AC had dropping items on death and an increasing vitae everytime you died. This vitae reduced every stat and ability you had, essentially making you weaker each time you died.
EQ had items drop on death and loss of xp, you could even delevel.
Now we have WAR where you die you drop nothing and you can pay an npc a very small amount of money to eliminate the penalties the moment you revive. Also there are no penalties for dying in pvp, and no items get looted. You actually USE death as a mechanic to speed up questing by using to to get back to the town fastest after completing an area of quests.
Yes it is obvious to even a blind/deaf man that death penalties have gotten considerably less and it is because all MMOs aim for the casual market now. The casual market doesn't like penalties or difficulty, they want easy and always a cookie at the end of it (a ding, a particle effect, a congratulations, or an item/money for doing anything and everything).
There are really two schools of thought on this subject.
The first - Negative Reinforcement:
You punish people for doing things bad. Death penalties, XP loss, all kinds of the more "old school" type of systems MMOs used to quite frequently have.
The second school of thought - Positive Reinforcement:
You reward people for doing things good. Rewards for staying alive, bonuses for doing something really well or without making mistakes or dying, etc.
Interestingly enough, World of Warcraft is adding an element of Positive Reinforcement to their latest Raid in 3.2 The highest difficulty raid instance will have a "Tribute Run" where the game will keep track of how many times you wipe on the bosses leading up the end boss.
If you wipe a lot, the rewards you earn for killing the end boss, the tribute, will be less. If you never wipe on the first bosses, when you kill the end boss you gain much better loot from the tribute run.
It's rewarding the good versus punishing the bad.
Both really accomplish the same objective, make players care about dying and try to avoid it.
Other games like Chronicles of Spellborn have a Positive Reinforcement system. You don't lose anything when you die, but instead you gain bonuses the longer you stay alive.
Psychologically, the vast majority of humans respond to Positive Reinforcement much better then they do the negative side.
It's all about finding different ways to motivate people. One just does so in a fashion that doesn't punish you or make you feel as bad, but the rewards at the end for accomplishing something are just as sweet...
I'd like perma-death but because of lag the player would have to choose the time and not the game.
So, I'd like the *normal* death penalty to be that you respawned at the nearest safe base with one point of health and damaged gear so the penalty was the time taken to heal up and repair gear. This feels more realistic to me than corpse runs.
However there'd be special quests that involved the risk of perma-death.
One case might be that you had perma-death if you died too far from a safe base and quests delivering messages to a far away city. You'd get the choice to accept the quest or not and also you chose the time you did it. So if you were lagging you'd leave it and do something else for a while.
The main case I'd use it for would be heroic and epic type quests. The best gear would come from those and they'd involve the risk of perma-death to get it. Groups for those kind of quests would be intense - you'd only want it with people you really trusted and knew well and everytime some little rat spawned and squeaked everyone would freak out in fear. Would be fun.
When you die, you leave your body as an ethereal spirit. You will remain in this state until a living player resurrects you via a spell or scroll. If no one is available to resurrect you, then you must find a way to resurrect yourself, althought it may not be easy, you will need to absorb enough life from living creatures as they approach their own death. The amount of life absorbed, and your actions in the spirit realm, will affect your attributes and abilities in life, also, the manner in which you died will affect your abilities in death, as well as how difficult it will be to revive by yourself. While in this state you can move freely through the world, even through walls and objects. you are unable to interact with the living realm directly, but you can interact with them indirectly. Depending on your spiritual attributes you might be able to suggest to an NPC humanoid to draw his sword on a player, or possess a lower level creature. This spirit realm will be a sort of whole other game. You will be in competition with other spirits for ascendance into the realm of the living. You may even choose to remain in the spirit realm, and become a powerful spirit.
Resurrecting yourself would only be necessary when no other player is watching out for you. This will encourage people to work more closely together, and watch each others back.
When you are successfull in resurrecting yourself, you will appear at the nearest temple, graveyard, or similar safe location.
Antipathy: What you're saying makes zero sense. S Now, apply that story to video game equates, and know what you get? A rogue-like you can't be "bored" by, because you're more likely frightened. To say that you're bored of dangerous dungeons isn't exactly accurate. More likely you're too afraid to venture into that dungeon for said reasons. That's the fear that many rogue-like junkies such as myself are looking for...
The attitude above makes me wonder if you've ever played any rogue-likes at all - or rather have you progressed to any decent level in any of them? I strongly sense the above post is bullshit.
When the consequences of a bad move is permanent death, fear is the last emotion you aim for. You want to avoid fear at all cost, and avoid all risk. Once I'd got through the first few levels, where risk taking is normal since there's so little at stake, I fealt no fear playing these games until the turn before one of my characters died (which normally occurred due to my over extending myself due to feeling a completely different emotion, namely boredom).
So - there's a really nice staff for me on level 80? But I haven't got the gear to get there. No problems - I'll get that staff. I'll just take my time getting there, and get there safely.
After careful thinking, I have just remembered another strong element of rogue-likes. Stronger, closer clans (or in general people will help each other out more). Many people think that in rogue-likes you're in shear terror always losing equipment, but people forget that's what buddies are for. I have a friend that played a rogue-like a while ago (can't remember the game's name), and he was part of a clan that I wish I could have. He joined a clan that had a total standing of 7 people (himself included), and it was small. But, he had become great friends with the clan he joined, and they did everything together.
Are you sure you're talking about rogue-likes? Or are you confusing them with something entirely different (e.g. MUDs).
