Game Mechanics Remove Soul Points (v2)

Other RPG's have their own punishment system: Bordelands makes you loose a ton of cash; WoW force you to get back to your death location in a shity ghost form without the possibility to use anything to move faster (Which is FAR FAR more annoying than soul points, like realy, I dont understand how we can cry on SP when the most popular MMORPG in the world has the most sadistic death punishment); Final Fantasy makes you loose xp levels; Etc ... Also Cuphead dosn't have one because the game is already hard enough like this and is meant to be a "Die and Retry" type of game (which Wynncraft isn't) at the end of the day, Death penalty is meant to be a balance in the difficulty of games but If we can't increase difficulty with the gameplay then it's fair to use penalty systems.

 

That's my problem, soul points and frankly most punishments for death outside of simply having to run back to a boss and start over just make the single playstyle that I find fun become very annoying, and in a way that doesn't improve the game in any way at all, there is literally no reason I can see to arbitrarily make that playstyle less fun. Secondly I don't play glassy builds for the damage really I play them because tanks are actively unenjoyable for me, getting hit by a bunch of attacks from a boss and not taking much damage feels just wrong to me and facetanky playstyles are less engaging. Third the drawback on a glassy build is that you will not be able to beat most bosses especially when you get into the late-game without memorizing their spell-combos completely and the way they chain together, that means with most bosses you'll have to try many times until you beat them, when you add soul points it just makes the process annoying, it doesn't balance those builds in any productive way and it doesn't make the game more fun either, it makes the game unnecessarily tedious. Fourth on non-glassy builds many bosses are still hella hard, your assertion that wynncraft is an easy game doesn't hold when it comes to boss altars and endgame bosses, the final boss in AHC is going to take you tons of attempts no matter what build you use (outside of the occasional busted ultraglass-cannon that has like 10 mythics), same goes for Bovine Barn, Prison of Souls if you aren't on assassin, many of the LI bosses as well will take many many attempts, these are all bosses that you can't beat without learning the ins and outs of the boss fight, and they're all made to be kind of annoying thanks to soul points as well as the general mentality the game seems to sometimes have that death needs some extra punishment (stupid emerald cost for LI, unnecessarily long walkback times)

I think a reasonable player would realize they were underleveled after dying repeatedly to overpowered enemies, soul points or not.

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Half of the boss altars in wynncraft really beg to differ, much of the content of this game really is a "die and retry" situation. Also the fact that other RPGs have tedious death punishments isn't any reason why wynncraft should as well, death punishments that are designed to be unenjoyable are, well, unenjoyable, and generally speaking most people play games to enjoy themselves, not the other way around, if I wanted to get the experience of waiting for hours for soul points to regen, I could just wait in my room and wait for hours, no need to install minecraft, have an internet connection, any of that, the one thing I can't do without wynncraft is, well, actually playing wynncraft, and that's why I play wynncraft, to play the game, not to spend hours not playing the game.

 

Well a lot of players see quest level as an indicatator of difficulty and without SP players will just try again over and over to beat the bosses and it will just become a luck matter since they wont try grinding sometthing else to beat it.

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Also I don't think you realyze that a big part of the players just don't play like you, so if you like to play glassy builds just to die more quickly and try to learn the boss spells it's up to you but the game itself is just not meant to be played like that : 1 Because of lags, making smooth and fluid fights nearly impossible; 2 : Because of how Wynncraft telegraphing works (nearly all bosses just use this old white particle swirl) 3 : Because of how random boss spells can be sometimes.

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The problem is that you try to play Wynncraft like if it was Dark Souls or something like this but you forget that Wynncraft is Wynncraft you can't make epic tryhard bossfights (mostly because of what I said : Lags, telegraphing, etc ...) now don't get me wrong, there is spell learning and all that stuff but you try do have an accurate gameplay with a non accurate game ...

