Hmmn interesting question. Permadeath work hmmn. If you die your character gets deleted from the server permanently in 7 days, or you could pay a heavy fine to get it released and back into the game. This could work if permadeath had some rules regarding your untimely death lol. A pvp death wouldn't apply in my model, only and act of betrayal of some kind.
I think L2 at level 102 the character needed something like 26 577 830 769 499 xp. Not to mention you lost xp every time you died and could de-level. So yes some games took years to reach max.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Permadeath can work okay if less than 4 hours of progress are lost on death. Nethack and other roguelikes have been pretty fun over the years, though they tend not to hold my interest quite as long as standard games lately (even when you include hybrids like Rogue Legacy where each of your short-lived permadeath runs earns you permanent progression across all characters.)
But permadeath as found in D3 or MMORPGs is just a waste of time. It encourages safe play, which translates to unchallenging boring combat. I'm more interested in tightly balanced encounters where failure is a possibility, so I can then work on figuring out how to play better next attempt -- so personally I want even less penalty to death, but the ability to increase the difficulty of the challenges faced.
I think @Axehilt hits on why Permadeath doesn't mix with an MMORPG -- these games encourage people to invest a great deal of time into their characters. One bad mistake and months of time are wiped out in a single event. The kind of game where permadeath could work couldn't really feature progression, especially progression over long periods of time, as a viable mechanism. That just doesn't mesh with my vision of an MMORPG.
I did start an MMORPG in 2003, but I failed to find funding for it. One of the big ideas was an in-game religion function that required people to build 'faction' with the various gods. When the character died, the player would not automatically respawn. Instead the character's soul would join the gods in their realm, and either retire there (voluntary death) or use some of their 'faction' to implore the various gods to recover, relocate and repair their earthly form, then reunite their spirit back into their body. (Get killed by a giant lizard, it might eat your corpse -- you had to get the gods to cooperate to rebuild your body and get it back from the lizard's stomach). I had envisioned the process of recovering from a death to take 1-2 hours of playing, if they had sufficient 'faction' at the time of their death. If not, the gods had tasks to earn favor.
It would certainly stop zerging, which is what I wanted that system to do. It also gave some other non-combat things to do in game (worshiping), which I've always been keen on.
But that's about as close to permadeath as I would want in an MMORPG -- a 1-2 hour time penalty on character death, with the player having some task to complete to return to life.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I say do it the other way then your suggesting. Don't make it hard to die make it required to die. Like kill the player in the tutorial and then maybe kill them rather regularly. If perma death is rare, then players/devs will build their expectations around not dieing and when they do eventually die, it will be a huge hit. Make dieing a expected thing, and you can build a game where it doesn't feel horrible to die.
Let's explore the permadeath concept a little further...
What can permadeath offer players in a game?
"The Rush"
Risk
Bragging rights
Grief
Realism/Immersion
These are factors that already exist in MMORPGs, in other forms that is less of a punishment. With that notion, permadeath is just another feature that hinders overall player growth rate and interest.
Throw out the concept and how it relates to punishment, approach it as a means of recycling old content and encourage re-rolling of characters could work. This is a pretty shallow solution in that it's not very specific but I think the direction is correct.
I say do it the other way then your suggesting. Don't make it hard to die make it required to die. Like kill the player in the tutorial and then maybe kill them rather regularly. If perma death is rare, then players/devs will build their expectations around not dieing and when they do eventually die, it will be a huge hit. Make dieing a expected thing, and you can build a game where it doesn't feel horrible to die.
Some games, death is a regular thing but to compensate it has few penalties. Once you get use to it death becomes no big thing but the usual reaction in the beginning was to avoid death as much as possible.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Easy. So long as character development is just an aspect of the game instead of the point of the game, it could be done. It's a non-starter when the entire game revolves around farming shit to make your numbers get bigger.
Making permanent death a non-certainty could also be viable. I'm not fond of the "Oh, you're not dead - you were just knocked out model that occasionally pops up (e.g., Salem). It could present a good means to actually implement religion as a gameplay mechanic by, for example, having players earn divine favor through various tasks/rituals/sacrifice. Die without being in good with a deity, it's permanent.
spitballin. when you die you're reborn as another class. this continues each time you die, there is a long timer when you can rebirth into your original character, by then who has weakened from non-use. not really permadeth, but a weird middle-ground. would probably need some more mechanics to prevent trying to kill every rebirth until you run out of classes.
