Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
A different sort of death penalty: stay dead for a while
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,524
My idea for a game's death penalty is that if you die, you stay dead for 24 hours before you respawn. You don't lose experience or gear or any other sort of progress. You can choose where you respawn to some degree, whether right where you died or back in town. You can chat, and perhaps you can transfer some goodies to other characters. But you can't really play the game on that character again for 24 hours.
You could, on the other hand, play an alt in that time. Until the alt dies, too. In which case, you'll need another alt.
The idea is that this would make players fear dying, and really try to stay alive. You die, and then it's, oh no, I can't do this and this and this that I was planning on doing today. That's pretty good incentive not to die.
And yet, dying doesn't make you lose progress. The problem with harsher death penalties is that they make it can make it so that you'd have been better off not playing at all that day. That too strongly discourages players from trying anything hard. This would let you go ahead and try something crazy hard that you expect to kill you, so long as you had planned on mostly playing other characters that day instead.
This would also completely kill a zerg rush strategy, in which players run in and die recklessly, and don't care because they'll respawn in ten seconds.
Comments
then people will get bored and flush your game down the toilet, and play a game that actually rewards them, instead of punishing them.
next.
Anything that makes you not able to play your game is a terrible idea.
People arnt gonna pay a sun fee to not be able to play there characters after they actually take a chance on something.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
There's a niche audience out there that would be looking for this sort of challenge, same folks who played Diablo 2 on perma death mode. Make it free to play and allow players to purchase "insurance" that would reduce the amount of down time (not totally eliminate it) and you probably have a decent money making MMO.
"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
Interesting idea, but no. What if I die because my internet connection went down? Or I had to step away for a minute to take care of IRL business? Or we get griefed by a player who aggros the whole dungeon on us just to be a dick? Or my cat decides to jump up on the keyboard? Etc, etc...
Until such factors can be eliminated completely, I'm against any sort of harsh death penalty in an MMO. Not all deaths are due to player error, and it's rather silly to penalize someone for somethng they had no control over at the time. Especially when it comes to essentially denying them the ability to play the game as they wish.
we already have this feature for people who want it. its called turning off your game when you die.
there's no need to make a game suck for people who actually want to play the game that...they...want to play....
It would require a rework on video game death and risk. Most games throw you in the die, die, do it again cycleon a regular basis or they redefine it. You were "defeated" with no mention of death or rendered "unconcious" but not killed. I see where you are coming from. Penalty or lack of define a games worth but given the restrictions of games in general, they can become unplayable for extended periods of time if the penalty is so great that you never make it out of the gate.
Original SWG Jedi were slated to suffer perma death. None ever did. The price was too high. EVE Sov losses can set people back years, its why EVE is still a niche MMO. Entropia is a game of real money and people have lost upwards of $50K or thats what the publicity stunt suggested, one or the other but most dont even know WTF Entropia is, the game was too serious in loss.
Many games out now inflict enough of a penalty on a character that while they can be logged in, they aren't playable in any way shape or fashion so to block account login isnt even needed really. The idea needs more thought but honest, I would like to see a game with higher penalty I just dont know how they could do it and people would accept it.
Yeah, pretty much.
The overwhelming majority of players aren't masochists, and if a game wastes their time punishing them instead of entertaining them they're gone. Resetting fights/encounters is about as harsh as punishment should be (but sadly open world gameplay necessitates a default death penalty slightly harsher than this.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't think it's a punishment per se. It's certainly not a reward. You might be surprised at the number of people who would play a game with that kind of dp. It wouldn't be raiders or people who PvP, but there would be people who would play.
However, what would actually happen with a real developer and a real publisher is the they would charge money for you to be able to play sooner than the set time limit. They'd name the game Allods and the death mechanic combined with the cash shop would crush any hope of the game ever being great.
** edit **
This is a game mechanic that works on the player's subconscious mind. Making them wait, with no other penalty can actually drive them to want to play the game more, not less. I don't think it would work with a 24 hour waiting period because it's too long, but that waiting period is a real game 'hook' for some reason. Make the waiting period short at first, then progressively longer and you have both a goad to play better and a goad to just keep playing until you're divorced and nearly starved to death.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I might be in the minority on this forum but I'm in favor of less death penalty, not more.
Even in WoW, which has somewhat minor death penalty (paying some money to repair), I've still seen it where people basically give the healer two chances to get their act together before they'll just leave.
The way I look at it, if you wipe 4 times on a boss and don't get anything for your hour's worth of effort, then your penalty is that you just wasted an hour. If the boss is difficult or complex, I'd rather waste an hour or two trying him over and over and failing with different tactics than to not even attempt it at all because nobody wants to go without a sufficient gear check or demonstration that you know the strategy (or linking the achievement that you've already done it).