Most rogue likes are single player games, and the community goes little further than posting YASD files (yet-another-sudden-death) on usenet groups such as rec.games.roguelike.angband
Heremypet: Get a patent for your idea. That would be an awesome game to play.
Svann: What do you mean Rogue can't count?!? Rogue is the granddaddy of all things rogue-like on mmorpgs. It doesn't have to be online, it was the idea and concept that counted the most. Like one wise man said before: "Eliminate the foundation, and the whole building collapses."
Heerobya: What you're saying does prove an excellent point. But negative reinforcement isn't all that bad either. Like you said, different people need to be trained and disciplined different ways. Some people simply can't be disciplined on the positive reinforcement alone.
I learned in psychology classes interesting things on the different reinforcements. Positive reinforcement is the most favored because it does avoid unpleasant consequences. But, if it's taken too far or the person being disciplined doesn't "learn properly," then you have issues. Some people may develop some issues, like narcissism (person sees themselves as center of the world) for example. Now I'm not saying that positive reinforcement is bad, it's just that it's not necessarily the best reinforcement. So when games are created, it's noted that the reinforcement used to discipline gamers can create different atmospheres. Is the game postive enough to a point where gamers learn excellently from rewards, or do they become greedy and don't feel the sting of failing, thus they don't learn from mistakes? Is the game negative enough where gamers learn not to repeat mistakes, or do they get burned so hard they don't come back out of frustration?
P.S.: In psychology, I learned an interesting syndrome that can occur in a person under special circumstances. If a person is neglected too much or is overly rewarded /coddled as a child, they can develop something called Manchausen's Syndrome (not sure if that's the exact spelling). This makes the person extremely sensitive to emotional pain/conflict, and he/she will take drastic, even life-threatening methods to avoid that pain. It shows up usually in hospitals, where patients will do things to make themselves look like they're sick or actually make themselves sick through mis-used medications. The reason why they do that? Because they want the doctor to save their life, and feel like someone cares for them.
This can occur through misproperly-used positive reinforcement. If a person is overly rewarded/coddled, then they become too easy to break emotionally. How does this apply to games? Well, it really doesn't, this was just an example to show that positive reinforcement, when done incorrectly, can produce some rather nasty results...
All I can say is that I'm so glad you guys are no longer the target audience. You are a bunch of strange people who seem to want these games to replace your real life, by making them as realistic as possible. I'm here to have fun, screw death penalties, screw time sinks, screw raiding, screw forced grouping and screw anything that turns a game into a chore.
I guess that's why the only MMO I play right now is Wizard 101, heh. It may be targeted at kids, but damn if it isn't a hell of a lot more fun than those "second job" style MMOs that prolifeerate the market.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Antipathy: First off, yes, I do play alot of rogue-likes. Secondly, "rogue-like" is used to describe games with severely harsh death punishments nowadays. Yes, I do know that Rogue is a single player turn-based game (so apparently I do know alot about the game's history too). Modern day rogue-like mmorpgs don't neccessarily have to follow that exact formula. Now it can be an mmorpg and doesn't have to be turn-based to be called a rogue-like, as long as it has severe death punishments like it's granddaddy had.
I'm being serious about the game my friend played. It wasn't big, and I think it was made by an indy developer, but it existed.
Also, what do you mean fear isn't a huge and important aspect of rogue-likes? It is a huge part, but you're thinking of fear too negatively. Fear didn't keep me from entering those dungeons, it added thrill to the whole adventure. Like one wise man said: "If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all."
Vrazule: So, a guy that plays a wizard game aiming towards the kids-tween group is any better? Don't forget, we are all gamers, all nerdy, all hoping that we were ninjas, or had wings, etc.
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
Antipathy: First off, yes, I do play alot of rogue-likes. Secondly, "rogue-like" is used to describe games with severely harsh death punishments nowadays. Yes, I do know that Rogue is a single player turn-based game (so apparently I do know alot about the game's history too). Modern day rogue-like mmorpgs don't neccessarily have to follow that exact formula. Now it can be an mmorpg and doesn't have to be turn-based to be called a rogue-like, as long as it has severe death punishments like it's granddaddy had. I'm being serious about the game my friend played. It wasn't big, and I think it was made by an indy developer, but it existed. Also, what do you mean fear isn't a huge and important aspect of rogue-likes? It is a huge part, but you're thinking of fear too negatively. Fear didn't keep me from entering those dungeons, it added thrill to the whole adventure. Like one wise man said: "If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all." Vrazule: So, a guy that plays a wizard game aiming towards the kids-tween group is any better? Don't forget, we are all gamers, all nerdy, all hoping that we were ninjas, or had wings, etc.
Maybe this comes down to a matter of definitions. I've got no idea which games you're talking about, and you haven't told us. Some people would classify games such as "Diablo" or "Hellgate" as being roguelike, whilst I would not.
And rogue likes aren't defined by "Harsh death penalties". They have perma-death. You spoke of your friend "losing all his items when he died." That's a long long way from perma death. All that sort of game does is encourage people to get by with cheap items that they don't mind losing - in which case death isn't really much more meaningful than death is in WoW.
"All I can say is that I'm so glad you guys are no longer the target audience. You are a bunch of strange people who seem to want these games to replace your real life, by making them as realistic as possible. I'm here to have fun"
An MMORPG world that feels (a bit) more realistic makes it more fun for me - it doesn't mean you have to play the game for more hours.
