PC Death penalty is too much!

After playing for the last couple of days I think the death penalty does need revision. I like having a death penalty, love the idea of consequences. During a normal game day I can live with an hour of handicap but would suggest that it would be better if the penalty slowly scaled back to full over the hour.Where the penalty is broken is during the horde night. You get swamped, die and now you have to fight off the horde for the rest of the night with all your ability buffs gone. No more quick stamina regen or cut back stamina usage for melee. After that first death, you are pretty much guaranteed a continues string of deaths until sunrise. Especially now the AI paths so much better. Not so easy to hide hehe. Makes for a frustrating experience tho.
This would be the same no matter how long the debuff is though, you die on horde night in A17 your pretty much screwed, even if it was a 10-15 min debuff, you'd still be just as screwed on horde night. Remember they gps to you on horde night so when you respawn they are already coming for you. If it didn't take away perk levels it'd not be as bad. I don't mind conditions such as hot/cold etc taking away perks temporarrly as they can be solved generally pretty quick, but losing them for an hour? Thats a wee bit much.

 
K, so what if the buff time varied based on player level?

And would it be better to make it longer or shorter for the lower levels?

...I suspect this is doable.

 
They could change it to be only a stat debuff, but it doesn't lower perks, its the lowering of the perks based on the stats where it really hurts and turns you useless. I can deal with going from 10 str down to 1, as long as I keep my perks fully leveled, I mean i'll be losing damage/block damage/health etc, but at least I can still craft all my normal stuff etc, with the current debuff, you die, you pretty much can't do much of anything for an hour. People aren't complaining about the debuff itself, its how LONG it lasts that people are complaing about.
Tbh this would be an adequate fix. You'd still have something to do while you wait for the debuff to go away, so it would be like the broken leg from a9-16, but wouldn't completely neuter you. I'm 100% supportive of this.

I think (well, I know) there needs to be a penalty for death to keep us from saying "Oh well" and just dying to get back to base faster or something. I just think there should be one that doesn't make me want to go do something else for an hour instead of playing a game I enjoy, because all the things I enjoy doing aren't doable anymore. Can't go looting bc I get lower quality items, so I'd waste the loot spawns. Can't go killing stuff bc what if I die? I'd end up resetting the debuff. Can't craft bc I lose all my crafting perks. So that leaves... Nothing. I can repair damages to the base if there's any, but what am I gonna do for the next 57 minutes? xD

 
K, so what if the buff time varied based on player level?
And would it be better to make it longer or shorter for the lower levels?

...I suspect this is doable.
I'd say shorter for lower levels, as it hurts low level players the most overall. Mainly due to lack of gear/items that a higher player would have. If your below lv 30 or 40, and you die, your pretty much garbage for an hour as you lose bascally every perk above level 1. You also got to consider how much easier it is to die in a17, in a16 I rarely died even playing dead is dead on the highest diffculty, in a17? I get wrecked on nomad at times, I have over 1800 hours or so in the game so i'm not new. Most of my deaths is BS like zombies from 100 meters+away somehow detecting me in a cleared poi then beelining it to me. Plus its pitch black so its hard to aim hits at them. Can't really get night vision early game unless you get very lucky and find them in a drop, if they even can drop.

One death me and my friend had, was we were in a room, we had nothing going but a torch, all of a sudden we have 5 zombies all busting in at once that beelined it right to the room we were in, we were even crouched and not moving, doors were shut and we boarded up the windows, so the zombies should have had no realistic way to know we were there. Unless even 1 torch is just like a massive signal light now. I love the new AI, but I think they can find the player far to easly at anytime, its not so bad during the day, the problem is at night.

 
I'd say shorter for lower levels, as it hurts low level players the most overall. Mainly due to lack of gear/items that a higher player would have. If your below lv 30 or 40, and you die, your pretty much garbage for an hour as you lose bascally every perk above level 1. You also got to consider how much easier it is to die in a17, in a16 I rarely died even playing dead is dead on the highest diffculty, in a17? I get wrecked on nomad at times, I have over 1800 hours or so in the game so i'm not new. Most of my deaths is BS like zombies from 100 meters+away somehow detecting me in a cleared poi then beelining it to me. Plus its pitch black so its hard to aim hits at them. Can't really get night vision early game unless you get very lucky and find them in a drop, if they even can drop.
One death me and my friend had, was we were in a room, we had nothing going but a torch, all of a sudden we have 5 zombies all busting in at once that beelined it right to the room we were in, we were even crouched and not moving, doors were shut and we boarded up the windows, so the zombies should have had no realistic way to know we were there. Unless even 1 torch is just like a massive signal light now. I love the new AI, but I think they can find the player far to easly at anytime, its not so bad during the day, the problem is at night.
Yeh, and zombies have a bad habit of spawningon top of you in prefabs. We're playing on Warrior difficulty on our server, so deaths happen a LOT. Most folks just log out for horde night now to avoid the dreaded debuff though.

