You're completely right of course. But, these threads tend to go only one way.
Those that have played MMOs with risk vs reward AND WoW clones will say that a death penalty brings them into the game, adds tension, makes things memorable and strategic, ect ect.
And those who have ONLY played WoW clones will go on and on about "But you lose money!" or "But dying already sucks!" and emphatically argue that their way is better, even though they've never played any other way, and have no perspective.
Same thing goes when you bring up a non instanced MMO. Hell, some of them say "MMOs can't work without instancing!" or even more hilariously "someone will steal all my kills and grief me!" (but note, if that problem actually existed, it'd exist outside instances too). They just don't understand and cannot comprehend how an MMO would work unless its a WoW clone.
Have you even wondered that maybe topics like these don't go anywhere beacsue of assumptions and arrogance displayed above?
Nope. Because this isn't assumption based or arrogance, it's simple observation. I've been here many years and I know how it always goes. People with experience will try to talk pros and cons while those with none torpedo the conversation. Ignorance at its finest.
Many years here? where? i have also been playing MMOS for a long time but i don't think i am in any position to make assumptions regarding million of players. When you start assuming and start generalising, discussion goes down hill fast.
I've been ON THIS WEBSITE for a good 4-5 years, and by my extensive experience on how these forums work, that's how these types of threads go down. Sorry if you're having trouble understanding that.
You're wrong.
I havent played any WoW clones at all and I still say the death penalty has to be a balance.
Too tough death penalty, and people dont ever take risks.
Too easy death penalty, and the challenge gets lost.
Fear of death is a very simple thing to institute into games.
If you die, you lose all your belongings.
But companies are too afraid of losing subscribers to do it.
Please. Even most of the so-called hardcore old school gamers on this site would squeal like stuck pigs if they died and immediately lost all their gear.
Just imagine dying due to a lag spike, or a hole in the map, or some other in-game glitch, or to an exploit. People would be spamming the CSR team with requests to have all their gear returned to them.
Oh come on, you don't actually think WoW is succesful because it has fluid animations do you? No, it's the fact that they were the first MMO to have a huge marketing budget and brand name behind them. LotRO and WAR failed simply because they came to the casual game too late.
They failed because they didn't had fun combat beside other things.I really wanted to enjoy LOTR since i am a big Tolkien fan but the combat killed the game for me and 2 other friends.So yes,i would say that combat together with other things like open and colorful world,good music,interesting races are things which some developers missed when trying to copy wow success.
You're completely right of course. But, these threads tend to go only one way.
Those that have played MMOs with risk vs reward AND WoW clones will say that a death penalty brings them into the game, adds tension, makes things memorable and strategic, ect ect.
And those who have ONLY played WoW clones will go on and on about "But you lose money!" or "But dying already sucks!" and emphatically argue that their way is better, even though they've never played any other way, and have no perspective.
Same thing goes when you bring up a non instanced MMO. Hell, some of them say "MMOs can't work without instancing!" or even more hilariously "someone will steal all my kills and grief me!" (but note, if that problem actually existed, it'd exist outside instances too). They just don't understand and cannot comprehend how an MMO would work unless its a WoW clone.
Have you even wondered that maybe topics like these don't go anywhere beacsue of assumptions and arrogance displayed above?
Nope. Because this isn't assumption based or arrogance, it's simple observation. I've been here many years and I know how it always goes. People with experience will try to talk pros and cons while those with none torpedo the conversation. Ignorance at its finest.
Many years here? where? i have also been playing MMOS for a long time but i don't think i am in any position to make assumptions regarding million of players. When you start assuming and start generalising, discussion goes down hill fast.
I've been ON THIS WEBSITE for a good 4-5 years, and by my extensive experience on how these forums work, that's how these types of threads go down. Sorry if you're having trouble understanding that.
You're wrong.
I havent played any WoW clones at all and I still say the death penalty has to be a balance.
Too tough death penalty, and people dont ever take risks.
Too easy death penalty, and the challenge gets lost.
Actually you're wrong.
He's right. People will complain about instancing too, "but someone will run in and steal my kill!"
But what they dont understand, is that, that situation is part of being in a virtual world. It sorta comes with the territory.
A virtual world is more than just farming. God forbid, someone comes in and impedes upon your "fun" its part of the virtual world experience and you have to react accordingly.
The point of the OP is that attritrion itself in these games is FUN and I have to agree with him. If there no attrition, no difficulty, then the game gets boring.
The people who have only played WoW themepark clones have this mentality of constant advancement and that anyone or anything that gets in the way impedes upon their "fun" when in reality thats the fun part. Its about the journey, not the destination. They can't comprehend different situations, and thus always post "its not fun when someone steals my kill!" when they havent experieced the opportunity to react accordingly.
In a virtual world, lets say someone steals your kill. SO you plan to get even. Hide in the shadows, stalk the player and wait until THEY start farming and steal their kill. In a world with PvP, who knows, it might even spark a guild war. Thats the fun part.