I think this is the perfect death system. However your idea has a nice balance of all 3 difficulties. - Will focus on loss of experience
- Will have corpse runs and still indecisive to have you return as nude character or ghost.
- Loss of experience will cease once you accumulated 100% death experience lost.
- If you die from a target that is within the same level to 1-3 levels of you, you will loose 7% experience
- If you die from a target that is within 3-6 levels of you, you will loose 5% experience
- If you die from a target that is 7-10 levels you will loose 3% experience.
- So you can loose up to 1 full level at max.
- Resurrections and potions can help you obtain loss experience back.
- Will also loose 1% durability to items each death.
I think this is going in the right direction, but I would still have some modifications.
No corpse runs, at all. Just make it so that you respawn somewhere. Not even the WoW ghost run. There are problems when doing corpse runs, namely the MOBs still being there, so you'll just lose experience constantly until you are out of range. Have some experience loss, but have a limit to that loss. Have some durability loss.
This would still deter people from dieing because you would have to travel back to where you were and possible have to face all the MOBs you already got through again. You wouldn't want to die, but it also isn't so harsh that you will ragequit because you just lost 5 hours of XP and all of your gear.
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
I think this risks vs reward talk is becoming less and less relevant.
We are talking about entertainment/games here. There is no issue if there is always reward. Just the risks of wasting time of not getitng a reward is good enough.
Remember that playing a GAME does not equal to real achievement. It is the ILLUSION of achievement that is so entertaining.
Simply said, I dont believe in penalities at all. Not in schooling or in games. I find that an absurd, old fashioned concept, like wearing wigs in 18th century or medival medicine.
Penalities don't heighten my sense of fun in any way. Loosing a mission, failing in a quest, dying itself IS the penality. Why add extra penalities to the fact that you lost? It's as pointless as beating your kid for bringing back a bad grade in school. It doesn't make better people. I find the very idea of penalizing archaic.
I could go all the way into psychology, where it is proven that penalizing is negative reinforcement, which doesnt make better people, but only trains them. Nothing we should strife for, for it breaks what makes the personality ethical, and trains it to do "what it is told to". And we know where that usually leads to. There is that saying "show me what kind of games you play, and I tell you who you are." And that is very revealing, and for many people it will do little credit when you see what they aspire for. It actually would shed quite a dubious light on many. Games shape people. It is a miniature social training ground, and IMVPO many MMO are educated quite devastating values, of which the death penalitiy is just one very gross end. But I guess you really would have to delve into behavior studies to see that. *shrug*
Besides, the only thing you CAN penalize in a MMO is time. You cant rob a gamers extra money, you cant spank him or whatever. So essentially EVERY penality is a timesink. So you penalize those extra, who have little time, and thus you treat people unequal. You penalize people for playing the game, since you can't avoid death altogether. In a MMO it is even more absurd that in reality. That sort of "accomplishment" is just the result of "Pavlov training". People are MADE to feel gratified with the threat of a death penality. It isnt something that is their natural instinct but the result of decades of games which formed the habits of thinking. It is something we must break free, since in essence it is a sado-masochist circle, which serves no purpose. It is like you can train someone to enjoy pain. You can. But you shouldn't. Thats what happend in gaming. People were trained to enjoy penalities and to kiss the whip.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
As long as you balance reward and penalty I don't think there will be a huge problem. Dying should be bad.
I liked the penalty in Lineage where sometimes you would loose an item (which could be picked up by other players or mobs that would drop it when killed.
You should be scared of dying but not so much that it would totaly ruin the game for you. No death penalty whatsoever or very light encourage people to do suicidal things or even die to move faster between areas. That is stupid. But loosing everything you have on you is too hard and will make people quit the game if they are unlucky or lag to death.
But rewards should always be balanced to the danger, otherwise the game will just be boring.
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
If the only risk is not gaining anything, then players will simply use zerg tactics / mentality. If I want to kill a boss with huge HP, I might do 1 dmg to him, die and repeat the process 10,000 times until he dies. Now what should be a high-risk encounter (high risk of not gaining an item) is reduced to a lower risk because I can just fail as many times as it takes before I finally win.
That is the point of death penalties, not risk vs reward. People should be encouraged to win without failing over and over and over in the process.
There are obviously two completely different types of personality involved in this - with one type the fun is in the risk and with the other the fun is in the reward.
Antipathy: Well, like you said, we seem to have very different definitions of rogue-likes. Also, I believe harsh death punishments are a heavy part of rogue-likes. Rogue started the trend when you lost all your items when you died, and the concept has carried on and even evolved with new penalties attached. Perma-death is an example of this (perma-death can also exist in non rogue-like games too). Basically, my definition of rogue-like is most likely a new generation thinking. It originally was a term used to describe turn-based games that had harsh death penalties, but now so many games have taken the harsh death punishment concept that rogue-likes can really apply to many mmorpgs out there. Some games that aren't rogue-likes have even taken some ideas from the term. Remember the game Runescape? It looks like an easy, Second Life clone, but underneath it all there is a severe death penalty (you lose most of the equipment you had on at the time except the weapon equipped). It really is a matter of opinion here, but I still believe that rogue-likes are games that incorporate many harsh punishments when you die.
P.S.: I did state in the first post mentioning my friend playing that game that I don't remember it's name. It was old at the time that my friend played it, so by now it may have shut down for good, who knows?
