The top five, indisputable reasons against harsh death penalty!

Meridion

(should be followed by 'in PvE' but that took too long)

Rank 5 - Motivation; While this has been stated countless times, I'll drag it into the ring again. Death penalties that throw you back hours on your advancement curve are just not fun. Sure, it's a thin line between suspension (because there's something at risk) and frustration (because you lost too much); Still generally speaking, too harsh death penalties are much more likely to drive players away than too soft ones...

Rank 4 - Balancing; How many times have you taken encounters that were marked, advertised or looked like you had a real chance of success if you just took care. And how many times have you been slain because "oops, the encounter was just too hard". The boss mob was meant to be for a group of 4, but the quest was advertised as 'solo', for example. So you get the penalty bat just because the devs don't balance their encounters?

Rank 3 - Bugs; Just take some seconds and remember some of the (I'm sure there's many) times you stood there and were attacked, killed or chased by an unattackable mob. I remember overland fish in Everquest 2, invisible elites in WoW, through-walls-casting lichs in Tibia. You name it. So first the game cheats and then you get the death penalty on top of it! Great.

Rank 2 - Lacking encounter control. This is probably the most common reason harsh death penalties suck in certain games. Because some games work with the 'surprise effect'. You open a door for the first time, or pull a lever or just plain walk around. You enter a door, you don't know whats in there so you try to carefully go in, adding a small army of mobs and there's no way you could have known that in advance. And on top of wiping you get the death penalty cherry; yay.

Rank 1 - The inglorious lag; Seriously, how many times have you been wiped, in any game, during lagspikes or because you got kicked from the server. because your healer disconnected or your tank. Any online game, at any time, features this. And what about 'virtual' linkdeads, like RL events, your baby cries, your cat walked over the keyboard, your wife aggroed, the doorbell rings. All this kills hundreds of thousands of players daily. And some games additionally kick yor face with death penalties on top of it.

So as much as I appreciate the suspense harsh death penalties create, without superstable, balanced, controllable encounters _not_ having them is the lesser evil, by far.

M

 

Josher

Originally posted by Meridion


(should be followed by 'in PvE' but that took too long)
Rank 5 - Motivation; While this has been stated countless times, I'll drag it into the ring again. Death penalties that throw you back hours on your advancement curve are just not fun. Sure, it's a thin line between suspension (because there's something at risk) and frustration (because you lost too much); Still generally speaking, too harsh death penalties are much more likely to drive players away than too soft ones...
Rank 4 - Balancing; How many times have you taken encounters that were marked, advertised or looked like you had a real chance of success if you just took care. And how many times have you been slain because "oops, the encounter was just too hard". The boss mob was meant to be for a group of 4, but the quest was advertised as 'solo', for example. So you get the penalty bat just because the devs don't balance their encounters?
Rank 3 - Bugs; Just take some seconds and remember some of the (I'm sure there's many) times you stood there and were attacked, killed or chased by an unattackable mob. I remember overland fish in Everquest 2, invisible elites in WoW, through-walls-casting lichs in Tibia. You name it. So first the game cheats and then you get the death penalty on top of it! Great.
Rank 2 - Lacking encounter control. This is probably the most common reason harsh death penalties suck in certain games. Because some games work with the 'surprise effect'. You open a door for the first time, or pull a lever or just plain walk around. You enter a door, you don't know whats in there so you try to carefully go in, adding a small army of mobs and there's no way you could have known that in advance. And on top of wiping you get the death penalty cherry; yay.
Rank 1 - The inglorious lag; Seriously, how many times have you been wiped, in any game, during lagspikes or because you got kicked from the server. because your healer disconnected or your tank. Any online game, at any time, features this. And what about 'virtual' linkdeads, like RL events, your baby cries, your cat walked over the keyboard, your wife aggroed, the doorbell rings. All this kills hundreds of thousands of players daily. And some games additionally kick yor face with death penalties on top of it.
So as much as I appreciate the suspense harsh death penalties create, without superstable, balanced, controllable encounters _not_ having them is the lesser evil, by far.
M
 