Which leads to really dull gaming and people never really testing the limits of their classes, never really actually learning to play their classes.
Clearly what you said is not true for all players (admittedly for some). Otherwise, you won't be seeing D3 hardcore players at very high greater rifts.
Hrmmm... I wouldn't do permadeath, per se. I would do a loss of all inventory. No "safe" boxes in houses or banks. Pickable locks. Ability for banks to get robbed.
I would also do a stat loss and exp penalty for death, that would include negative exp, making it possible to go down in levels.
Not a permadeath, but a very, very, very good incentive to not die... ever.
I say do it the other way then your suggesting. Don't make it hard to die make it required to die. Like kill the player in the tutorial and then maybe kill them rather regularly. If perma death is rare, then players/devs will build their expectations around not dieing and when they do eventually die, it will be a huge hit. Make dieing a expected thing, and you can build a game where it doesn't feel horrible to die.
^^^^ This is what I've been trying to get across to everyone. In order for perma-death to work you can't have any sort of themepark gear grind time sink MMORPG. Every player must play their avatar everyday with the expectation that there is about a 30% chance that they will die...forever. This means that having a massive amount of alts will also be required. You can't have a system where it takes weeks to get each avatar viable for combat.
Which leads to really dull gaming and people never really testing
the limits of their classes, never really actually learning to play
their classes.
Clearly what you said is not true for all players (admittedly for some).
Otherwise, you won't be seeing D3 hardcore players at very high greater
rifts.
Again: the only two options to have permadeath is
(a) actually not have it - like in EVE, which has permadeath, except it has safe zones and for the unsafe zones you can buy clones, which circumvent permadeath.
(b) a game that evolves around it, i.e. a highscore game.
Now I havent played D3, but in my first posting I already mentioned specifically D2 hardcore mode. Thats a highscore game, because the highscore was reset every quarter year, so after that time your character was pointless anyway. The goal was to get high on the highscore.
And for D2 besides you could get any training you wanted by playing on non-hardcore. And AFAICS you needed it, too, to avoid dying on hardcore.
I have played Lineage 2 and yes, EVERYBODY plays it safe in L2, because on highlevel it took six hours farming xp to get back the xp of a single death. So what did people do ? They mass killed light green mobs - mobs that on the next level will be gray and wont give neither xp nor loot.
The only other behavior I know from L2 is /ragequit.
I say do it the other way then your suggesting. Don't make it hard to die make it required to die. Like kill the player in the tutorial and then maybe kill them rather regularly. If perma death is rare, then players/devs will build their expectations around not dieing and when they do eventually die, it will be a huge hit. Make dieing a expected thing, and you can build a game where it doesn't feel horrible to die.
^^^^ This is what I've been trying to get across to everyone. In order for perma-death to work you can't have any sort of themepark gear grind time sink MMORPG. Every player must play their avatar everyday with the expectation that there is about a 30% chance that they will die...forever. This means that having a massive amount of alts will also be required. You can't have a system where it takes weeks to get each avatar viable for combat.
What I was trying to get across, it can't just be a chance. If it's a possibility rather then an guarantee, then players will play in a way to avoid it. They will invest too much into their character, take no risks and do other things to make it so that when they do lose them it will be a game quitting loss.
I recall one mmo talked about your characters just getting old and dieing. That is how I would do it. Just have your characters all have a life span (hopefully with like a gameplay arc). When they die, just roll up a new one and start from a baby.
Though the progression aspect might be an issue. MMO players love their progression.
Permadeath doesn't work in online games, I simply don't do it as I don't have a flawless connection. It simply can't work in MMOs period, those are investment based games. I don't really believe in corpse looting either, I am however in favor of harsh xp penalties for death.
I much preferred Lineage 2s chronicles systems for penalties and consequences.
Why do I imagine you about to die in game interfering with the network connection then going "Oh, that network connection again".
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Aonother option for perma-death would be only at the extreme top end of content. Maybe only inside dragon lairs or demon pits, with an appropriate reward for success vs. the risk of perma-death. Such a game would need a form of MOB adjustment vs. the strength of player assault inside such places. Success would make real "heroes". Failure would make real "loss" for many to bemoan. And no one would be required to attempt it.
