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Notes -
If it's well-designed then a good run that gets cut short only due to scaling should yield a huge amount of meta-currency and reward you with faster progression. There's nothing that kills a roguelite for me faster than winning on literally the first try because of some combination of luck and the game being too easy on the base difficulty.
I think the main problem is that Roguelites are appealing to two different demographics simultaneously. There are the hardcore gamers who want to challenge their wits and skills and slam their heads into a wall over and over again until they get it: people who play Souls games and lots of multiplayer PvP and brutally unforgiving games, and Roguelites are often good at that. And then there are more RPG-leaning gamers like me who want to grind out levels and currency and overcome challenges through a combination of skill and tenacity, with the ability to fungibly trade one for the other. Skill should be rewarded, but skill and progress should both grow concurrently until the sum combination is enough, so that I can take risks without failures being a literally pointless waste of time with nothing to show for it. And also have an endlessly increasing difficulty so that through progress and rewards I can eventually tackle and overcome higher and higher challenges that used to be literally impossible from the beginning of the game. If the hardest challenge of your game can be beaten in 1 hour by a player of sufficient skill level, then once you reach that skill level the game has no replay value. But if you never reach that skill level then you can never clear the game no matter how hard you try. In my opinion. I understand that lots of people have different preferences than me. But this is the weird sort of interplay, where roguelites are (trying or accidentally? not sure) appealing to both types of players at the same time under the same label. So a lot of roguelites throw some token but short and unimportant meta-progression in there and just scale it so the hardcore players can quickly unlock everything and then balance the game under that assumption, which partially satisfies but partially annoys both types of players.
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