Everyone in general: The thing is, penalties exist. You can ignore them if you want, but that isn't always the best thing to do. Like another wise man said, "Those who refuse to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them." Penalties are necessary to train and discipline people and animals to do things beneficial. Even in positive reinforcement, there are penalties. Let's say you do a quest, and if you do it perfectly, you get a bonus. If you do not do the quest perfectly, then no bonus. There's a penalty involved there. If you don't do the quest perfectly, then you get no bonus, so obviously you would try your best. That is how positive reinforcement works. No matter how much anyone wants to get around it, penalties will always be around.
In my opinion, you need both rewards and punishments to properly discipline someone or something.
Positive reinforcement is not the answer in an mmo. You are all assuming that dieing less leading up to the boss or raid finale is going to grant you a greater reward. What about exploring? It is the biggest part of any mmo. Going to see the new areas with the new monsters and such. Where is the fear? where is the adrenaline pumping through your veins going into a new dungeon? Oh no, If I die, I might not get as good a loot from some boss at the end of the dungeon! Thats not fear, thats just greed. You have to have some type of fear in the game for it to reach that level of excitement. Sure you die 50 times trying to figure out some raid boss and when you do, woot your excited. But those 50 times you died, you were just annoyed cause you hadnt figured it out yet. No fear at all, no adrenaline pumping, just going through the grind till you figure out what the exact pattern is to kill the big baddy. Someone mentioned in wow that they suffer a lot of money loss doing those raids and they are right but money is easy to get in the game and thus not a factor to deter people from not dieing.
Look, Im not a fan of corpse runs or exp penalties or hell levels or any of that. I have played a lot of mmo's in my day and I can honestly say that the ONLY mmo that made me fear death or kept my adrenaline pumping was EQ1. Since then, I have never been afraid to die in a game and thats because every game since then has had such easy death penalties that it makes almost no difference and as such, allows you to "run and gun"(otherwise known as zerging) everything in the game.
This also leads to another part of the mmo experience that is now all but forgotten and that is the respect of and from other players. Ohh, that raid guild died 100 times figuring out how to kill boss X. But they did it, look at the cool loot they got. Who gives a crap! I had more respect for the group just trying to pull from the house in unrest for the first time in eq1. Why? Cause those people could die and I know what that death penalty is as it could happen to me to. See, back in eq1 people had a lot more respect for other peoples accomplishments because death was feared by all and to survive a big battle and walk away victorious, was in some weird way a victory for yourself. Even if you only got to watch what happened and didnt participate in anyway, you still felt what they felt because you know the penalty of failure and its not pretty. So all of you out there that says your glad you dont play our type of game, you have no clue on just how much more, fear, adds to a game. Those folks that play a true pure pvp game like eve and others, they know, and they understand what I am talking about. Thats why they play. Thats what it used to be like playing a PVE game. Nowadays pve mmos are a joke with their dinky death penalties, their in games maps, radar, etc... Im not saying they aren't fun. They do have some enjoyment in them, but what they dont have is just to hard to explain to people because they have never felt "it" before.
Doomsday, that was a beautiful thought you had about the point of exploration. Basically I'm just getting tired of games where dying's worst punishment is getting teleported back to homebase or doing a ghost walk (when your body is in a safe area not surrounded by a mob). Why can't there be stricter death punishments in some of these games? EVE Online has alot of rogue-like elements, yet it's extremely popular, so rogue-likes can obviously do well nowadays if a striking balance is hit.
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
If the only risk is not gaining anything, then players will simply use zerg tactics / mentality. If I want to kill a boss with huge HP, I might do 1 dmg to him, die and repeat the process 10,000 times until he dies. Now what should be a high-risk encounter (high risk of not gaining an item) is reduced to a lower risk because I can just fail as many times as it takes before I finally win.
That is the point of death penalties, not risk vs reward. People should be encouraged to win without failing over and over and over in the process.
That is an extreme example that no modern MMO uses. When you die the fight resets. You cannot accumulate enough failures to get an automatic success. The only way to get a success is to learn from your mistakes and do the fight right. If you do not learn no amount of failures (and corresponding penalties) will let you win the fight. Too much negative reinforcement actually discourages the player from trying to learn the fight.
Positive reinforcement is not the answer in an mmo. You are all assuming that dieing less leading up to the boss or raid finale is going to grant you a greater reward. What about exploring? It is the biggest part of any mmo. Going to see the new areas with the new monsters and such. Where is the fear? where is the adrenaline pumping through your veins going into a new dungeon? Oh no, If I die, I might not get as good a loot from some boss at the end of the dungeon! Thats not fear, thats just greed. You have to have some type of fear in the game for it to reach that level of excitement. Sure you die 50 times trying to figure out some raid boss and when you do, woot your excited. But those 50 times you died, you were just annoyed cause you hadnt figured it out yet. No fear at all, no adrenaline pumping, just going through the grind till you figure out what the exact pattern is to kill the big baddy. Someone mentioned in wow that they suffer a lot of money loss doing those raids and they are right but money is easy to get in the game and thus not a factor to deter people from not dieing.