It was always supposed to be more than farming. But some people can't recognize that.
I'll have to agree, MMORPG's that incoporate some sort of loss as a consequence for failure have much more appeal to me.
Now I like to have the ability to somewhat control my level of risk, such as offered in EVE, vs unrestricted risk such as found in titles such as DF.
But I really enjoy it when the game mechanics favor cautious fighting, makes it seem more realistic, as opposed to designs where people throw caution to the wind and just wade in swinging with no regard to actually surviving the fight.
It's a totally different way to play I'll grant you, and I understand why many people don't care much for it, they enjoy the unfettered combat style most MMO's today's offer.
They also enjoy concepts such as "fair fights", or honorable combat, and to me, there's only two outcomes out of any fight, survivors and dead people, and you really should be trying hard to win w/o dying.
And yes, this means that if the odds look bad, you are wise to retreat and regroup, then to return later when the odds are more in your favor.
EVE combat does an excellent job of providing this sort of environment, just hoping that one day a few more titles that involve swinging swords or shooting assault rifles will also take up the banner.
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
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
I am also not the most skilled player, so i die a bit - but TOR's penalty is way too lenient imo. A lot of us do the group daily quests solo just by dying and ressurecting because the monetary and time punishemnets are so lenient. I still come out ahead in credits, and i spend less time waiting for a group when I just run in and die.
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
I am also not the most skilled player, so i die a bit - but TOR's penalty is way too lenient imo. A lot of us do the group daily quests solo just by dying and ressurecting because the monetary and time punishemnets are so lenient. I still come out ahead in credits, and i spend less time waiting for a group when I just run in and die.
Different strokes for different folks then I find the need to stand around for iincreasing increments after death to be more annoying than I am willing to face in the case of TOR. But if this is something that many of you are doing then maybe they should implement a harsher death penalty for heroic runs?
It works just find for me when used as intended instead of as mmo players tend to do by finding sneaky ways to trick the content.
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
I am also not the most skilled player, so i die a bit - but TOR's penalty is way too lenient imo. A lot of us do the group daily quests solo just by dying and ressurecting because the monetary and time punishemnets are so lenient. I still come out ahead in credits, and i spend less time waiting for a group when I just run in and die.
Failing and not giving up breeds a stronger resolve & is actually useful in the outside world. In today's games if you are given the easy route you don't really learn much from it. You call it a punishment to die in an MMO, i call it a learning experience to figure out what you did wrong & correct it. I'm sick of MMO's where people are max level and really don't even know how to play their character.
Some quotes that I found:
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~Bill Cosby
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. ~Henry Ford
You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure. ~George Cukor
Failure changes for the better, success for the worse. ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. ~Kenneth Boudling
You always pass failure on your way to success. ~Mickey Rooney
The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. ~Lloyd Jones
This is the 'Pepsi generation gamers' time, these kids would not know what to do with extreme death penalties, they would go and probably shout and scream and cry to there parents, or video themselves like fools and post it on youtube...enough said.
The reason i stay in an MMO is the progress i make and the items i earn.
If i would loose things i had spent alot of time earning, i certainly would NOT waste my precious time
doing it all over, no way. I would probably quit and get a RL life.
So basically you are stuck on the treadmill in the game and don't want to quit because "You can't take it with you". Fair enough. I can see how with this outlook you could consider any setback a waste of time but do you really plan to be playing the same MMO for the rest of your life because you don't want to lose what you "earned"
I play MMO's for the shared experience with other players in a community. The agony of defeat sweetens the thrill of victory & the bonds you share with them in these experiences transcend the boundries of the game into real life. Those you can take with you out of the game.
The one part of your statement I don't really get is saying you spent "alot of time earning" your items. In EQ we would sometimes go a few months without upgrading a single item because we would gear up our lesser equipped players to be able to tackle greater challenges. Or sometimes up 6months to a year (for some people) completing epic quests for a single person to get a single item.
The definition of "alot of time" can vary greatly. In my mind I see current MMO's much like a Munchkinized version of a "Monty Haul" Dungeons and Dragons game. It might be fun in the short term but not in the long term for me.
Welcome to the death of "risk/reward" balance game play. This has irked me for some years, I loved the thrill of being faced with a large impact if I failed, that when I was successful it meant more. Mmorpgs do not cater to a real sense of achievement anymore. They tend to cater to fast and easy pats on the head. Pull the lever and get a treat, which after a while means the treats mean less.
Invariably these sorts of people love sandbox games, where one has the freedom to decide how their character acts, how much risk to take, where to travel...so on and so on.
Yes somehow when these same sandbox players are thrown into a themepark, their ability to actually take charge of their character evaporates -- through no fault of the game mind you. They are utterly incapable of pulling themselves off the rails.
