Game Mechanics Change Soul Points, Don't Remove Them

To put a bandaid on this problem that people have been complaining about (there's been a couple threads on the feedback section in wynn discord) here's a suggestion to (half) solve the problem of soul points.

The first point that people say is that soul points make newer players quit after dying 5-6 times and then they lose all their items, etc, etc.

My first suggestion is to increase the base sp for a level 1 player to 15 and increase the base sp of a level 100 to 20. This makes it so that when a newer player dies, there will be more room for error for a newer player, so that they can die more than 2 times without quitting.

My second suggestion is to decrease the amount of sp lost on death to 1 sp. This would also increase the room for error more, and when you get to level 50-ish you could add a sp on death to go back to the original 2 sp lost per death.

My third suggestion is to make all teleport scrolls 1 sp. but don't remove free tps to dungeons i like being able to get to cinfras for free This will make it so that there is more of an incentive to use teleport scrolls in the endgame, because /killing loses 2 sp whereas scrolls only use 1 sp.

this was already in the game and i am stupid

a bit more tweaking includes:

1 sp per 30 minutes offline instead of every hour which means that it'll be 2/3ds the speed of regular regening sp

hunted: you already know what you're doing so you're always going to lose 2 sp on death

also idk if this has a reason but change gaining sp to be levels 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 or do it on a curve

oh and here's a thread by saya about a rework to soul points
https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...-desperately-needed-soul-point-rework.269293/

 

this isnt bad. just a question, uh they already take 1....

 

oh.

 

Even by giving more leniency and time for people to work around soul points the fundamental problems are still there. This just pushes them somewhere else instead of nipping them in the bud. I won’t go into detail why because it has been elaborated to death in numerous other threads.

 

at this point just remove them

i do not understand what benefit there is to keeping them like this. i understand that there needs to be a punishment for death but this is just not it

 

Ultimately, this still does the same thing. Players will still have to stop playing after reaching a challenge, teleports will still have a pointless "cost" tied to them. While I think they should be reworked, I believe they need to be entirely reworked, not just for the numbers to be tweaked a little. This would be like if they hadn't added quests past level 90 but compensated by lowering the xp to get to 100 by 10%. While it would make it better, it's still a huge detriment to the gameplay. A new player will still probably die multiple times while getting a feel for the game or upon hitting their first real challenge, get to 6 or 8 or whatever soul points, then start dropping stuff or quit. If a game punishes me for trying, I stop playing. I can't imagine new players who just lost half their money or their only weapon or the helmet they did a dungeon to get are going to be any more interested in continuing. Ultimately, the system punishes people who are having trouble already and does nothing for anyone else. It needs to be completely changed so that this is not the case.

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I'd argue that death itself is a punishment. You lose any progress made and have to travel back to wherever you were. Ultimately I think soul points should be used for some other system (maybe rewarding you for not dying) or, as you suggested, removed entirely.

 

I agree with the approach of fully changing soul points, but I think until that happens we need a band-aid fix, something that wouldn't take too much time to implement. Once you get out of early game, soul points are nothing but an inconvenience, but it isn't threatening. Sure, you can lose some items, but most end-game players have more than 1 class, so you can just play on a different one or take a break.

Personally, I think the biggest issues with soul points go to new players, for two reasons.

1. They figure out what they do and get too scared to play if they drop under X soul points, killing player retention.
2. They go afk and don't really understand ./class and it's importance yet, and they lose all their stuff.

I think #1 is harder to tackle without a rework, but #2 has a stupid easy solution and I cannot believe it has not been done. When a player dies, they are always teleported to a town. Make it when you die, you gain AFK protection, where you cannot take damage until you move in game. This way, if you afk in a town, and a mob breaks in. You will only die one time instead of 100+ times. There would have to be some checks in place to make sure people can ONLY get AFK protection in a town or entrance to a dungeon or smth if you die, and nowhere else. At least this would prevent players from coming back from a break to losing all progress, leaving the server in dissapointment.

Idk just my 2 cents. I know this wouldn't be too hard to implement and would probably solve some of the issues we have. I'd like to see less players disappointed when they realize they lost all their gear (I know it's easy to get back, but in their perspective it's their entire playthrough's progress wiped).

 

I feel like this is asking for soul points to be made just weak enough that people will stop complaining about them to the extent they do now while still leaving them as an unnecessary inconvenience; at this point you aren't advocating for soul points as a game design decision, you're just trying to nerf them enough that they won't exist substantially enough for people to complain while still technically taking the 'middle ground'. There's no sense in admitting that soul points are an unneeded and worthless hindrance that only wastes people's time and prevents them from playing the game and trying to disarm them for that reason, but still for some reason choosing to maintain them as a feature instead of removing them altogether as you obviously should.