Look, Im not a fan of corpse runs or exp penalties or hell levels or any of that. I have played a lot of mmo's in my day and I can honestly say that the ONLY mmo that made me fear death or kept my adrenaline pumping was EQ1. Since then, I have never been afraid to die in a game and thats because every game since then has had such easy death penalties that it makes almost no difference and as such, allows you to "run and gun"(otherwise known as zerging) everything in the game. This also leads to another part of the mmo experience that is now all but forgotten and that is the respect of and from other players. Ohh, that raid guild died 100 times figuring out how to kill boss X. But they did it, look at the cool loot they got. Who gives a crap! I had more respect for the group just trying to pull from the house in unrest for the first time in eq1. Why? Cause those people could die and I know what that death penalty is as it could happen to me to. See, back in eq1 people had a lot more respect for other peoples accomplishments because death was feared by all and to survive a big battle and walk away victorious, was in some weird way a victory for yourself. Even if you only got to watch what happened and didnt participate in anyway, you still felt what they felt because you know the penalty of failure and its not pretty. So all of you out there that says your glad you dont play our type of game, you have no clue on just how much more, fear, adds to a game. Those folks that play a true pure pvp game like eve and others, they know, and they understand what I am talking about. Thats why they play. Thats what it used to be like playing a PVE game. Nowadays pve mmos are a joke with their dinky death penalties, their in games maps, radar, etc... Im not saying they aren't fun. They do have some enjoyment in them, but what they dont have is just to hard to explain to people because they have never felt "it" before.
I guess we are just wired differently. For me fear adds very little to the excitement. The exciting part is facing down a challenge and doing your best. Fear is just a distraction to that because it means that doing my best might not be the most optimal option for me. This is because I know my limits and know even if I perform to the best of my abilities I might not succeed and the best way to learn is to try things out till I figure out the best solution. Artificially limiting my ability to learn in the game goes against the spirit of why I play.
As far as having respect for players I really have little respect for people doing things just because of the risk. I have respect for people who attempt a task to better themselves. So people who do a fight just because it is risky get no respect from me.
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How are there 6 pages to this thread?
Most MUDs had harsh dealth penalties.
UO had full loot.
AC had dropping items on death and an increasing vitae everytime you died. This vitae reduced every stat and ability you had, essentially making you weaker each time you died.
EQ had items drop on death and loss of xp, you could even delevel.
Now we have WAR where you die you drop nothing and you can pay an npc a very small amount of money to eliminate the penalties the moment you revive. Also there are no penalties for dying in pvp, and no items get looted. You actually USE death as a mechanic to speed up questing by using to to get back to the town fastest after completing an area of quests.
Yes it is obvious to even a blind/deaf man that death penalties have gotten considerably less and it is because all MMOs aim for the casual market now. The casual market doesn't like penalties or difficulty, they want easy and always a cookie at the end of it (a ding, a particle effect, a congratulations, or an item/money for doing anything and everything).
The way I see it -
There are really two schools of thought on this subject.
The first - Negative Reinforcement:
You punish people for doing things bad. Death penalties, XP loss, all kinds of the more "old school" type of systems MMOs used to quite frequently have.
The second school of thought - Positive Reinforcement:
You reward people for doing things good. Rewards for staying alive, bonuses for doing something really well or without making mistakes or dying, etc.
Interestingly enough, World of Warcraft is adding an element of Positive Reinforcement to their latest Raid in 3.2 The highest difficulty raid instance will have a "Tribute Run" where the game will keep track of how many times you wipe on the bosses leading up the end boss.
If you wipe a lot, the rewards you earn for killing the end boss, the tribute, will be less. If you never wipe on the first bosses, when you kill the end boss you gain much better loot from the tribute run.
It's rewarding the good versus punishing the bad.
Both really accomplish the same objective, make players care about dying and try to avoid it.
Other games like Chronicles of Spellborn have a Positive Reinforcement system. You don't lose anything when you die, but instead you gain bonuses the longer you stay alive.
Psychologically, the vast majority of humans respond to Positive Reinforcement much better then they do the negative side.
It's all about finding different ways to motivate people. One just does so in a fashion that doesn't punish you or make you feel as bad, but the rewards at the end for accomplishing something are just as sweet...
... if it's done right.
I'd like perma-death but because of lag the player would have to choose the time and not the game.
So, I'd like the *normal* death penalty to be that you respawned at the nearest safe base with one point of health and damaged gear so the penalty was the time taken to heal up and repair gear. This feels more realistic to me than corpse runs.
However there'd be special quests that involved the risk of perma-death.
One case might be that you had perma-death if you died too far from a safe base and quests delivering messages to a far away city. You'd get the choice to accept the quest or not and also you chose the time you did it. So if you were lagging you'd leave it and do something else for a while.
The main case I'd use it for would be heroic and epic type quests. The best gear would come from those and they'd involve the risk of perma-death to get it. Groups for those kind of quests would be intense - you'd only want it with people you really trusted and knew well and everytime some little rat spawned and squeaked everyone would freak out in fear. Would be fun.
I have an idea for a death penalty *snicker*
When you die, you leave your body as an ethereal spirit. You will remain in this state until a living player resurrects you via a spell or scroll. If no one is available to resurrect you, then you must find a way to resurrect yourself, althought it may not be easy, you will need to absorb enough life from living creatures as they approach their own death. The amount of life absorbed, and your actions in the spirit realm, will affect your attributes and abilities in life, also, the manner in which you died will affect your abilities in death, as well as how difficult it will be to revive by yourself. While in this state you can move freely through the world, even through walls and objects. you are unable to interact with the living realm directly, but you can interact with them indirectly. Depending on your spiritual attributes you might be able to suggest to an NPC humanoid to draw his sword on a player, or possess a lower level creature. This spirit realm will be a sort of whole other game. You will be in competition with other spirits for ascendance into the realm of the living. You may even choose to remain in the spirit realm, and become a powerful spirit.