 

1: Lag is annoying but it is what it is, there's not much the devs can do but the game shouldn't be made less fun just because the game is being designed assuming everybody is having game-breaking lag, that is when you don't have soul points, with soul points lag completely prevents you from playing the game at all regardless of your skill and/or build since after dying several times you're locked out of playing the game. Also I thought it was "up to the player to find a better connection" and game mechanics shouldn't take lag into consideration, at least that's what you said a day ago?
2: Every boss fight (or at least nearly every boss fight) and many normal mobs as well do their spells in a specific order with the exact same timing every time, these spell combos usually begin with a non-lethal spell so once you see the combo once or twice you pretty much know exactly what to expect when you see a certain telegraph (for example Virus Doctor in LI has a push-arrow storm attack, every time he does push it will be followed by arrow storm and he will never arrow storm without first doing push, so every time he pushes you you know to prepare for an arrow storm, this is true for the rest of virus doctor's attacks as well, a similar system exists for nearly every boss fight in the game) you know what attack is coming and how to avoid it, the telegraphing in this game is pretty damn accurate once you know what you're looking at, that's also why I'm perplexed by you talking about "how random boss spells can be sometimes", outside of the occasional unbalanced BS boss fight (of which there aren't really that many when it comes to major bosses and their numbers are thinning) you'll pretty much know exactly what to expect from a boss after fighting it a few times if you're paying attention, of the bosses I've had at least some amount of experience with there are very few if any that I would say I truly cannot predict, and I don't just mean bosses I've attempted 20-30 times, many bosses that I've yet to beat and whom I've only attempted several times are usually fairly predictable to me, the mob AIs of wynncraft are pretty simple and there's a pretty small number of mob spells to draw from. Spirit of Gale is probably the only truly weird and unpredictable boss and even she becomes much less overwhelming if you have a little bit of experience with fighting her.
Besides if you're actually meant to just tank a boss's attacks and not avoid them, why tf does Bovine Barn, a boss that's pretty much a guaranteed 1-2 shot on every at-level build, exist? why tf do Prison of Souls and Panic Zealot exist? The amount of care that's been put into the movesets of many of the bosses by the CT really kinda suggests that you are supposed to avoid their attacks, and that they were designed with the assumption that people would pay attention to the boss's attacks.

And regardless of all of that, the fact that "a big part of the players don't play like you", is not an argument for why the single playstyle that I and at least some other players find fun should be unviable or at least headache-inducing.

 

I did said it helps a lot, never said server themselves don't lag ^^ ... Dont get me out of context please.

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I wasn't talking about telegraphing, some boss IA are just trash. Just look at Garoth or survival bosses in underworld cryp/ CUC ...

 

Of course there is bosses like this that prioritize avoiding attacks but I am talking about regular gameplay which boss altars aren't (like seriously who the f*** runs enough boss altars to loose all their soulpoints, just farming for the tokens will already fill your SP back)

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Yes it Is, it's as if you were doing a standing water slide when the rules are to use it lying down and you fall but you still dare to complain to the staff that their slide is not adapted to your vision of fun. You cant complain about something and want it changed because you prefer like this while the bigger part of the community is ok with it, I mean look a the poll most people prefere to have a death penalty system (even if its not soul points) and I am pretty sure that the "silent majority" of the players are also ok with it. Now I am sorry if my responses were a bit harsh or toxic but I am just tired of this debate around removing soulpoints while developpers should just add a better death penalty or rework soulpoints (and it's clearly what most of us want).

