Game Mechanics Another Soul Point Thread.

This thread has been in the works for months now, but I never got around to posting it until now. So, here you go.

Right now, the soul point system is... honestly really rubbish. As many, many people have pointed out, the entire system is hugely flawed, and have made a number of suggestions on how to remedy that. I of course will be jumping on this bandwagon because I can never resist a popular trend.

The major flaw with the current system is that it encourages the player to stop playing, which isn't just unpleasant, it's really bad game design. The system forces the player to stop trying if they have trouble, or risk losing their items. If you get stuck and then are forced by the game to stop trying, why would you want to come back? Why should you? And don't give me the whole "but you need to get better" spiel. The system literally prevents you from trying to get better by trying over and over and encourages you to stop trying. Give up and wait until someone carries you or you get overleveled or you get an overpowered build. Don't actually try to get better at the game. Or just flat out quit, we mustn't forget that option.

The reason for that, and the biggest flaw with a number of the suggestions is the idea of punishing the player for failure. While death should have consequences, you shouldn't be punished for trying and failing. That, again, encourages you to not try.

So now that we've seen some of the problems with our current system, can we come up with something a little better? I think we can.

Okay, let's start off with coming up with a basic plan. The soul point system, where you have 15 or so and they're regained once a day and whatever doesn't really work, but I think we could make it work with some changes. Major changes. First off, let's increase the limit to 30 instead of 15, and if it's possible, for them to set the minimum at 0 instead of 1. That gives us more ability to work with smaller increments. However, and this is gonna sound crazy, you'll still only lose 2 on every death. I know, but you'll see why I think this is okay in a minute. Next, we need to address the fact that you get 1 every 15 levels or whatever. It worked kind of fine back when the maximum level was 75, but now it's kind of weird. Let's just give you 30 at the start and work from there. We should also fix how the soul points are obtained. One every morning is... awful. Assuming 1 every morning, it takes nearly 5 hours to get from 1 to 15. Let's make a way to get them through gameplay, not waiting or spamming server hopping. As someone who ended up having to do this recently (trying to do a stupid challenge run), it's hellish and makes you want to just quit (which I did).

Okay, so here's where we run into the first big problem: if you have to do a gameplay action every time you die, it becomes repetitive and starts interfering with gameplay if you get stuck and die a few times. So let's not do that. But, if it's not gained through gameplay, how can you make them not take a long time to gain? Well, let's take this suggestion in a way you weren't expecting. We're gonna make it so they can be regained by killing enemies, with each soul point taking slightly more enemies to regain (With the max still being at most a few dozen enemies, certainly not over 100.). Obviously, testing to find a good balance in the number is necessary, but the key thing is that it is not grindy or annoying.

But wait, won't that be interrupting to gameplay? Not if it isn't required after every death. Yup, that's right, you don't have to do it every time you die. But then you'll be at low soul points and won't be able to play, right? Wrong. Let's get rid of the "requiring soul points to play" nonsense altogether. Quite frankly, it is the worst game design decision I have ever seen and needs to be done away with ASAP.

So, what's the point of it then? Well, rather than losing soul points being just a negative, let's add a new system to them. So, when you have fewer soul points, you should have some sort of penalty, right? However, it shouldn't be something that should interrupt gameplay or make you stop playing, so item loss is straight out. That is a terrible system in its current incarnation and really shouldn't have been a thing in the first place. It was more acceptable before the rework, but even then it was iffy. But anyway, item loss is straight out. XP loss too. The same goes for a damage reduction; that just takes your failure and compounds it so that each time you fail it gets harder and harder. XP bonus reduction though... Hear me out. So, if you have 30 soul points, 15 can be the baseline. Every soul point below that decreases xp by a small percentage (I think 4-5% would be reasonable, so that at 0 you get a -50 to -60% XP bonus). Every soul point above 25 increases xp by the same amount, so you're encouraged to have high soul points whenever possible, especially when you're grinding. Grinding and doing dungeons would even help to fill up your soul points, which encourages participation by anyone without full soul points, while reducing the overall grind to level up. However, if you run low while fighting a difficult boss or doing a hard dungeon, you don't have to stop playing or do some sort of repetitive task in order to keep trying. This way you can keep doing stuff for a quest or for a specific item, but not while just grinding xp (And to clarify - this wouldn't affect quest xp as that would be extremely counter-productive and/or overpowered). In addition having more than 25 soul points would give a small (3% or less) loot bonus per soul point over 25. This would incentivize loot runners to not use /kill to get around.