Resurrecting yourself would only be necessary when no other player is watching out for you. This will encourage people to work more closely together, and watch each others back.
When you are successfull in resurrecting yourself, you will appear at the nearest temple, graveyard, or similar safe location.
"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun."
The attitude above makes me wonder if you've ever played any rogue-likes at all - or rather have you progressed to any decent level in any of them? I strongly sense the above post is bullshit.
When the consequences of a bad move is permanent death, fear is the last emotion you aim for. You want to avoid fear at all cost, and avoid all risk. Once I'd got through the first few levels, where risk taking is normal since there's so little at stake, I fealt no fear playing these games until the turn before one of my characters died (which normally occurred due to my over extending myself due to feeling a completely different emotion, namely boredom).
So - there's a really nice staff for me on level 80? But I haven't got the gear to get there. No problems - I'll get that staff. I'll just take my time getting there, and get there safely.
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Are you sure you're talking about rogue-likes? Or are you confusing them with something entirely different (e.g. MUDs).
Most rogue likes are single player games, and the community goes little further than posting YASD files (yet-another-sudden-death) on usenet groups such as rec.games.roguelike.angband
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Heremypet: Get a patent for your idea. That would be an awesome game to play.
Svann: What do you mean Rogue can't count?!? Rogue is the granddaddy of all things rogue-like on mmorpgs. It doesn't have to be online, it was the idea and concept that counted the most. Like one wise man said before: "Eliminate the foundation, and the whole building collapses."
Heerobya: What you're saying does prove an excellent point. But negative reinforcement isn't all that bad either. Like you said, different people need to be trained and disciplined different ways. Some people simply can't be disciplined on the positive reinforcement alone.
I learned in psychology classes interesting things on the different reinforcements. Positive reinforcement is the most favored because it does avoid unpleasant consequences. But, if it's taken too far or the person being disciplined doesn't "learn properly," then you have issues. Some people may develop some issues, like narcissism (person sees themselves as center of the world) for example. Now I'm not saying that positive reinforcement is bad, it's just that it's not necessarily the best reinforcement. So when games are created, it's noted that the reinforcement used to discipline gamers can create different atmospheres. Is the game postive enough to a point where gamers learn excellently from rewards, or do they become greedy and don't feel the sting of failing, thus they don't learn from mistakes? Is the game negative enough where gamers learn not to repeat mistakes, or do they get burned so hard they don't come back out of frustration?
P.S.: In psychology, I learned an interesting syndrome that can occur in a person under special circumstances. If a person is neglected too much or is overly rewarded /coddled as a child, they can develop something called Manchausen's Syndrome (not sure if that's the exact spelling). This makes the person extremely sensitive to emotional pain/conflict, and he/she will take drastic, even life-threatening methods to avoid that pain. It shows up usually in hospitals, where patients will do things to make themselves look like they're sick or actually make themselves sick through mis-used medications. The reason why they do that? Because they want the doctor to save their life, and feel like someone cares for them.
This can occur through misproperly-used positive reinforcement. If a person is overly rewarded/coddled, then they become too easy to break emotionally. How does this apply to games? Well, it really doesn't, this was just an example to show that positive reinforcement, when done incorrectly, can produce some rather nasty results...
All I can say is that I'm so glad you guys are no longer the target audience. You are a bunch of strange people who seem to want these games to replace your real life, by making them as realistic as possible. I'm here to have fun, screw death penalties, screw time sinks, screw raiding, screw forced grouping and screw anything that turns a game into a chore.
I guess that's why the only MMO I play right now is Wizard 101, heh. It may be targeted at kids, but damn if it isn't a hell of a lot more fun than those "second job" style MMOs that prolifeerate the market.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Antipathy: First off, yes, I do play alot of rogue-likes. Secondly, "rogue-like" is used to describe games with severely harsh death punishments nowadays. Yes, I do know that Rogue is a single player turn-based game (so apparently I do know alot about the game's history too). Modern day rogue-like mmorpgs don't neccessarily have to follow that exact formula. Now it can be an mmorpg and doesn't have to be turn-based to be called a rogue-like, as long as it has severe death punishments like it's granddaddy had.
I'm being serious about the game my friend played. It wasn't big, and I think it was made by an indy developer, but it existed.
Also, what do you mean fear isn't a huge and important aspect of rogue-likes? It is a huge part, but you're thinking of fear too negatively. Fear didn't keep me from entering those dungeons, it added thrill to the whole adventure. Like one wise man said: "If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all."
Vrazule: So, a guy that plays a wizard game aiming towards the kids-tween group is any better? Don't forget, we are all gamers, all nerdy, all hoping that we were ninjas, or had wings, etc.
The basic problem with negative reinforcement is that it motivates people to avoid failure rather then motivate them to succeed. To encourag people to succeed you need positive reinforcement. Without it people will simply avoid tasks with a cost of failure. Content with little reward but a serious cost of failure will not be played eg. bosses with crappy loot are not killed, PvP areas with few rewards are left empty. Similarly content with good rewards but prohibitive cost of failure will be avoided.
Maybe this comes down to a matter of definitions. I've got no idea which games you're talking about, and you haven't told us. Some people would classify games such as "Diablo" or "Hellgate" as being roguelike, whilst I would not.