 

ok wait I read through a lot of arguments in this thread but I don't remember everything so if I missed any points (which I most definitely did) can someone remind me of them so I can respond to those as well?
thanks


Alright, first off.
I'm highly against penalties for death. Most simplistically, my reasoning is "I play video games to have fun, and being punished isn't fun." (This is an argument you've heard me make before if you've seen any of my anti-lootrun rants).
Soul Points at level 100 really don't make sense, because it's just putting a cap on how much time you can play for (if you aren't rich enough for good gear (like me!) or are bad at the game (like me!)) - you can only fight so many bosses before your time is up and you go have to play badpixel grindblock or whatever else you play. I have yet to see a valid argument against sp at level 100 - even "sp are telling you that you need a better build" doesn't work here because dying repeatedly tells you that you need a better build regardless of whether or not it forcibly removes items from your inventory, decreasing your net worth and making it harder to get a better build.

Soul Points while levelling, however, make some form of sense. You want the player to learn that dying is a bad thing, and put them in situations where they now own nothing and give up on Wynncraft.
In all seriousness, though, I do see some sort of valid argument for sp while levelling - the argument would be something along the lines of "players can, without punishment, throw themselves at bosses that they're not prepared for (no they can't there are level requirements to fight almost every boss in the game), and they would just die repeatedly until they eventually beat it.
The above argument is still true here - when you die over and over, it will eventually become clear that you need a better build, or be a higher level, or that there's something wrong and you're not doing it properly. Even for really hard bosses like Bovine Barn, they tell you what level you need to be (by blocking lower level characters from doing the boss altar), and if you can't beat it, then maybe you should get a better build or level up before trying to beat it again.

On to /kill abuse!

I mean, yeah, honestly, /kill should have some punishment, but it shouldn't be linked to death in general. Make it a separate thing, and then you get the best of both worlds - no sp and no /kill abuse.


I definitely missed a bunch of arguments so like if you see a hole in my arguments or have a counter-argument or I didn't mention something that you think is important in this debate definitely reply

 

When I mentioned earlier that I want soul points removed, I also meant that I'm fine with consumables, ingredients, and money dropping upon death. Heck maybe even unidentified gear too. So unless if you're going to challenge every boss without consumables (which is especially challenging for noobies that inherently struggle at the game), you couldn't then just keep throwing yourself at the boss without consequence bc you'd quickly run out of consumables and money. To me, that penalty is fine because at least you can then grind a bit to get more money/consumables in the normal gameplay loop. In the current system, however, there's nothing you can do except world hopping or literally stop playing the game in order to be ready again to fight.

TL;DR Soul points are bad not necessarily because the punishment is harsh, but because how you recuperate is time-based and out of your control in the game without world hopping.

 

Late response, but I just wanted to rephrase what I was saying to get my point across better. I like said in the post above, my main gripe isn’t necessarily that it’s a harsh punishment, but that how you recover from that punishment is out of the player’s control beyond world hopping. In Borderlands, WoW, and Final Fantasy, you can immediately start playing the game again to recover your lost money, stuff, or exp by grinding. Whereas in Wynncraft, you do have to wait IN ADDITION to having to grind again to recover your stuff. Or at least you have to wait in order not to risk losing even more of your stuff (again without world hopping but that still breaks up the gameplay loop). That's why I've been saying that it discourages playing the game because while you can stop fighting the boss and come back later, you also don't want to do other stuff to level up like quests or dungeons in the meantime because you still risk dying and making the situation worse. Just because other content might be easier doesn't mean that you might say, lag out and die or get stuck in quest have to do /kill. And the lower level you go, the more inefficient leveling becomes. So even though these games have harsher punishments on the surface, in this way they don’t bc their punishments never break the gameplay loop and are consistent, whereas Wynncraft’s death penalty does by becoming harsher each time you die.

That’s why I said before the system was too harsh, though I should’ve clarified this aspect b4. I’d rather have a system where you always lose a percentage of your consumables, money, ingredients, and unidentified items every time you died than the current one. I’d even say this system would be more difficult, yet fair in some ways. For example, if you know that you could lose a substantial portion of your consumables every time you died, you’d limit how many consumables you’d bring to a battle in case you lost most of them by accident. Whereas in the current system, you have to die at least 5 times (from 15 SP) to start losing only a small fraction of your consumables. So it’s much safer to bring a ton of consumables with you, which makes the fight easier than the former case. Unlike the former case as well, you could cheese the system by just world hopping.