You want more serious death penalties? Then make a commitment to yourself that whenever you die, you will erase your character. Oh, that's too harsh? Okay. Pick a piece of equipement you own. When you die, delete that piece of equipment.
There's your harsh death penalty.
But I suspect that isn't what you really care about...you really want to know, deep in your heart, that OTHER players are suffering when their character dies. You want the heady feeling of being at the top of the masochistic heap.
Sorry, but you are the minority.
I could name a thousand games, successful games, in which the penalty isn't harsh. For most of us, for most of gamers, it is enough to have lost. When I play chess, I don't need to have my opponent also punch me in the face as part of my loss. When I play a FPS game, when I die, that death is enough of a loss to inspire me to do better next time. The same goes for any modern MMO. When I lose against a boss...it is enough that I lost. I learn from that loss and try again. I don't learn any MORE from making that loss a punch in the face.
Fear of death is a very simple thing to institute into games.
If you die, you lose all your belongings.
But companies are too afraid of losing subscribers to do it.
What I liked was systems where it wasn't automatic. Basically systems where items had breakage chances based on type of item and what it was made of, where you could improve and repair as well. On dying, I liked that if someone came out or stumbled upon your corpse they could raise you or organize a rescue.
I had alot more fun when we used to have to organize corpse runs to rescue characters bodies and gear. Which also sometimes got us killed as well. Which might cause more to have to come and rescue the rescue party! One game I used to play priests had an ability called "life keep". It prevented the soul/spirit from departing the body. Also you could find these life keep flasks which head 1 to 3 doses of "life keep" in them.
Anyhow you'd life keep the corpse, then call for a priest and healer. You see you had to heal the body of its wounds before you could raise it. Well you could raise it but it might die again due to bleeding out from the various wounds. Anyhow things like that added a lot to the sense of adventure and wanting to be a part of a group. Though I might often solo just to see what I could achieve on my own under harsher conditions, I loved grouping as well. I loved coming to help others, or picking chests/disarming traps for others and being tipped for my services. I liked going to a crafter and having him craft me gear I wanted to use etc.
Those game worlds felt more immersive and living then what we see now. What we see now is more like pulling a lever and getting a treat tied into watching a movie. Sort of immersive but not in the way a living, breathing, game world should be. btw if you didn't get life kept and or raised your body decomposed and your gear would then be on the ground. There was a chance of the critters picking up the items if they could use them like weapons and shields. And over time the gear would start to also vanish, but if you were fast or others came in time they could gather your gear for you.
I honestly don't see these types of game worlds ever returning, players don't want true risk/reward systems anymore. Sense of achievement is capping, dinging various achievements that mostly don't require much skill or effort, grinding for gear etc. Hell role-play as the norm or at least remaining IC(In character) and not talking about real world crap in the game world died years ago. lol
Invariably these sorts of people love sandbox games, where one has the freedom to decide how their character acts, how much risk to take, where to travel...so on and so on.
Yes somehow when these same sandbox players are thrown into a themepark, their ability to actually take charge of their character evaporates -- through no fault of the game mind you. They are utterly incapable of pulling themselves off the rails.
You want more serious death penalties? Then make a commitment to yourself that whenever you die, you will erase your character. Oh, that's too harsh? Okay. Pick a piece of equipement you own. When you die, delete that piece of equipment.
There's your harsh death penalty.
But I suspect that isn't what you really care about...you really want to know, deep in your heart, that OTHER players are suffering when their character dies. You want the heady feeling of being at the top of the masochistic heap.
Sorry, but you are the minority.
I could name a thousand games, successful games, in which the penalty isn't harsh. For most of us, for most of gamers, it is enough to have lost. When I play chess, I don't need to have my opponent also punch me in the face as part of my loss. When I play a FPS game, when I die, that death is enough of a loss to inspire me to do better next time. The same goes for any modern MMO. When I lose against a boss...it is enough that I lost. I learn from that loss and try again. I don't learn any MORE from making that loss a punch in the face.
Your analogies are a bit flawed in my mind. If you die in an MMO you don't get punched in the face, In older MMO's if you died it was the equivlant of having to start over a game of chess and try again. In current MMOs its the equivlant of getting to redo your last move.
Plus think about the sheer number of timeless/ successful classic NES/SNES/Genesis/etc games where if you died or ran out of lives. you started over from level 1. Sure some of them had save points where if you had to continue you would start over from there, but not like some of games (not just mmos) where you have like 8-10 save points a level making you lose next to nothing. Or how about some of the even newer games which if you die too many times or have too much trouble, they make it even easier to progress (give you a super powerup, warp you to the next level etc).
I recently rerolled a 4 year old character of mine on Starquest Online because he had too many deaths. When you die there it is an accumulative death penalty. The more times you "clone" the harder it is on your skills each time. It got to the point where I was coming back to life worse off than a well made new player.
