Bluffing is merely a strategic element of gameplay. You weigh the risks and rewards and decide if you can fool the opponent when the risk is against you. It is actually an aspect of the 'gamer' side of poker rather than the 'gambler' side. There is no bluffing in roulette but there is plenty of bluffing in sports. Your 'stacking the odds' example has nothing to do with gambling. It simply means that people motivate tend to motivate themselves more when the challenge is greater and barely reachable. Once again I bring up the point that in the big time poker tournaments the 'death penalty' aspects of poker are elminated and replaced with a 'win and you get the prize, lose and you walk away with nothing' approach of sports.
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
So lets imagine that we have good death penalty idea,which is for example you will be banned from game like for 3 minutes.
ok
to make it somewhat realistic,we need a situation,where to try it.
Everybody in real-life fears death,atleast allmost everybody,but you are not scared of that everyday every second.
PvEPvP example
You are collecting flowers for some unknown reason and Britney Daggers comes to watch and says shes here to help you,you say that you dont need her help and keep collecting flowers,now she gets aggro,and stabs you in the back,knowing that if she kills you ,you will be out of the game for 3 minutes ,but,because shes trying to murder you there must be risk to her also,so if she loses the fight and because she tried to murder you,she´s risking to get banned for 20 minutes.
PvP example
whoever wins stays in game and can loot corpse,but because rules are trying to be realistic you can full loot ,but you cant carry like monster truck,so you must swap items with body.take epix leave blue.or leave blue keep your epox.
PvE example
you wont attack anything you cant win in the first place.
You have to have a good Death Penalty. At least for me it is very important. I cannot enjoy winning unless I have a chance to lose. I grew up playing hockey and I love the sport because you have a chance to lose if you are not on top of your game. Without that chance to lose then winning would mean nothing.
That's not a death penalty. A 'death penalty' in that example would be if after every loss the coach broke your hockey stick and you had to go buy a new one.
Nah, my coach would just not allow pucks or sticks in the next practice after a lose
Originally posted by Neanderthal But let's be honest here; we all know that we're going to "beat the challenge". You know you're going to kill the Jabberwocky, if not on your first try then on a subsequent attempt. So let's say that the reward for killing the Jabberwocky is 1000 experience points. If there is no experience loss for dying then you know that you will get those 1000 points, you cannot fail to get them because you WILL kill the jabberwocky sooner or later. This is where I have trouble understanding that "satisfaction of winning" that you get when you know that ultimately you can only win and never lose. But now let's say that dying incurrs a loss of 2000 experience points. NOW you can lose. Now you need to kill the Jabberwocky at least three times more often than he kills you in order to get a net gain. At 1 to 1 you will be losing progress. At 2 to 1 you will only be breaking even. Now winning your 1000 points is really winning because the other option (losing) exists. Winning can't really be winning if there is no chance to lose. If you can't lose then winning isn't really winning...it's just...being there. Like getting a trophy just for showing up.
I know no such thing. I might presume that I will beat the Jabberwocky because my ego tells me that but it is far from certain. I might just not have the skill to beat it at my level/gear. There are plenty of encounters I could never beat in games.
My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better. I set myself a goal that did not seem possible at first but I applied myself and proved myself wrong. If I cannot beat that challenge I lose that satisfaction and that is worse than any death penalty a video game could impose.
<<<<"My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better.">>>>
But in games with no death penalty all you can do is improve yourself. There are no set backs there is only improvement. There is only winning and no losing. Gains but no losses. You can "lose" a fight but it basically doesn't count because you don't lose anything you have when you lose a fight.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
In a game in which you can ONLY improve your character and NEVER lose anything I have to say I still don't understand how you can get any satisfaction from improving when it is impossible not to.
Maybe by "improve myself" you meant that you improved your game playing so that you could kill the mob. I don't know but that seems like a pretty empty satisfaction if there was never any chance to lose anything before you got around to improving your technique. I mean, that's going to happen anyway, you're going to get better as you play a game. But if you can never really lose to begin with it seems like a pretty hollow victory to me.
Originally posted by cukimunga Oh let me rephrase that, Im not a competitive person with all things. I guess im just weird that if there is no real penalty for dying or losing it just doesn't really feel worth trying harder because if I die or lose there are no repercussion. But if a game has a penalty for dying or losing I will put more effort into not dying because I don't want to die or lose because I know the repercussions are not good. Im competitive when there is something at stake like a harsh death penalty, getting hurt or sitting out for a while. Because I enjoy these games I want to keep playing them as often as possible and I get the satisfaction of over coming that risk of not being set back or having to sit out or getting hurt.
It's a difference in mindset. We play to win, you play not to lose.
Isn't that the same thing?
But with games with little to no death penalties the only thing you really lose is time, which is like a few minutes. So basically the loss is so trivial in a MMORPG because your putting in hundreds of hours in gameplay. Your basically breaking even or winning and "Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat" to quote Malcolm S. Forbes.
The bigger the challenge, the easier it is to fail. If you then beaten the challenge, you have proven that you have improved yourself aka 'risen to the challenge'. Failing the challenge is not trivial since it will remain with you until you finally manage to beat it. Death penalties are trivial in comparison because they will be replaced in time but the actual failure can only be expunged by actually beating the challenge.
