Bring back deleveling in 2.0

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I would personally be fine with xp loss as a penalty.

Personally, it was never a big deal to me in XI, and I really don't understand why people get so up in arms about it. I find gear damage/repair to be more annoying. At least when you die and lose xp, you get up start fighting and within 20 minutes or so (in my experience) have your lost xp back.

I also wonder how often some people died with how violently they act out against it. I consider myself to have been a pretty average FFXI player. I wasn't "leet", but I wasn't "gimp" either. I knew my jobs and made reasonable preparations for groups or group events. I didn't study wiki guides, or follow "FoTM" job guides to the letter. In over seven years of playing XI, from its US PC release, I died a number of times, and de-leveled a few of them. So what?

I would say for every time I died, I leveled up at least 10 times, probably more. To me it was part of playing the game. It was part of the experience. It wasn't some horrible penalty or huge, red, glowing F! being stamped on me for making a mistake. It was simply a way for the game to have some bite that affected my character enough that I would make a conscious effort to not die again. Death penalty was a means of encouraging smarter and more tactical play, not a penalty for failure. Seeing how carelessly so many people engage in content in MMOs with lesser penalties, including XIV, no one's going to tell me that having a harsher one doesn't make a difference.

Unless someone's dying so often that it's literally preventing them from progressing ever, which I highly doubt - unless they're doing something very wrong, repeatedly - dying and, hence, losing xp was not that big a deal.

I just feel people are exaggerating the situatin and blowing xp loss way out of proportion. It was not that big a deal, in my opinion. But then, "getting to level cap and doing end-game ASAP" was not my sole driving goal, as it seems to be with many people these days. My goal was to log in and do whatever was enjoyable to me for the time I had that session.

As for xp loss stopping people from exploring or taking risks. Nonsense. FFXI had xp loss and people took risks and explored all the time, myself included. Lineage 2 had an xp loss that made XI's seem like a slap on the wrist, and people still took risks and explored in that game. The difference is people in those games simply chose their challenges more carefully and had more respect for the danger they'd face. Consequently, emerging on the other side of such an event was much more gratifying, because the stakes were that much steeper.

Regardless, the argument that people won't take risks with xp loss is completely unfounded and completely unsupportable. The facts don't support it. Maybe the people making that claim wouldn't explore as much, but then they should speak for themselves not and presume to speak for "everyone".