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Perma death servers
Boshi
Member Posts: 7
Yes that's right my friends I have a dream.
Well yeah it's a pipe dream but hey it's still a dream. Everybody plays MMORPG's so they can make some awesome character. They might be a team player or a lone wolf, but everybody wants their character to be that epic individual. We all want that character that is unique & even legendary in some way.
The problem is that no game has given us that. The sad part is that as they are right now they won't give us that. It'd be great to have a game where even a casual gamer can make a character that is legendary on the server. A game where being at max level or what ever the cap system is , actually means something other than “you didn't move on to a different game”. A game where economics actually worked realistically. A game where crafting was a critical part of the world system. Personally I hate level grinding but it seems most players love it. I guess it makes them feel they are building something. It's a shame developers only seem to build games where the only meaningful building a player can do is leveling. If
Well I have a challenge for any developer that would dare take it.
Have at least one server with permanent death for characters. This isn't as harsh as some would think. Make the “leveling” slightly less risky and give each character a few free deaths to get them rolling along. In a skill based game this would be much easier is it is self balancing, unlike level based games that revolve around classes . This one thing makes a huge difference in a game world. Hell a casual gamer that made it to max level would only add to the mystique of a legendary character by being logged on rarely. Perma death would also help the economy of the game. As characters die their gear & banked money fade from the game. Assassination actually has value other than griefing. Imagine a billionaire crafter that has to pay other players to be bodyguards when they are in public. Even player thievery would be meaningful. If you have nothing to loose you really have no challenge. Where is the fun a building something when you can't fail .
A perma death server would enhance a game in every way. The role play and PvP would have meaning. Since this is rather extreme for most gamers their would have to be some perk for playing, and that can be as simple as faster leveling since the Tread mill won't be the purpose of the server.
Comments
I'm a little amazed that no body even though enough of this idea to flame it if nothing else.
what?
I think it would be an interesting feature to shaiya if you didn't have to grind 500000 levels to actually acsess it
ok here is an idea for a permadeath server.
If you die, you have to make a new character, BUT, the new character will be slightly more powerful than before. This will give people who keep getting killed a reason to keep on playing. They will be getting stronger and stronger.
So even if you have some large guild dominating the server, eventually everyone else will be so much more powerful that they will die.
Of course if you die at level one, you wont get any more powerful. It will be based on how high a level you get.
There is no way I'd ever consider playing a on permadeath server, and would never even consider a game with forced permadeath.
uh ...
every game in existance to date has this ability already built in.
when you die .. delete the toon ,dont save a copper /credit , an item , power, anything just hit delete no transfer of items just poof you are dead.
play that way before asking for a server see how long you like it. or how long you pay for it.
i lasted :
9 weeks in SWG.
19 days in shadowbane. ( tho one guy only lasted about 20 minutes ).
7 days and counting in TR .
almost a year in eve online ( podded 6 days from one year mark damn it)
and yes PVE deaths count too.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Yeah, but we aren't talking about a whole game, just one server that you don't have play on if you don't want to. I can actually see this as working if it gets opened up after enough of the community has reached lvl cap and are looking for a little more challenge. It's like Diablo 2 in hardcore mode. The first time through D2 you just played the game like normal, after that you tried it over again with permadeath.
At any rate, it would provide an interesting distraction while you wait for the next expansion to come out.
I dont think its a bad idea for just one server. It will be played by those who want to have the greatest risk. The issue will be class balance. With so much at risk everyone will basically play the character with the greatest escapability (woW bubble hearth anyone?). this is especially true if there is PvP involved
Also, I do not believe that people would be against it so much if the grind was very little or non existant. the only reason people dont like the idea of perma death in todays MMORPG is due to the huge time investment we take in leveling, gearing and grinding one up.
Torrential
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
just like dragon ball z!
As an example in WoW. If the contested zones could actually be take by one side or the other & they recieved some perk for owning it. Maybe resource access.
Ultimately this changes the focus of the game to be more inline with the "STORY" of both the world & the characters that exist in it. It completely removes the focus of the various flavors of the Tread Nill concept.
You can't have meaningfull RvR, PvP, Roleplay, Trash talking, or anything else in a game unless it has lasting consequences. Personally I think most players would hate this style of play for one & only one reason. People hate to have consequences to thier actions.
This is great but in your case it doesn't have an effect on the game/server because everybody isn't doing that. The Objective here is to enhance the game world. While I'm impressed with your style of play, it doesn't enhance the game/world. I don't expect the masses to want to play a game/server like this. There are MUDS that have been doing this for more than a decade, & they have had an amazingly loyal player base during that time with no eye candy at all. I know that some players would love this. All that is required is a change in the focus of the game. Ditch the idea of the tread mill crap. & poof you have a story driven world.
Interesting idea, but if that is gonna work they have to completely(atleast almost) remove the grind. I really dont think people will play it if they have to spend a few months grinding a toon to a good level. One of the reasons it worked in d2 was that the grind was almost non-existent. Just get someone to powerlevel you to almost max level in no time. The permadeath in d2 wasnt really as dangerous either as you could, whenever you wanted, exit and save the game if you saw things go sour. In an mmo world you cant do that as all of them have a slight delay before you're logged out of it.
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Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
My favorite online RPG experience was a MUD which had full looting and eventual perma death. Best time I ever had.