They all make complete sense, to normal people that is.  But they're completely irrelevant to those who simply don't care that any of those problems could cause a few hours of backtracking.  Some wouldn't be considered problems at all=)  Thats the thing.  TIME is just irrelevant to those who seek harsh penalties.  No amount of logic will help them understand except a certain life event that suddenly switches something in their brain and convinces them that losing a few hours of playtime just isn't "worth it" anymore.  Sadly many of these people will never have that switch go off, due to personal choice or apathy.   A niche play style is just a niche play style.  Essentially it is whats irrelevant in the big picture;)

dodsfall

 A death penalty can be as hard as a player wants it to be. They could even delete their character in most games if they choose to upon dying. It's a non-issue.

drago_pl

I need harsh death penalties. This way game is less likely to get me bored after a while and it forces me to play better (not dying). I kinda prefer games with full loot. Death is harsh but winning gives you reward. This way we have balance.

Omali

5. Motivation is a pretty poor reason, if you quit an MMO because the armor vitality reduction or exp loss was too great, it says a lot more about you than it does about the game. To go more specifically, if you quit Darkfall, Mortal Online, Runescape, or another game that you lose your items upon death, because you lost items upon death, it says a lot more about you, namely your ability to read game descriptions.

4. Balancing. This follows the Call of Duty formula: The reason that Call of Duty 4 and up throw more enemies, with higher accuracy, at you than the earlier titles is because your health regenerates and the player can take many more hits. If you were to transport someone from Call of Duty 2 to Call of Duty 4, they would not stay alive long due to the reliance on med-packs. Games like World of Warcraft would not work with dropping items upon death, because the game would have to be balanced for it for the same reason. Meanwhile in, say, Darkfall, the player is expected to figure out what weapons work best against what, and is punished for bum-rushing the field. NPC spawns are more sparse, and lack of auto-target means that just because the fight becomes three on one, you can still evade the attacks of all three.

3. Bugs are a pain in the ass, but they are not a reason to stop the process full force, as they will always exist in some fashion or another, and the best the developers can do is up the QA process and stomp them out as soon as they are reported. Your justification for this is like saying "Let's stop building houses. They set on fire so we should just stop building them altogether."

2. This is part of the "Don't bum-rush into unknown territory" bit I talked about earlier. If you're getting wiped because you're not carefully going through the stage, it is an issue on your end, not the game's.

1. All online games have this issue, and it is a problem on the player's end, not the company (Unless you are playing Fallen Earth, who need to open up a European server to reduce lag for those outside of North America). I know there are people who don't have a choice in provider, thanks to their geographical positioning, but the best the developers can say is "too bad". Like lowering the national speed limit because the horse and buggy can't go nearly that high speed, you are going to either be left in the dust or consolidated to single player games if the lag is too great.

As for "hundreds of thousands" getting killed every day by doorbells, babies, cats, mailmen, and parents: Exaggerating only hurts your argument, not helps it.

Murashu

You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end

 

Without risk there can be no reward.

tro44_1

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Disagree. Fun is a reward.

PvP is more fun with more people. Harsh DP scares off more People.