I guess we both have different views. But the way i see it, you kill a mob you over come the challenge so you get rewards, the satisfaction of beating it and XP and or Loot. If you lose it should be the same, you don't get the satisfaction of defeating the mob and you lose XP and or Loot. If there is no penalty for your death all your left with is being left unsatisfied that you died so the reward greatly out weights the penalty and then for me even that reward seems trivial because I feel that I really had nothing to lose in the first place.
I used to skateboard which is full of risk and rewards. The satisfaction of landing a trick that you missed a ton of times is so awesome. But there is risk involved, like hurting yourself and possibly dying or breaking your board because you didn't land right. Granted not every fail in skateboarding ends in hurting yourself and or a board breaking but for me a lot of the time I got hurt but id sit out and go back at it.
Edit: The rewards are you have the satisfaction of landing a trick, your getting better and you not hurt or your board isn't broken.
Dp scares off Players in PvP. And in a MMO, mass scale (AKA More People) the more epic the battles. So I dont want people running off because they dont want to risk. I want them to stay and fight till they Lose, or Get Bored.
Just two totally different philosophies about what combat should be about in a game. I prefer a model where the DP is severe enough to prevent people from throwing caution to the wind and fight more like they would in the real world. (defensively, to win and to not die in the process)
Think paintball combat and you're on the right track. (but it'd be cooler if you could keep your opponents gun and helm)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
the point of puting a death penalty is not to set back or give a draw back to the players or even screw them of their items, or gear or whatever.
death penalties should be harsh enough (be it in a casual mmo or hard core or even a kid's mmo) to make the player consider their actions.
lvl 40 (pick your class) versus lvl 999 ancient dragon of the ages.
with death penalty = hmmm maybe i should get a party or get some help or at least come back when im lvl 950.
without death penalty = LEEEROY JENKINS!!!! die, respawn keep playing the game.
immersion went out the window.
i like eve online's system because it makes me think 2x before engaging x player. or bringing x ship to this fleet.
im not going to bring my nighthawk to an offensive small scale pvp fight in enemy territory but i will bring something i can aford to loose like a heavy assault ship. witch is about 1/3 of the cost of the nighthawk. but i will on the other hand not hesitate to use the nighthawk (command ship) to defend territory. just because there are death penalties i had to actually think what ship in which conditions i was going to use it. made me think about my actions and the consequances.
im not saying to make every game like eve, but at least put a death penalty that will make people think 2x about their actions.
There is winning, and not winning. Not winning = losing.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
Of course you can "lose" in a game without a harsh death penalty. Example: You spend an hour trying to do something and then fail. If you had succeeded, your character would have become more powerful .. but you didn't. You failed, and your character did not become more powerful. You may not have lost any progression, (ie. you haven't had any XP taken from you) but you have lost an hour of potential progression by failing. That's still losing.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
In trying to explain to some folks on this board the importance, in regards to immersion and risk and reward, for having a death (or failure) penalty, I think I have finally come up with an analogy: Imagine playing poker with play money. Doesn't really hurt when you lose, but doesn't really mean as much when you win. Now, imagine playing poker (small stakes) with real money. Losing sort of stings, but winning has a thrill; gets the adrenaline pumping. Such a game would draw a person in more than the former example. A penalty for failure is critical for MMO's to have immersion and for rewards to fully be appreciated.
I think it is a perfect analogy.
And while you mention WoW I will mention WAR. There it was way too easy to get back into combat, the RvR areas were just too small compared to DAoC.
So a death penalty does not have to be loss of XP per se ( even tho DAoC had that too ), but a long walk thru the dangerous frontier, back to the place where you need to be, now that was a good death penalty. It made the fights more thrilling and meaningfull.
But it all depends on what you want in a game, if you wan't to get quick into battle and gain something before your 1 hour gaming shift ends, then death penalties are to be avoided.
Currently WoW is more a quick multiplater game, opposed to more involving mmo's with death penalties and where you have to plan carefully and look harder for a fight.
At times I have to urge to actually resub to WoW, so I can jump into the instant action. Then again, it is clear the social bonds in WoW are becomming less important, and that is still part of why I want to play mmo's.
p.s. I could never play poker without real money, it just doesn't work imho.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site : http://mmodata.blogspot.be/ Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
There is winning, and not winning. Not winning = losing.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
Of course you can "lose" in a game without a harsh death penalty. Example: You spend an hour trying to do something and then fail. If you had succeeded, your character would have become more powerful .. but you didn't. You failed, and your character did not become more powerful. You may not have lost any progression, (ie. you haven't had any XP taken from you) but you have lost an hour of potential progression by failing. That's still losing.
Not winning = not winning. It's not all black and white. 'Grey' = 'a draw'.
It depends on how you define losing. Time is the ultimate denominator. If you exclude it from consideration, because it's the common deno, and you examine tangible 'rewards' / 'penalties' then his statement absolutely stands. Because if one *does* consider that a 'loss of time' is a penalty, then someone who doesn't even participate and is afk is being 'penalized'. By putting it into proper context his statement stands. Proper context deals with the penalty that deals with tangible results, potentials can be argued until the sun comes down.
There's a null and a positive in a world without penalty, time excluded.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
There is winning, and not winning. Not winning = losing.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
Of course you can "lose" in a game without a harsh death penalty. Example: You spend an hour trying to do something and then fail. If you had succeeded, your character would have become more powerful .. but you didn't. You failed, and your character did not become more powerful. You may not have lost any progression, (ie. you haven't had any XP taken from you) but you have lost an hour of potential progression by failing. That's still losing.