And rogue likes aren't defined by "Harsh death penalties". They have perma-death. You spoke of your friend "losing all his items when he died." That's a long long way from perma death. All that sort of game does is encourage people to get by with cheap items that they don't mind losing - in which case death isn't really much more meaningful than death is in WoW.
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"All I can say is that I'm so glad you guys are no longer the target audience. You are a bunch of strange people who seem to want these games to replace your real life, by making them as realistic as possible. I'm here to have fun"
An MMORPG world that feels (a bit) more realistic makes it more fun for me - it doesn't mean you have to play the game for more hours.
I think this is going in the right direction, but I would still have some modifications.
No corpse runs, at all. Just make it so that you respawn somewhere. Not even the WoW ghost run. There are problems when doing corpse runs, namely the MOBs still being there, so you'll just lose experience constantly until you are out of range. Have some experience loss, but have a limit to that loss. Have some durability loss.
This would still deter people from dieing because you would have to travel back to where you were and possible have to face all the MOBs you already got through again. You wouldn't want to die, but it also isn't so harsh that you will ragequit because you just lost 5 hours of XP and all of your gear.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
I think this risks vs reward talk is becoming less and less relevant.
We are talking about entertainment/games here. There is no issue if there is always reward. Just the risks of wasting time of not getitng a reward is good enough.
Remember that playing a GAME does not equal to real achievement. It is the ILLUSION of achievement that is so entertaining.
Simply said, I dont believe in penalities at all. Not in schooling or in games. I find that an absurd, old fashioned concept, like wearing wigs in 18th century or medival medicine.
Penalities don't heighten my sense of fun in any way. Loosing a mission, failing in a quest, dying itself IS the penality. Why add extra penalities to the fact that you lost? It's as pointless as beating your kid for bringing back a bad grade in school. It doesn't make better people. I find the very idea of penalizing archaic.
I could go all the way into psychology, where it is proven that penalizing is negative reinforcement, which doesnt make better people, but only trains them. Nothing we should strife for, for it breaks what makes the personality ethical, and trains it to do "what it is told to". And we know where that usually leads to. There is that saying "show me what kind of games you play, and I tell you who you are." And that is very revealing, and for many people it will do little credit when you see what they aspire for. It actually would shed quite a dubious light on many. Games shape people. It is a miniature social training ground, and IMVPO many MMO are educated quite devastating values, of which the death penalitiy is just one very gross end. But I guess you really would have to delve into behavior studies to see that. *shrug*
Besides, the only thing you CAN penalize in a MMO is time. You cant rob a gamers extra money, you cant spank him or whatever. So essentially EVERY penality is a timesink. So you penalize those extra, who have little time, and thus you treat people unequal. You penalize people for playing the game, since you can't avoid death altogether. In a MMO it is even more absurd that in reality. That sort of "accomplishment" is just the result of "Pavlov training". People are MADE to feel gratified with the threat of a death penality. It isnt something that is their natural instinct but the result of decades of games which formed the habits of thinking. It is something we must break free, since in essence it is a sado-masochist circle, which serves no purpose. It is like you can train someone to enjoy pain. You can. But you shouldn't. Thats what happend in gaming. People were trained to enjoy penalities and to kiss the whip.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
As long as you balance reward and penalty I don't think there will be a huge problem. Dying should be bad.
I liked the penalty in Lineage where sometimes you would loose an item (which could be picked up by other players or mobs that would drop it when killed.
You should be scared of dying but not so much that it would totaly ruin the game for you. No death penalty whatsoever or very light encourage people to do suicidal things or even die to move faster between areas. That is stupid. But loosing everything you have on you is too hard and will make people quit the game if they are unlucky or lag to death.
But rewards should always be balanced to the danger, otherwise the game will just be boring.
Best death penalty in the genre. Everything else feels either too weak (WoW), or more annoying than anything else (XP and item loss).
The idea is to reward *not* dying.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
If the only risk is not gaining anything, then players will simply use zerg tactics / mentality. If I want to kill a boss with huge HP, I might do 1 dmg to him, die and repeat the process 10,000 times until he dies. Now what should be a high-risk encounter (high risk of not gaining an item) is reduced to a lower risk because I can just fail as many times as it takes before I finally win.
That is the point of death penalties, not risk vs reward. People should be encouraged to win without failing over and over and over in the process.
"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun."
There are obviously two completely different types of personality involved in this - with one type the fun is in the risk and with the other the fun is in the reward.
Antipathy: Well, like you said, we seem to have very different definitions of rogue-likes. Also, I believe harsh death punishments are a heavy part of rogue-likes. Rogue started the trend when you lost all your items when you died, and the concept has carried on and even evolved with new penalties attached. Perma-death is an example of this (perma-death can also exist in non rogue-like games too). Basically, my definition of rogue-like is most likely a new generation thinking. It originally was a term used to describe turn-based games that had harsh death penalties, but now so many games have taken the harsh death punishment concept that rogue-likes can really apply to many mmorpgs out there. Some games that aren't rogue-likes have even taken some ideas from the term. Remember the game Runescape? It looks like an easy, Second Life clone, but underneath it all there is a severe death penalty (you lose most of the equipment you had on at the time except the weapon equipped). It really is a matter of opinion here, but I still believe that rogue-likes are games that incorporate many harsh punishments when you die.
P.S.: I did state in the first post mentioning my friend playing that game that I don't remember it's name. It was old at the time that my friend played it, so by now it may have shut down for good, who knows?
