Game Mechanics A Better Way to Look at Soul Points

HMTN
~ presents ~
YET ANOTHER SOUL POINTS THREAD
~ but is attempting to assure you that ~
THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING NEW ABOUT IT

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kk.

The Problem​

Soul points are an unnecessary punishment system. Having to backtrack is already a punishment, honestly, and SP loss' punishment isn't really item loss. No, all SP as they are now do is prevent you from playing game, which is a horrible punishment for a game that you're presumably playing.

That's the thing, though: item loss is a visceral and permanent punishment that adds some difficulty and stakes to a fight. Soul points - if that's what they actually did - are a pretty decent way of going about this, adding those stakes only in highly-lethal "I am dying many times" situations.

The problem with Soul Points isn't the plan, but how that plan gets bungled in execution. The problem is that they wreck engagement, giving the player nothing to do while they regen on a super-slow clock. Once a player is low on soul points, they have no way to engage with the game other than wait.

Not great.

So, how do you take the passive waiting simulator that's the current soul point system and turn it into an actual game mechanic? Can you even solve this problem, with how Soul Points are?

The Solution​

The good news is that Wynn has, in glorious game design fashion, already done so. Hoorah!

Number of SP is fundamentally just another health bar. It decreases when you get damaged (die) and you don't wanna run low on it.

Imagine Wynn if the only health regen you got was the criminally slow base regen? It would be the exact same problem that current soul points have, just on a (slightly) faster timescale: If you get hit too much you have to stop fighting and just sort of wait somewhere safe until it came back.

Wynn solved this by adding a bunch of ways to regain hp and increase the amount of hp you have. Healing potions, hpr IDs, life steal, health increasing items, the Heal Spell, etc etc etc. These aren't free - money cost, mage dps, doing profs etc - and all require preparing ahead of time or active engagement during combat. Sometimes both.

The Suggestion​

Two new soul point IDs, one of which is for any armor/accessories and the other solely for consumable crafting ingredients.

The former is simple: +Soul Point Maximum. It is exactly what it says on the tin, and gives you extra soul points as long as you're wearing the item. If you take the item off and put it on again, those soul points go away and you have to wait for them to regenerate. It's basically the Raw Health ID, but for SP instead of HP. The SP maximum gained at certain levels remains, and most items with this ID are +1-5 soul point max at most. Maybe a pair of mythic boots of the undying gives you somewhere in the range of +20.

The latter is an effect that will allow you to use a consumable to quickly regain Soul Points. I'll call it Soul Point Regeneration here, and as a part of this suggestion assume that current SPR is renamed to Extra Soul Point Chance or something.

(If it really needs a new unique name, maybe something like Soul Point Refill?)

Now, this ID can't just grant extra SP as a one-and-done, because consumable items other than the basic ones give you an effect over time, hence the regeneration. This ID would appear as for X Seconds, returning a soul point to you each second for a set amount of time. The specific duration is left to the crafting ingredients. This ID will explicitly not last the full duration of the consumable, only for the set time.

This ID will generally start appearing in crafting ingredients pretty early on, giving low-level consumable proffers something cool and directly useful to be able to make right off the bat.

Okok, there's also a secret third part to the suggestion, considering that the above two IDs do not apply to this final item:

A Soul Replenishing Potion can be available very rarely at potion shops. The potions will be at Level 25/45/65/85/105, selling for 1eb/3eb/5eb/7eb/10eb and instantly returning to the drinker 2/3/5/8/10 soul points, respectively.


These new additions turn soul point management into an active process, increasing player engagement while still punishing careless play. Whether through incorporation of SP Max when buildmaking, a new cool thing for Profs to do, or simply buying a bunch of SPR pots before/after you do something mad reckless, Soul Points can go from a despicable and obsolete system into a neat death-punishment mechanic that can be mitigated if you know what you're doing.

The Coda
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This is more of a game design concept suggestion than a specific mechanic one - this can be extended to a lot of other things. Maybe a Soul Steal ID that gives you a (small) percentage chance to regain SP on a kill? Maybe a class/archetype that uses Soul Points as a resource? Maybe major IDs that do so, or give you certain effects at high/low SP thresholds? Really, the suggestion is just to Treat Soul Points like a meta-healthbar, because again, Wynn has absolutely knocked it out of the park with making HP ids engaging.