<<<There is winning, and not winning. Not winning = losing.>>>
I would argue that in games with no death penalty there is only winning and delayed winning. Win now or win later but you will always win.
<<<<Of course you can "lose" in a game without a harsh death penalty.
Example: You spend an hour trying to do something and then fail.
If you had succeeded, your character would have become more powerful .. but you didn't. You failed, and your character did not become more powerful.
You may not have lost any progression, (ie. you haven't had any XP taken from you) but you have lost an hour of potential progression by failing. That's still losing.>>>>
That argument would hold more water if everything took an hour to do. Killing one mob takes an hour, fail and you lose that time investment. But it doesn't work that way and I doubt if anyone would want it to.
If you're doing a dungeon crawl to reach some goal at the end and it takes an hour to reach the end AND if dying means it will all be respawned before you get back so that you can't just zip through to the point you were at, then I would agree that that would count as a significant penalty if, say, you died just before you reached the end.
But for most normal leveling progression it's not like that in most games.
Bluffing is merely a strategic element of gameplay. You weigh the risks and rewards and decide if you can fool the opponent when the risk is against you. It is actually an aspect of the 'gamer' side of poker rather than the 'gambler' side. There is no bluffing in roulette but there is plenty of bluffing in sports. Your 'stacking the odds' example has nothing to do with gambling. It simply means that people motivate tend to motivate themselves more when the challenge is greater and barely reachable. Once again I bring up the point that in the big time poker tournaments the 'death penalty' aspects of poker are elminated and replaced with a 'win and you get the prize, lose and you walk away with nothing' approach of sports.
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
In retrospect my wording was probably off. What I was trying to say that a game having bluffing does not have to have death penalties. Starcraft, Street Fighter, Chess, all have bluffing in them but don't have 'death penalities'. It is simply part of the strategy. The lack of a 'death penalty' does not remove the risk vs reward calculation inherent in a good challenge.
My counterpoint to the poker analogy is that poker has shown us if you make the winning a rewarding enough incentive, you cna remove the 'death penalty' aspects of it and still maintain all the important aspects of the game.
Not winning = not winning. It's not all black and white. 'Grey' = 'a draw'. The only time that not winning wouldn't equal losing would be when nothing was consumed with the attempt. In the MMO context we're discussing, Time is always consumed. It depends on how you define losing. Time is the ultimate denominator. If you exclude it from consideration, because it's the common deno, and you examine tangible 'rewards' / 'penalties' then his statement absolutely stands. Because if one *does* consider that a 'loss of time' is a penalty, then someone who doesn't even participate and is afk is being 'penalized'. By putting it into proper context his statement stands. Proper context deals with the penalty that deals with tangible results, potentials can be argued until the sun comes down. There's a null and a positive in a world without penalty, time excluded. I consider Time to be the most valuable resource in existence. Why would it ever be excluded from consideration?
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
Originally posted by Neanderthal But let's be honest here; we all know that we're going to "beat the challenge". You know you're going to kill the Jabberwocky, if not on your first try then on a subsequent attempt. So let's say that the reward for killing the Jabberwocky is 1000 experience points. If there is no experience loss for dying then you know that you will get those 1000 points, you cannot fail to get them because you WILL kill the jabberwocky sooner or later. This is where I have trouble understanding that "satisfaction of winning" that you get when you know that ultimately you can only win and never lose. But now let's say that dying incurrs a loss of 2000 experience points. NOW you can lose. Now you need to kill the Jabberwocky at least three times more often than he kills you in order to get a net gain. At 1 to 1 you will be losing progress. At 2 to 1 you will only be breaking even. Now winning your 1000 points is really winning because the other option (losing) exists. Winning can't really be winning if there is no chance to lose. If you can't lose then winning isn't really winning...it's just...being there. Like getting a trophy just for showing up.
I know no such thing. I might presume that I will beat the Jabberwocky because my ego tells me that but it is far from certain. I might just not have the skill to beat it at my level/gear. There are plenty of encounters I could never beat in games.
My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better. I set myself a goal that did not seem possible at first but I applied myself and proved myself wrong. If I cannot beat that challenge I lose that satisfaction and that is worse than any death penalty a video game could impose.
<<<<"My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better.">>>>
But in games with no death penalty all you can do is improve yourself. There are no set backs there is only improvement. There is only winning and no losing. Gains but no losses. You can "lose" a fight but it basically doesn't count because you don't lose anything you have when you lose a fight.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
In a game in which you can ONLY improve your character and NEVER lose anything I have to say I still don't understand how you can get any satisfaction from improving when it is impossible not to.
Maybe by "improve myself" you meant that you improved your game playing so that you could kill the mob. I don't know but that seems like a pretty empty satisfaction if there was never any chance to lose anything before you got around to improving your technique. I mean, that's going to happen anyway, you're going to get better as you play a game. But if you can never really lose to begin with it seems like a pretty hollow victory to me.
The same happens in a 'death penalty' game. All you can do is improve yourself as a player. The death penalty merely costs you time. It does not electroshock you so you forget how to kite, heal or hold aggro.
Your do-over example focuses on counting failures rather than successes. Personally I could care less how many times I failed if at the end I am able to succeed because I 'rose to the challenge'. When I am learning to shoot hoops I do not care how many times I missed only that in the end I learned how to score baskets.