But what sort of system only decreases xp and loot bonus? That's right, a boring one. Let's add some more stuff. If you get to really low soul points, that means you're probably having trouble with something. So, when you have low soul points, I propose a small increase in damage, starting at 5, where you gain a 5% (possibly it should be less than this, but I'm just using that as a placeholder; around 25% seems fair to me) increase in damage to mobs (in a way that is multiplicative like with tomes) with every soul point below that. This gives a small buff to struggling players which increases to a rather significant amount if they continue having trouble during a difficult boss fight, but is only applicable if you give up most of your xp bonus, so it's not useful for dungeons or grinding. While I don't generally like it when games get easier the more trouble I have, in this case it seems fair and not like handholding because the system requires a knowing sacrifice in order to get that power. The difference is between deliberately handicapping yourself in one area for power in another, versus simply getting a free "here you win" when you have trouble.

"Wait, but that doesn't punish failure" I hear someone in the back row screaming. Good. I didn't want it to (Well, it sort of does, just not in a way that encourages people to stop playing). But realistically, why is that needed? Punishing failure isn't a good thing. It doesn't make the game more fun. It doesn't even offer a better incentive to try harder; dying and having to restart or go back to whatever you were doing is already the primary incentive, item loss is just a way of telling the player to play something else. You can even see this in the popular wisdom; "don't play if you have low soul points". It's not "be more careful" or to "try extra hard" or something. It's literally to stop playing. I don't like the mentality of "players who have trouble should be punished for it", it's just a mean attitude in my eyes.

A couple of other benefits this may also provide. Repeatedly dying before grinding a dungeon to get dungeon rewards would allow you complete the dungeon faster, at the cost of a very low XP reward from it. This would decrease the tedium of grinding dungeon rewards without the player getting the XP quicker as well. It also allows for quicker level gain while grinding, which alleviates some of the boredom associated with that. It gives players an incentive to actually kill mobs when in a dungeon party past the minimum required. Most importantly, it makes death not a quit moment for new or experienced players, which is essential for attracting and retaining new players. It allows people to get better at the gameplay by trying again when they fail.

So, thank you for reading out my suggestion, I hope you liked it. If you did, please leave some feedback as to why you did and if you didn't, would you mind telling me why?

 

definitely an interesting idea, but i have issues with it. i do like the idea of having the penalty for soul point loss be detriments to the player's XP gain and loot, but the issue with this is that, without a real punishment for death, a lot of new players would end up being on low soul points at almost all times and thus having their XP gain be severely debuffed always, ruining their enjoyment of the game because grinding takes too long and they don't understand why, not to mention they're getting less gear drops from mobs and thus will get less good equipment, meaning they'll struggle with the game more. as for the 5% damage bonus thing, absolutely not. in concept it seems like a great idea, until you realise that endgame players who don't care about their XP or loot bonus would intentionally get themselves to low soul points for a free damage bonus.

 

While I understand the motive whenever someone tries to rework soul points instead of just removing them, it usually results in over-complicated solutions like this.

It’s definitely not bad per se because I like how it incorporates gameplay, but it’s more so self-defeating because killing up to few dozen enemies per soul point isn’t really that much given how easy it is to kill most mobs in the game. Especially since you still lose only 2 SP when you die. Most people will practically have no penalty from dying because of the few times they do die, their sp can be quickly regained before they die again.