Most people in the game will never have to do this, but my character was a terrorist who did a lot of suicide raids. I was sad to see my character go, but I was even more upset about the fact that I forgot to get his money out of the bank before I did this.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
First of all, let me preface my point in that it is highly likely that the majority of the readers of this post will at least partly agree with me because we who frequent this site are more apt to be "looking" for something at the moment as we are obviously not currently playing an MMO while we peruse these forums...
Anyway...enough of my jargon...
I have posted a few threads lately about the demise of MMO's and the impending doom that looms over my preferred choice of recreation: MMO's (okay, I wasn't quite through with the formal jargon). As such, I have concluded that what is missing from todays games that was prevalent in the early MMORPGs is true excitement. In the early MMO's (I am mostly considering UO, EQ1, etc.) the fear of losing was the driving force behind the excitement of the game: the fear of losing your hard-earned gear and the fear of losing your hard-earned experience/time. It is the fear of losing that makes winning feel great! And the fear of losing is what makes winning and even playing EXCITING!
Just so we are clear, I do NOT like losing: either gear or experience/time, however, it is the fear of losing those things that makes progress actually FEEL great. If I had never known the "yucky-icky-horrible-terrible-dread" of losing my corpse or losing a significant chunk of my experience (time=experience), I would not appreciate the days in which I did NOT lose those things at all. There were many days in UO and in EQ1 where I finished the day with either less money or less experience than I started....and believe me when I say, I was not happy at that very moment. But the next day I would vow NOT to let that happen. I would make it a personal quest of mine to make SURE I gained that day and I would feel great knowing I had accomplished something. Gaining a level was HUGE! Remember in EQ1 shouting "DING!!!!" Dozens of people would "Gratz!!!" because gaining a level was NOT A GUARANTEE! Having bad days made me appreciate the good ones. In today's games, by my standards, it is not possible to have a "bad" day. Everyday you gain experience and more money...the game makes sure of that. I want a game that progress is NOT ASSURED! I wan't a game where people progress when they progress in knowledge and skill IN THE GAME. I don't want a game that is so "funnel-minded" that even a retard can get to the final levels and have great gear. (On a side note...I remember the first time I saw someone in EQ1 levitating....I about crapped myself with envy...or in Ultima Online the first time I saw someone come into town with a DRAGON in tow!!...I wanted to be able to do that too! And what was neat was...I was not sure I was going to ever be able to...that way...if I ever did...WOW, I really accoplished something) In todays games, EVERYONE expects to be able to have great gear and be the top levels. This overall concept of funneling people to the end makes me heave.
I am not suggesting that every game become "hard-core" where one death means you have to start over. But I am suggesting that a death be significant. That losing a battle means losing an item or even losing everything until you go back and get it. Oh man...do you remember the days of EQ1 when you died? You woke up naked and your corpse (with all your belonings) were left exactly where you fell. If you were 4 levels deep in a dungeon, thats where you had to go to retrieve your "stuff". Now a lot of you look back on that and cringe---you hated that part of the game. And I'm telling you that THATS the part I MISS. It is the lack of genuine fear that makes playing all these other games feel like eating a plain baked potato tastes -- bland. When I lost my corpse, either in UO or EQ1, I panicked. I would call on everyone of my friends and would plead with anyone who had ever been in my predicament to come help me on my newly self-created quest "Retrieve Alasti's corpse from the depths" quest. THAT WAS FUN!! The fear of losing everything (or even ANYTHING) is what made games exciting...and THAT IS FUN!! In the last 15 MMO's or so that I have played since then, I haven't been "scared" at all. I can die and not even flinch. Death in the former games was (or I should say "could be") catastrophic. Remember in EQ1 when you were resolved to dying, fleeing from a monster that was going to kill you, you only had a chance to partly decide where, so you would run to a "better spot to die", knowing that the difficulties of retrieving your corpse could be ugly? I did that more times than I can count. THAT was fun. Anyway...I think I've made my point.
I know I rant. I rant alot. But I miss being excited playing games. Excitement means dealing with genuine fear, and sometimes the result is positive and sometimes negative, but the excitement COMES from the fear.
The Glory of Victory is directly correlated to the Risk of Defeat. No Risk=No Glory....Little Risk=Little Glory....and a boring as hell game. Give me risk and I'll show you Glory...or die trying.
I'm no programmer, but given everything we see done in today's games, I can't imagine it would be difficult for a company to set up a "death penalty" server for a given game.
That kinda takes the argument out of it and makes it a personal choice.
Gods forgive my lack of faith in humanity, I can still imagine someone complaining, though.
_____________________________ "Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
I am also not the most skilled player, so i die a bit - but TOR's penalty is way too lenient imo. A lot of us do the group daily quests solo just by dying and ressurecting because the monetary and time punishemnets are so lenient. I still come out ahead in credits, and i spend less time waiting for a group when I just run in and die.