I get a satisfaction from winning and not from not losing. If I wanted to merely not lose, I would never do anything challenging. I am only going to get better playing a game if I constantly challenge myself and try to win. The point of the game for me is to 'improve my technique'.
In retrospect my wording was probably off. What I was trying to say that a game having bluffing does not have to have death penalties. Starcraft, Street Fighter, Chess, all have bluffing in them but don't have 'death penalities'. It is simply part of the strategy. The lack of a 'death penalty' does not remove the risk vs reward calculation inherent in a good challenge. My counterpoint to the poker analogy is that poker has shown us if you make the winning a rewarding enough incentive, you cna remove the 'death penalty' aspects of it and still maintain all the important aspects of the game.
Now you're talking internalized bluffing or bluffing as part of the meta-game. All of the above involve cat-and-mouse styled tactics to get someone to over-exert for a finishing blow.
Poker or Starcraft- which game is more popular, as well as has more money involved? Poker versus Street Fighter? Chess? Why does Poker command such an interest in gamers of all varieties?
Excitement, and accessibility. These elements are true to any sort of spectator event. I need to find an interest, and I need to have a way of connecting.
Accessibility- just a deck of cards. Don't need a chess board with specific pieces or a computer and monitor or an arcade. I can learn the rules and become involved very easily.
Excitement- the potential losses versus gains (gambling) and how bluffing is such a key component to it. 'But I should have gone for it I knew he was bluffing!' <~ things like this. And these things aren't present in a world where losses aren't a real result, as we've previously touched on.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
Bluffing is merely a strategic element of gameplay. You weigh the risks and rewards and decide if you can fool the opponent when the risk is against you. It is actually an aspect of the 'gamer' side of poker rather than the 'gambler' side. There is no bluffing in roulette but there is plenty of bluffing in sports. Your 'stacking the odds' example has nothing to do with gambling. It simply means that people motivate tend to motivate themselves more when the challenge is greater and barely reachable. Once again I bring up the point that in the big time poker tournaments the 'death penalty' aspects of poker are elminated and replaced with a 'win and you get the prize, lose and you walk away with nothing' approach of sports.
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
In retrospect my wording was probably off. What I was trying to say that a game having bluffing does not have to have death penalties. Starcraft, Street Fighter, Chess, all have bluffing in them but don't have 'death penalities'. It is simply part of the strategy. The lack of a 'death penalty' does not remove the risk vs reward calculation inherent in a good challenge.
My counterpoint to the poker analogy is that poker has shown us if you make the winning a rewarding enough incentive, you cna remove the 'death penalty' aspects of it and still maintain all the important aspects of the game.
I do not understand what you are trying to say.
Starcraft has a death penalty.
Street Fighter has a death penalty.
Chess has a death penalty.
All of your examples of a death penalty. You lose something when you lose a fight. It is that simple. The Risk vs Reward is there because the bigger risk you take the better reward is possible.
Chess is a great example. Do you risk moving your queen out early or do you wait for the right time to move the queen? Do you let the other guy take your pawn so that you can set him up for the kill or do you protect all your pieces? These are all risk that a player must choose while playing chess. If they lose the death penalty is that you lose that a piece, that piece could have been the difference between winning and losing the whole game.
... The only time that not winning wouldn't equal losing would be when nothing was consumed with the attempt. In the MMO context we're discussing, Time is always consumed. ... I consider Time to be the most valuable resource in existence. Why would it ever be excluded from consideration?
Your second sentence answers your last. It's the common denominator. Nothing is 'won' by examining it (small pun intended). The example of someone who is afk demonstrates this to a 'T'.
Edit: more typos....
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
I'd have to agree with one of the earlier posters. If a death penalty is so important. Why not give one to yourself? Why does the game have to do it for you? I hear so much talk about freedoms in game. Well you are free to give yourself whatever death penalty you need. Died? Delete your character. Forbid yourself from playing that character for x amount of days. Take part of the money you have on you now and destroy it. Take any items in your inventory and destroy them. Hell take the gear you have on now and destroy it. Stop blaming developers and other players for a lack of death penalty. If they want it in their game it will be there, if it isn't, then don't let that stop you from giving one to yourself.
In War - Victory. In Peace - Vigilance. In Death - Sacrifice.
Starcraft has a death penalty. Street Fighter has a death penalty. Chess has a death penalty. All of your examples of a death penalty. You lose something when you lose a fight. It is that simple. The Risk vs Reward is there because the bigger risk you take the better reward is possible. Chess is a great example. Do you risk moving your queen out early or do you wait for the right time to move the queen? Do you let the other guy take your pawn so that you can set him up for the kill or do you protect all your pieces? These are all risk that a player must choose while playing chess. If they lose the death penalty is that you lose that a piece, that piece could have been the difference between winning and losing the whole game.
The chess analogy isn't bad.
It's not quite a death penalty though, as you don't die and then are given penalty for dying.
It's more about "you make a bad move" and the penalty for doing that is losing your piece.
So in an mmo you are saying that you "make a bad move" and then lose something. hmmm... ok I can run with that.
Though the thing is you can still win in chess and still lose pieces. You can also lose in chess and not lose many pieces (for more novice players).
There is a penalty of sorts for losing pices. Not for losing the game.
Still there is some sort of setback for losing a piece as that piece cannot help you.
