Every now and then I’ll go back into Diablo III and something that always happens that drains my enthusiasm to continue is well… I die. Now it’s not the fact that I died that leaves me with this feeling, after all I see death as part of what makes games and interesting challenge to over come, But rather Diablo III as a game seems to have a complete unwillingness to punish player mistakes.
A death in Diablo III outside of hardcore and the rifts of endgame comes with absolutely no consequences at all. You die, you press a button that re-spawns next to your corpse and your progress continues as if nothing happened.
The problem with this system is once players realise this all steaks are removed. Staying alive means nothing when the act of dying means nothing and diminishes the feeling of over coming the odds because no matter how many enemies are on screen you cannot lose.
This also leads to bad player behaviour. Players can mindlessly drone their way to end game, there is no incentive to ever actually learn how to play their class what talents and skills work with their current gear set up and so on.
Now players have complained about this lack in punishment before and generally are met with the same answer - “why don’t you just play on hardcore”.
the problem with this answer is that it solves the idea of no punishment with the idea of ultimate punishment and I believe there should be a middle ground between the softcore and the hardcore… A mediumcore if you will.
Now I would go through a list of different punishments that could be implemented but I feel my blog post is long enough and I’m sure that many of the users here play other games and probably have a good idea of what those could be so I’ll end this post here.
I KNOW THAT THERE ARE THOSE THAT DO NOT AGREE WITH ME BUT LETS TRY TO HAVE A NICE DISCUSSION ABOUT IT, K? 
TL;DR Punish players for dying to reward the player for not dying. blizpls
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i agree.
dying means +seconds in greater rifts.
that’s why i started to play hardcore.
finishing a GR or increasing a difficulty means a lot now.
death was good like within 2 years? after release … it was even fun to play with friends … now they just respawn on their own …
D3 lost quite a lot with years … the older it is, the more childish it is … but still its funny that so many players are so lame and dont get it … refuse to learn.
One of my friends is good example … “nah i dont need you” and 5 minutes later “how come you do GR120 and i cant do GR50?” … 
You know … GOG … in this case, GOD
The idea I had a while back for softcore, would be to tie death to the players portrait … so, if they die (regardless of level/paragon) the portrait resets to the “basic” version, so only those players that haven’t died in a “long” time would have cool looking portraits … no real lose, but something that might interest some players to not die 
I totally agree. The best way to punish death is by cutting experience (the higher the level, the more %xp lost). In diablo 2, this capped at your level (e.g. if you died after just levelling up, you lost no xp). While I wouldn’t mind if you could lose levels to death, I’m sure there are people who prefer to draw a line.
Regardless, xp loss and gold loss would really make the world seem a lot more dark and dangerous, which are the developer’s aims.
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Yeah I wonder why it adds +seconds to GR time. Why not only make your character able to resurrect from last checkpoint only. In that way it would automatically add seconds to your GR time.
Yeah the resurrection thing by another player was pretty awesome. I remember playing with friends in Inferno Act2 trying to kill Belial for the first time in Inferno. We only manage to do it because we were able to resurrect each other during the fight
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Same lol! 2manned it, was an epic fight that seemed to last forever. Monk+Wiz vs Belial Inferno mode. I know people hated on Inferno mode and it was a bit overtuned for some classes, but I had fun there 
I completly agree with this, in general I think there should be more punishment in softcore, but I also would love to see a “mediumcore” difficult where the only way of reviving is through coop and the rest of the gameplay is as hardcore.
Necromancy detected!
This thread died 19 months ago…
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