For every 4 deaths you would lose one point of con. 0 con = death. And con was your max health, so most people would wait until they hit max level before they did lots of pvp
By the way Hellgate:London has hardcore mode (one death – perma death). And it is a hell of all lot of fun.
I would love to see a MMO with open pvp and perma death. That game would have me for life.
To make it work - fleeing a fight, running and escaping has to be a big part of the game (which it was for the MUD I played). So you could get jumped by a group and escape run and hide. Which made pvp chasing 95% of the time, but it was a lot of fun.
You will be rewarded. You will get to loot players you kill. You might get to kill players all day long for 3 months straight.
But most people will level their characters up for a month. Then get ganked by a 10 man group. Then realized that the month of leveling was for nothng. Then they will quit the game. You have to give the people that died a reason to start over.
You will be rewarded. You will get to loot players you kill. You might get to kill players all day long for 3 months straight.
But most people will level their characters up for a month. Then get ganked by a 10 man group. Then realized that the month of leveling was for nothng. Then they will quit the game. You have to give the people that died a reason to start over.
Isn't it funny that this seems to be the one thing a lot of FFA PvP supporters forget to mention?
Im working on adding perma death into a future game of mine.
The main issue with it is, folks like the idea... and then... dont like it in practice. Its one of those things you love, until it happens to you.
Regardless I think its something you can have, as long as its on a special server. That way folks that dont like it can avoid it, and those that find it interesting can do it.
I still think if its done right it could be mainstream. Its just doing it right is difficult.
Why is it that no mmorpg has perma death servers anyway? I mean how freakin hard would it be to setup? Just take away the respawning on death...
No need to flame this idea, it just will never happen for one reason.
No dev in the world wants the support the disaster this will be. Deaths due to disconnects alone would drive the support staff batty to start with and that is just the tip of the nightmare for support.
It would be nice if someone could come up with a game that has built in safeguards, but then everyone will be screaming it is not truely perma death.
It doesn't work well in games where the power variance between the highest ranked toon (skill based or level based ) and the lowest ranked toon is to far apart (which is just about every MMO on the current market). UO was probably the closest MMO that I could think of that could pull off a perma-death server, especially because it didn't take much to get to a level where you and a couple of young newbies could be a threat to a 7X GM.
How are is it for people to understand the outcome of perma death with a teen population of hardcore gamers. The last thing I'd want to see in the news is some kid killing themself because their character died. You don't think it would happen?
How to make it work.
Excelling in a permadeath environment is the ultimate challenge. This is why I would want to play on a permadeath server. If the developers made it crystal clear that there were no exceptions for disconnects etc. and you had to agree to it everytime you logged in, then they are covered and damn the whiners.
Frankly, I think perma-death adds all the wrong incentives to an MMO. It encourages the player to use offline resources like Wikis or strategy guides to tell them what will happen around every corner, where they can safely level (or more likely mob grind) and all in all ruins the ability for the player to explore the game without feeling the need to resort to a walkthrough. The risk of losing everything is usually too great to avoid the temptation. It also gives the devs incentives to make lazy programming. The more they can make people die, the less new content they have to create as players will have to roll through the old stuff for the umpteenth time while they pay $X a month to do what they did three times in the last two months.
Anyways, Perma-death is nothing more than the ultimate timesink. Most games, if you die, you lose XP, gold, your position and/or some items. All of these can be recovered in a matter of hours or in the worst case days. With perma-death all you're doing is setting back the player however long they've invested in the character. The knowledge you gleaned from the fight is a trivial benefit since it would probably take weeks to get back to that encounter and it pales compared to the loss of the character.
Most of the alternatives suggested to perma-death (multiple lives, heirs, etc.) are simply other ways of making a steep death penalty. If a character is down to their last life, the player will probably log him out or play it very safe until he gets a few extra lives again, thereby making him lose time. Heirs have to regain portions of the original characters skill, gold, etc. which again merely takes time. Perma-death is nothing more than a name for an arbitrary time penalty. A game may as well lock you out of your character for X number of days every time you die depending on your level and it'd have the same effect overall.
If a person is looking for perma-death right now, they may as well pick up Tabula Rasa. When the game gets cancelled, you'll lose everything. Now that's the ultimate death penalty. (Disclaimer: Tabula Rasa is just an easy whipping boy. I have no idea if it's good or profitable - any game likely to die can be substituted in there)
I will say this however should the game exist or be in the minds of some devs out there. The mythical game needs to have two key components to it. Firstly, it has to make dying VERY easily avoidable. There's no point to having perma-death in a game where you can simply be mobbed by 20 enemies whether it's because of a griefing player training mobs or a overpowered PvP group running past you or bad spawn placement by the devs or lag or any other possibility. Secondly, it needs to make the levelling treadmill unique everytime or blazingly fast - no player will stand for having to visit region X for level 1-10, region Y for 11-20 and so on after the first dozen times.
one of the reasons i hate blizzard is cause they have like 220 servers and only 4 rulesets. I wish they would experiment more with different server rulesets, but I guess since no one else has really done it yet they don't know how to go about.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
if I were to kill a titan tomorrow and no CCP employees showed up to say grats I would petition it.
Waiting for: the next MMO that lets me make this macro
if hp < 30 then CastSpell("heal") SpellTargetUnit("player") else CastSpell("smite") end
this has been discussed a million times, unless perma death is done right it wont work nuff said