Then again, in an mmo, losing a chunk of health or being debuffed and not having the use of your skills can also be equated to losing your piece.
hmmm it's hurting my head now. Probably because it "almost" works.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I'd have to agree with one of the earlier posters. If a death penalty is so important. Why not give one to yourself? Why does the game have to do it for you? I hear so much talk about freedoms in game. Well you are free to give yourself whatever death penalty you need. Died? Delete your character. Forbid yourself from playing that character for x amount of days. Take part of the money you have on you now and destroy it. Take any items in your inventory and destroy them. Hell take the gear you have on now and destroy it. Stop blaming developers and other players for a lack of death penalty. If they want it in their game it will be there, if it isn't, then don't let that stop you from giving one to yourself.
It is not important for a single player to inforce a death penalty on themselfs, it is about making the community of the game better. Death penalties make communities better, you can look at games without death penalties and see the communities suffers without.
The community in EQ1 was one of the best I have ever been a part of and alot of that is due to the death penalty, because people knew that they would need help one day and would help the guy asking for help getting his corpse back.
You and the poster you are talking about are missing the point. The point is that a good death penalty in an MMORPG game makes the game better, makes the players better, makes the community better. its not about myself, its about the community. Its about making the players in that community help each other out to over come something that will "cost" you.
Starcraft has a death penalty. Street Fighter has a death penalty. Chess has a death penalty. All of your examples of a death penalty. You lose something when you lose a fight. It is that simple. The Risk vs Reward is there because the bigger risk you take the better reward is possible. Chess is a great example. Do you risk moving your queen out early or do you wait for the right time to move the queen? Do you let the other guy take your pawn so that you can set him up for the kill or do you protect all your pieces? These are all risk that a player must choose while playing chess. If they lose the death penalty is that you lose that a piece, that piece could have been the difference between winning and losing the whole game.
The chess analogy isn't bad.
It's not quite a death penalty though, as you don't die and then are given penalty for dying.
It's more about "you make a bad move" and the penalty for doing that is losing your piece.
So in an mmo you are saying that you "make a bad move" and then lose something. hmmm... ok I can run with that.
Yea its about making that choice and having to live with the outcome good or bad. Either way you learn something for the next time, with a penalty you learn nothing and keep doing the same "bad move" because the game is not teaching you that it is a "bad move"
A non-slap-on-the-wrist death penalty has no place in a game that hopes to attract casual players.
A huge chunk of MMO players, I'd daresay the majority, want an MMO that plays like a single-player game except there's tons of other people around if they decide they want to play with other people and/or need to show off their shinys.
Strict death penalties are for more competitive, group-oriented games. If you're a casual player and don't care about your castle / your guild's server ranking / <insert whatever method of comparison here> then there's no point for you paying a steep price for dying. If you do, then it makes absolute sense that if you die or otherwise screw up you'll suffer a penalty that will impact whatever you're competiting over.
.. but, as I keep saying, you can't expect millions of casual players to suddenly decide they want to go play some non-casual game. There are lots of good, competitive MMOs out there now. If anything this segment is growing because it's simply too expensive for all but the biggest studios to compete in the casual market these days.
This genre is splitting. It's been a long time coming but it's a good thing and we should encourage it.
There is always a death penalty, and that penalty is always time.
XP debts, full inventory dropping, etc, doesn't necessarily make one death penalty more severe than the other. It can influence the amount of time it take to 'make back' what was lost, but it is that length of time to get your character back into a position of where you can continue to do what you were trying to accomplish that is the true death penalty.
So even if there is no XP debt or loss, nor any item drops or even repair costs, there can still be a death penalty if say, it takes the player an hour to move their character back to the location where they were when they died, so they can continue to do what they were doing when they died.
Comments
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
So lets imagine that we have good death penalty idea,which is for example you will be banned from game like for 3 minutes.
ok
to make it somewhat realistic,we need a situation,where to try it.
Everybody in real-life fears death,atleast allmost everybody,but you are not scared of that everyday every second.
PvEPvP example
You are collecting flowers for some unknown reason and Britney Daggers comes to watch and says shes here to help you,you say that you dont need her help and keep collecting flowers,now she gets aggro,and stabs you in the back,knowing that if she kills you ,you will be out of the game for 3 minutes ,but,because shes trying to murder you there must be risk to her also,so if she loses the fight and because she tried to murder you,she´s risking to get banned for 20 minutes.
PvP example
whoever wins stays in game and can loot corpse,but because rules are trying to be realistic you can full loot ,but you cant carry like monster truck,so you must swap items with body.take epix leave blue.or leave blue keep your epox.
PvE example
you wont attack anything you cant win in the first place.
Zerg vs 1 PvP
noidea
just a though
Generation P
That's not a death penalty. A 'death penalty' in that example would be if after every loss the coach broke your hockey stick and you had to go buy a new one.
Nah, my coach would just not allow pucks or sticks in the next practice after a lose
Sooner or Later
I know no such thing. I might presume that I will beat the Jabberwocky because my ego tells me that but it is far from certain. I might just not have the skill to beat it at my level/gear. There are plenty of encounters I could never beat in games.
My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better. I set myself a goal that did not seem possible at first but I applied myself and proved myself wrong. If I cannot beat that challenge I lose that satisfaction and that is worse than any death penalty a video game could impose.
<<<<"My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better.">>>>
But in games with no death penalty all you can do is improve yourself. There are no set backs there is only improvement. There is only winning and no losing. Gains but no losses. You can "lose" a fight but it basically doesn't count because you don't lose anything you have when you lose a fight.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
In a game in which you can ONLY improve your character and NEVER lose anything I have to say I still don't understand how you can get any satisfaction from improving when it is impossible not to.
