All of those words and you are still wrong. Challenge and death are separate entities that have no relationship. Death is, in the simplest terms, a penalty for failure in a task. That task can be challenging or not challenging. How harsh the death penalty is does not make the prior task any easier or harder, it just makes the recovery more or less tedious/frustrating. If you are trying to kill a dragon and die in the process 10 times, what difference is there in how severe the death was? You still failed ten times - the death penalty did not alter that. You could either respawn instantly intact and try again, or lose all your gear and spend a week gathering it back to try again. The latter is no harder than the former, it just consumes more time. I played EQ1 since release in 1999 and I have no desire to see its death system resurrected, so to speak. It did not add difficulty, merely frustration. Make games challenging by making encounters challenging, not by making failure a pain in the ass.
A magnificant response by you!
I agree EQ1 had perhaps the most brutal non-perma-death death penalty ever. Or perhaps tied with AC. In EQ a player would lose experience points they spent days, and weeks getting! Any player could pull a train on other players. There is even a very famous (infamous?) player Bard who almost destroyed an entire server by pulling trains on everyone non-stop, until the game makers theirselves had to step in.
What is there really to discuss? They are both carebear in how they handle death. Your items don't even get destroyed in WoW when their durability hits 0, you just lose the bonuses. I can understand why they do this from a business and social standpoint, it keeps the whiners to a minimum.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
They both are carebear, but losing all your items seems a bit extreme to me. I guess when you organize 20 to 40 idiots/people multiple times to get one or two pieces of gear, dying once and losing it all seems a little.. off-putting.
Therein lies the problem.. In WoW, at least, it takes 20 to 40 (used to, anyway) people organized for a chance to get a single item of worth to your character. Good luck getting someone to support a death penalty that costs them an item off a raid boss that only has a 5% chance of dropping it. I'd say you'd need to slide the availability of these items up to slide the death penalty up. Otherwise, you're just asking more for frustration than excitement. That's all a lot of personal opinion, though.
In no graveyard in WoW will you ever be attacked by a mob, no matter your level vs the level of the zone you're in, reason being that no mobs patrol near enough to graveyards.
Right after the launch of WoW I ran, level 1, through the entire Night Elf starting zone, a level 1-10 area, past the level 10 monsters, then into a level 20 zone and through it, through a series of mountains infested with level 20 monsters, and then through a level 10-20 zone just to get myself to the Dwarf starting zone. Every time I died, I'd rez at a graveyard further away and continue on.
I'm guessing OP went to Scarlet Monestary on their <level 10 undead character?
If you're chain dying in WoW, all you're really doing is losing durability and having to return to WoW to repair. You can die 100 times in a row (durability aside) and never get Ressurection Sickness, that only occurs when you res at a graveyard and take an additional 25% durabiilty hit to ALL items, inventory and equipped. If you're in a zone over your head, you graveyard res and hearthstone out.
WoW's death penalty is a nuisance, not a penalty. FFXI's death penalty was a real bitch.
Harsh death penalties don't add any challenge that's not there already. I do like harsh penalties for dying though, even though they are a pain in the ass sometimes.
Harsh penalties weed out the incompetent quickly. [...] Harsh penalties mean you can't just keep trying until you succeed, because the amount of time you lose from a failed attempt makes using the percussive method impractical. Instead, people must learn from their mistakes and actually get better.
I do like death penalities, but not for your reasons. In fact, i dont think the reasons you invoked are good reasons (at least for me).
About the incompetent
"incompetent" is not used correctly here. In fact, the guy you feel incompetent is not incompetent, he's just less competent than you are. Why do you deserve to experiment and enjoy more content of a game, just because you are more competent than another ? Especially when we know, sooner or later, that guy - less competent than you - will get better and beat the challenge anyway.
In other words, your first argument is just an elitist point of view, and elitists are very often wrong in their views. In our discussion, there's two cases about "how to deal with less competent players" (assuming the challenge is correctly balanced) :
Put a harsh death penality..... And make most of the content unaccessible for most of the player base.