Failing and not giving up breeds a stronger resolve & is actually useful in the outside world. In today's games if you are given the easy route you don't really learn much from it. You call it a punishment to die in an MMO, i call it a learning experience to figure out what you did wrong & correct it. I'm sick of MMO's where people are max level and really don't even know how to play their character.
Some quotes that I found:
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~Bill Cosby
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. ~Henry Ford
You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure. ~George Cukor
Failure changes for the better, success for the worse. ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. ~Kenneth Boudling
You always pass failure on your way to success. ~Mickey Rooney
The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. ~Lloyd Jones
Amost got inspired....then I realized that it was just a game, again.
I don't mind death penalities or peoples reasons for them, but when I see people do what you just did, I truly have to wonder:
I'm no programmer, but given everything we see done in today's games, I can't imagine it would be difficult for a company to set up a "death penalty" server for a given game.
That kinda takes the argument out of it and makes it a personal choice.
Gods forgive my lack of faith in humanity, I can still imagine someone complaining, though.
Or maybe MMO's could just set up "Easy Mode or Casual Mode" type servers & call those with an actual death penalty "Normal Servers"
If you resign those servers to "special" servers than it will have less of an effect in reversing the decline of the MMO genre towards (/shudder) Farmville status....
First of all, let me preface my point in that it is highly likely that the majority of the readers of this post will at least partly agree with me because we who frequent this site are more apt to be "looking" for something at the moment as we are obviously not currently playing an MMO while we peruse these forums...
Anyway...enough of my jargon...
I have posted a few threads lately about the demise of MMO's and the impending doom that looms over my preferred choice of recreation: MMO's (okay, I wasn't quite through with the formal jargon). As such, I have concluded that what is missing from todays games that was prevalent in the early MMORPGs is true excitement. In the early MMO's (I am mostly considering UO, EQ1, etc.) the fear of losing was the driving force behind the excitement of the game: the fear of losing your hard-earned gear and the fear of losing your hard-earned experience/time. It is the fear of losing that makes winning feel great! And the fear of losing is what makes winning and even playing EXCITING!
Just so we are clear, I do NOT like losing: either gear or experience/time, however, it is the fear of losing those things that makes progress actually FEEL great. If I had never known the "yucky-icky-horrible-terrible-dread" of losing my corpse or losing a significant chunk of my experience (time=experience), I would not appreciate the days in which I did NOT lose those things at all. There were many days in UO and in EQ1 where I finished the day with either less money or less experience than I started....and believe me when I say, I was not happy at that very moment. But the next day I would vow NOT to let that happen. I would make it a personal quest of mine to make SURE I gained that day and I would feel great knowing I had accomplished something. Gaining a level was HUGE! Remember in EQ1 shouting "DING!!!!" Dozens of people would "Gratz!!!" because gaining a level was NOT A GUARANTEE! Having bad days made me appreciate the good ones. In today's games, by my standards, it is not possible to have a "bad" day. Everyday you gain experience and more money...the game makes sure of that. I want a game that progress is NOT ASSURED! I wan't a game where people progress when they progress in knowledge and skill IN THE GAME. I don't want a game that is so "funnel-minded" that even a retard can get to the final levels and have great gear. (On a side note...I remember the first time I saw someone in EQ1 levitating....I about crapped myself with envy...or in Ultima Online the first time I saw someone come into town with a DRAGON in tow!!...I wanted to be able to do that too! And what was neat was...I was not sure I was going to ever be able to...that way...if I ever did...WOW, I really accoplished something) In todays games, EVERYONE expects to be able to have great gear and be the top levels. This overall concept of funneling people to the end makes me heave.
I am not suggesting that every game become "hard-core" where one death means you have to start over. But I am suggesting that a death be significant. That losing a battle means losing an item or even losing everything until you go back and get it. Oh man...do you remember the days of EQ1 when you died? You woke up naked and your corpse (with all your belonings) were left exactly where you fell. If you were 4 levels deep in a dungeon, thats where you had to go to retrieve your "stuff". Now a lot of you look back on that and cringe---you hated that part of the game. And I'm telling you that THATS the part I MISS. It is the lack of genuine fear that makes playing all these other games feel like eating a plain baked potato tastes -- bland. When I lost my corpse, either in UO or EQ1, I panicked. I would call on everyone of my friends and would plead with anyone who had ever been in my predicament to come help me on my newly self-created quest "Retrieve Alasti's corpse from the depths" quest. THAT WAS FUN!! The fear of losing everything (or even ANYTHING) is what made games exciting...and THAT IS FUN!! In the last 15 MMO's or so that I have played since then, I haven't been "scared" at all. I can die and not even flinch. Death in the former games was (or I should say "could be") catastrophic. Remember in EQ1 when you were resolved to dying, fleeing from a monster that was going to kill you, you only had a chance to partly decide where, so you would run to a "better spot to die", knowing that the difficulties of retrieving your corpse could be ugly? I did that more times than I can count. THAT was fun. Anyway...I think I've made my point.