Everyone in general: The thing is, penalties exist. You can ignore them if you want, but that isn't always the best thing to do. Like another wise man said, "Those who refuse to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them." Penalties are necessary to train and discipline people and animals to do things beneficial. Even in positive reinforcement, there are penalties. Let's say you do a quest, and if you do it perfectly, you get a bonus. If you do not do the quest perfectly, then no bonus. There's a penalty involved there. If you don't do the quest perfectly, then you get no bonus, so obviously you would try your best. That is how positive reinforcement works. No matter how much anyone wants to get around it, penalties will always be around.
In my opinion, you need both rewards and punishments to properly discipline someone or something.
Positive reinforcement is not the answer in an mmo. You are all assuming that dieing less leading up to the boss or raid finale is going to grant you a greater reward. What about exploring? It is the biggest part of any mmo. Going to see the new areas with the new monsters and such. Where is the fear? where is the adrenaline pumping through your veins going into a new dungeon? Oh no, If I die, I might not get as good a loot from some boss at the end of the dungeon! Thats not fear, thats just greed. You have to have some type of fear in the game for it to reach that level of excitement. Sure you die 50 times trying to figure out some raid boss and when you do, woot your excited. But those 50 times you died, you were just annoyed cause you hadnt figured it out yet. No fear at all, no adrenaline pumping, just going through the grind till you figure out what the exact pattern is to kill the big baddy. Someone mentioned in wow that they suffer a lot of money loss doing those raids and they are right but money is easy to get in the game and thus not a factor to deter people from not dieing.
Look, Im not a fan of corpse runs or exp penalties or hell levels or any of that. I have played a lot of mmo's in my day and I can honestly say that the ONLY mmo that made me fear death or kept my adrenaline pumping was EQ1. Since then, I have never been afraid to die in a game and thats because every game since then has had such easy death penalties that it makes almost no difference and as such, allows you to "run and gun"(otherwise known as zerging) everything in the game.
This also leads to another part of the mmo experience that is now all but forgotten and that is the respect of and from other players. Ohh, that raid guild died 100 times figuring out how to kill boss X. But they did it, look at the cool loot they got. Who gives a crap! I had more respect for the group just trying to pull from the house in unrest for the first time in eq1. Why? Cause those people could die and I know what that death penalty is as it could happen to me to. See, back in eq1 people had a lot more respect for other peoples accomplishments because death was feared by all and to survive a big battle and walk away victorious, was in some weird way a victory for yourself. Even if you only got to watch what happened and didnt participate in anyway, you still felt what they felt because you know the penalty of failure and its not pretty. So all of you out there that says your glad you dont play our type of game, you have no clue on just how much more, fear, adds to a game. Those folks that play a true pure pvp game like eve and others, they know, and they understand what I am talking about. Thats why they play. Thats what it used to be like playing a PVE game. Nowadays pve mmos are a joke with their dinky death penalties, their in games maps, radar, etc... Im not saying they aren't fun. They do have some enjoyment in them, but what they dont have is just to hard to explain to people because they have never felt "it" before.
Doomsday, that was a beautiful thought you had about the point of exploration. Basically I'm just getting tired of games where dying's worst punishment is getting teleported back to homebase or doing a ghost walk (when your body is in a safe area not surrounded by a mob). Why can't there be stricter death punishments in some of these games? EVE Online has alot of rogue-like elements, yet it's extremely popular, so rogue-likes can obviously do well nowadays if a striking balance is hit.
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
Many, if not most players in MMOs will always try to find the best and easiest way to do something, to get the reward. Every MMO ever made has proved this.
You make an activity too challenging or too punishing for failure and people will avoid it like the plague unless the loot is the absolute best in game, but this creates a problem where content has to be created for a divided audience like we see in raid-centric games, you garauntee to create a second class of players.
At the other end if you make the loot crappy even if they content is easy and the risk of death low people still won't do it.
You have to find that perfect middle ground between risk vs. reward, which is what death penalties are all really about anyway.
In the end it's all about personal taste, like everything on these boards really, but the vast majority overwhelmingly approve of the positive reinforcement model over the negative.
Where the risk of failure is not losing anything, but instead not gaining anything.
If you can't see the difference, you need to study human psychology a bit more.
If the only risk is not gaining anything, then players will simply use zerg tactics / mentality. If I want to kill a boss with huge HP, I might do 1 dmg to him, die and repeat the process 10,000 times until he dies. Now what should be a high-risk encounter (high risk of not gaining an item) is reduced to a lower risk because I can just fail as many times as it takes before I finally win.
That is the point of death penalties, not risk vs reward. People should be encouraged to win without failing over and over and over in the process.
That is an extreme example that no modern MMO uses. When you die the fight resets. You cannot accumulate enough failures to get an automatic success. The only way to get a success is to learn from your mistakes and do the fight right. If you do not learn no amount of failures (and corresponding penalties) will let you win the fight. Too much negative reinforcement actually discourages the player from trying to learn the fight.
I guess we are just wired differently. For me fear adds very little to the excitement. The exciting part is facing down a challenge and doing your best. Fear is just a distraction to that because it means that doing my best might not be the most optimal option for me. This is because I know my limits and know even if I perform to the best of my abilities I might not succeed and the best way to learn is to try things out till I figure out the best solution. Artificially limiting my ability to learn in the game goes against the spirit of why I play.
As far as having respect for players I really have little respect for people doing things just because of the risk. I have respect for people who attempt a task to better themselves. So people who do a fight just because it is risky get no respect from me.