For me the reason why I would kill someone is to get totally rid of him. So a perma-death game needs to provide this or it is none. The idea of having 100 deaths and the ability to get more free deaths is in no way a perma-death game, it is just the idea of getting killed forever, but nearly no one will ever get killed forever in such a game.
So if you really want perma-death and the effects of it simply implement it in the way it is implemented in reality too. All other is just false-labeling and ridiculous.
*Creates a hack that floods your client with so many packets you can't keep up and disconnect, kills you while you're LD, laughs because you just lost your character*
It's feasible.
"Your mom is my champion... just without the c... or the a... or the m... the p... the i... and now that you mention it, no, no n either."
The thing that drew me to permadeath was the possibility that it might discourage griefers. Seriously, griefing is a high risk activity. It's very unlikely that a group of griefers could get very high level in a permadeath environment. After you put in all that time, are you really gonna blow it all just to ruin someone else's day? Didn't think so.
And if you're going to give people a limited number of lives, you should keep it at three. it was good enough for Pac Man..... Personally, I also like the idea of stat penalties until leveling becomes pointless and the character is deemed dead. This makes griefing a practice of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, the griefer is going to have to start all over or be rendered completely useless. Oh yea, and they can only have one active character at a time.
Another possibility is to let players have many characters instead of just one and implement death like it is in real life - once dead this character will never again see the light of day again.
id try a permadeath game but most likely what would happen is you'd have forty or fifty of the "professional" i.e. lifeless mmorpg kids form a guild...level up beyond what any normal working person could achieve and then kill everyone before they could get high enough to defend themselves
even if you had random spawn points for new players...they'd close in and kill anyone unless the game was so massive that u couldnt cover the entire area
think talking island in lineage 2 when players from open beta were allowed to keep their characters just continuous death over and over...and half the community destroyed before the game even started
You have entered One Life (TM) as a level 1 paladin.
You have been given quest: Fox Ears.
You are now leaving 'Haxy' town.
ChuckNorris66 hits you for 1780 damage with Spear of Flaming Stars +8.
You have died. Please wait 24 hours to make another character.
Perma-death without backup options.....no thanks mate. Unless you're allowed 'clones'. No griefers...what a joke OP. People will make guilds JUST to grief people. These guilds will be the ones that start out first,grind longer,and thus have the best weapons.
Perhaps having a 'permadeath' server as A different server would be worth a try,but not as the whole game. Face of Mankind does perma-death,but you're allowed to buy clones to avoid it. Having said that,FOM is full of gankers,corp backstabber gankers and more gankers. Unless you join the GOM like I did. Or get lucky enough to not have a 'ganking' day in your HQ.
Originally posted by Jargonecius *Creates a hack that floods your client with so many packets you can't keep up and disconnect, kills you while you're LD, laughs because you just lost your character* It's feasible.
lol ala d2 hardcore....i had a lvl 99 barb hardcore character that died like that.
Originally posted by Suitepee You have entered One Life (TM) as a level 1 paladin. You have been given quest: Fox Ears. You are now leaving 'Haxy' town. ChuckNorris66 hits you for 1780 damage with Spear of Flaming Stars +8. You have died. Please wait 24 hours to make another character. Perma-death without backup options.....no thanks mate. Unless you're allowed 'clones'. No griefers...what a joke OP. People will make guilds JUST to grief people. These guilds will be the ones that start out first,grind longer,and thus have the best weapons.
Ofcourse you need a working law and order and reputation system if you implement it that way. If criminals will have no shelter in guarded areas and their characters need to stay in the game instead of the ability to logout with the player and if there are rewards on their head and headhunters behind them - then it would not be that way you described above - but otherwise it is just crap like you have pointed out in your statement.
I'd like to see someone try this... I wouldn't play it personally, but I'd like to see someone try.
The biggest problems, beyond griefing, as I see it are:
1. Burnout on newbie content : a perma-death game is going to need a lot of low-level content, far more than any previous MMO. People are going to die, and die a lot, no matter how the game designers build the rest of the game. They are going to run through those newbie areas again and again. Anyone who's ever had alt-itis knows that it does not take too terribly long for this to get very old.