NinjaNerf

Originally posted by Meridion


(should be followed by 'in PvE' but that took too long)
Rank 5 - Motivation; While this has been stated countless times, I'll drag it into the ring again. Death penalties that throw you back hours on your advancement curve are just not fun. Sure, it's a thin line between suspension (because there's something at risk) and frustration (because you lost too much); Still generally speaking, too harsh death penalties are much more likely to drive players away than too soft ones...
Rank 4 - Balancing; How many times have you taken encounters that were marked, advertised or looked like you had a real chance of success if you just took care. And how many times have you been slain because "oops, the encounter was just too hard". The boss mob was meant to be for a group of 4, but the quest was advertised as 'solo', for example. So you get the penalty bat just because the devs don't balance their encounters?
Rank 3 - Bugs; Just take some seconds and remember some of the (I'm sure there's many) times you stood there and were attacked, killed or chased by an unattackable mob. I remember overland fish in Everquest 2, invisible elites in WoW, through-walls-casting lichs in Tibia. You name it. So first the game cheats and then you get the death penalty on top of it! Great.
Rank 2 - Lacking encounter control. This is probably the most common reason harsh death penalties suck in certain games. Because some games work with the 'surprise effect'. You open a door for the first time, or pull a lever or just plain walk around. You enter a door, you don't know whats in there so you try to carefully go in, adding a small army of mobs and there's no way you could have known that in advance. And on top of wiping you get the death penalty cherry; yay.
Rank 1 - The inglorious lag; Seriously, how many times have you been wiped, in any game, during lagspikes or because you got kicked from the server. because your healer disconnected or your tank. Any online game, at any time, features this. And what about 'virtual' linkdeads, like RL events, your baby cries, your cat walked over the keyboard, your wife aggroed, the doorbell rings. All this kills hundreds of thousands of players daily. And some games additionally kick yor face with death penalties on top of it.
So as much as I appreciate the suspense harsh death penalties create, without superstable, balanced, controllable encounters _not_ having them is the lesser evil, by far.
M
 

 

If the players receive harsh death penalties due to lags and bugs the game companies will receive a much bigger penalties of losing players. For this I don't think we will see harsh death penalties nowadays and in the future.

rutaq

 Personally I like a harsh death penalty.  I acknowledge that many of your points are valid but personally I am willing to assume the risks for greater challenge.

 

 I am an adult with a life, I don't have unlimited time to play so when I do play I want to game to be challenging.  I want there to be a real tangible risk that requires that you pay attention and play your class well to survive and the sense of accomplishment you get from playing well.

 

Everyone is different:

      some people play poker just for fun, while others want the thrill and risk of having real cash on the line.

      some people play golf for fun and don't keep score,  while others want the thrill and challenge of competition against the other golfers.

       some people play MMOs to relax, they don't want to be stressed or challenged.  Playing is like meditation, they click a couple buttons for a few hours and let half their brain go to sleep.   Other players want the game to put them on edge, they want the game to be more immersive and challenging.  They want success to be judged on how well you played not how long you played through easy content.   A game where reaching max level is a sign of achievement not the expect norm after playing through 120 hours of solo easy mode content.

 

 

 

 

Angorim

Originally posted by tro44_1

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Disagree. Fun is a reward.

PvP is more fun with more people. Harsh DP scares off more People.

 

And no risk or consequence makes any 'victory' a shallow one.

Just like the debate on death penalty, fun is subjective.  Some people enjoy playing Hardcore mode on Diablo 2 because if you screw up once, your character is dead and gone forever.  I find that to be far too extreme for my tastes even though I crave games with consequence.  There are far too many games already on the market that cater to mindless zerging and a virtual slap on the wrist at the very worst should you do something stupid and die. 

To me, death should be meaningful enough to make you evaluate what you did wrong and correct it because it wasn't just annoying to lose a bit of time, but it stung a bit to, say, gain experience debt or drop items on your corpse you have to recover.  However there is a balance to how harsh said penalty should be.  FFXI's 10% experience loss on death wasn't terrible, but the deleveling was a slap in the face and took it that one extra step too far.

Asheron's Call was the only game I've played so far that had that nearly perfect balance in death.  Then again, loot was handled far differently and the game had an actual dynamic economy, not just currency and an auction house full of static duplicate items (or static bound gear).

Josher

Originally posted by Angorim

Originally posted by tro44_1

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Disagree. Fun is a reward.

PvP is more fun with more people. Harsh DP scares off more People.

 

And no risk or consequence makes any 'victory' a shallow one.