Maybe by "improve myself" you meant that you improved your game playing so that you could kill the mob. I don't know but that seems like a pretty empty satisfaction if there was never any chance to lose anything before you got around to improving your technique. I mean, that's going to happen anyway, you're going to get better as you play a game. But if you can never really lose to begin with it seems like a pretty hollow victory to me.
It's a difference in mindset. We play to win, you play not to lose.
Isn't that the same thing?
But with games with little to no death penalties the only thing you really lose is time, which is like a few minutes. So basically the loss is so trivial in a MMORPG because your putting in hundreds of hours in gameplay. Your basically breaking even or winning and "Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat" to quote Malcolm S. Forbes.
The bigger the challenge, the easier it is to fail. If you then beaten the challenge, you have proven that you have improved yourself aka 'risen to the challenge'. Failing the challenge is not trivial since it will remain with you until you finally manage to beat it. Death penalties are trivial in comparison because they will be replaced in time but the actual failure can only be expunged by actually beating the challenge.
I guess we both have different views. But the way i see it, you kill a mob you over come the challenge so you get rewards, the satisfaction of beating it and XP and or Loot. If you lose it should be the same, you don't get the satisfaction of defeating the mob and you lose XP and or Loot. If there is no penalty for your death all your left with is being left unsatisfied that you died so the reward greatly out weights the penalty and then for me even that reward seems trivial because I feel that I really had nothing to lose in the first place.
I used to skateboard which is full of risk and rewards. The satisfaction of landing a trick that you missed a ton of times is so awesome. But there is risk involved, like hurting yourself and possibly dying or breaking your board because you didn't land right. Granted not every fail in skateboarding ends in hurting yourself and or a board breaking but for me a lot of the time I got hurt but id sit out and go back at it.
Edit: The rewards are you have the satisfaction of landing a trick, your getting better and you not hurt or your board isn't broken.
Just two totally different philosophies about what combat should be about in a game. I prefer a model where the DP is severe enough to prevent people from throwing caution to the wind and fight more like they would in the real world. (defensively, to win and to not die in the process)
Think paintball combat and you're on the right track. (but it'd be cooler if you could keep your opponents gun and helm)
To each his own.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
the point of puting a death penalty is not to set back or give a draw back to the players or even screw them of their items, or gear or whatever.
death penalties should be harsh enough (be it in a casual mmo or hard core or even a kid's mmo) to make the player consider their actions.
lvl 40 (pick your class) versus lvl 999 ancient dragon of the ages.
with death penalty = hmmm maybe i should get a party or get some help or at least come back when im lvl 950.
without death penalty = LEEEROY JENKINS!!!! die, respawn keep playing the game.
immersion went out the window.
i like eve online's system because it makes me think 2x before engaging x player. or bringing x ship to this fleet.
im not going to bring my nighthawk to an offensive small scale pvp fight in enemy territory but i will bring something i can aford to loose like a heavy assault ship. witch is about 1/3 of the cost of the nighthawk. but i will on the other hand not hesitate to use the nighthawk (command ship) to defend territory. just because there are death penalties i had to actually think what ship in which conditions i was going to use it. made me think about my actions and the consequances.
im not saying to make every game like eve, but at least put a death penalty that will make people think 2x about their actions.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
I think it is a perfect analogy.
And while you mention WoW I will mention WAR. There it was way too easy to get back into combat, the RvR areas were just too small compared to DAoC.
So a death penalty does not have to be loss of XP per se ( even tho DAoC had that too ), but a long walk thru the dangerous frontier, back to the place where you need to be, now that was a good death penalty. It made the fights more thrilling and meaningfull.
But it all depends on what you want in a game, if you wan't to get quick into battle and gain something before your 1 hour gaming shift ends, then death penalties are to be avoided.
Currently WoW is more a quick multiplater game, opposed to more involving mmo's with death penalties and where you have to plan carefully and look harder for a fight.
At times I have to urge to actually resub to WoW, so I can jump into the instant action. Then again, it is clear the social bonds in WoW are becomming less important, and that is still part of why I want to play mmo's.
p.s. I could never play poker without real money, it just doesn't work imho.
If you are interested in subscription or PCU numbers for MMORPG's, check out my site :
http://mmodata.blogspot.be/
Favorite MMORPG's : DAoC pre ToA-NF, SWG Pre CU-NGE, EVE Online
Not winning = not winning. It's not all black and white. 'Grey' = 'a draw'.
It depends on how you define losing. Time is the ultimate denominator. If you exclude it from consideration, because it's the common deno, and you examine tangible 'rewards' / 'penalties' then his statement absolutely stands. Because if one *does* consider that a 'loss of time' is a penalty, then someone who doesn't even participate and is afk is being 'penalized'. By putting it into proper context his statement stands. Proper context deals with the penalty that deals with tangible results, potentials can be argued until the sun comes down.
There's a null and a positive in a world without penalty, time excluded.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
<<<There is winning, and not winning. Not winning = losing.>>>
I would argue that in games with no death penalty there is only winning and delayed winning. Win now or win later but you will always win.
<<<<Of course you can "lose" in a game without a harsh death penalty.
Example: You spend an hour trying to do something and then fail.
If you had succeeded, your character would have become more powerful .. but you didn't. You failed, and your character did not become more powerful.