To clarify, does having less than 25 sp decrease your base loot bonus as well, I.e. at 0 sp one would have -50% to -60% as well? Because you mentioned the slight loot bonus above 25 sp and that low sp decreases xp and loot bonus, but you didn’t include loot bonus while talking about xp bonus initially.

If no, then death isn’t relevant anymore in the endgame because xp bonus doesn’t matter and a 3% loot bonus isn’t going the same distance as a 5% damage bonus.

Could this be improved by tweaking the numbers? Sure, but this is what I mean by over-complicated; now you have to deal with balancing multiple things at once and deal with how it affects different players. Like you said, you don’t want it to be grindy to regain sp, but currently the kill requirement and thresholds are way too inadequate. But the more you increase the kill requirement to regain sp, the more grindy it becomes. It’s a catch 22.

Whereas if you just remove soul points and replace it with a static drop rate of emeralds or something, you just have to deal with balancing one thing (I.e. drop rate) and it’s consistent for all players. It sucks whether you’re level 20 or 103 to lose 25% of your emeralds. But it doesn’t matter if you have -60% xp bonus at level 103, but not when you are level 20.

TL;DR It’s better than the current system by far, but it causes any penalty for death to be virtually nonexistent for most players due to how easy it is to bypass and incentivizes endgame players to have 0 sp. It’s better just to remove sp and have a static drop rate for items except for horses and ID’d items.

 

Having zero penalty for death is exactly the point. The xp bonus reduction isn't too punish the player, it's to offset the damage bonus so that just dying all the time isn't optimal all of the time. In the endgame, I don't really think it matters as during raids you'd likely be killing enough mobs that you'd lose the bonus, so it wouldn't affect raid bosses. Even if you made it to the end with the damage bonus, a 25% damage bonus is still only about even with the raid buffs. In any non-raid situation, a 25% damage bonus is pretty much irrelevant. The only reason I added it was so that players stuck on a single, challenging boss would be able to get a small buff to help them get through it.

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I was concerned about this majorly impacting new player in a negative way. That's part of why I made the maximum reduction around 50% and made it relatively difficult to stay that low. Even a player that's having significant difficulty is meant to be able to have only a small penalty, which keeps them at a given level for longer, rather than moving on to more difficult content when they're not prepared for it. I doubt this would be the case very often though, as I don't think new players actually die that much, even if they're having difficulty. Getting to even -25% XP bonus would require dying 5 times from neutral without getting more than a few kills in the process. The xp bonus was intended to balance the damage, and as a way to encourage the player to make sure they're properly prepared, without forcing them to stop playing with an actual serious penalty. Possibly having the -xp bonus start at a lower level would work, but I would assume most players would try to keep theirs at the max until endgame, so in practice it would be several deaths before the xp bonus even went negative.

 

While this system is probably better than thr current one. At the end of the day every suggestion to rework soul points will devolve into "that's a lot of effort to put into a feature that should just be removed".

 

Iirc Salted has said he wants to keep it, just to have it reworked. Otherwise, I'd say just remove it and let me have an extra hotbar slot.

 

Salted said he wants to keep them for now because he doesn’t have a new death punishment yet and needs to figure out what to do with the extraneous features tied to soul points like the soul point regen ID and soul point bombs; NOT that he wants zero penalties for death.

Death should have some sort of death penalty. It helps balance the difficulty and without it any suggestion is less likely to be implemented. People complain how Wynncraft is too easy anyway.

And when I say death penalty, I mean a light, consistent punishment that won’t impede or disincentivize someone from retrying challenging content. Wynncraft barely has a death penalty as it is unless if you die 6 times in a row. No one but proffers care about ingredients, and you don’t even start dropping emeralds until *4 sp (*according to the wiki). That’s why I think my suggestion is better bc it only affects items you get from loot chests; your build and horses will never be affected so beyond refilling some consumables here and there you can keep retrying as much as you want to. It’s a similar reason why loot chests are locked behind kill/challenge requirements so that people just don’t coast and get all the loot without consequence or risk. It’s fine to retry content as much as you want, but don’t expect to be as rich as someone who died less or not at all.