ID items and horses should never drop bc not only does it set back your progress, but it also makes it much harder to get that progress back. Especially in the endgame where if you lose a piece of your build it could screw up the entire build and you need to get a new one. And this system would still prevent players from just spamming content and praying to get through it since they would consistently lose their consumables, money, and ingredients. In the current system you only start losing your emeralds and consumables at 6 SP, and your ID'd items at 4 SP anyway, so it isn't much of a stretch. And again, there’s world hopping abuse.

TL;DR Having smaller, but consistent punishments are much better than the current system because it still encourages the player to get stronger before retrying a challenge without needlessly incentivizing them to not play the game and makes the difficulty fairer.

 

maybe this is in some way a response to Dr Zed's response, but it kind of sounds like your argument is "these games also have bad death systems, we need to make sure this game has one too", I'm not necessarily saying those games are bad or anything, their death systems might work in the contexts they're meant for, but that's not an arguement for wynncraft having a serious punishment for death or the wynncraft community being expected to put up with one. I think something's wrong if you can't understand why wynncraft players are, as you said, crying over soul points, soul points are a sometimes infuriating "feature" that solely serves the role of preventing people from playing the game they want to play. If WoW has an even more unpleasant death system (I'm assuming you think it's unpleasent considering you said it was "FAR FAR more annoying than soul points" and called it "sadistic") that would if anything say something very bad about WoW's death system, not anything good about wynncraft's.

 

I think you both missunderstood, I am not defending "Soul Point" system (because yes it's kinda trash and we could have something better) I am just defending "Death Punishments" and I absolutely think that Wynncraft needs one, maybe not Soul Points (if something better is found) but still needs one. I also defend the fact that Wynn's Death Punishment isn't that bad compared to what we can find in other MMO's *cough* WoW *cough*. Anyway, I think Death Punishment is a good way to create the fear of death in the player's mind (because dying in a game should never be CASUAL especially in MMO's) and when we look a the poll It's clear that a major part of the community thinks the same way, even if they are not ok with the Soul Point system (like me).

 

I really just think that death punishments in general don't need to be a thing - they're just a feature that raises the skill floor and makes the game, in my opinion, less fun, since they're just a feature that removes items from an inventory. I don't particularly care for a feature that drains my hard-earned emeralds (or items) since it just nullifies some amount of work I put into the game. I want my time to count, and with a death system, it doesn't.

 

Hopefully soul points do a jingle jingle poof like yahyabot and go bye bye

 

soul points have been replaced with rat points.

they function the same but nobody complains about them because rat

 

There has to be a penalty for scrolls too.

 

bruh, I'm getting sick of this argument.

Let's just remove death entirely

 

Despite my lack of experience in this game, I'm going to insert my opinion here.

The debate currently doesn't seem to be over whether or not to remove Soul Points - the community seems to almost entirely agree on this point (the removal of Soul Points being a positive, that is), however the debate is on punishment for death in general.

I can see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, I'm persuaded by Mardeknius's simple "fun" argument - it could be seen as strictly a negative in that it's just a feature that takes away items. On the other hand, it is true that if players see death as something that is not a negative, they won't fear it, and as such could throw themselves more into positions where they die repeatedly, making the game less fun.

Personally, I believe that punishment for death is necessary, since in a game with no death punishment, there's no reason to have any sort of defensive strategy whatsoever. While walkback and monetary punishments (Legendary Island and Dungeons are both examples of this) are punishments, those are both heavily boss-specific and don't work in all situations.

/kill and Teleport Scrolls both need punishments. /kill could have a cooldown, which would be an effective measure (in my opinion), and Teleport Scrolls' costs could be increased, so they weren't abused.

