So if there were a server where you lost xp on death the algorithm I came up with would be 10x^2.
at lvl 27 you would lose 7,290xp on death
at lvl 60 you would lose 36,000xp on death
In the beginning of wow you lost some current level exp progress on death actually. They removed it.
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there’s many ways to implement it. The problem is that the game was designed with dying in mind. It’s part of the fun of the game. People are already taking the deaths way too seriously, xp penalty would not be good for the game.
And beleive it or not, people ridiculed wow for being hyper casual because of that decision. Crazy, right?
Haha yeah. At the time in some other games you could delevel and lose equipment etc from dying. So, contextually it was pretty casual.
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I’ve played since beta and that was 100% never a thing.
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In FFXI you had to come to raids with an exp buffer because you could level down mid raid if you died too much. So when we all came over to Wow the contrast was definitely memorable which is why I’m positive it wasnt ever a thing in Wow. Comparatively it seemed much easier, and I guess it was since we ended up with half the Vanilla world 1sts.
Not crazy at all. In everquest, death mattered. Not just the loss of xp, but having to retrieve your corpse to get your gear back. I remember multiple times when a guild wiped breaking into the plane of fear and had to call up other guilds to help them break back in so that they could get back to their corpses and loot.
unless this was closed beta/alpha this was never a thing played since launch day and open beta
i do remember this in final fantasy and using a 2 hour cooldown to die to a mob worth like 10 exp dying and leveling down and uninstalling the game XD.
And it sucked. Having to keep a second set of gear in the bank to equip so you could get your first set wasn’t fun.
Waiting 45 min for monks to corpse drag your body back to the zone in wasn’t fun.
Loosing experience to the point that you lost a level and could no longer zone in and retrieve the corpse wasn’t fun.
I’ve not played EQ in over 15 years, but even back then they were slowly removing all death penalties. Necromancers summoning corpses, Clerics giving 100% rezzes. They realized what a mistake it was.
Clerics could give 96% rez, not 100%. And no, having to go through a nasty corpse retrieval wasn’t generally fun. But the added care you had to take did make the game more fun overall.
I still remember when my wife and I fell through a hole in the floor to the bottom of Befallen and had to get a high level (mid 30s!) monk to drag our corpses out. Made a new friend that day.
There was a xp penalty in beta on death. I can’t remember if it only applied when taking a spirit rez or not, but that’s my vague recollection.
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Could be im misremembering. It was a long time ago. But for some reason the image that pops into my head is dying in hinterlands on my druid over and over till I just rage quit. Could be a false memory though.
There was an xp penalty for dying at some point during beta, the senior producer for mop had commented on it back in 2012. There was also “negative rested” xp for playing too long.
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Pulling numbers out of a hat doesn’t make it a good basis for a mechanic.
I came to WoW straight from EverQuest which I had been playing since 1999. When I came to WoW and realized the only penalty for dying was a small damage to equipment my mind was blown. I miss the loss of exp element just because it made the world that much scarier
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“Divine Resurrection” was a Cleric AA ability. Most folks called it, “100% Rez”, because it granted 100% XP recovery. It was a thing. It was added in Shadows of Luclin, only the third expansion, back in 2001. So it was in there for a long, long time.
On topic… it looks like you did a whole lot of math for an idea that absolutely never would have worked in WoW.
I mean, the original WoW Dev team pretty much ALL played EQ, and one of the things they stated in multiple interviews over the years that they collectively disliked was the XP penalty for death. It was also one of the first things they removed from the “Prettier, more casual friendly” copy of EQ they were working on at the time.
I can appreciate the fun of tinkering with an idea, but it would never work.
edit
No, you are (as seems typical) correct.
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IIRC they consciously chose not to have an XP loss on death in WoW in order to differentiate it from other games like Everquest and FF11.
XP loss on death isn’t great design anyway; it punishes anyone who is learning the game by compounding their mistakes, and breaks the flow quite horribly. WoW already has feedback loops that make dying repeatedly punishing - your gear breaks, monsters respawn if you take too long, travel time from the graveyard doesn’t get any better etc. It’s very important to understand feedback loops when proposing design changes like this that could add one too many.
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They have also apparently added a “Summon all corpses and grant 100% exp” AA that everyone has access too. Usable once every 24 hrs.
And it also seems that when you die, you keep your gear when you spawn at bind spot.
How times have changed.
That was just the alpha phase prior to beta, and never went live. I couldn’t see a time where WoW would have ever taken off the way it did in the early years if you lost xp on death.