'Mediumcore': One Game Mode to Fix Them All

As it currently stands, ARPGs are currently either mercilessly punishing (HC) or trivially forgiving (SC).

I feel like the vast majority of players who play Path of Exile and who'll play its sequel don't like either of the two extremes, and would actually like to be punished for making mistakes, just not to the point of losing their entire character for just one moment of distraction or connection issue—particularly in a game with a deep, ever-expanding endgame where a character can have up to tens or even hundreds of hours played and invested into.

Thus, I propose the following Mediumcore mode:

a. Each character can have up to 3 lives
b. If you lose a life, you can only gain it back via an RNG drop-only 'quest' item (non-tradeable)
c. This item is extremely, extremely scarce (rarer than a Divine/Exalt), is not subject to IIQ/R multipliers of any kind, and cannot drop more than once per map/boss, etc.
d. Lose your last life and it's over, time to pay Hillock a visit

Basically the idea is to make players care more about character death, as getting a life back is both extremely difficult and risky since it cannot be obtained without exposing your character to dangerous content (since it's drop-only), but at the same time without the demolishing punishment of entirely losing a character after just one strike.

One question: why?

Because it'd be fun.
People would care more about deaths. There'd be less mindless zoom. There'd be an item sink for a healthier economy.

Videogames usually have more than two difficulties to accommodate players's skills and tastes.

Some people don't like playing on easy.
Some don't like playing on hard.
Most people usually enjoy the middle road, medium difficulty.

Currently SSF and Ruthless are more like variants. Everybody knows the real difficulty 'slider' is softcore/hardcore, and it's not really a slider but a binary condition.

It'd be cool to have something in between.

Already too many game modes. Bad idea


If you want to inflict this upon yourself make a private league where people agree to delete their character after 3 deaths. Or do that in softcore xD If people care about the "mode" they would respect the rule. You could even just roll a d100 after each map boss. If you roll 95+ you get one life back. Solved xD

Not enough people would do this? Well then the mode wouldn't be popular enough anyway and the point is moot. The difficulty slider is already there. You just choose not to use it. Or don't have the dicipline to?

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1eyedking wrote:

Because it'd be fun.
People would care more about deaths. There'd be less mindless zoom. There'd be an item sink for a healthier economy.

Videogames usually have more than two difficulties to accommodate players's skills and tastes.

Some people don't like playing on easy.
Some don't like playing on hard.
Most people usually enjoy the middle road, medium difficulty.

Currently SSF and Ruthless are more like variants. Everybody knows the real difficulty 'slider' is softcore/hardcore, and it's not really a slider but a binary condition.

It'd be cool to have something in between.

Nope, I would be still play SC and care about more important things in my life

Pretty sure, as many others.

If it were up to me I'd just delete Softcore and swap in Mediumcore.
With the current state of PoE's newer playerbase, however, that could be potentially catastrophic.

Honestly I don't think there's any harm in adding another mode, it's not like an extra flag would bother at this point. It could be just another tick mark under SSF/Ruthless anwyay.

As for playing the mode as a make-believe... it's not the same thing.
You can't see how a live economy would play out, or how'd players react or work around this new limitation.
The excuse of 'too few players' trying it out could also apply to Ruthless (7% of players), yet I think it's a more than valid game mode to exist, if not actually better than the current state of normal PoE.
It can also be applied to Hardcore and so on, and at the end of the day why even have modes besides Softcore trade which is what 70% of players play.

I like the idea of caring more about player death, but I feel like there are better ways to do that than offering a cheat death item which is locked behind a grindwall.

Honestly the approach they're taking with PoE2 is fantastic and I'm hoping it gets added to PoE1 at some point: if you die during a boss fight etc, the encounter is effectively reset, forcing players to beat a boss by actually learning the encounter and playing the mechanics rather than throwing bodies at it like Dr. Strange looking for a bargain.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

a cheat death item which is locked behind a grindwall.

The gist of the idea is that while you're 'grinding' (ie., playing the game) for the item to drop, you're exposing your character to further deaths, so you have to play more carefully with each life you lose, with the game effectively becoming HC when you have just one left.

It shouldn't be a target-farmable item, and it should definitely drop more often in harder content (although still incredibly rarely), so it could theoretically be tied to area level. They could aim for something like a character seeing 1 or 2 more extra lives (if lucky) by the time they reach, say, level 95.
Would definitely be a fun drop rate to fine-tune.

As for PoE2's approach, it's currently how it works more or less in PoE1 Ruthless.
It still doesn't solve the fact SC is incredibly forgiving during mapping—and PoE2's full area resets are incredibly lame in my opinion.