Do not push a harsh death penality.... And allow everyone to attempt any challenge in your game.
Are you elitist enough to consider that "only the best should be allowed to play." ?.... Please, also notice that, if you dont want to play with players less competent than you, you are not forced to : it's not very challenging to leave a group, and there's no death penalities when doing so.
About the "amount of time you lose from a failed attempt"
This one affects the casual gamers. Casual gamers dont have time to waste in "not playing, waiting" when they login. They login to get entertainement as soon as possible.
So, while correct, your second argument is bringing something that shouldnt be in any game, mmo or not, this thing is : "the amount of time you lose".
Let's see any game that isnt a mmo. In solo offline games, there's very very little or even no time sink. For me a "time sink" correspond to a duration while you're not "playing". And for me, "playing" means : "be entertained / get entertainement", etc... "Playing" has a nothing of pleasure, fun.
So, in any game that isnt a mmo, there's no time sink, or very little. And if any solo offline game were about to be released tomorrow and contained a huge time sink, then i bet this game would not be played a lot, or the developpers would release a patch to remove the time sinks.
So, why do we need time sinks in mmorpgs ?....
Let's come back to your argument. The problem with it isnt the death penality itself, but how the death penality had been developped. For example, in WoW....
Originally posted by Dirgon
WoW's death penalty is a nuisance, not a penalty.
Indeed, WoW's death penality brings absolutely nothing to your playing session, except a break or few minutes, up to 10 minutes, solo, and up to 30-45 minutes or even more while in a raid.
And while the death penality is active, what are you supposed to do ? Hell... What can you do ?... You can wait. You can chat... You cannot play.
So, we have a game that tells you : "if you're not competent enough, you're not allowed to play". Ok, cool.... Or not.
Both Wow and Eq2 have pretty minimalistic death penalty. Running back to your corpse without losing anything is a joke imo... Uo has the best system still, making your items fully lootable from your corpse while you run back. But the difference between UO and Wow/Eq2 is that Uo never was item based game like Wow/Eq2 is. That system wouldn't obviously work in Wow/Eq2. But that is what is wrong with todays mmo's. No skill needed in fighting, items do that for you...
May Darkfall save us all!
It will, dont wurry finally we get rid of the carebears and have our own game thats even superior to most out there in every sense:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
I find it very interesting that WoW’s death penalty is much harsher than the death penalty in EQ2, which goes against our preconceived notions of these two games. Let’s look at the facts: World of Warcraft Death Penalty:
Death causes damage to your equipment. You are expected to run a long way to your corpse and then reappear in a dangerous area, taking time and risking a second death. Your other option is to resurrect at a graveyard, whereupon your equipment suffers serious damage (likely requiring you to trek back to a repair NPC immediately), and you are unable to fight for ten minutes.
Everquest 2 Death Penalty:
Death causes damage to your equipment. You accrue a very small penalty to future earned XP. You respawn at a safe spot.
