Game Mechanics Remove Soul Points (v2)

Remember this?

Remove Soul Points.
​

To quote nkklk: "The only thing soul points do is break momentum and force people to stop playing the game."

They're a cheap-feeling stamina system that is a cause of a lot of Wynncraft's issues. A non-insignificant number of new players, new players that have importantly made it past the initial wall of retention, quit due to losing all their stuff. Call it a "skill issue" all you want, just remember that people active in the community have a very biased view of player capability and we see the vast majority of wynn as extremely easy. Sure, you can do non-dangerous things while low on sp. Do people actually do those things? Nope, they either stop playing or repeatedly die. And to those of you that think "nobody goes in multiple times until they run out of soul points." I've spent over a year now in #questions. There are plenty of people that do. Oh, and that's not even counting the people who afk in towns and come back to losing all their stuff. Wynn is horrible at teaching the player its quirks. A new player doesn't instantly know that towns aren't safe. A new player doesn't magically know to /class while afking.

There's already a penalty for death. Having to walk back. Losing progress in a bossfight. Having to use another dungeon key/boss altar mats. Is that not enough? If you want some sort of dark souls system, soul points in their current state aren't even close to that. I would say to have the player drop a percentage of their emeralds on death since that's more reasonable...

Oh yeah you can spam swap worlds to gain sp which makes it even more of an artificial & cheap system (https://uwynn.github.io/worlds makes it easy, click on the soul point column to sort)
Not to mention that soul point regen is the chance to gain 2 (cappping at 100%) instead of one, and negative spr doesn't do anything at all (you still gain 1 @ sunrise)... even the ID associated with it feels half-baked.

I've personally never had an issue with soul points, but that doesn't magically mean that they're good.


What are the upsides of removing them?
+ Additional hotbar slot
+ Less abuse of /class spam
+ No need to constantly remind people about losing items when recommending /kill
+ More active playtime & higher player count
+ Challenge runs can be retried more
+ Builds can be swapped more


What about the downsides? (and responses to them)
- It makes the game too easy!
Soul points do not add real difficulty to the game. They are an inconvenience, not a challenge.

- /kill abuse to tp to towns
People do it already with the -2 anyway, and you can't spam it to get around. Don't see a problem with this. If you're escaping from a dangerous situation, you have to walk back & lose progress anyway.

- Hunted
Hunted can keep its item dropping rates. I don't see how this is relevant.

- TP scrolls being spammable
They have an emerald cost.

- Free skill point resets
Good.


ok add an emerald cost or something if you really really need one but i don't see why a cost is necessary

- Soul point bombs are useless
...





Anyway have some quotes

 

real and true


but just don’t die. i don’t really see the issue here it was pretty easy for me

 

Another great thread from saya

 

Yeah, soul points are frustrating at lower levels, and just don't do anything at higher ones. So I agree that there should be a new system.

 

Might wanna add the downside soul points stop players from being "stupid" (I don't agree with this but it's a common argument i've seen brought up that it's the only reason players don't go to high levelled areas)
Either way as we see in the quotes. I agree here.
Only time i've ever had trouble with soul points is when I get /kill happy or any of the things you use soul points for. Also a lack of punishment would give me good reason to go for fun personal challenges since now I don't have to worry about losing my stuff due to trying to have fun.

 

Thank you for making this thread Saya

 

old news. still needs changing
here to bump

 

Praise be! Saya at it again with another excellent thread!

I just want to remind the people voting “Yes but there needs to be a penalty for death” that there will ALWAYS be a penalty for death, which Saya described in the thread. With Salted agreeing that soul points will be removed at some point, I would encourage thinking about ways you envision a death punishment system working, and whether your ideas would truly be better than simply removing soul points.

 

Thanks for the great thread.

 

I think you should include what happens to people that already bought soul point bombs. Grant it there probably aren't that many people that bought soul point bombs, but it is still something that needs to be addressed beyond that they're useless. One solution could be to just refund their soul point bombs for other types of bombs or crates. Another is to instead revamp soul points so that they act like Totem's of Undying and if you run out then it sends you back to your respawn point when you die again.

 

That would require some extreme rebalancing of pretty much the entire game. Maybe instead you only lose items at 0 soul points, but not before that, but you should go back to spawn every time you die, otherwise a lv 100 player basically has 120k hp not to mention defense points. Defense points would allow for builds to have literally over a million ehp. I think letting people chose some other kind of bomb instead is a much better idea.

 

Yes
10chars

 

The fact that this is even a question blows my mind.

 

Oh yeah it would be broken af if 2 soul points counted as a totem with a total of 15 soul points.

 

You know, I hadn't even thought about it much until now, but yes, theyre an absolute negative. The only benefit I've encountered is the TP scroll cooldown. Sometimes I gotta walk places cuz my SP are low.

I've only lost my inventory once, and that was when I was a newbie, lvl 20, maybe had 10 hours of play time back in 2014. it absolutely sucked, I can't remember what I did after, but I'm sure that I didn't enjoy it.
And today, the only thing it does is make me stop playing and come back tomorrow since I'm afraid of losing more SP.

Bad mechanic overall. Maybe keep scrolls cost, and that's it. You only need SP to use TP scrolls, and if you die, you lose some of your TP ability until they regen, just like they work now. But no loss of items for god's sake.

 

True but I still feel like some penalty for death is needed, you can’t just leave it at nothing (walking all the way back doesn’t count, like actually losing smth, not just gaining 0 progress)

 

Does Wynncraft really need an item penalty for death though? Not every game needs to be a Dark souls where you lose all or part of your stuff. Losing your items doesn’t teach you to become better at the game, especially for noobies, because you need practice to learn how to improve. Losing more of your items just discourages you to practice more when you need to the most.

 

Not items, I just some penalty at all
I agree that soul points should be changed and losing items is very annoying
Just I don’t think straight up removing them is good enough, some other penalty has to be added in as a replacement

 

This is what I mean; is the game really better for having a harsher death penalty? We tend to assume that most games should have hard death penalty because other games have them without considering how appropriate it is for a specific game. That’s why I think people still feel that there needs to be a harsher penalty despite that no one so far has outweighed the pros with the cons of removing soul points or has come up with a replacement yet.

 

for sure saya duck.