The damage bonus is also kinda wack because if a boss has minions that 25% damage bonus can be quickly negated. Let’s just assume for a moment a linear relationship between the number of mobs killed, and the order of soul points gained. Ex: If it takes 1 mob kill to go from 0 to 1 sp, then it would take 30 mob kills to go from 29 to 30 sp. That’s only a difference of 1 mob kill per 1 sp increase, and we are already hitting about a few dozen mob kills at the max number of sp. The point is that it won’t take too many mob kills to completely negate the damage bonus, so bosses with minions will be even more harder than bosses without minions. Which isn’t good for balancing.

Again, we can avoid all of this and gain an extra slot by just removing soul points.

 

I strongly disagree with death penalties; they are probably the single biggest quit moment in most games. Besides that, dying already has a penalty in that you have to return to wherever you last were. That said, I agree that it would be better to entirely remove soul points, but seeing as Salted wants to keep them or something similar, I want to to be a system the player can use, not just a bad thing that happens to them if the game is difficult. That discourages taking risks instead of encouraging the player to try new things. In a game with such a heavy emphasis on exploration and building, that's the worst possible thing to do.

 

As cool as this would be for a soul point rework suggestion, the better option is to just remove them entirely. I would go on an entire spiel about why they're bad but I already said this beforehand, so I'll let my past self speak for me:

Also my points for why this is neat but removing soul points is the better option have already been said by other people in this thread.

 

Agreed. This thread only exists because Salted has said he wants some other system in place to replace them, so I was providing an idea for how soul points could be used in a way that benefits the player, rather than just as a punishment.

 

I feel that’s an unfair criticism given how most games punish your death by making you lose money, regardless of difficulty or genre. The Dark Souls trilogy, Hollow Knight, Sonic, Shovel Knight, Super Mario Odyssey, etc. Even the base vanilla game has a much worse death penalty, and that has objectively more exploration and building than Wynncraft, yet people still enjoy Minecraft by the millions. Most MMOs have way worse death penalties too, so again it’s not genre-specific.

Not every game has or needs a death penalty sure. Celeste and Cuphead are good examples; but they compensate by being ball bustingly hard, which is a direction Wynncraft will never go in. And given Wynncraft’s greater emphasis on loot, it makes more sense to punish players through money than in Celeste or Cuphead. At least you have to still beat the level in Cuphead to get the coins too.

Furthermore, you can’t say you that having a death penalty discourages risk, because that literally is the risk, so if you take that out there isn’t any risk to begin with. And in my suggestion, all you need to do to avoid most of the death penalty is to make sure to stop by your bank here and there; it’s not that hard and already part of the gameplay loop. Especially since you get teleported to the nearest town anyway right after you die the first time. Plus because your ID’d gear will never drop, you can feel free to try new builds while trying to beat a boss or something.

 

Those are all fair points. Attacking all games that have a punishment for death isn't fair of me. A system where only un-ided items or emeralds are dropped would be fine and wouldn't really be that objectionable, and it is true that such systems can help games. My issue it wholly with the mentality of "death must be punished", when that doesn't improve the player experience at all in most circumstances. Dark Souls has the ability to reclaim your souls, Remnant: From the Ashes borrows heavily from it but has no penalty, which was never really complained about, Minecraft has a toggleable option to keep your inventory on death. None of these are worse for not having a strict punishment for death and some would argue they're better.
In my opinion, if a game adds a system, then the system shouldn't be entirely a "bad things happen to you". It doesn't really add anything to the player experience, it only rubs a little salt in the wound if you're having trouble. A big part of my suggestion was that I really just want them to make this system something the player can interact with and control to a degree. I like the idea of death leading to different outcomes and having the player be rewarded for consistently playing well. Giving the player something to do to change the outcome of death instead of having it happen to them gives the player a sense of agency and control, and rewards them for actively trying to get better outcomes.