 

So I take it you NEVER play a game with anyone without betting $100 or agreeing that the loser give up his car, the ball, a golf club, his deed to his house, ect?  I've played games/sports with people like you many times in my life.  YOU just don't know how to have fun.  But fun is subjective of course...some people think cutting themselves or sniffing glue is fun...go figure=)

just1opinion

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Didn't you MEAN....

Without risk there can be no reward, IMO?

Gameloading

Everybody loves the thrill of harsh death penalty, until the moment they die.

Kyleran

Its such a subjective thing, everyone has their own threshold of pain they are willing to tolerate.

I recall playing L2 when it first came out, and it was possible to drop one of your equipped items if you died to an NPC.  Since gear in L2 was very expensive and hard to obtain, dropping an amulet worth 2M or horrors, your main weapon worth 10M really added some thrill to the game as you frantically ran back to your gravesite hoping someone else didn't loot you first. 

But the thrill wasn't pleasant for me, so combined with the game's grind I decided to move on.  Others stayed and enjoyed it however.

I now play EVE, and when I die to either players or NPCs, my ships are destroyed, along with most of the contents and modules.  Yet I don't find this to be a problem, I guess because replacing them isn't a problem for me, and I don't mind the time I 'lost" earning the ISK to pay for them in the first place, all part of the game.

So I definiely don't care for games where death has zero meaning, I like a small monetary penalty like Aion has (or DAOC had) with some sort of time penalty, not as crazy about experience loss, or worse yet, deleveling like used to happen in Lineage 1.

 

Axehilt

Originally posted by dodsfall


 A death penalty can be as hard as a player wants it to be. They could even delete their character in most games if they choose to upon dying. It's a non-issue.

 

I prefer the other arguments against death penalty.

Mostly I dislike when this same argument is applied to other playstyle choices: like grouping vs. soloing.  If Group players in a game advance 4x faster than Soloers, it won't matter whether soloers can choose to solo because the game is basically kicking them in the gonads for choosing to do that.

Same deal with excessive death penalty (although excessive death penalty itself is like being kicked in the gonads.)

Unlike Grouping vs. Soloing, Death Penalty isn't really the sort of thing that can share the same game world.  You can have solo and group content in a game, but multiple types of death penalty don't really share the same space as easily.  If you make painful/normal death penalty a player option, then inevitably either the Painful players get screwed (because there's no benefit to the masochism) or the Normal players get screwed (because Painful gets some type of bonus.)  It's vaguely possible some middle ground exists between these two extremes, but I'd be impressed to see a game actually balance them within the same world.

It's more reasonable to offer this decision as a server choice, as you'll create pools of players playing with the same ruleset.  This does cause it to be competing with other server rulesets though, as I think there's a limit to how many types of rulesets are reasonable to have for a given MMORPG.  It's unreasonable to ask players 20 questions about their ruleset preferences before they've even started playing.  (Although wording it this way, it might be reasonable to start all players on the default ruleset and let them gradually move away to other ruleset servers, if the game world is structured in a certain way.)

Elikal

To make it brief, I fully agree 100% with the OP! In the essence a death penality is always in the end a timesink, and nothing else.

Axehilt

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end  
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

This is true, but Time is risked in everything you do.  In games with normal death penalty, there's still a penalty.

Meridion

Let me throw in something real quick.

I was - mostly - not talking about harsh death penalty itself, I play EvE so I like the thrill in the right environment.

My point was: For a fun game experience harsh death penalty sometimes should be sacrificed because there are factors you cannot control that let you die. I'm all for suspense and that edge, but there were games in my past that let me curse the dev team many times. Example?

Vanguard: There was this quest in a ruin some 3 miles away, so you had to ride for 10 minutes, once there I started doing my quests there, killing stuff etc., I opened a door to a tower and there were 2 4-dot (elite) guards behind the door. they instantly attacked and killed me within 5 seconds. There was no way I could have planned this encounter of could have been more careful. It was just plain bad design.

