s not entirely a Boundless issue. Also I’ve never said hey I wish there was a death penalty in any game without one.

My first impression was that the death penalty was pretty harsh but after playing a little longer I think it is necessary. There needs to be some risk/reward to visiting higher level planets and, other than the death penalty, where would the risk come from?

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Plentyof forms of entertainment don’t involve punishing someone. I’m not saying a penalty shouldn’t exist, but to say it “needs” one is wrong.

But when you die at level 40+, then it sucks. And you can bet it’ll probably be a bug that causes it.

edit It’s like saying you enjoy a movie more if there’s a chance it’s sold out. “You only appreciate the movie because you waited in line for 2 hours”. Lol, no, I’d rather not wait 2 hours.

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In your example of the movies, you risk the price of admission and the opportunity cost associated with possibly doing something else to see a movie that may be entertaining as a reward.

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I would argue that the currently death penalty doesn’t really represent a risk though. As soon as I’ve died once (whether that be to a bug, a super-cuttle spawn in your face or something that was actually my fault), I stop playing carefully at all. In fact, while exploring Till yesterday, after I died I started deliberately throwing myself into lava to get the game to move me ‘a safe distance away’ until it got me side of other the larger lava rivers. At that point, it’s less costly than the resources required to build bridges (and arguably more entertaining).

The only risk I see with the current death penalty is that it doesn’t affect all playstyles equally and you risk people getting bored and leaving the game if the death penalty feels to harsh for their playstyle, especially when they see other playstyles more or less shrug it off.

I had actually assumed that the xp penalty stacks for successive deaths, I just never actually checked. And while I’m not against reducing its effect, I think it is necessary to provide an element of challenge to the game or the players who are already shrugging it off will in turn become bored. Like most things in game development, its a matter of balance.

I’d agree if ‘On no, now you’ll have to Grind extra XP!’ represented any form of actual challenge and wasn’t just a tedious filler. Although I Can’t pretend to know what would be an actual ‘Good’ and meaningful death penalty that would turn more people off than the current one does.

Oh and yeah, it doesn’t stack (I’m glad about this, it would only exacerbate the discrepancy between how it affects different playstyles).

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In my opinion there needs to be something that encourages you to survive, as stated earlier it might be better to have a survival bonus that kicks in after you earned 10% of your current level (but what would you call the skills for it then :slight_smile:). Without a reason to survive one of the challenges in the game is removed and it diminishes the overall feeling of achivement when you accomplish something.

I think the current system is pretty balanced, I’m in the 30s now on my miner/gathererer/hunter and I usually want to avoid getting hit by it but when I do it usually takes less than an hour to be rid of it if I just continue with what I was doing. Usually this will be something that rewards a fair bit of XP like hunting meteors or mining high level resources (gems, etc).

I can see how repeatedly dying to lag or bugs migth be annoying, that’s just happened once or so to me in a month of playing so I guess I’m lucky.

This is a bit off-topic but I think one of the issues that makes this feel worse than it is is the missing XP reward for going gathering and collecting non-mineral resources on higher tier worlds. You get more XP on a lower tier in that case because of block protection which impacts some roles in the game.

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“Survival master”
“Allow for Survival Bonus to be earned twice as fast, existing buffs will be twice longer, debufs will be half shorter”
Or something like that :wink:

I would really love to see this little psychology trick used inside Boundless, cause I’m seeing practically the same reactions WoW had before it added “rested” bonus.

I personally like the Death Penalty as it is.

It’s a slap on the wrist and quite annoying sometimes, but has the intended effect of preventing you from ignoring danger, and adding the very important effect of risk/reward in the game.
But it is not too punishing even at lvl50, because you only “loose” 10k XP. Which is maybe 10-15 Minutes of mining if you take it slow.

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I really hope that this is sarcasm.

No it’s not. Why?

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Cause this 10kXP in 10-15 mintues may be possible if you are bomb mining.
While most of the deaths I have are on hunter character while doing meteors, not on miner or other chars.
This Alt is not specked for bomb mining and recovering from death penalty by hunting mobs is way more work.
Not to mention accidental deaths on builders, crafters, or forger alt, etc. cause of lags and so on.
I’m not going to respec character so i can go and for 15 minutes mine stuff than respec again for a task the Alt has. I would be burning through cubits very quickly this way, especially on my hunter.

On the other hand, my miner is dying very very rarely, usually if i do something really stupid.

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If I may ask but what level your hunter is?

As if I have a defeat penalty I usually just go for 3-4 meteors to get rid of it and that won’t take more than just ~30 minutes at most.

Around 35, don’t remember right now and i have no way to check at the moment. And you are right, it usually take between 30-45 minutes to recover if i push it (and not die again).

Found a way to gain 1k xp per minute, so at least the death penalty can be over fairly quickly for me with minimal tears… dare not post it because they got kinda nerf happy in the first week after launch. It’s stupid that you no longer gain xp for placing blocks in the wild.

I see.

At lower levels you will not have access to the same specs as on lvl50. So its harder to get high xp rates, but you also get a less steep punishment for dying. Maybe there is some balancing needed on that end I don’t know. I never cared much for leveling because I just play the game and xp just comes with playing.

Respecing just for the death-penalty seems a bit much. I use the same spec for mining, hunting, gathering and building. I only rarely switch some epics around if I really need an edge and did the same at lower levels.

I think it’s mostly a goal question. If your prime objective is XP, hunting is probably not the way to go. Mine/craft till 50 and respec with one of the 3 free respecs. If XP is not you prime objective, well playing even 30minutes longer to reach a side goal( the next level ) shouldn’t really matter that much in my opinion.

But hey, we all play it differently. :slight_smile: