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Should MMOs remove the death penalty?
TheScavenger
Member EpicPosts: 3,321
Should MMOs remove the death penalty? It never really made sense to me. Especially in the older MMOs.
You are dead! Lose 25% of your stats and/or skills! (usually a debuff for x amount of minutes or needing to earn x amount of exp/kill x amount of monsters to remove it)
This never made sense. Okay, so I die...I lose 25% of my ability...how am I supposed to kill anything to remove the debuff? Even if it is just 30 minutes...that just means I can't play for 30 minutes? Especially since most MMOs penalize you for killing weaker stuff than your level/skill...so...this seems very counter beneficial
Then if all your gear is damaged...how are you supposed to continue in a dungeon or a raid or do anything? gear is very important in almost all MMOs...I guess go and repair it...but usually...ESPECIALLY for tanks...its so expensive, sometimes you cant even afford to repair it all.
And then it runs into the same problem as losing stats/skills...but even worse...because gear is usually way more important...so without fully repaired items, again...you are penalized so much, you can't do anything.
So going back to the original question...should MMOs remove the death penalty? Or, at least change it to something that still lets you...you know...still play the game even if you die?
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Comments
Oh no, the death penalty debate.
I think harsh death penalties work well in some games and not in others. For example, an extremely harsh death penalty in WoW would be silly (and is silly right now) in my opinion while in EVE it's part of what makes the game special and contributes to the economy in a meaningful way.
Different game design concepts demand different types of death penalty. In my opinion at least, the only wrong answer here is that one is better than the other.
For the most part removing the death penalty has made acomplishing anything trivial. When you have an endless number of chances and an unlimited amount of time to do something, it's not much of anything when you finally do it....or at least I would hope for your sake it isn't.
The more a DP hurts the more frustrating it is when you fail but the greater the sense of acomplishment when you actually manage to do it. I think that sense of accomplishment has sort of gone from mmos now though. Now it's more about casual wasting of time.
Good for some bad for others I guess.
/thread
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
You are overstating the penalties of dying in MMO's today as an argument for removing penalties entirely. Most MMO's alow you to die multiple times, as many as ten times, before your gear becomes unusable. As to the 25% 30 minutes thing, what game is that from? Most games have lower skill/hp drops than that or shoter time periods or both.
As for death penalties at all, you just died dude. Most people kind of stop entirely when they are dead, so why not have at least a token penalty in game for a character death.
You could also try Planeshift, in that game when you die you go somewhere else and have to quest your way back to life.
Going to the afterlife and having to fight/quest/explore your way out, sounds far better than losing a bunch of stats and gear.
However, this topic more implies to themepark MMOs. Sandbox MMOs need gear loss (if they don't they suck), and harsh death penalties...that is just in their nature. Themepark MMOs rely too much on levels/stats and gear for these kind of penalties to work.
I would like a modern themepark mmo to have an afterlife thing. WoW you run as a ghost to your corpse, which was cool but not really what I had in mind as far as afterlife goes...penalties were far too high though.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
I thought they already removed the death penalty from MMOs back in 2006.
If it was up to me, there would be no death penalty up to level 15. After than, it's 30%+ XP loss as well as durability loss as well as a respawn in your faction's main city (unless revived by a teammate). There will also be a little bit of coin loss to compensate the body pickup and treatment.
No. Death penalities should stay.
You need challange and consequence in a decent mmorpg.
Your hero's death is failure. The death penalty says you: Do it better next time by using a different tactic. You don't even need a reward for staying alive because you get enough rewards in recent MMORPGs.
This. if there is no death penalty then why even have your character fall at all? Just make it be players burning down the enemy and then opening the chest at the end.
I will agreee that some death penalties don't make sense, especially penalties that remove the player from playing and make him wait until some debuff lifts.
I'd rather lose xp.
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Without a death penalty where's the risk in combat?
Without a death penalty death just becomes another means of fast travel (it already is in WoW).
Without a death penalty where's the rush from surviving an epic fight?
The question makes as much sense as "Should MMOs remove chickens?"
So, to answer your question:
Not all MMOs have chickens.
In some MMOs, chickens really enhance the environment.
In others, the chickens are out of place.
In some MMOs, the chickens are just plain annoying.
I'd say the presence or absence of chickens should depend entirely on the type of MMO and the interest of the MMOs target audience.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
No.
how about a big game over sign instead.
You mean you don't do that anyway, regardless if there is a penalty or not?
Whether it is a death penalty to me is irrelevent.
There should be real and tangible motivation for living.
If the game lacks incentive for staying alive and winning battles, I'm not sure it meets the requirements of being a game anymore.
I see a lot of people saying rather then losing gear or stats that stop a player playing just have a XP loss, yep I kind of agree as the last thing a game company wants is people dying and then just logging off becasue they have to sit around for 15 mins or so.
But one thing I would ask about a XP loss death penalty what happens at max leave on death ? would you allow players to drop lvls ? if you would this will come with all sorts of problems i.e gear can't be used all of a sudden due to lower lvl etc.
and if you can't drop lvl's then you have to have a different penalty for max lvl players or death means nothing ?
What other games penalize you for losing. They lose, they don't advance till they win. Sometimes they may have to wait for the next competition but they don't make the competition harder just because you lost. Thats it.
I think many/most do just that. Very few just run in and die over and over and over. After a couple tries they try something different.
Hell, I only play cause fighting wolves is fun. What other point should there be? Not winning is punishment enough, isn't it? What if I don't get a rush from a high death penalty? What if its merely an inconvenience?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
who the hell gets a rush from a death penalty? of course it's an inconvenience. i don't LIKE death penalties and they frustrate me but i ultimately appreciate their purpose. i find it hard to believe the mmo community is largely comprised of pansies who will quit a game because they have to spend a few minutes getting resurrected by a fellow player or recouping experience.