[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.

[ya1]

i 'd like to see the end fight of SR so the boss room to be set up differently. either by creating waves of certain boss combinations or by making a map where you face certain nems together but not this small room bullshit where you have to mess with your camera and i see these painful movies where people are crawling through the edge to fight one nemesis.

I 100% agree with this and will tattoo it in small print on my forehead.

I think SR is great but that’s only because GD is great. SR itself could’ve been done so much better. Boss shards should have had different modes just like normal shards do (hunger, levers, desert, chests) and focused on fighting bosses in different, carefully designed settings. Boss shards seem to me kind of - really no offense - lazy design. Draw a circle, drop four enemies on the other side of the player and see what happens. And what happened was aggro abuse with impossibly imbalanced difficulty spikes when it fails.

[omnitrio]

If someone want death-penalty in SR just Play Hardcore

[Dmt]

It’s funny to see this topic.
The majority of builders with SR+ tags post those mighty videos where they camera and aggro abuse SR 75 with some lame Fabius, Benn, Zanti or smth else almost dying 1 vs. 1 to such easy bosses.
I have never seen vids with Gargabol, Grava, Korvaak and others difficult combos.

AND after that people say that SR is easy, lol

[ya1]

That is indeed a problem

SWISH!

the static 30s penalty to the timer (…) is not proving adequate

WHOOSH!

we will have that penalty scale up to 90s

BAM!!!

[Zantai]

And what happened was aggro abuse with impossibly imbalanced difficulty spikes when it fails.

The majority of builders with SR+ tags post those mighty videos where they camera and aggro abuse SR 75 with some lame Fabius,

Fixing that blatant abuse would sure put a nail in the coffin of “SR = Noobocracy of Grim Dawn”, now wouldn’t it.

People seem to enjoy this exploit, I guess cause they feel like they outplayed the game in doing so successfully, but if these joke threads about SR being easy mode keep popping up, I hope you can guess what we will do to address it…

[Rhylthar]

See? No exaggeration or strong words like “noobocracy” needed.

Now the penalty for 6 times dying is 9 minutes (not 3 minutes) and some loot is lost in higher shards. But the fun fact: Most people don´t care for loot anymore while playing this.

[Rhylthar]

People seem to enjoy this exploit, I guess cause they feel like they outplayed the game in doing so successfully, but if these joke threads about SR being easy mode keep popping up, I hope you can guess what we will do to address it…

You will fix the camera issue and make the boss shards like the non-boss-shards with plenty of room to kite, hide and run away?

Just kidding.

[Nery]

It’s funny to see this topic.
The majority of builders with SR+ tags post those mighty videos where they camera and aggro abuse SR 75 with some lame Fabius, Benn, Zanti or smth else almost dying 1 vs. 1 to such easy bosses.
I have never seen vids with Gargabol, Grava, Korvaak and others difficult combos.

AND after that people say that SR is easy, lol

Funny enough I have never seen Korvaak in SR. But you’re right. Some builds can’t beat 5% of possible combos in SR 75, some can beat only 5% of them like Benni and Moose combo. But SR+ tag means you finished 75th shard and you did. Job well done!

But now problem is that players that use that or camera “method” will oversell their builds and try to prove how easy is SR. It’s not though. It’s not that easy for most players, builds or against most bosses combos deep shards.

[afanasenkov26]

Funny enough I have never seen Korvaak in SR

you lucky guy! he’s one of the most annoying bosses in SR ever as only at SR65-66 he has ~15 millions hp for both phases which is about 3 nemesis’ health bars.

[mad_lee]

@Slanter

Good post, man.

@Zantai

Good post too, doesn’t sound like Zantai we know at all tho, lmao

[vizix]

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.

you can keep all that in tact. Just arrange the bosses a bit differently its in no way proportional to the rest of the SR experience. And you still have to fight all those nemesis just not in a 10 by 10 m bathroom

[Norzan]

but if these joke threads about SR being easy mode keep popping up, I hope you can guess what we will do to address it…

[banana_peel]

Fixing that blatant abuse would sure put a nail in the coffin of “SR = Noobocracy of Grim Dawn”, now wouldn’t it.

People seem to enjoy this exploit, I guess cause they feel like they outplayed the game in doing so successfully, but if these joke threads about SR being easy mode keep popping up, I hope you can guess what we will do to address it…

People don’t like agro abuse because it is clearly an exploit. But using it allows single target focused builds to shine, and it is an experience different from Crucible.

