I DON'T like Stormblood RDM

[Kabooa]

I do think that could do well if tuned right, but then it's a matter of perception.

"Rested XP bonus" vs "XP Death Penalty", ya know?

The two would probably require the same amount of work tuning wise, but one of them creates a negative "We don't want this" compared to a "We do want this" while achieving the same result.

[Taranok]

I do think that could do well if tuned right, but then it's a matter of perception.

"Rested XP bonus" vs "XP Death Penalty", ya know?

The two would probably require the same amount of work tuning wise, but one of them creates a negative "We don't want this" compared to a "We do want this" while achieving the same result.

Fun fact, you didn't need to bring up XP Death Penalty at all.

When WoW created the Rested XP Bonus system, it wasn't rested XP bonus, it was an Exhaustion mechanic that served as a penalty for playing the game too much. Players absolutely hated the system in testing, so, without changing a single thing about the system, they rebranded it from Exhaustion (or whatever it was called) to a Rested XP bonus. Nothing was changed otherwise. The major difference is that players didn't anchor the high-end XP as normal, and instead anchored the low-end XP as normal, so what was a penalty was now a bonus.

Gearbox had an entire article on what they did to QA their game when players had complaints. Such as Sprinting in Borderlands. Players thought it was too slow, so they made it go to a fisheye lens when you started sprinting, and added a bunch of ground clutter so that you could see it run by the exaggerated camera lens and made it seem like you were moving faster even though the speed wasn't changed at all.

Similarly, Skag Gully was complained about being this large, empty zone that took too long to do anything in as it was primarily a zone you just ran through. So the devs added a ton of monsters to the zone, made it take substantially longer, but changed it from a "passover" zone to a "combat" zone and boom, problem solved.

Perception is key in videogame design, to put it mildly.