I know I rant. I rant alot. But I miss being excited playing games. Excitement means dealing with genuine fear, and sometimes the result is positive and sometimes negative, but the excitement COMES from the fear.
The Glory of Victory is directly correlated to the Risk of Defeat. No Risk=No Glory....Little Risk=Little Glory....and a boring as hell game. Give me risk and I'll show you Glory...or die trying.
two words..
Darkfall online
Darkfall would be great if they banned all the exploiters. It would also be pretty empty.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
It's not entirely true, but having an old school penalty does add more to a game. The reason I say this is that for me (keywords are "for me") Story and Lore trumps all. Games I tend to stick around are usually chocked full of Story. DAoC, LotRO, Rift all have a great story to them.
In DAoC, it was realm pride that kept players fighting. You weren't really fighting anything "Evil", instead you fought against other nations that had different ideals and threatened your entire realm's way of life. Players from Midgard would not stand for a tree-huggin hibbie being in thier lands (a little racist? Yes, but fun.). There were some, I guess you can call, evil npcs. The dragon raids weren't really against anything evil. It was to stop dragons from doing what the beasts do, burninating the peasants lol.
In LotRO, it's all about good versus evil, and the story we all know. I spent hours just so I could follow the story and see that cutscene and /jump in victory after completing a book. I almost never die, but it's still fun. There's alot of things to do, and I like the monster play, although I wish they'd expand on it more.
In Rift, it's all about reading. If you're a quest clicker (just click accept and go), I don't think you'll like this game. If you take time to read the quests, and the millions of books that lay around the world, it's quite engrossing. Now that you can get married it's even better. There's nothing like taking your mate out on the wilds (instead of town hehe) and close up some rifts in an invasion. My mate is a cleric, and I'm a warrior, so she keeps me alive, and I keep her safe. We were meant for each other
While adding a realy death penalty to these games would make them even more fun, they're still fun.
Comments
You're wrong.
I havent played any WoW clones at all and I still say the death penalty has to be a balance.
Too tough death penalty, and people dont ever take risks.
Too easy death penalty, and the challenge gets lost.
Please. Even most of the so-called hardcore old school gamers on this site would squeal like stuck pigs if they died and immediately lost all their gear.
Just imagine dying due to a lag spike, or a hole in the map, or some other in-game glitch, or to an exploit. People would be spamming the CSR team with requests to have all their gear returned to them.
They failed because they didn't had fun combat beside other things.I really wanted to enjoy LOTR since i am a big Tolkien fan but the combat killed the game for me and 2 other friends.So yes,i would say that combat together with other things like open and colorful world,good music,interesting races are things which some developers missed when trying to copy wow success.
I have hopes for Wizardry Online, and its Giant Maze Exploration and Permadeath extremes.
Not unreasonably high hopes,
but it's a breath of fresh air, with extreme challanges like that.
Actually you're wrong.
He's right. People will complain about instancing too, "but someone will run in and steal my kill!"
But what they dont understand, is that, that situation is part of being in a virtual world. It sorta comes with the territory.
A virtual world is more than just farming. God forbid, someone comes in and impedes upon your "fun" its part of the virtual world experience and you have to react accordingly.
The point of the OP is that attritrion itself in these games is FUN and I have to agree with him. If there no attrition, no difficulty, then the game gets boring.
The people who have only played WoW themepark clones have this mentality of constant advancement and that anyone or anything that gets in the way impedes upon their "fun" when in reality thats the fun part. Its about the journey, not the destination. They can't comprehend different situations, and thus always post "its not fun when someone steals my kill!" when they havent experieced the opportunity to react accordingly.
In a virtual world, lets say someone steals your kill. SO you plan to get even. Hide in the shadows, stalk the player and wait until THEY start farming and steal their kill. In a world with PvP, who knows, it might even spark a guild war. Thats the fun part.
It was always supposed to be more than farming. But some people can't recognize that.
I'll have to agree, MMORPG's that incoporate some sort of loss as a consequence for failure have much more appeal to me.
Now I like to have the ability to somewhat control my level of risk, such as offered in EVE, vs unrestricted risk such as found in titles such as DF.
But I really enjoy it when the game mechanics favor cautious fighting, makes it seem more realistic, as opposed to designs where people throw caution to the wind and just wade in swinging with no regard to actually surviving the fight.
It's a totally different way to play I'll grant you, and I understand why many people don't care much for it, they enjoy the unfettered combat style most MMO's today's offer.
They also enjoy concepts such as "fair fights", or honorable combat, and to me, there's only two outcomes out of any fight, survivors and dead people, and you really should be trying hard to win w/o dying.
And yes, this means that if the odds look bad, you are wise to retreat and regroup, then to return later when the odds are more in your favor.