2. Community: if everyone keeps changing characters, how are communities, guilds, etc going to stay together? What's the point of a friends list if character names keep changing? This game needs some kind of persistance from character to character if real communities are going to form.... perhaps some kind of surname that travels with your character of a "global" name like was attempted in the CoX games...
3. Player churn: There needs to be a reason for players to start over after a character death or they won't. If everything you've done in months of game play is lost due to a disconnect or a lucky PK, you don't have any reason to continue your subscription.
If these three things can't be addressed - in fun ways - then I think Perma-death can, at best support a novelty server on a non-perma-death game.
I think perm death should depend on the character you play.
Take Star Wars Galaxies. The place is overflowing with Jedi. Well in the history Jedi become allmost extinct right? Well i think people taking that class should have permdeath. Making it more risky and dangerous, and forcing the players to keep it somewhat "hidden" such as they really did.
Oh and in WoW. Pallandins sould have perm death....the overpowered scum
Well you get my point. I think my SWG idea/point is a good idea.
We offer new service. If you like don't permadeath. You pay 300 $. We make personal army. You don't die. We 100 accounts make to protect you. Very safe. We don't hack use. Visit our site today. Super service!
A new market has been created
Serious now. First of all permadeath will never really happen. The majority doesn't want it. It doesn't sell and therefor the risks involved in making this is way to big.
Permadeath doesn't appeal to me. Why? For me roleplayings games are alot about your character. The time you spend with him/her, and the way you shape him. I get attached to my characters. The roleplaying aspect means quite alot for me. With permadeath it wouldn't exist anymore for me. If the game boasts easy progress to make the create a new character more appealing, the roleplaying would suffer. Because the character would just be another product on the way to the next death. If the progress is hard. The permadeath comes way to harsh for my taste and I wouldn't even try to play it. So the whole idea of permadeath fails at this part for me.
The only way the 200k permadeaths fans will ever have permadeath, is if some company makes a permadeath server. But there will never be a game built around permadeath.
Greyface, these problems are just there if you are just thinking of a conventional MMO here.
#1 burnout on newbie content - in a game where those contents are provided by players instead of developers (i.e. a world simulation, not a theme park like MMO) this is no problem at all.
#2 cummunity - if a player controls a family instead of a single character this is no longer a problem and real perma-death can be implemented also. Players will advance as a family, not as a single character, they do not concentrate their efforts too much onto a single character and therefore perma-death does no longer feel that scaring as in a conventional game - and still has the advantages of the perma-death concept (for example no maxed out character due to the fact that he might get killed by a group before he could reach this).
#3 player churn - if a player controls a family instead of a single character this is also no problem because the family lives on - there is a loss but it is not the end of the game.
Hope this gives an idea how this could be implemented addressing your 3 points.
the bad thing would be wasting your money on an MMO where you can only play it once, but those death token things are a good idea as long as its not real money.... but still..... in game money..... how expensive will they be.....
Originally posted by Kazanukari the bad thing would be wasting your money on an MMO where you can only play it once, but those death token things are a good idea as long as its not real money.... but still..... in game money..... how expensive will they be.....
It is non-sense to implement a buyable resurrection and call it perma-death - it is not perma-death then and you dont have those long-term benefits for your game from it anymore. So you simply can drop the idea totallly - if you dont want to implement real perma-death, it is pretty useless to think about it.
This is just such a bad idea that keeps coming up.
So youself and your crew have driven hard through Death Valley down Highway 99, you're blasted your way through road blocks, and outrun a major attack by scrub raiders. You've found the abandoned nuclear power station, and are successfully battling the Brotherhood of Steel when your connection dies and everyone wipes.
Not only is the run over. Not only have you lost your character, but the rest of the party are screaming at you because they've lost their characters too, and are vowing never to play with you again because you've got a shitty connection.
Yes, permadeath is the route to happy gameplay.
An ironman server in anygame would be good for a laugh, but otherwise you just can't have the same connection to any character because they have to be very replaceable.