A system like the OP is suggesting sounds good on paper for a solo oriented game, but having only one shot at a boss or having to quit playing because the healer let the tank die or something similar, I just can't see that working.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Obviously, the game would need to be designed around this. For starters, it would have to be very alt-friendly. The idea would be, you die, you go play an alt for the rest of the day.
Or imagine this as a business model. You can play for free with the 24 hour death penalty option. You subscribe for $15/month and the death penalty is removed.
The players might play new games during the 24 hours, and may abandon your game as soon as they find a game interesting enough.
It is the harshest death penalty in my mind if I couldn't play a game. It will discourage the players to try hard quest and grinding.
Edit: Is there any difference between alts and players? Or is there any limitation when players play alts?
Indie game developer. Passion manifests itself in the games we create XD
So many people would ask for a refund lol. Maybe it would work in a niche though.
The griefing would be rediculous!
The losers that enjoy killing people just to piss them off would be rife. Just imagine - if killing people to piss them off because they have to do a corpse run and lose some xp is fun, how much fun would they get from killing people so they couldnt play the game for a day?
Cluck Cluck, Gibber Gibber, My Old Mans A Mushroom
2 Reasons I don't see this working.
1. People would tire very quickly of not being able to play and progress (Also connected to #2). Unless they still had the ability to play an alt while waiting for the other character to come off the death timer. Would definitely make you think of your actions before...well, acting lol.
2. And the bigger reason. Today's MMORPG community is made up of mainly self entitlement spoiled brats. Hence, it wouldn't do so well in the current market. "Waaaah! We want something different.!" "Oh look! THIS is different!" "Waaaaah! It's too hard and not like WoW! It's teh suck!111! Make it easier or I quit!"
Not a single person would play this game. Not one. Horrible idea. Even permadeath is preferable to this.
WHY are people SO obsessive over death penalty? I've been playing MMO's for over 10 years and still don't understand the need for itl.
Here, steal my idea.
Death penalty where you gotta work to come back to life. I dunno either like Rage style or more involved like mini dungeon or puzzle or something.
NOT playing a game (being dead for 24 hours) is counter productive to your end goal, which is getting people to play your game. They won't like such a harsh penalty or having to deal with not playing something they are paying for.
I like the concept, but the length of time is much to extreme. Try 10 minutes. In this day of instant gratification, it will drive people crazy without costing subs. Just an idea.
I self identify as a monkey.
Spun the other way: The gaming community has never been strongly composed of players looking to throw their money away to a developer for non-gameplay.
Gamers want gameplay.
Typical death penalty is non-gameplay.
Simple as that. The money goes to whomever provides the player with the greatest amount of gameplay, and wastes their time the least amount with non-gameplay.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yeah, pretty bad idea.
If you want a death penalty that seems to be accepted by most is to have some type of XP debt.
What I didn't anticipate about the replies, but should have, is that people would think of some particular game, think of what would happen if this death penatly were inserted into that particular game without any modifications, and evaluate the idea on that basis.
For example, cali59 is thinking of how this would work in a raiding game where you have one high level character working through the endgame and switching to an alt isn't viable. Furthermore, you may have little influence on whether you die or not. Obviously, it would be a disaster in games like that. I haven't played any games like that in a long time, though, so that wasn't what I was thinking of.
Meanwhile, stragen001 is thinking of a game with open world non-consensual pvp. Being unable to play your favorite characte for 24 hours because you got ganked by some high level player and had no hope of escaping would indeed be horrible. But I wasn't thinking of that, as I haven't played many games with non-consensual pvp, and the ones I have played kept it as a minor part of the game. Regardless, that's readily avoided by not having pvp apply the death penalty.
Rednecksith brings up the specter of some idiot deciding to aggro an entire dungeon all at once. Again, I haven't played any game where that was even possible in quite some time.
The key to making the idea work is that the game couldn't have unavoidable deaths that simply aren't your fault. It would very much have to be designed such that if you're properly careful, you very rarely die. Think of Champions Online, where if you recognize trouble promptly enough, you can probably fire up a travel power and get out of there alive.
lol
people that want harsh DP, seem to never want to self inflict the penalty
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
the thing is, people want to play their game. not spend downtime on it.
In MMO we progress our characters. who wants to simply have a bunch of meaningless characters that are only playable for short durations? maybe a niche group, but that would be a killer for a AAA title.... Downtime on a MMO... lol
you want that, go play a MMORTS browser game
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
A too harsh death penalty is just as bad, or worse, than a too small one. It will cause people to never take risks.
also they avoid fighting at their fullest
Philosophy of MMO Game Design