Which leads to really dull gaming and people never really testing
the limits of their classes, never really actually learning to play
their classes.
Clearly what you said is not true for all players (admittedly for some).
Otherwise, you won't be seeing D3 hardcore players at very high greater
rifts.
Now I havent played D3, but in my first posting I already mentioned specifically D2 hardcore mode.
well .. you just admit why you do not understand how perma-death can work.
May be you should read up on D3 first. If you play the normal (non-season) game, perma-death is perma-death, and there is no high score, and resetting.
And yet players go up higher and higher in greater rift (more challenging).
I've seen permadeath only ever work in two types of games:
1) Action-oriented dungeon crawler style games, with shallow, very functional mechanics such as in the Diablo series, where the character-avatar just acts as a convenient interface for action in a semi-linear experience.
2) Ironically, the other extreme: extremely detailed, character driven roleplay MUSHs, where combat is rare, highly stylized, and often done through stealth and guile.
MMOs, today, are neither of the two. There's still an element of social gameplay and creative expression that the dungeon crawlers like Diablo lack. They are also, in essence, combat games where the entire point is pretty much to kill things, not to play a role. This is why permadeath doesn't work so well here: characters are not special enough to throw away, and combat is too fundamental to the experience to bother doing anything else.
And so, how to make permadeath work is to do one of two things:
1) Strip away all character customization, all expressive, social gameplay beyond an OOC global chat, and sever the avatar-player connection as much as possible, like what an above poster said. This would make it more like Diablo.
2) Do the opposite. Make the characters so detailed, so expressive and so social so as to make the game all about character drama, and not about fighting. Make the game about role play intrigue, and not about fighting, making the avatar-player connection so strong that fighting will be rare as to almost never happen, reserved it for specific, roleplay inspired reasons only.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
While I can't say that I would always want to play with permadeath, I think that the current standard is pretty lame. I am thinking mainly of PvE games, but some sort of mortality seems like it would add to the game in the form of tension. With the stakes much higher, you don't need to throw thousands of mobs at the players and you could have encounters that mean something. I don't like PvP with permadeath, it just feels like you die quickly and then are constantly reduced to nothing so there is no context (character is literally just a life in a game).
A number of revives allowed until permadeath would work. You get X downs within a span of time and then the character is dead. The rare items going into escrow, and accrued XP raising a Legend stat or something. This would make players think twice about doing stupid shit. If part of the game revolves around staying alive, then you can reward players for achieving longevity. You would have to make sure that other players could not grief with the result of getting a player killed though. This might result in a game that reinforces you for life rather than metering your activities based on how many deaths on average occur in that activity.
The character can be a part of a lineage or whatever, and some or all of the gear on the former character can be salvaged by the player. In a PvE game this can be done with a token system if you don't want to actually refund the gear. If you strip the dead character in a PvP game then you get two groups of players in the game:
-The Goons who stay together and are strong enough to keep their gear -Everybody else who'll make a character and then won't bother to get things they know they will easily lose when killed by the goons (just run around in loin cloth and carry a rock).
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
I don't have to have permadeath at all,i just prefer to see games refer to the current state of death as nothing more than an injury or being knocked out.So if we are to assume an injury then your stats should show it as such with reduced stats.I feel a game should distinguish between a ko or injury,a ko might just need some recovery time while an injury might need 123 game days to fully recover.
If i just had to have permadeath then it would go along with what i just mentioned plus aging.I think around 1 month per game year so after a year playing your player would be 22 years old if we started at say 10.Then i would have variable stats that change while you age but being fantasy i would also have some very tedious tasks to curb aging.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Making it optional wouldn't be that good an idea because to make the concept interesting you'd have to design the game around it. I'd go for:
Character progression shouldn't be the main focus of the game. It should be there but the stuff you can do in the game should be more important.
Your characters actions should be able to permanent affect the gameworld around you so you can leave a legacy that lasts beyond your characters life.
The game should be as interesting to play for new characters as it is for an experienced one.
I'd make the game skillbased rather than levelbased.
I'd used some point system where the character gets points for accomplishing difficult missions/quests or achieving other goals. These points could be used on character death to buy perks and unlocking other races and cultures to play for the next character.