 

As a proponent of the "no death punishments" side of the argument I'd like to point out that this argument doesn't make sense.
players will obviously still see death as a negative because, well, you lose progress, and until you stop dying to something you won't be able to make progress.

You could be arguing that removing penalties for death would decrease the difficulty too much, after all on a tanky build it's hard to die to anything and only a minority of boss fights/dungeons/etc will actually be a serious roadblock meaning that outside of that minority it's true that you wouldn't have to worry about death and you could just be reckless, but I have two problems with this; 1, that "minority of boss fights/dungeons/etc", while a minority, is still some boss fights and dungeons, and those will kill you a lot and be a roadblock, and, if there is a death punishment, will trigger that punishment many, many times, and I don't think that'd be very fun, examples of what I'm talking about would be bosses like prison of souls and the AHC final boss (which I won't name because spoilers) both of which are going to keep killing you until you start using strategy with them and/or learn their attacks, which is a long process that inevitably will involve you dying a lot; My second response is that you can control your own difficulty in this game, if the game gets to easy for you and becomes less fun you can try playing it without potions, or use a build that has a higher skill floor, and you can start doing harder content like LI and boss altars (and the CT is also going to keep coming out with more and more hard content because of this exact issue), if you decide that now with no death punishments and your current build the game is too easy, change your build, or do any of the other things I mentioned, people will ultimately start doing this anyways since the game at easier difficulty will become increasingly dull over time for many people death punishments or not, however while with no death penalties this is perfectly fun to do (and I'd argue more fun than playing the game the way I originally played it at least for me) when you do have penalties for death the game becomes an annoying nightmare where every couple of minutes your locked out of playing the game (that's with the current soul point system, whatever other death punishment there is it probably won't be too much better and certainly not better than not having death punishments for people playing the way I'm describing).
I think the problem is another case of balancing the game around tank builds, especially overpowered ones. Sure some people just make builds that are designed to completely nullify any mechanics the game throws at them and allow them to not have to do anything, and obviously that's fine, if those people enjoy building more than they enjoy the combat system they should do whatever's fun for them, but for people who want to be challenged or enjoy the process of learning a boss's moveset over the course of many many attempts, they shouldn't be punished for playing the game the way they want to, especially when that way of playing the game is quite clearly being catered to by other things the content team is working on, large parts of the item pool are dedicated to ETW/EWA/TWA, and the existence of dungeons like EO, raids like TCC or TNA (which is just coming out) and even recently added bosses like Panic Zealot show that the content team is trying to cater to players that want to have the option of having harder content, soul points and the idea that players should be penalized every time they die completely flies in the face of this, so while yes it may seem obvious to have punishments for death from the perspective of newer(-ish) players using safer builds, it becomes one of the worst things you could put in the game once you start exploring more difficult builds and content.
One interesting solution if people still think that tanks being too powerful is a big problem (raids could be one situation where it is) would be to have abilities on the 2.0 ability trees of certain archetypes (like Paladin for example) that increase your defense thereby making death less likely but in exchange cause you to lose some amount of emeralds/other stuff or some other penalty upon death, that way you can balance death penalties for tank builds without them completely ruining every other build in the game, I don't care if this kind of thing gets added since I don't use tanks very much anymore but it's just an idea for people who think that tanky builds with no death penalty would be a problem.