There could be a place for this in a game that is not about building a developing character. But in that case is it really permadeath? If you just generate another rifleman in 15 secs (cos what's the point in spending time over his creation), and get back to the fight, who died? Cardinalsin the 74th?
This is just a crap idea. That's why it is never used. It strongly discourages you from doing anything risky (ie exciting), and strongly encourages you to do completely safe, unchallanging, boring things for as long as your soul can stand it. Then when you get killed trying to do something a bit more risky, you have to do what you should have done in the first place - delete the game, take the disks, put them on a clay pigeon launcher and reach for a shotgun.
Nick
The race doesn't always go to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that's the way to bet.
And the single reason why no successful MMORPG will have permadeath:
Nobody will be willing to throw away months of work on a character because they had a connection failure. And they will not play a game where that can happen.
The best arguement I can give for permadeath is actually a single player RPG from the early 80's called Rogue. People still player this game, almost religously, and there are many roguelike games that have been made since. The greatest of these, IMHO, is ZangbandTK.
For the uninitiated, these games only save the game on exit and delete the save file when you die. In short, you have to start all the way over when you die. Just getting to the end of the game is a challenge, and that's what brings people back.
I'd also like to add that the first MUDs were permadeath. The goal of the game was to get your character to a certain level and become immortal or a "wizard." Wizards were also assistants to the server admin so there were only so many wizard slots available. This, of course, lead to some pretty cut throat shenanigans to prevent all the players from becoming wizards. It worked well enough that there are over 1500 active MUDs in operation as you read this.
And this all ties into an idea that I posted about in another thread. Replacing the endgame with ending. The game sets the stage for a particular conflict and the players drive it to it's ending. The "winners" get some bonuses for the characters they make in the next "round" that may either repeat or continue the "story" from the last round. These rounds could last for years. Think of the server as a combination of Civ4 and Diplomacy with the players acting as one citizen in a given faction and you have a pretty good idea of how this works. In this environment, permadeath works very, very well. Heroes rise and fall as do entire nations. You could literally do the war of the ring in an environment like this. I have a feeling that it would have played out very differently with random player from around the internet competing for the ring.
Games with perma-death are just not for me. I can probably zip through my 100 deaths in a matter of weeks. I died 19 times my first day in Shadowbane. No one even has to grief me... I can manage it all by myself. It's probably one reason I enjoyed working on MUDs back in the olden days, instead of playing them.
The box seems to look quite nice from the inside doesnt it?
/sarcasm off
Anyway it would be a very good idea to have PD in games as it make it more realistic. Honestly saying that only griefers would be taunted to join the game is very missleading. I bet because i now use this one word my post will be skipped but i will still use it. Saying that griefers will ruin the fun is in my eyes just an extreme carebear view.Griefers are not the ordinary group PVPer and so they will loose to the real PVPer.
The second thing is get your eyes of the stupid level system.A PD game should ue skill based toons and NO levels i say again NO Levels!The next thing only PVP should give PD as PVM not.
"You cant say civilization isnt advancing: in every war they kill you in a new way." Will Rogers "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." - George Bernard Shaw
Perma death in a game can ruin it, or make it much more interesting and fun. It all depends on how the rest of the game is set up. For one thing, nothing else matters if the game allows players to indiscriminately perma death others. There absolutely must be a justice system that works to allow players a relatively safe area, a homeland, to work out of. If not, only the really hard core are going to "win", they will see to that, and they alone would eventually be left in the game. Subscription wise that's not good at all, and game wise it isn't any better, as the types of players that specialize in trade skills and anything else but PvP wouldn't be there anymore.
I think perma death offers some real advantages to a game in several way, but it has to be done right or it will kil alot of subscriptions along with the characters.
Originally posted by mstic Permadeath in game will bring in an older crowd I think. Kids wouldn't "see the point" in it... much like some here The main reason why most game economies suck is because everybody lives forever. Permadeath needs to be implemented.