You may not have lost any progression, (ie. you haven't had any XP taken from you) but you have lost an hour of potential progression by failing. That's still losing.>>>>
That argument would hold more water if everything took an hour to do. Killing one mob takes an hour, fail and you lose that time investment. But it doesn't work that way and I doubt if anyone would want it to.
If you're doing a dungeon crawl to reach some goal at the end and it takes an hour to reach the end AND if dying means it will all be respawned before you get back so that you can't just zip through to the point you were at, then I would agree that that would count as a significant penalty if, say, you died just before you reached the end.
But for most normal leveling progression it's not like that in most games.
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
In retrospect my wording was probably off. What I was trying to say that a game having bluffing does not have to have death penalties. Starcraft, Street Fighter, Chess, all have bluffing in them but don't have 'death penalities'. It is simply part of the strategy. The lack of a 'death penalty' does not remove the risk vs reward calculation inherent in a good challenge.
My counterpoint to the poker analogy is that poker has shown us if you make the winning a rewarding enough incentive, you cna remove the 'death penalty' aspects of it and still maintain all the important aspects of the game.
lets put this thread on the table.
You want to put your money where your mouth is? Every time you die your credit card is charged $5.00.
Finally - Best site for Chuck Norris
http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/
And every time I kill a mob I am credited...how much? 10 cents? A penny?
I'd do it.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
I know no such thing. I might presume that I will beat the Jabberwocky because my ego tells me that but it is far from certain. I might just not have the skill to beat it at my level/gear. There are plenty of encounters I could never beat in games.
My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better. I set myself a goal that did not seem possible at first but I applied myself and proved myself wrong. If I cannot beat that challenge I lose that satisfaction and that is worse than any death penalty a video game could impose.
<<<<"My 'satisfaction of winning' comes from the fact that I improved myself and became better.">>>>
But in games with no death penalty all you can do is improve yourself. There are no set backs there is only improvement. There is only winning and no losing. Gains but no losses. You can "lose" a fight but it basically doesn't count because you don't lose anything you have when you lose a fight.
Going back to someone's sports analogy it would be like getting a do-over any time you lose a game. Only your wins count and your losses are ignored, so effectively you can't lose even when you do lose.
In a game in which you can ONLY improve your character and NEVER lose anything I have to say I still don't understand how you can get any satisfaction from improving when it is impossible not to.
Maybe by "improve myself" you meant that you improved your game playing so that you could kill the mob. I don't know but that seems like a pretty empty satisfaction if there was never any chance to lose anything before you got around to improving your technique. I mean, that's going to happen anyway, you're going to get better as you play a game. But if you can never really lose to begin with it seems like a pretty hollow victory to me.
The same happens in a 'death penalty' game. All you can do is improve yourself as a player. The death penalty merely costs you time. It does not electroshock you so you forget how to kite, heal or hold aggro.
Your do-over example focuses on counting failures rather than successes. Personally I could care less how many times I failed if at the end I am able to succeed because I 'rose to the challenge'. When I am learning to shoot hoops I do not care how many times I missed only that in the end I learned how to score baskets.
I get a satisfaction from winning and not from not losing. If I wanted to merely not lose, I would never do anything challenging. I am only going to get better playing a game if I constantly challenge myself and try to win. The point of the game for me is to 'improve my technique'.
Now you're talking internalized bluffing or bluffing as part of the meta-game. All of the above involve cat-and-mouse styled tactics to get someone to over-exert for a finishing blow.
Poker or Starcraft- which game is more popular, as well as has more money involved? Poker versus Street Fighter? Chess? Why does Poker command such an interest in gamers of all varieties?
Excitement, and accessibility. These elements are true to any sort of spectator event. I need to find an interest, and I need to have a way of connecting.
Accessibility- just a deck of cards. Don't need a chess board with specific pieces or a computer and monitor or an arcade. I can learn the rules and become involved very easily.
Excitement- the potential losses versus gains (gambling) and how bluffing is such a key component to it. 'But I should have gone for it I knew he was bluffing!' <~ things like this. And these things aren't present in a world where losses aren't a real result, as we've previously touched on.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
Bluffing doesn't exist without gambling. It's either all in or fold. The gameplay becomes very dry, and entirely predictable without it. If you can't accept this, I would suggest playing casually and hardcore with friends and diehards and weigh the worths for oneself. This simple matrix would provide enough empirical knowledge to support my first sentence in this paragraph.
And being as you have recognized that bluffing is an element of gameplay (or, a part of the game) then you would recognize that part of the game *is* gambling.
'Stacking the odds' and 'challenge' are one and the same. I believe we're talking past each other on this issue. Not you, nor me, nor anyone in life is fully involved unless they are challenged. Being challenged requires becoming fully vested, because the bar is higher than what could be achieved through casual involvement. Because that bar is higher than what can be normally achieved, the 'odds' are against you.
Let's flip this. Sometimes it helps to understand better.
If someone would advocate that death penalties aren't needed... then why have death at all? Why not simply provide an element to gameplay that allowed you to go in, engage, and 'die'. But all that dying did in terms of setback would be to place you at full health 15yds from your killer, allowing you to re-engage right away again.
I'd like to believe any intelligent individual would see how this would make PvE rather mindnumbingly boring and would make PvP absolutely not work at all.
Or, let's take it to the extreme: because one could argue that a reset of a character 15yds away causes one to lose time and therefore you are penalized.