In Crucible you also face 4 strong bosses. But they are downgraded just enough to be able to fight them all at once with a well built char with cruci buffs. Fixing arrgo abuse in SR, to force people to fight 3-4 full blown bosses at once, with no buffs, will not only homogenize the gamemodes, it’ll tip the balance from easy to impossible for the majority of the builds. Only chars left to fight higher SR would be 1) Super-tank casters 2) No recovery monster-shields (probably retal) 3) Kiting (player scaled pets) and pet builds.

I believe what people ideally want (and i understand it might be too much to ask) is complete overhaul of boss chunks, not just abuse fix.

My personal wish is that boss chunks would be 1v1 fights by design. Maybe with Celestials at higher shards. 1v1 is the ultimate ARPG challenge, and people love it (see Dark Souls).

Right now, if you play by GD design, the whole game is made for AoE builds. The only exception is Celestials but they are a very small part of the game.

[Shadowpast]

So let me see if I understand things here:

Some points I seen

Loot doesn’t matter: if I doesn’t why does it matter if someone is dying 100000 times to get the loot playing the build they want and having fun while others just wave the gdstash wand and in reality make someone’s else’s playing irrelevant. Oh right it doesn’t. Single player game.

Normal elite SR loot runs: agree change this.

Death penalty timer: yes increase this at higher shards

This now sounds like some crusade against others who may be having fun that doesn’t match yours and that couldn’t be more wrong. That’s why this game is modable.

You can’t ask for stiffer penalties for everyone when some of those people are struggling to get to where you are after you waved your gdstash wand or have thousands of hours more then them.

Stiffer penalties for those players who are trying to push the envelope I totally agree.

As a prior only HC player I can’t stand to die in SC.

However should someone who is legitimately trying, is spending all their resources to fix their build for 2-3 hrs, reading forums and guides, still have as harsh as a penalty? At the end of the day time is a very valuable resource and most human beings will want something for that time if the game isn’t being fun because they are getting destroyed.

Not everyone will find fun in having nothing after 3 hours. Some people will.

Catering to one side or another isn’t about money, it’s about, as Z said, making a solid product.

Take a step back and look at a new player who wants to get to where you are, by not using mods, with a build they love, on their own steam.

I’m not advocating for easy. I’ve lost 1000’s of hours in HC across every Arpg that has the mode. I also only meme build.

I’m advocating for fairness and a good portion of those arguments that I’ve seen are very to one side, biased on the posters personal beliefs and not the vast majority of those playing.

Make ST harder. I’m cool with it. Personally I just would want more streamlined boss rooms that aren’t so too easy or haha loldie.

[hammyhamster1]

My personal wish is that boss chunks would be 1v1 fights by design . Maybe with Celestials at higher shards. 1v1 is the ultimate ARPG challenge, and people love it (see Dark Souls).

Good post. I am more aware of this as I typically use a controller - and with a controller you simply can not use the exploit. Unlike the m&kb, you need to pivot the view to move the character.

I suppose I can just use a mouse and KB, but what will happen when this gets to console?..it seems like it might be wise to fix this issue ahead of time.

[Garfunkel]

Don’t we already lose time-chest because we lose time for dying 6 times? It could be insta -2 min penalty for dying. As for more penalty besides that i say ‘no’. Because…

a different problem of imo either very badly designed RNG or faulty aggro - it has never been clarified

RNG in SR can be awful. First fix that and make SR more balanced then we talk about more penalties

[Stupid_Dragon]

Loot doesn’t matter: if I doesn’t why does it matter if someone is dying 100000 times to get the loot playing the build they want and having fun while others just wave the gdstash wand and in reality make someone’s else’s playing irrelevant. Oh right it doesn’t. Single player game.

With all due respect, the fact of getting some loot doesn’t matter without mentioning how much time it took to get it. Bruteforcing your way to get loot is neither easy nor hard, just long and tedious. But I wholeheartly agree that the game shouldn’t reward this kind of approach too much, because that’s a sure way to make people lose interest in the game.

Not sure why do you wave GDStash argument though. Some people play legit, some just engage in buildmaking “competition”. If one doesn’t aspire to join that competition there’s literally no difference whether someone else plays legit or not.

[Garfunkel]

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…

Absolutely. I started from scratch when FG was released. Removed all stashes/ characters / blueprints … everything. And it took me three lvl 100 characters and many hours of farming to do SR 66 (no cheat, no gdstash-ing, no abuse). Sure i was not pushing SR but rather wanted to do it more easy farming way but I’m good at arpg and now I know many ‘hidden’ mechanics of GD, read manuals, this forum other sources. Something not every player would ever do. Maybe 3-5% of them. 90% of players are casuals with little knowledge they want just to put things together intuitively and at least do SR30-40. Believe me that is not that easy with such approach.

[Garfunkel]

You also underestimate the psychological penalty of dying to an encounter.

True. I personally hate dying. It is psychological penalty for me