I'm amazed it took 5 pages of posts before someone mentioned the LOST CONNECTION problem. I'm sure alot of people 'see the point', but what I don't see is how you implement a fair system that safeguards against lost connections, crashes, powercuts whilst preventing abuse of that system to avoid dying simply by pulling the plug.
There can not be a single person here that has never dropped out of a game whilst mid combat/mission/travel whatever due to reasons beyond there control. Until you can make that problem non existant said games CSR's inbox would be overflowing with said problems.
Originally posted by mstic Permadeath in game will bring in an older crowd I think. Kids wouldn't "see the point" in it... much like some hereThe main reason why most game economies suck is because everybody lives forever. Permadeath needs to be implemented.
I'm not sure what you mean by "older". If you mean over 25 or 30, then that's not been my experience. Most of the gamers I've met who seriously advocate permadeath have been under 25, though not all, of course. Permadeath insinuates a level of commitment that I wouldn't be crazy about. One would want the best gear and items to ensure longevity. Most of the older people I meet gaming have responsibilities other than themselves and really can't invest the sort of time that takes.
While there might be an increase in a sense of accomplishment and excitement for some, Im not sure most people would feel that way. In fact, it could have the opposite affect for many. People might not want to do much that is risky. I think many might lose interest faster due to the lack of adventure caused by being afraid to take a chance. I'm not sure that I would actually feel any sense of acheivement if I lost my character before I had done everything I could or at least wanted to in a game.
I'm sure there people who enjoy the realism associated with permadeath but I have a feeling I'm not one of them. While I like a modicum of realistic behaviour in a game, for me permadeath will be just a bit too OTT. I would probably get a bit stressy about my character and that's not really what I'm looking for in an MMO. These are the same reasons I enjoy games without great death penalties, although I'm not against some sort of penalty.
I used to be very into Shadowbane and it was rather nerve-wracking never knowing if your town would be in ruins next time you logged in. In one respect I enjoyed that excitment, in another it was very trying. When I left, I decided I'd never get too serious about a game again. I'm much happier playing games today. I do like PvP, but not for the material rewards to my character. I don't need them to enjoy pitting myself against another player or another guild.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be games with permadeath. I'm not even saying I wouldn't give one a go. I think there should be enough choice to suit everyone's style, if possible. I don't know, however, how well a game with permadeath would do but I'm sort of interested in finding out. So I agree with you... someone should implement it.
Comments
For me the reason why I would kill someone is to get totally rid of him. So a perma-death game needs to provide this or it is none. The idea of having 100 deaths and the ability to get more free deaths is in no way a perma-death game, it is just the idea of getting killed forever, but nearly no one will ever get killed forever in such a game.
So if you really want perma-death and the effects of it simply implement it in the way it is implemented in reality too. All other is just false-labeling and ridiculous.
Ragosch
*Creates a hack that floods your client with so many packets you can't keep up and disconnect, kills you while you're LD, laughs because you just lost your character*
It's feasible.
"Your mom is my champion... just without the c... or the a... or the m... the p... the i... and now that you mention it, no, no n either."
The thing that drew me to permadeath was the possibility that it might discourage griefers. Seriously, griefing is a high risk activity. It's very unlikely that a group of griefers could get very high level in a permadeath environment. After you put in all that time, are you really gonna blow it all just to ruin someone else's day? Didn't think so.
And if you're going to give people a limited number of lives, you should keep it at three. it was good enough for Pac Man..... Personally, I also like the idea of stat penalties until leveling becomes pointless and the character is deemed dead. This makes griefing a practice of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, the griefer is going to have to start all over or be rendered completely useless. Oh yea, and they can only have one active character at a time.
Another possibility is to let players have many characters instead of just one and implement death like it is in real life - once dead this character will never again see the light of day again.
Ragosch
id try a permadeath game but most likely what would happen is you'd have forty or fifty of the "professional" i.e. lifeless mmorpg kids form a guild...level up beyond what any normal working person could achieve and then kill everyone before they could get high enough to defend themselves
even if you had random spawn points for new players...they'd close in and kill anyone unless the game was so massive that u couldnt cover the entire area
think talking island in lineage 2 when players from open beta were allowed to keep their characters
just continuous death over and over...and half the community destroyed before the game even started
that being said...id still take a look
You have entered One Life (TM) as a level 1 paladin.