Wow, I was thinking about how to implement permadeath in a game and this is pretty close to what I was thinking. The issue most people have with permadeath is that they are thinking about it in terms of their current game, where mobs either try their best to kill you as fast as possible, and will know where you are until they reset or you are lucky enough to have a hide power, or they will straight up ignore you, with no middle ground, and it's pretty easy to die.
I used to play AD&D and it wasn't so easy to die, we used bleeding out, and their were always resurrection spells, or -joy- reincarnation! Those spells did have their penalties though. And if you did die you could roll a new character at 80% xp, and you would still play with the same group anyway, which was theo whole point, not gear progression. It won't be for every one, but if you aren't risking anything you won't really be able to gain anything. In a game with permadeath high level players will be someone to respect and fear. And low level characters should always have a chance to kill high level ones, which is also not how most games work.
2) Do the opposite. Make the characters so detailed, so expressive and so social so as to make the game all about character drama, and not about fighting. Make the game about role play intrigue, and not about fighting, making the avatar-player connection so strong that fighting will be rare as to almost never happen, reserved it for specific, roleplay inspired reasons only.
This is closer to what I'm thinking. However there still will be PVP- it just won't result in someone's death. There are alternatives, like having a system where a player can retreat after throwing down all inventory. Or maybe even enslavement or jail. Though there will be so much more to do in the game than simply small scale PVP.
I've seen permadeath only ever work in two types of games: 2) Do the opposite. Make the characters so detailed, so expressive and so social so as to make the game all about character drama, and not about fighting. Make the game about role play intrigue, and not about fighting, making the avatar-player connection so strong that fighting will be rare as to almost never happen, reserved it for specific, roleplay inspired reasons only.
The problem with this is that there are always sociopathic griefers, and they don't care about anything except being a sociopath.
Even if you made it all about drama, they would still want to kill (or glitch, even better, if they knew the net code!) all other players.
Comments
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I did start an MMORPG in 2003, but I failed to find funding for it. One of the big ideas was an in-game religion function that required people to build 'faction' with the various gods. When the character died, the player would not automatically respawn. Instead the character's soul would join the gods in their realm, and either retire there (voluntary death) or use some of their 'faction' to implore the various gods to recover, relocate and repair their earthly form, then reunite their spirit back into their body. (Get killed by a giant lizard, it might eat your corpse -- you had to get the gods to cooperate to rebuild your body and get it back from the lizard's stomach). I had envisioned the process of recovering from a death to take 1-2 hours of playing, if they had sufficient 'faction' at the time of their death. If not, the gods had tasks to earn favor.
It would certainly stop zerging, which is what I wanted that system to do. It also gave some other non-combat things to do in game (worshiping), which I've always been keen on.
But that's about as close to permadeath as I would want in an MMORPG -- a 1-2 hour time penalty on character death, with the player having some task to complete to return to life.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Which leads to really dull gaming and people never really testing the limits of their classes, never really actually learning to play their classes.
Death penalties need to be balanced. Death needs to matter. But that doesnt mean one has to go to the other extreme.
What can permadeath offer players in a game?
- "The Rush"
- Risk
- Bragging rights
- Grief
- Realism/Immersion
These are factors that already exist in MMORPGs, in other forms that is less of a punishment. With that notion, permadeath is just another feature that hinders overall player growth rate and interest.Throw out the concept and how it relates to punishment, approach it as a means of recycling old content and encourage re-rolling of characters could work. This is a pretty shallow solution in that it's not very specific but I think the direction is correct.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Making permanent death a non-certainty could also be viable. I'm not fond of the "Oh, you're not dead - you were just knocked out model that occasionally pops up (e.g., Salem). It could present a good means to actually implement religion as a gameplay mechanic by, for example, having players earn divine favor through various tasks/rituals/sacrifice. Die without being in good with a deity, it's permanent.
I would also do a stat loss and exp penalty for death, that would include negative exp, making it possible to go down in levels.
Not a permadeath, but a very, very, very good incentive to not die... ever.
In order for perma-death to work you can't have any sort of themepark gear grind time sink MMORPG.
Every player must play their avatar everyday with the expectation that there is about a 30% chance that they will die...forever. This means that having a massive amount of alts will also be required. You can't have a system where it takes weeks to get each avatar viable for combat.
(a) actually not have it - like in EVE, which has permadeath, except it has safe zones and for the unsafe zones you can buy clones, which circumvent permadeath.
(b) a game that evolves around it, i.e. a highscore game.