EVE combat does an excellent job of providing this sort of environment, just hoping that one day a few more titles that involve swinging swords or shooting assault rifles will also take up the banner.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
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
Kithicor Woods at night......
Life IS Feudal
Maybe some players like myself will just never be as good as players like the op but I die too much in all mmorpg's including the easy mode themeparks to want to be "afraid" to die again.
When death is handled like it was in STO I can certainly see a need for change but I've found myself satisfied with the death penalty that TOR enacted I don't want to have to either walk back to the area I'm at or wait for minutes at a time just to rev so I certainly a mindful of how I engage in encounters unlike the early STO where many players just made it a point to focus and take out a ship at a time while dying three and four times tofinish an encounter.
I am also not the most skilled player, so i die a bit - but TOR's penalty is way too lenient imo. A lot of us do the group daily quests solo just by dying and ressurecting because the monetary and time punishemnets are so lenient. I still come out ahead in credits, and i spend less time waiting for a group when I just run in and die.
Different strokes for different folks then I find the need to stand around for iincreasing increments after death to be more annoying than I am willing to face in the case of TOR. But if this is something that many of you are doing then maybe they should implement a harsher death penalty for heroic runs?
It works just find for me when used as intended instead of as mmo players tend to do by finding sneaky ways to trick the content.
Failing and not giving up breeds a stronger resolve & is actually useful in the outside world. In today's games if you are given the easy route you don't really learn much from it. You call it a punishment to die in an MMO, i call it a learning experience to figure out what you did wrong & correct it. I'm sick of MMO's where people are max level and really don't even know how to play their character.
Some quotes that I found:
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~Bill Cosby
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. ~Henry Ford
You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure. ~George Cukor
Failure changes for the better, success for the worse. ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. ~Kenneth Boudling
You always pass failure on your way to success. ~Mickey Rooney
The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. ~Lloyd Jones
This is the 'Pepsi generation gamers' time, these kids would not know what to do with extreme death penalties, they would go and probably shout and scream and cry to there parents, or video themselves like fools and post it on youtube...enough said.
Total BS if you ask me.
The reason i stay in an MMO is the progress i make and the items i earn.
If i would loose things i had spent alot of time earning, i certainly would NOT waste my precious time
doing it all over, no way. I would probably quit and get a RL life.
So basically you are stuck on the treadmill in the game and don't want to quit because "You can't take it with you". Fair enough. I can see how with this outlook you could consider any setback a waste of time but do you really plan to be playing the same MMO for the rest of your life because you don't want to lose what you "earned"
I play MMO's for the shared experience with other players in a community. The agony of defeat sweetens the thrill of victory & the bonds you share with them in these experiences transcend the boundries of the game into real life. Those you can take with you out of the game.
The one part of your statement I don't really get is saying you spent "alot of time earning" your items. In EQ we would sometimes go a few months without upgrading a single item because we would gear up our lesser equipped players to be able to tackle greater challenges. Or sometimes up 6months to a year (for some people) completing epic quests for a single person to get a single item.
The definition of "alot of time" can vary greatly. In my mind I see current MMO's much like a Munchkinized version of a "Monty Haul" Dungeons and Dragons game. It might be fun in the short term but not in the long term for me.
Welcome to the death of "risk/reward" balance game play. This has irked me for some years, I loved the thrill of being faced with a large impact if I failed, that when I was successful it meant more. Mmorpgs do not cater to a real sense of achievement anymore. They tend to cater to fast and easy pats on the head. Pull the lever and get a treat, which after a while means the treats mean less.
Invariably these sorts of people love sandbox games, where one has the freedom to decide how their character acts, how much risk to take, where to travel...so on and so on.
Yes somehow when these same sandbox players are thrown into a themepark, their ability to actually take charge of their character evaporates -- through no fault of the game mind you. They are utterly incapable of pulling themselves off the rails.
You want more serious death penalties? Then make a commitment to yourself that whenever you die, you will erase your character. Oh, that's too harsh? Okay. Pick a piece of equipement you own. When you die, delete that piece of equipment.
There's your harsh death penalty.
But I suspect that isn't what you really care about...you really want to know, deep in your heart, that OTHER players are suffering when their character dies. You want the heady feeling of being at the top of the masochistic heap.
Sorry, but you are the minority.
I could name a thousand games, successful games, in which the penalty isn't harsh. For most of us, for most of gamers, it is enough to have lost. When I play chess, I don't need to have my opponent also punch me in the face as part of my loss. When I play a FPS game, when I die, that death is enough of a loss to inspire me to do better next time. The same goes for any modern MMO. When I lose against a boss...it is enough that I lost. I learn from that loss and try again. I don't learn any MORE from making that loss a punch in the face.
What I liked was systems where it wasn't automatic. Basically systems where items had breakage chances based on type of item and what it was made of, where you could improve and repair as well. On dying, I liked that if someone came out or stumbled upon your corpse they could raise you or organize a rescue.