You have been given quest: Fox Ears.
You are now leaving 'Haxy' town.
ChuckNorris66 hits you for 1780 damage with Spear of Flaming Stars +8.
You have died. Please wait 24 hours to make another character.
Perma-death without backup options.....no thanks mate. Unless you're allowed 'clones'. No griefers...what a joke OP. People will make guilds JUST to grief people. These guilds will be the ones that start out first,grind longer,and thus have the best weapons.
Perhaps having a 'permadeath' server as A different server would be worth a try,but not as the whole game. Face of Mankind does perma-death,but you're allowed to buy clones to avoid it. Having said that,FOM is full of gankers,corp backstabber gankers and more gankers. Unless you join the GOM like I did. Or get lucky enough to not have a 'ganking' day in your HQ.
lol ala d2 hardcore....i had a lvl 99 barb hardcore character that died like that.
read this http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1044304#post1044304 then come back and talk to me about the vanguard/soe fiasco.....
Ofcourse you need a working law and order and reputation system if you implement it that way. If criminals will have no shelter in guarded areas and their characters need to stay in the game instead of the ability to logout with the player and if there are rewards on their head and headhunters behind them - then it would not be that way you described above - but otherwise it is just crap like you have pointed out in your statement.
Ragosch
I'd like to see someone try this... I wouldn't play it personally, but I'd like to see someone try.
The biggest problems, beyond griefing, as I see it are:
1. Burnout on newbie content : a perma-death game is going to need a lot of low-level content, far more than any previous MMO. People are going to die, and die a lot, no matter how the game designers build the rest of the game. They are going to run through those newbie areas again and again. Anyone who's ever had alt-itis knows that it does not take too terribly long for this to get very old.
2. Community: if everyone keeps changing characters, how are communities, guilds, etc going to stay together? What's the point of a friends list if character names keep changing? This game needs some kind of persistance from character to character if real communities are going to form.... perhaps some kind of surname that travels with your character of a "global" name like was attempted in the CoX games...
3. Player churn: There needs to be a reason for players to start over after a character death or they won't. If everything you've done in months of game play is lost due to a disconnect or a lucky PK, you don't have any reason to continue your subscription.
If these three things can't be addressed - in fun ways - then I think Perma-death can, at best support a novelty server on a non-perma-death game.
I think perm death should depend on the character you play.
Take Star Wars Galaxies. The place is overflowing with Jedi. Well in the history Jedi become allmost extinct right? Well i think people taking that class should have permdeath. Making it more risky and dangerous, and forcing the players to keep it somewhat "hidden" such as they really did.
Oh and in WoW. Pallandins sould have perm death....the overpowered scum
Well you get my point.
I think my SWG idea/point is a good idea.
China boy be safe in permadeath game service. http://www.no-pd-with-haxx-army.ch.tw.co
We offer new service. If you like don't permadeath. You pay 300 $. We make personal army. You don't die.
We 100 accounts make to protect you. Very safe. We don't hack use. Visit our site today. Super service!
A new market has been created
Serious now. First of all permadeath will never really happen. The majority doesn't want it. It doesn't sell and therefor the risks involved in making this is way to big.
Permadeath doesn't appeal to me. Why? For me roleplayings games are alot about your character. The time you spend with him/her, and the way you shape him. I get attached to my characters. The roleplaying aspect means quite alot for me. With permadeath it wouldn't exist anymore for me. If the game boasts easy progress to make the create a new character more appealing, the roleplaying would suffer. Because the character would just be another product on the way to the next death. If the progress is hard. The permadeath comes way to harsh for my taste and I wouldn't even try to play it.
So the whole idea of permadeath fails at this part for me.
The only way the 200k permadeaths fans will ever have permadeath, is if some company makes a permadeath server. But there will never be a game built around permadeath.
Greyface, these problems are just there if you are just thinking of a conventional MMO here.
