Why Does PoE2 Keep XP Loss on Death?

If you do not take care of yourself irl you're gonna get hit by something and might lose a limb. If you run into an angry mob bad things will happen. Now just why should it not be the same in game?

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Pendarinchik#3879 wrote:

Why Does PoE2 Keep XP Loss on Death?

To fish addicted players. That’s the business base for this company.

Because they copied Diablo II. In Diablo II, dying reduces experience points, so they just took it over unchanged. After level 90, leveling up becomes difficult. Although I really want to try different gameplay strategies, in order to reduce deaths, I can only choose the safest method.

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mystsol#3553 wrote:

Because they copied Diablo II. In Diablo II, dying reduces experience points, so they just took it over unchanged. After level 90, leveling up becomes difficult. Although I really want to try different gameplay strategies, in order to reduce deaths, I can only choose the safest method.

There is small difference: in D2, you recover 75% of lost exp by picking up your corpse. So you only get really punished by being silly and dying 3-4 times in a row.

In poe, death is a singular gotcha moment. Get hit by unexpectedly large payload from rare mob buffed by 3 pools of RNG, thats it. Nothing you can do. And no way you could know that mob's damage BEFORE you got hit with it. In early poe1 there wasn't yet so crazy spread on player or monster dps, so penalty was more or less fair, you could feel the threat level. Now its pure casino.

About "just buy omens", omens scale fully with inflation, and in recent days everyone was reminded how badly poe handles currency inflation. Even if player can afford permanent omen supply, penalty still doesn't feel fair in current environment, it is just outdated.

For me, this league is another one I quit after about 10-20 hours into the endgame.
It always ends the same way: I push until mid-level maps, then the deaths start piling up. A few IK deaths here and there? No big deal.
But then I hit a string of BS, lose 50% of my XP bar—hours of progress down the drain—and that's it for me.
I slowly log off, uninstall, and wait 6-12 months for the next league or big update.
I'm not in any way a great PoE player, but I love working on my own builds (even if they suck) and playing self-found. I know I'll probably never touch the super endgame, and that's fine.
What kills it for me is this XP loss mechanic—it's a total gut punch. Why invest my time (and money) into a game that doesn't respect it?
I've always wanted to drop some cash on GGG for cosmetic stuff beyond stash tabs, but nah.
I know I don't have the bandwidth for their BS or their weird fetish for wiping player progress over random IKs.
Maybe I am not their target audience anyway.

Losing XP is really frustrating. It doesn't lead anywhere, it just prolongs the game as has been mentioned many times here. I'm a softcore player and I really don't have time for this. I can try as hard as I want, there's always a chance of dying. And should I suffer for it? Does the game literally impose a penalty for dying? If this option were to change, I'm willing to continue progressing.

Remove it completely or give us the option to buy some levels in game.

XP loss is an outdated holdover from D2 that makes getting to level 100 enough of a slog to keep the top 5% of players playing for an extra week before they go elsewhere, nothing more than a temporary player count padder.

It serves no real purpose for the other 95% of players, especially in a seasonal game.

meh

No disrespect intended but this kind of handwaving of outdated design is why games fail to improve and start to lose their player base permanently as more unresolved grievances pile up, very dangerous behaviour to encourage during early access.

If you keep defending outdated mechanics you will end up with retail WoW, this game and it's development is making me think more and more of Shadowlands era Blizzard. All flashy presentations and media events but denial, deflection and reluctance to accept player feedback by the developers, even when player retention is the worst it's ever been.