I had alot more fun when we used to have to organize corpse runs to rescue characters bodies and gear. Which also sometimes got us killed as well. Which might cause more to have to come and rescue the rescue party! One game I used to play priests had an ability called "life keep". It prevented the soul/spirit from departing the body. Also you could find these life keep flasks which head 1 to 3 doses of "life keep" in them.
Anyhow you'd life keep the corpse, then call for a priest and healer. You see you had to heal the body of its wounds before you could raise it. Well you could raise it but it might die again due to bleeding out from the various wounds. Anyhow things like that added a lot to the sense of adventure and wanting to be a part of a group. Though I might often solo just to see what I could achieve on my own under harsher conditions, I loved grouping as well. I loved coming to help others, or picking chests/disarming traps for others and being tipped for my services. I liked going to a crafter and having him craft me gear I wanted to use etc.
Those game worlds felt more immersive and living then what we see now. What we see now is more like pulling a lever and getting a treat tied into watching a movie. Sort of immersive but not in the way a living, breathing, game world should be. btw if you didn't get life kept and or raised your body decomposed and your gear would then be on the ground. There was a chance of the critters picking up the items if they could use them like weapons and shields. And over time the gear would start to also vanish, but if you were fast or others came in time they could gather your gear for you.
I honestly don't see these types of game worlds ever returning, players don't want true risk/reward systems anymore. Sense of achievement is capping, dinging various achievements that mostly don't require much skill or effort, grinding for gear etc. Hell role-play as the norm or at least remaining IC(In character) and not talking about real world crap in the game world died years ago. lol
Your analogies are a bit flawed in my mind. If you die in an MMO you don't get punched in the face, In older MMO's if you died it was the equivlant of having to start over a game of chess and try again. In current MMOs its the equivlant of getting to redo your last move.
Plus think about the sheer number of timeless/ successful classic NES/SNES/Genesis/etc games where if you died or ran out of lives. you started over from level 1. Sure some of them had save points where if you had to continue you would start over from there, but not like some of games (not just mmos) where you have like 8-10 save points a level making you lose next to nothing. Or how about some of the even newer games which if you die too many times or have too much trouble, they make it even easier to progress (give you a super powerup, warp you to the next level etc).
I recently rerolled a 4 year old character of mine on Starquest Online because he had too many deaths. When you die there it is an accumulative death penalty. The more times you "clone" the harder it is on your skills each time. It got to the point where I was coming back to life worse off than a well made new player.
Most people in the game will never have to do this, but my character was a terrorist who did a lot of suicide raids. I was sad to see my character go, but I was even more upset about the fact that I forgot to get his money out of the bank before I did this.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
two words..
Darkfall online
That kinda takes the argument out of it and makes it a personal choice.
Gods forgive my lack of faith in humanity, I can still imagine someone complaining, though.
_____________________________
"Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"
Amost got inspired....then I realized that it was just a game, again.
I don't mind death penalities or peoples reasons for them, but when I see people do what you just did, I truly have to wonder:
Did dying in EQ make you a better man?
Or maybe MMO's could just set up "Easy Mode or Casual Mode" type servers & call those with an actual death penalty "Normal Servers"
If you resign those servers to "special" servers than it will have less of an effect in reversing the decline of the MMO genre towards (/shudder) Farmville status....
Darkfall would be great if they banned all the exploiters. It would also be pretty empty.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
It's not entirely true, but having an old school penalty does add more to a game. The reason I say this is that for me (keywords are "for me") Story and Lore trumps all. Games I tend to stick around are usually chocked full of Story. DAoC, LotRO, Rift all have a great story to them.
In DAoC, it was realm pride that kept players fighting. You weren't really fighting anything "Evil", instead you fought against other nations that had different ideals and threatened your entire realm's way of life. Players from Midgard would not stand for a tree-huggin hibbie being in thier lands (a little racist? Yes, but fun.). There were some, I guess you can call, evil npcs. The dragon raids weren't really against anything evil. It was to stop dragons from doing what the beasts do, burninating the peasants lol.
In LotRO, it's all about good versus evil, and the story we all know. I spent hours just so I could follow the story and see that cutscene and /jump in victory after completing a book. I almost never die, but it's still fun. There's alot of things to do, and I like the monster play, although I wish they'd expand on it more.
In Rift, it's all about reading. If you're a quest clicker (just click accept and go), I don't think you'll like this game. If you take time to read the quests, and the millions of books that lay around the world, it's quite engrossing. Now that you can get married it's even better. There's nothing like taking your mate out on the wilds (instead of town hehe) and close up some rifts in an invasion. My mate is a cleric, and I'm a warrior, so she keeps me alive, and I keep her safe. We were meant for each other
While adding a realy death penalty to these games would make them even more fun, they're still fun.