#1 burnout on newbie content - in a game where those contents are provided by players instead of developers (i.e. a world simulation, not a theme park like MMO) this is no problem at all.
#2 cummunity - if a player controls a family instead of a single character this is no longer a problem and real perma-death can be implemented also. Players will advance as a family, not as a single character, they do not concentrate their efforts too much onto a single character and therefore perma-death does no longer feel that scaring as in a conventional game - and still has the advantages of the perma-death concept (for example no maxed out character due to the fact that he might get killed by a group before he could reach this).
#3 player churn - if a player controls a family instead of a single character this is also no problem because the family lives on - there is a loss but it is not the end of the game.
Hope this gives an idea how this could be implemented addressing your 3 points.
Ragosch
the bad thing would be wasting your money on an MMO where you can only play it once, but those death token things are a good idea as long as its not real money.... but still..... in game money..... how expensive will they be.....
It is non-sense to implement a buyable resurrection and call it perma-death - it is not perma-death then and you dont have those long-term benefits for your game from it anymore. So you simply can drop the idea totallly - if you dont want to implement real perma-death, it is pretty useless to think about it.
Ragosch
If levling is easy and fast permdeath would be nice.(if implemented right)
If it's hard, it's too much too loose for me :<
This is just such a bad idea that keeps coming up.
So youself and your crew have driven hard through Death Valley down Highway 99, you're blasted your way through road blocks, and outrun a major attack by scrub raiders. You've found the abandoned nuclear power station, and are successfully battling the Brotherhood of Steel when your connection dies and everyone wipes.
Not only is the run over. Not only have you lost your character, but the rest of the party are screaming at you because they've lost their characters too, and are vowing never to play with you again because you've got a shitty connection.
Yes, permadeath is the route to happy gameplay.
An ironman server in anygame would be good for a laugh, but otherwise you just can't have the same connection to any character because they have to be very replaceable.
There could be a place for this in a game that is not about building a developing character. But in that case is it really permadeath? If you just generate another rifleman in 15 secs (cos what's the point in spending time over his creation), and get back to the fight, who died? Cardinalsin the 74th?
This is just a crap idea. That's why it is never used. It strongly discourages you from doing anything risky (ie exciting), and strongly encourages you to do completely safe, unchallanging, boring things for as long as your soul can stand it. Then when you get killed trying to do something a bit more risky, you have to do what you should have done in the first place - delete the game, take the disks, put them on a clay pigeon launcher and reach for a shotgun.
Nick
The race doesn't always go to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that's the way to bet.
And the single reason why no successful MMORPG will have permadeath:
Nobody will be willing to throw away months of work on a character because they had a connection failure. And they will not play a game where that can happen.
Chris Mattern
The best arguement I can give for permadeath is actually a single player RPG from the early 80's called Rogue. People still player this game, almost religously, and there are many roguelike games that have been made since. The greatest of these, IMHO, is ZangbandTK.
For the uninitiated, these games only save the game on exit and delete the save file when you die. In short, you have to start all the way over when you die. Just getting to the end of the game is a challenge, and that's what brings people back.
I'd also like to add that the first MUDs were permadeath. The goal of the game was to get your character to a certain level and become immortal or a "wizard." Wizards were also assistants to the server admin so there were only so many wizard slots available. This, of course, lead to some pretty cut throat shenanigans to prevent all the players from becoming wizards. It worked well enough that there are over 1500 active MUDs in operation as you read this.
And this all ties into an idea that I posted about in another thread. Replacing the endgame with ending. The game sets the stage for a particular conflict and the players drive it to it's ending. The "winners" get some bonuses for the characters they make in the next "round" that may either repeat or continue the "story" from the last round. These rounds could last for years. Think of the server as a combination of Civ4 and Diplomacy with the players acting as one citizen in a given faction and you have a pretty good idea of how this works. In this environment, permadeath works very, very well. Heroes rise and fall as do entire nations. You could literally do the war of the ring in an environment like this. I have a feeling that it would have played out very differently with random player from around the internet competing for the ring.