The point is. As long as I get a harsh death penalty when I or my group screwed things up that's all right, it's like a "well you could have done better" from your coach.

The moment things get nasty is when you drop down dead with only "wtf was that" on your mind, be it a lagspike or an unavoidable encounter you just can't win.

M

EDIT: Oh and btw. SOEs devs, aside from their notion to make every game the get their hands on easier, did the right thing in Vanguard, they chopped down the death penalty,  because their game had so many lags, bugs and imbalances people started to rightfully complain. A lot.

 

Murashu

Originally posted by girlgeek

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Didn't you MEAN....

Without risk there can be no reward, IMO?

 

Of course! Anything I write is my opinion. The OP stated his opinion and said it was INDISPUTABLE.

Meridion

Originally posted by Murashu

Originally posted by girlgeek

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

Didn't you MEAN....

Without risk there can be no reward, IMO?

 

Of course! Anything I write is my opinion. The OP stated his opinion and said it was INDISPUTABLE.

That was just a bait tbh. I added the "indisputable" to get readers, it's MMORPG.com after all... *grins*

 

Ceridith

Originally posted by Murashu


You also forgot to add 'IMO' at the end
 
Without risk there can be no reward.

 

The risk of dying in any MMO, harsh death penalty or not, is time. When there are fundamental and glaring issues that we as players have zero control over, harsh death penalties simply don't make sense. And they exist, as they were mentioned by the original poster.

If I'm going to CTD or lag out or get disconnected while playing, chances are if I was doing something "fun", I'm going to log back in dead, which is very much not fun. If that death means 5 minutes, then fine, It's more of just a 5 minute inconvenience. If I'm going to log back in after that with multiple hours worth of work to get back to where I was when I was punished for doing absolutely nothing wrong, then yes, I'm sure as hell going to be pretty bothered by that.

Most players play to relax and have fun, not to have a second job where random occurrences out of our control can put us back hours, if not days or even weeks.

Tanon

So, one day, I'm driving along the highway, minding my own business, when some jackass decides to ram into me with his 18-wheeler, setting off a massive chain-crash, killing me along with dozens of other people. There's no way I could've planned that encounter and been more careful. It's just bad design! They need to nerf the death penalty of RL!

 

On a more serious note: suck it up or play games without harsh death penalties. No one is forcing you to play games that include full-body looting; either take it like a man or go back to your carebear friends in WoW.

 

PS: You should change your thread title; your points have already been disputed by Omali. Therefore, you fail, and should probably quit life as per my first point.

metalcore

The point of harsh death penalty is fear.

Fear is an emotion that is missed by a lot of gamers because of its absence in so many games.

All the reasons mentioned are valid but are they worth losing the adrenaline rush created from fear.

That is really a personal view point and hence why it doesn't matter to a lot of gamers what reasons are posted.

Murashu

Originally posted by Meridion


EDIT: Oh and btw. SOEs devs, aside from their notion to make every game the get their hands on easier, did the right thing in Vanguard, they chopped down the death penalty,  because their game had so many lags, bugs and imbalances people started to rightfully complain. A lot.

That is the typical SOE way of handling things. The death penalty we had in VG back in beta was not very harsh at all, but instead of fixing the bugs and numerous issues the game had, they put a bandaid on it by removing the death penalties. The bugs still existed and many still exist today, 3 years after launch, but we should be happy about it because if you die to a bug or crappy coding/design it's no big deal right?

 

Robsolf

For most people, harsh death penalties are a deal breaker.  That simple.  the bigger the risk, the fewer people will partake.  that's why all of us aren't stock brokers and gamblers.

That said, if someone wants to play DF and likes its full loot ffa PvP, more power to them.  But they should be well aware that their taste for such things is rare.  Everyone should be blessed to have their fandom.  So long as they leave my game alone.

 

spades07

I don't know why old EQ fans go on about the importance of a harsh death penalty. I played Everquest and people were 96% rez whores.