Now I havent played D3, but in my first posting I already mentioned specifically D2 hardcore mode. Thats a highscore game, because the highscore was reset every quarter year, so after that time your character was pointless anyway. The goal was to get high on the highscore.
And for D2 besides you could get any training you wanted by playing on non-hardcore. And AFAICS you needed it, too, to avoid dying on hardcore.
I have played Lineage 2 and yes, EVERYBODY plays it safe in L2, because on highlevel it took six hours farming xp to get back the xp of a single death. So what did people do ? They mass killed light green mobs - mobs that on the next level will be gray and wont give neither xp nor loot.
The only other behavior I know from L2 is /ragequit.
I recall one mmo talked about your characters just getting old and dieing. That is how I would do it. Just have your characters all have a life span (hopefully with like a gameplay arc). When they die, just roll up a new one and start from a baby.
Though the progression aspect might be an issue. MMO players love their progression.
Why do I imagine you about to die in game interfering with the network connection then going "Oh, that network connection again".
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Success would make real "heroes". Failure would make real "loss" for many to bemoan. And no one would be required to attempt it.
Once upon a time....
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
May be you should read up on D3 first. If you play the normal (non-season) game, perma-death is perma-death, and there is no high score, and resetting.
And yet players go up higher and higher in greater rift (more challenging).
1) Action-oriented dungeon crawler style games, with shallow, very functional mechanics such as in the Diablo series, where the character-avatar just acts as a convenient interface for action in a semi-linear experience.
2) Ironically, the other extreme: extremely detailed, character driven roleplay MUSHs, where combat is rare, highly stylized, and often done through stealth and guile.
MMOs, today, are neither of the two. There's still an element of social gameplay and creative expression that the dungeon crawlers like Diablo lack. They are also, in essence, combat games where the entire point is pretty much to kill things, not to play a role. This is why permadeath doesn't work so well here: characters are not special enough to throw away, and combat is too fundamental to the experience to bother doing anything else.
And so, how to make permadeath work is to do one of two things:
1) Strip away all character customization, all expressive, social gameplay beyond an OOC global chat, and sever the avatar-player connection as much as possible, like what an above poster said. This would make it more like Diablo.
2) Do the opposite. Make the characters so detailed, so expressive and so social so as to make the game all about character drama, and not about fighting. Make the game about role play intrigue, and not about fighting, making the avatar-player connection so strong that fighting will be rare as to almost never happen, reserved it for specific, roleplay inspired reasons only.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
A number of revives allowed until permadeath would work. You get X downs within a span of time and then the character is dead. The rare items going into escrow, and accrued XP raising a Legend stat or something. This would make players think twice about doing stupid shit. If part of the game revolves around staying alive, then you can reward players for achieving longevity. You would have to make sure that other players could not grief with the result of getting a player killed though. This might result in a game that reinforces you for life rather than metering your activities based on how many deaths on average occur in that activity.
The character can be a part of a lineage or whatever, and some or all of the gear on the former character can be salvaged by the player. In a PvE game this can be done with a token system if you don't want to actually refund the gear. If you strip the dead character in a PvP game then you get two groups of players in the game:
-The Goons who stay together and are strong enough to keep their gear
-Everybody else who'll make a character and then won't bother to get things they know they will easily lose when killed by the goons (just run around in loin cloth and carry a rock).
If i just had to have permadeath then it would go along with what i just mentioned plus aging.I think around 1 month per game year so after a year playing your player would be 22 years old if we started at say 10.Then i would have variable stats that change while you age but being fantasy i would also have some very tedious tasks to curb aging.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I used to play AD&D and it wasn't so easy to die, we used bleeding out, and their were always resurrection spells, or -joy- reincarnation! Those spells did have their penalties though. And if you did die you could roll a new character at 80% xp, and you would still play with the same group anyway, which was theo whole point, not gear progression. It won't be for every one, but if you aren't risking anything you won't really be able to gain anything. In a game with permadeath high level players will be someone to respect and fear. And low level characters should always have a chance to kill high level ones, which is also not how most games work.
There are alternatives, like having a system where a player can retreat after throwing down all inventory.
Or maybe even enslavement or jail.
Though there will be so much more to do in the game than simply small scale PVP.
Even if you made it all about drama, they would still want to kill (or glitch, even better, if they knew the net code!) all other players.