Games with perma-death are just not for me. I can probably zip through my 100 deaths in a matter of weeks. I died 19 times my first day in Shadowbane. No one even has to grief me... I can manage it all by myself. It's probably one reason I enjoyed working on MUDs back in the olden days, instead of playing them.
The box seems to look quite nice from the inside doesnt it?
/sarcasm off
Anyway it would be a very good idea to have PD in games as it make it more realistic.
Honestly saying that only griefers would be taunted to join the game is very missleading.
I bet because i now use this one word my post will be skipped but i will still use it.
Saying that griefers will ruin the fun is in my eyes just an extreme carebear view.Griefers are not the ordinary group PVPer and so they will loose to the real PVPer.
The second thing is get your eyes of the stupid level system.A PD game should ue skill based toons and NO levels i say again NO Levels!The next thing only PVP should give PD as PVM not.
"You cant say civilization isnt advancing: in every war they kill you in a new way." Will Rogers
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." - George Bernard Shaw
Perma death in a game can ruin it, or make it much more interesting and fun. It all depends on how the rest of the game is set up. For one thing, nothing else matters if the game allows players to indiscriminately perma death others. There absolutely must be a justice system that works to allow players a relatively safe area, a homeland, to work out of. If not, only the really hard core are going to "win", they will see to that, and they alone would eventually be left in the game. Subscription wise that's not good at all, and game wise it isn't any better, as the types of players that specialize in trade skills and anything else but PvP wouldn't be there anymore.
I think perma death offers some real advantages to a game in several way, but it has to be done right or it will kil alot of subscriptions along with the characters.
Once upon a time....
Permadeath in game will bring in an older crowd I think. Kids wouldn't "see the point" in it... much like some here
The main reason why most game economies suck is because everybody lives forever.
Permadeath needs to be implemented.
So YOU would get bored and quit playing MMO's forever and leave the rest of us to play fun games.
Cheers.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
I'm amazed it took 5 pages of posts before someone mentioned the LOST CONNECTION problem. I'm sure alot of people 'see the point', but what I don't see is how you implement a fair system that safeguards against lost connections, crashes, powercuts whilst preventing abuse of that system to avoid dying simply by pulling the plug.
There can not be a single person here that has never dropped out of a game whilst mid combat/mission/travel whatever due to reasons beyond there control. Until you can make that problem non existant said games CSR's inbox would be overflowing with said problems.
I'm not sure what you mean by "older". If you mean over 25 or 30, then that's not been my experience. Most of the gamers I've met who seriously advocate permadeath have been under 25, though not all, of course. Permadeath insinuates a level of commitment that I wouldn't be crazy about. One would want the best gear and items to ensure longevity. Most of the older people I meet gaming have responsibilities other than themselves and really can't invest the sort of time that takes.
While there might be an increase in a sense of accomplishment and excitement for some, Im not sure most people would feel that way. In fact, it could have the opposite affect for many. People might not want to do much that is risky. I think many might lose interest faster due to the lack of adventure caused by being afraid to take a chance. I'm not sure that I would actually feel any sense of acheivement if I lost my character before I had done everything I could or at least wanted to in a game.
I'm sure there people who enjoy the realism associated with permadeath but I have a feeling I'm not one of them. While I like a modicum of realistic behaviour in a game, for me permadeath will be just a bit too OTT. I would probably get a bit stressy about my character and that's not really what I'm looking for in an MMO. These are the same reasons I enjoy games without great death penalties, although I'm not against some sort of penalty.
I used to be very into Shadowbane and it was rather nerve-wracking never knowing if your town would be in ruins next time you logged in. In one respect I enjoyed that excitment, in another it was very trying. When I left, I decided I'd never get too serious about a game again. I'm much happier playing games today. I do like PvP, but not for the material rewards to my character. I don't need them to enjoy pitting myself against another player or another guild.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be games with permadeath. I'm not even saying I wouldn't give one a go. I think there should be enough choice to suit everyone's style, if possible. I don't know, however, how well a game with permadeath would do but I'm sort of interested in finding out. So I agree with you... someone should implement it.