The developers don’t have to do what I ask them they don’t have to follow my preferences. But they have to read my feedback to make a decision. WRFTW is a video game, an interactive work of art, and the devs have already expressed several times that they want to build this work with us players.
This is not a democracy the devs will not take the 1 to 1 feedback because they have to maintain the identity of the game, if they think that the falls must remain as they are, and if the opposite happened it would affect the identity of the game then they will not change them, and that’s fine.
I find really annoying that you bring the discussion to a personal level, I have 407 hours of play, I rarely fall, so even if I die 100 to 0 it’s not that much of a problem for me, and I’m not the type of person who gets angry about failures, at most after repeated failures I get annoyed, take a break and come back 10min later.
After playing all these hours I realize that the punishment for falling is not in line with the other punishments in the game, it’s like I’m playing the game on normal but the falls are on hard mode, as I said the strongest, slowest and most telegraphed attack from a boss will leave you alive but falls won’t, if the boss attacks were 100 to 0 then the falls by comparison would be in line with the difficulty of the game but they aren’t.
The devs have said that deaths from falling are by far the most common type of death, and that while they want falls to be punishing, they don’t want them to be the main way you die.
You talked about the fact that the player has to adapt and learn, I totally agree I often talk about it here: " Difficulty and Accessibility".
But realize that, in order for the player to learn, the game doesn’t have to be too punitive, the player learns better when the game is just the right amount of punitive, many improperly call this type of defect “artificial difficulty” (the name is improper because all the difficulty in a game is “artificial” because artificial means “man made”), in practice when the punishment for errors is so high that instead of stimulating the player to improve it induces (or makes necessary) degenerative behaviors, such as not going to an area because the risk is too high, or changing the pace of the game trying to manipulate the AI of the enemies, that we can call “bed difficulty”, in the same way when the punishment for errors is so low that instead of stimulating the player to improve it induces to degenerative behaviors like spam and other behaviors that make you “turn off your brain” that is also “bed difficulty” in the other direction.
The case of the falls in this game we are at the limit of acceptable and when we add the crucible in the count this limit is exceeded: Since the punishment for dying in the last levels of the crucible is higher becouse it requires much more time than the basic game to return to the same point, and in the base game you don’t have to re-face the enemies while in the crucible you do.