Remove health bars entirely. That way there's no 'die'-ing. It's the only way to truly not have a 'penalty' is if the element never manifests itself. By doing this, you'd begin to tear down the entire infrastructure of the MMO game as we know it.
Clearly, the OP's analogy provides a most excellent angle from which to examine MMO combat gaming via that of another more universally understood game. The parallels are sound. We need death penalties, because of all the reasons everyone has discussed in this thread.
Edit: helloooooo typos!
In retrospect my wording was probably off. What I was trying to say that a game having bluffing does not have to have death penalties. Starcraft, Street Fighter, Chess, all have bluffing in them but don't have 'death penalities'. It is simply part of the strategy. The lack of a 'death penalty' does not remove the risk vs reward calculation inherent in a good challenge.
My counterpoint to the poker analogy is that poker has shown us if you make the winning a rewarding enough incentive, you cna remove the 'death penalty' aspects of it and still maintain all the important aspects of the game.
I do not understand what you are trying to say.
Starcraft has a death penalty.
Street Fighter has a death penalty.
Chess has a death penalty.
All of your examples of a death penalty. You lose something when you lose a fight. It is that simple. The Risk vs Reward is there because the bigger risk you take the better reward is possible.
Chess is a great example. Do you risk moving your queen out early or do you wait for the right time to move the queen? Do you let the other guy take your pawn so that you can set him up for the kill or do you protect all your pieces? These are all risk that a player must choose while playing chess. If they lose the death penalty is that you lose that a piece, that piece could have been the difference between winning and losing the whole game.
Sooner or Later
Your second sentence answers your last. It's the common denominator. Nothing is 'won' by examining it (small pun intended). The example of someone who is afk demonstrates this to a 'T'.
Edit: more typos....
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
I'd have to agree with one of the earlier posters. If a death penalty is so important. Why not give one to yourself? Why does the game have to do it for you? I hear so much talk about freedoms in game. Well you are free to give yourself whatever death penalty you need. Died? Delete your character. Forbid yourself from playing that character for x amount of days. Take part of the money you have on you now and destroy it. Take any items in your inventory and destroy them. Hell take the gear you have on now and destroy it. Stop blaming developers and other players for a lack of death penalty. If they want it in their game it will be there, if it isn't, then don't let that stop you from giving one to yourself.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
The chess analogy isn't bad.
It's not quite a death penalty though, as you don't die and then are given penalty for dying.
It's more about "you make a bad move" and the penalty for doing that is losing your piece.
So in an mmo you are saying that you "make a bad move" and then lose something. hmmm... ok I can run with that.
Though the thing is you can still win in chess and still lose pieces. You can also lose in chess and not lose many pieces (for more novice players).
There is a penalty of sorts for losing pices. Not for losing the game.
Still there is some sort of setback for losing a piece as that piece cannot help you.
Then again, in an mmo, losing a chunk of health or being debuffed and not having the use of your skills can also be equated to losing your piece.
hmmm it's hurting my head now. Probably because it "almost" works.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It is not important for a single player to inforce a death penalty on themselfs, it is about making the community of the game better. Death penalties make communities better, you can look at games without death penalties and see the communities suffers without.
The community in EQ1 was one of the best I have ever been a part of and alot of that is due to the death penalty, because people knew that they would need help one day and would help the guy asking for help getting his corpse back.
You and the poster you are talking about are missing the point. The point is that a good death penalty in an MMORPG game makes the game better, makes the players better, makes the community better. its not about myself, its about the community. Its about making the players in that community help each other out to over come something that will "cost" you.
Sooner or Later
The chess analogy isn't bad.
It's not quite a death penalty though, as you don't die and then are given penalty for dying.
It's more about "you make a bad move" and the penalty for doing that is losing your piece.
So in an mmo you are saying that you "make a bad move" and then lose something. hmmm... ok I can run with that.
Yea its about making that choice and having to live with the outcome good or bad. Either way you learn something for the next time, with a penalty you learn nothing and keep doing the same "bad move" because the game is not teaching you that it is a "bad move"
Sooner or Later
A non-slap-on-the-wrist death penalty has no place in a game that hopes to attract casual players.
A huge chunk of MMO players, I'd daresay the majority, want an MMO that plays like a single-player game except there's tons of other people around if they decide they want to play with other people and/or need to show off their shinys.
Strict death penalties are for more competitive, group-oriented games. If you're a casual player and don't care about your castle / your guild's server ranking / <insert whatever method of comparison here> then there's no point for you paying a steep price for dying. If you do, then it makes absolute sense that if you die or otherwise screw up you'll suffer a penalty that will impact whatever you're competiting over.
.. but, as I keep saying, you can't expect millions of casual players to suddenly decide they want to go play some non-casual game. There are lots of good, competitive MMOs out there now. If anything this segment is growing because it's simply too expensive for all but the biggest studios to compete in the casual market these days.
This genre is splitting. It's been a long time coming but it's a good thing and we should encourage it.
There is always a death penalty, and that penalty is always time.
XP debts, full inventory dropping, etc, doesn't necessarily make one death penalty more severe than the other. It can influence the amount of time it take to 'make back' what was lost, but it is that length of time to get your character back into a position of where you can continue to do what you were trying to accomplish that is the true death penalty.
So even if there is no XP debt or loss, nor any item drops or even repair costs, there can still be a death penalty if say, it takes the player an hour to move their character back to the location where they were when they died, so they can continue to do what they were doing when they died.