WoW’s “travel back to your corpse or sit for ten minutes” mechanism, combined with the danger of dying again when you reach your corpse, makes it more of a nuisance than EQ2’s penalty. But here’s the real kicker, the reason that puts WoW’s penalty high above EQ2’s: WoW’s graveyard spots are not particularly safe. I remember my first trip to Scarlet Monastery: I got very lost and ended up in extremely dangerous territory, and died. And then I died again and again. Finally I respawned at the graveyard, only to discover to my horror that horrible monsters found me in the graveyard, too! I was instantly killed AGAIN. In WoW, when you’re in an area that’s much too high-level for you, monsters will come for you from miles around, and they are nearly impossible to escape. In fact, I would have been stuck at that graveyard forever, except for a glitch in WoW that they’ve never bothered to fix: if you log out and log back in, your ghost can then travel to a different graveyard spot and respawn there instead. But you have to log out and log back in first, and you have to know about this trick. This is well-known among a certain part of WoW’s audience, but is certainly not known to everybody playing WoW. And when a game’s death penalty can result in effective perma-death of your character (unless you know how to exploit a bug), it’s hard to call your death penalty “casual”. Compare it to EQ2, where death is a mild nuisance and then you get on with your evening. It’s much more casual friendly. You don’t have to run out into the same horribly dangerous spot and risk your life a second time. On the other hand, I’ve heard people complain that death in EQ2 is so tame that many people become careless, which gets groups killed. Just to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. I don’t mind that WoW is more aggressive in punishing death than EQ2 is. (Neither of them are anywhere near as tough as, say, EQ1’s death penalty, which was so punitive that it regularly made people quit the game forever.) But it does go against our stereotyped assumption that EQ2 is more “hardcore” than WoW. The Purpose of Death Penalties But what should the death penalty be? What’s the point of a death penalty? Some games don’t have much of any death penalty at all, such as Dungeon Runners. These games are aimed at players who are looking for a game that engages and entertains them, but doesn’t particularly challenge them. Most MMO’s, however, have relatively punitive death penalties because they are designed for players that want to be challenged, not just engaged. The theory goes that if a game doesn’t punish you for playing poorly, then your rewards for playing well will be hollow and without much significance. That’s true to an extent … but of course, that’s only true if “playing well” is your motivation for playing the game. But the death penalty has other side-effects, too. If the penalty is lenient, players find themselves experimenting with more tactics, exploring the landscape more, and poking into nooks and crannies of the game. If the penalty is harsh, they tend to stick with the strategies they know. Good survival strategies become more valuable, and in many games, players find that grouping together makes for a better survival strategy. So we often find that strong death penalties correlate with more grouping.
Correlation of death penalty to other aspects of MMO gameplay. The exact death penalty should be based on the target audience you want to reach. This is a gross simplification, of course, but it helps point out some of the ramifications of a particular death penalty. There are many other correlations, too, such as Time Expenditure, Opportunities to Zerg, and Rewarding In-Game Knowledge. None of these are hard and fast rules, and will vary depending on the exact details of the death penalty, but I think they hold up pretty well for a large number of penalties and games. I think both WoW and EQ2 are towards the “lenient” end of the spectrum. But is WoW’s death penalty too harsh or too mild? Well, the current death penalty is obviously not a deal-breaker for 9 million people — then again, we don’t know how many more people they would have if it was harsher or more lenient! If I were making a new game, I’d make it more lenient. EQ2’s more-lenient death penalty was more enjoyable to me than WoW’s, and I’m not exactly casual, so I think going lenient is the safer bet for modern MMO audiences. I agree with the assessment of harsher death penalties creating challenge. Too many people say they don't, that they are just annoying time consuming inconveniences. These people just like easy games. I also agree that harsher death penalties promote grouping, which is a good thing, security in numbers. I mostly solo, but I enjoy challenging solo content which I have experienced finding in games designed primarily for small groups, as opposed to solo play. Unfortunately the author is correct that most new gamers want easy games and that is a safer bet for developers. I only hope that there are still valid choices for veterans like myself that want to be challenged. Bring back the harsh death penalties of classic EQ for me please.
Comments
I agree EQ1 had perhaps the most brutal non-perma-death death penalty ever. Or perhaps tied with AC. In EQ a player would lose experience points they spent days, and weeks getting! Any player could pull a train on other players. There is even a very famous (infamous?) player Bard who almost destroyed an entire server by pulling trains on everyone non-stop, until the game makers theirselves had to step in.
Do I need to remind the OP that neither EQ2 nor Warcrack are realistic in regards to death?
What is there really to discuss? They are both carebear in how they handle death. Your items don't even get destroyed in WoW when their durability hits 0, you just lose the bonuses. I can understand why they do this from a business and social standpoint, it keeps the whiners to a minimum.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
They both are carebear, but losing all your items seems a bit extreme to me. I guess when you organize 20 to 40 idiots/people multiple times to get one or two pieces of gear, dying once and losing it all seems a little.. off-putting.