Thank you thank you for reading this suggestion, and regardless of what you make of it have a wonderful day!

 

solved it by world swapping being a thing

In general, adding more sp recovery just feels like adding fluff to a system that's rotted ages ago.

Ok wait this is like way cooler than the rest of the thread combined, why didn't you just start with this

 

Completely understandable, except that this is not intuitive to literally anyone and about as fun as clicking on some blocks and waiting

Metaphorically the idea of the suggestion is treating Soul Points more like a stagnant well of wasted potential than a rotting corpse, especially something as inherently productive as a punishment mechanic. SP recovery isn't fluff! It's literally the only problem with SP! Which leads into

I did!

Spoiler: Me doing so

Unless you mean the offhand ideas, in which case yeah those are indeed way cooler than the base utilitarian meat of the suggestion, but Soul Points becoming an actual resource that can be managed is the foundation that all those neat gameplay mechanics build up from. The base suggestion itself (the two IDs + pot) isn't very flashy, but just by existing they turn SP from self-harm hour into the cool mechanic meta-hp bar needed for all of that stuff.

 

Tl;DR: u can regen soulpoints without waiting 20 minutes

but why soulpoints, isnt losing progress bad enuff, isnt getting made fun of by random players and your friends bad enough, isnt losing a fight but having to do absolutely nothing productive for 2 hours bad, ur solution is good but only fixes a half of the problem with soulpoints

 

So uh here's my two cents on the issue:
SP = bad
controversial opinion, I know
However, here's my argument (it's honestly the same argument I have against lootrunning but WHATEVER it's still viable):
I play video games (Wynncraft is no exception) to have fun. What Soul Points do are, essentially, take some fun away from the game, by setting a timer on how much I can play.

generally not the best thing for a game to do.
I think the best idea is to honestly just remove soul points entirely, and not replace them - after losing a fight, you still have to go through the process of getting back to where you were, and that's punishment enough.

 

You are kinda stating what already exists and ignoring this threads arguements on the issue.

 

While these suggestions make the problem less severe, it still is… a problem. Therefore, it’s still worse than just removing soul points. For example, not every gear will have those IDs, and I doubt they would be on most early game gear like how Soul Point Regen is rn. And the early game is important bc that’s when new players are most likely to either stick with the game or leave.

Sometimes the best solution is the simplest; remove soul points.

 

I mean yeah I'm really just throwing in the "fun" argument here for the sake of it

 

Removing soul points is a simple and highly effective solution to the soul point problem, yeah, but it simplifies the game and removes any permanent death punishment. Whether or not the loss of stakes outside of backtracking would make the game feel too easy is entirely a game design values judgement, but Salted at least has been prerty clear. Even if soul points were removed, they'd be replaced with something else.

As for the early game, the incentive when you die once or twice is to do something else for a bit and gain like 5 levels. Early game is dense with really easy content. SP only really become a problem in the more advanced earlygame, hence the introduction of Soul Replenishing pots at level 25.

Finally, Soul Points are indeed a problem. But problems can be fun if players are given the tools to solve them. Removing soul points is the easiest solution, and it would solve the problem, but I don't think it would be the best one, at least from a game design standpoint.

Thanks for the feedback, though! You're right that a lack of earlygame Id's for Soul points (or a lack in general) harms the concept, and maling Soul Points so viable needs an insane amount of work put into SP recovery ability, not just two uncommon Ids and a pot.

 

As Saya said as well, Wynncraft would still have a significant death punishment in other ways such as lost time and lost consumables/resources. The key point is that does Wynncraft really need a harsher death system? I don’t think so. Salted has changed his mind b4, so this shouldn’t be set in stone.

Because what’s also important to ask is, “Does having another health (soul point) meter to keep track of make the game more fun?” Does it add anything to the gameplay loop? And the answer is simply no bc like you said it’s still a problem.

I get it that it’s good to try to utilize something that’s already in the game. Though the only way I could see SP sticking around is by having some sort of reward system like Daily Rewards, except that you get rewarded with loot or buffs for how much you died during your play session.