Back on topic, I'd agree that lower levels should be punished less. It's too easy to just pack up and start over somewhere else when you get that first debuff.

 
Umm, a LOT of what you guys are suggesting is already part of the NearDeath penalty. Look @ the XML.

Right now the Deathpenalty varies with playerlevel, the severity gets reduced in that 1hour duration, AND the player gets a Regeneration (HP and Stamina) buff!

 
@Wulf The duration doesn't vary, just the severity. You may lose 4 points and be at 6 instead of 10 at higher levels, but most folks aren't high level yet. I've been no-lifing it and I'm almost level 30, which will mena I can buy rank 5.At rank 4, I'm knocked to rank 1 of everything.

 
Exactry. I mean if it's a penalty less than half an hour, that'd mean I could go ahead and start making my way oh so carefully to where I died, as the debuff won't be so long I'd have to spend most of that time hiding in a tree. It'd give me something to do. If it didn't affect the crafting perks even, I'd be ok with that. Like, if it debuffed all but the Intelligence tree. Just gimme a game to play during the debuff lol. Put Bejeweled in there or something.

 
I honestly don't get why people feel like they can't do anything during that time though...
It may be because the level restrictions are too rigid. Could be more lax, so that someone can specialize sooner and lose less levels from what he specializes in.

 
I mean it does decline in severity as the buff's timer runs down. So we need to take that into consideration, bc upon reviewing this thread I see it's been brought up and nobody really addressed it. Just don't want it to be brought up when I'm not on here, bc... I'm rarely on here lol.

So if the severity starts decreasing halfway through, and I'm at level 28 where everything is scaled to 1 on death, I still can't make a forge or go looting or craft as quality items as I can if I just wait it our. That'd mean wasting materials just to have something to do, which isn't smart gameplay. If I'm looting level 1 guns as opposed to 2's and 3's (and sometimes 4's OH MY), then I'm not gonna waste the loot spawn and have to wait 3 more hours (ingame days) to get the quality loot. I can't allocate the skills I gained in the previous fight bc they all get locked down, so that's out. Same with making meds, furniture, etc. No matter how you look at it, I'm still stuck idle for 30 minutes unless I want to risk resetting the timer, which I've done several times and found it not to be worth it.

Again, just covering all the points so I can circumvent someone saying "It decreases with time so it's not so bad" later on when I'm not here lol. Military family, ya learn to cya as much as possible.

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I honestly don't get why people feel like they can't do anything during that time though...
I mean... I think I spelled it out pretty clearly. Anything you do in that time would either waste resources or risk resetting the timer if you die again. If we're supposed to play it safe with this debuff as many people are wanting to, then afk'ing inside your base through the timer is really the only way to go. It's smarter to do that than to do anything else.

 
@Guppy You get pushed back to the very beginning. That´s simply no fun at all. Ofc you can do things. It´s just simply annoying.

I´d rather have a way slower progress than this stupid penalty.

 
FWIW I set the time to 15 minutes. At that level it is annoying, but I can find something to occupy my time for 15 minutes. My players like it, and it's not the game killer that an hour penalty is. I'm considering lowering it to 10 minutes, depending on player feedback.

 
FWIW I set the time to 15 minutes. At that level it is annoying, but I can find something to occupy my time for 15 minutes. My players like it, and it's not the game killer that an hour penalty is. I'm considering lowering it to 10 minutes, depending on player feedback.
Wow. People don't even understand the debuff yet but are still modding it out. Wonder how many unsuspecting players will be playing on servers that have mods to gamefeatures not yet fully understood.

 
No, it does not affect any of the early T1 perks.Hyperbole is ineffective if it can be fact-checked that easily.
Out of interest, how does one check the impact of a buff without looking at the xml? I've tried messing around with the character screen but have seen no obvious method.

Regarding the debuff, can we please just make it a server-start option and move on with our lives? Clearly there are two vocal and opposing camps who are never going to accept that the other is right.

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Wow. People don't even understand the debuff yet but are still modding it out. Wonder how many unsuspecting players will be playing on servers that have mods to gamefeatures not yet fully understood.
Died, played for 5 minutes in cripple-mode; that was more than long enough to decide I hate it. Out it goes. I don't have time in my life to waste on this nonsense.

 
Regarding the debuff, can we please just make it a server-start option and move on with our lives? Clearly there are two vocal and opposing camps who are never going to accept that the other is right.
This. Just like zombie count, etc. Debuff time. Could be so simple.

 
Can we just get an ultra-hardcore checkbox, please? The game has slowly been drifting into the ultra-hardcore difficulty for a few alphas, and I think just being able to toggle some of the craziness off would solve a lot of issues, and ultimately allow people to play how they like.

 
I like that there is some kind of penalty for death - the previous mechanics of 'you have to spend extra 2 minutes to retrieve your stuff ' was just laughable.

TLDR; Some people dislike it, i actually like it.

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Also, the mandatory 'Git gud scrubs'.

 
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