Oh yeah did I mention I wanna get rid of those too?
Ok most dungeons aren't really a problem, there is an issue which is that many dungeons have key guardians that almost never spawn (I'm pretty sure there's a few dungeon key guardians that I have literally never seen in my entire life), but if the spawn rates got buffed (and maybe if more quests gave keys as rewards since a few quests already do this) I think dungeon keys would be fine. LI on the other hand is a problem in my opinion at least.
LI tickets right now are really expensive (yeah I know some people lootrun 26/7 and for those people LI's probably quite cheap but lootrunning isn't exactly fun and unlike those people I actually do try to spend some amount of my time looking at something that isn't a computer screen and I think everyone else should as well so at least for me and any sane people LI tickets are unreasonably expensive) and even without ticket costs LI would still be ridiculously difficult, you have to consecutively beat 10 of what are some of the hardest bosses in the game in one attempt, you essentially have to (unless you're using a tank or have a party, which yeah according to some people LI is meant to be multiplayer but the bosses are very fun to do in singleplayer if you're allowed effectively unlimited tickets, I know from the beta because I'm rich in the beta, so the point still stands) learn the attacks of all the bosses one at a time, each of which will take a lot of attempts, not to mention how nobody is perfect so even once you know the attacks of earlier bosses like mummyboard or matrojan idol you still might die to them many times just from making small mistakes, with this in mind you can understand that LI would still be plenty hard without ticket costs, and the ticket cost just makes LI completely impractical, frankly the only function tickets serve as far as I can see is draining the happiness (and wallets) of people who like soloing LI.
Similar things exist for other bosses that really should have short (and cheap) walkbacks, Bob has an unnecessary long hallway you have to walk down every time you want to fight him, I've used Bob as an example of a boss with a short walkback before but at that time my only experience with Bob was on a Chakram assassin where hallways aren't really a problem, but after doing it on Shaman the hallway is really annoying. Panic Zealot, like Bob also one of the hardest bosses in the game, requires 6 soul essences to fight, unfortunately the spawn rate of soul roamers/insanity crystals and the drop rate of the soul essence itself is pitiful, after grinding about 1o minutes with multiple mob totems I managed to get ~12 soul essence, now imagine not having VIP and trying to do that. Vulcor Andrenophage requires a long seaskipper ride which is really a problem for what I might actually consider to be the singular hardest boss in the game. The previously mentioned final boss which shall go unnamed has this annoying cutscene you have to watch every time (which I actually have a thread on!), and, ok that's actually about it. Orange Wybel requires you to find the damn island every time you want to fight it but I really don't mind that, and other boss altars have ingredient costs (orange wybel actually does have bad drop rates on it's entry fee ingredient) but most of them aren't that bad, I don't want to get rid of all walkbacks, just get rid of ones that feel like they're really, really unnecessarily exhausting and just feel like a middle finger to players.

 

I suppose I see your point. Walkback does seem rather unnecessary, now that I've more thoroughly considered the issue, and while I'm unaware of most of the bosses you referred to, I can see how long and potentially expensive walkbacks are irritating.

Perhaps my initial point was too hastily made. Plenty of masterfully crafted games (think Undertale and Deltarune as examples) don't have death punishments, and in those games, a lack of death punishment is a positive (at least in my eyes). The death punishment system brings nothing to Wynncraft, and as such I am now a firm believer in removal of it.

 

I'd say Deltarune (I'm too broke to play undertale) is probably one of the best examples of this, the runback to the spamton NEO and jevil fights both skip the cutscene that normally plays first, considering that many wynncraft fights are at (at least in my opinion) harder that spamton NEO and yet have annoying cutscenes or often times things that are even worse in front of them, if spamton NEO made you grind a bunch of mobs in order to re-attempt him I feel like a lot of people would be pretty pissed.
I'm not really asking for anything drastic, I just want a few of the particularly long (and unnecessarily so) walkbacks to be changed, and I want to change the mentality that there needs to be a punishment for death, or that people should be expected to first or second try stuff like LI when that's simply not possible with many of the build archetypes that are actively being catered to and considered by the CT, the most extreme example of a very short walkback would be Jevil from deltarune, where you respawn right outside the door to his arena, that's not exactly what I'm asking for (although for some bosses it wouldn't be bad), I just don't want the kinds of walkbacks where it feels like they were designed specifically to be annoying, or ones that feel like they were designed based on the assumption that nobody would ever use them (A Hunter's Calling comes to mind here) and that everyone would win first try when that's not really realistic and the fights themselves totally contradict that.