[POLL] Should dying get a bigger penalty in SR?

[Zantai]

My personal suspicion is that SR is as easy as it is (virtually no penalty for death) to increase sales. Unfortunately, that makes for a far less rewarding game for people who like a challenge, and like to be rewarded for overcoming that challenge. With SR, you don’t really need to learn the game. You can just keep zerging until you get your loot. The only exception is if you push so far that you literally cannot advance; which is a very easy problem to counter (don’t push that far!)

You have a skewed view of the average player if you think farming SR for loot is somehow not a challenge. Too many people here seem to forget how much effort it takes to create a powerful endgame build (without GDStash), which is what it takes to survive at the Shards that rain loot down on you, not to mention the skill level required…

If you have a character that can best the hardest content, there is no point in giving out a trickle of items for that effort or you’ll literally never find an upgrade.

You also underestimate the psychological penalty of dying to an encounter. Sure, some people don’t care if they zerg a boss fight and eventually win, but the average person becomes flustered and upset, some even going as far as to post on the various GD forums to let us know how unfair and “badly designed” a fight is.

The Shattered Realm is a different beast to the Crucible and offers different challenges. That players can ultimately overcome its challenges despite repeated failures and still get rewarded for the effort is not a flaw, it is a feature. Shattered Realm is about pushing farther and farther and seeing the limits of your abilities, as evidenced by the incredible coordination we’ve seen of groups besting Shard 160 recently using Death’s Waystones.

That said, the static 30s penalty to the timer that’s currently in effect inside the Shattered Realm is not proving adequate given higher shards do give you more time to clear them, so we will have that penalty scale up to 90s with increasing Shard #.

is much more an exploit than the diying penalty. granted the reward isn’t exactly the same in Normal and Ulti, but you’ll most likely run the shards not only safer but also faster, so the difference may not be so big in the end.

That is indeed a problem, and one we’ll be addressing by shifting the ratio of Epic to Legendary drops on Normal difficulty Shattered Realm in favor of Epics.

Non-free games with high replay value (like Grim Dawn) tend to get easier over time - because it increases sales.

I can tell you what increases sales, quality new content with fun gameplay that people enjoy. As it turns out, people enjoy the Shattered Realm. There isn’t some algorithm where decreasing difficulty over time boosts sales. That’s just nonsense.