Therein lies the problem.. In WoW, at least, it takes 20 to 40 (used to, anyway) people organized for a chance to get a single item of worth to your character. Good luck getting someone to support a death penalty that costs them an item off a raid boss that only has a 5% chance of dropping it. I'd say you'd need to slide the availability of these items up to slide the death penalty up. Otherwise, you're just asking more for frustration than excitement. That's all a lot of personal opinion, though.
Err....
In no graveyard in WoW will you ever be attacked by a mob, no matter your level vs the level of the zone you're in, reason being that no mobs patrol near enough to graveyards.
Right after the launch of WoW I ran, level 1, through the entire Night Elf starting zone, a level 1-10 area, past the level 10 monsters, then into a level 20 zone and through it, through a series of mountains infested with level 20 monsters, and then through a level 10-20 zone just to get myself to the Dwarf starting zone. Every time I died, I'd rez at a graveyard further away and continue on.
I'm guessing OP went to Scarlet Monestary on their <level 10 undead character?
If you're chain dying in WoW, all you're really doing is losing durability and having to return to WoW to repair. You can die 100 times in a row (durability aside) and never get Ressurection Sickness, that only occurs when you res at a graveyard and take an additional 25% durabiilty hit to ALL items, inventory and equipped. If you're in a zone over your head, you graveyard res and hearthstone out.
WoW's death penalty is a nuisance, not a penalty. FFXI's death penalty was a real bitch.
About the incompetent
"incompetent" is not used correctly here. In fact, the guy you feel incompetent is not incompetent, he's just less competent than you are. Why do you deserve to experiment and enjoy more content of a game, just because you are more competent than another ? Especially when we know, sooner or later, that guy - less competent than you - will get better and beat the challenge anyway.
In other words, your first argument is just an elitist point of view, and elitists are very often wrong in their views. In our discussion, there's two cases about "how to deal with less competent players" (assuming the challenge is correctly balanced) :
Are you elitist enough to consider that "only the best should be allowed to play." ?.... Please, also notice that, if you dont want to play with players less competent than you, you are not forced to : it's not very challenging to leave a group, and there's no death penalities when doing so.
About the "amount of time you lose from a failed attempt"
This one affects the casual gamers. Casual gamers dont have time to waste in "not playing, waiting" when they login. They login to get entertainement as soon as possible.
So, while correct, your second argument is bringing something that shouldnt be in any game, mmo or not, this thing is : "the amount of time you lose".
Let's see any game that isnt a mmo. In solo offline games, there's very very little or even no time sink. For me a "time sink" correspond to a duration while you're not "playing". And for me, "playing" means : "be entertained / get entertainement", etc... "Playing" has a nothing of pleasure, fun.
So, in any game that isnt a mmo, there's no time sink, or very little. And if any solo offline game were about to be released tomorrow and contained a huge time sink, then i bet this game would not be played a lot, or the developpers would release a patch to remove the time sinks.
So, why do we need time sinks in mmorpgs ?....
Let's come back to your argument. The problem with it isnt the death penality itself, but how the death penality had been developped. For example, in WoW....
Indeed, WoW's death penality brings absolutely nothing to your playing session, except a break or few minutes, up to 10 minutes, solo, and up to 30-45 minutes or even more while in a raid.And while the death penality is active, what are you supposed to do ? Hell... What can you do ?... You can wait. You can chat... You cannot play.
So, we have a game that tells you : "if you're not competent enough, you're not allowed to play". Ok, cool.... Or not.
It will, dont wurry finally we get rid of the carebears and have our own game thats even superior to most out there in every sense:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
if game design was as simple as 3 sliders... we'd see a lot more quality video games.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
WoW is simply a better made game than EQ2