 

I seriously disagree with this, having any punishment for death aside from losing progress is not only utterly unnecessary but I think will often make the game worse as it does here.
As an example: Bovine Barn, I have not beaten this boss but I've done it enough times to know it's hard. When you die to this boss the runback to it requires you to buy a seaskipper pass, sail to durum isles, kill ~16 cows, and then give 8 leather to the altar, this is a fairly long winded process when you consider that this is a boss that will almost certainly kill you upwards of 20 times before you win, and it's one that costs you both time and emeralds, Magmastream Core's runback is even longer, Wybel's requires you to find the damn island in the first place which I still can't consistently do without coords (and I suck at using coords), bosses at the end of difficult or long dungeons like EO take even longer, not to mention raid bosses where it can be quite a headache just to organize a party and keep it together through multiple attempts in addition to the complexity the multiplayer mechanics create, and that all pails in comparison to LEGENDARY ISLAND where upon dying to one of the later bosses you must fight through all the previous bosses to get back, a process which may take over half an hour and that's supposing you already know how to beat those previous bosses consistently, all of the things I've previously mentioned are a sufficient (sometimes more than sufficient) "punishment for death", now let's look at how soul points affect this.
Boss altars now can only be attempted somewhere around 5 times before you are forced to take a several hour long break, this is similarly true for dungeons and for LI except now you have a chance of losing your soul points before even getting to the boss, they did fix raids taking soul points multiple times but you still have to manage the soul points of everyone in the group.
Let's look at whether adding "stakes" to a fight really makes it fun? Robob is an LI boss where dying to him requires you to fight several very difficult bosses as well as a pretty big emerald cost (at least big if you're dirt poor like me), compare that to Bob, literally the exact same fight (or almost the exact same I guess phase 4 is different) but now the walkback just involves walking to a cave right next to nesaak and then going down a hallway, no emerald cost and a minimal time cost. Now do I find Robob to be significantly better or more fun? Not only should I find him more fun thanks to the higher stakes but also due to his phase 4 in my opinion being mechanically better with the new ultimate attacks, but instead I find Bob to be miles more fun, not because the fight itself has better mechanics but because I'm not constantly afraid of having to pay 10% of my net worth to have even a small chance of fighting this boss again if I die. When I die to Bob I usually can tell what happened and know what to do, when I die to Robob I just get pissed that I have to pay a bunch of money and fight a bunch of bosses just to get back to what I was trying to do. These stakes do not make the game more fun and to the contrary the seriously long walkback of all of LI when combined with the emerald cost and soul points makes the game significantly worse rather than better.

So does your solution fix this? No, it just makes the problem slightly less bad, which is still better than the current situation but inferior to just removing soul points altogether, soul points are not "stagnant well of wasted potential", they are the remaining descendent of the garbage default minecraft death system that we're still for some reason keeping around, frankly they are in my opinion the single biggest problem with Wynncraft in it's current state and their removal would probably improve the game for me more than literally any other change.

This sums up my problem with this suggestion and soul points in general honestly, I don't think players should be "punished" for what they do, they should be allowed to try different things until something works, any hinderances in the way of that are usually not going to be a good idea unless there's a damn good reason for them, and I don't think there is here.

 

, best reply

 

wtf why so based

 

This solves nothing and have fun when you loose your new soul point gear on death and can do nothing but wait

 

Ok I have another "stance" (individual datapoint) on this issue
So just earlier today, some level 32 person approached me and said that they had lost their bow by dying with low soul points - I bought them another one, but if they hadn't been brave enough to msg some random person and/or I hadn't bought them a new one, they probably would've just given up on Wynn entirely cause they had only been playing for a couple of days.
The point is, at low levels this is maybe even more of a problem cause low level players don't really have a way to get their items back. Sure, until like level 20 the soul point deaths are less punishing, but after that, you're screwed.

 

Fully agree on this one, it's incredibly dumb to punish and timegate players for trying to experiment with their builds, try glass cannon strategies, or just casually play the game without preparing much for stumbling upon a tough enemy.