Heaven forbid you saddle your gamers today with a death penalty. That is pretty much what I see in most of the new games coming out. I think the problem arises from so many players coming from FPS games where there is basically no death penalty.
I think the best death penalty I have seen was in AC1. You lost some of your more expensive items on your body and had some minor stat loss. The items were recoverable if you could get back to your body, the stat loss could be recovered by just gaining more experience. which was inclusive with the experience gained toward the next level.
I think a death penalty should have some meat to it because without such, the game represents little challenge.
Heaven forbid you saddle your gamers today with a death penalty. That is pretty much what I see in most of the new games coming out. I think the problem arises from so many players coming from FPS games where there is basically no death penalty.
I think the best death penalty I have seen was in AC1. You lost some of your more expensive items on your body and had some minor stat loss. The items were recoverable if you could get back to your body, the stat loss could be recovered by just gaining more experience. which was inclusive with the experience gained toward the next level.
I think a death penalty should have some meat to it because without such, the game represents little challenge.
I always liked SWG's penalty (black bar), as well as the methods of healing it (socially). On top of that weapon and armor decay added even more incentive to stay alive. Those days are gone I'm afraid, now it's as you say, like fps's an instant return to action.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
BULLSHIT. STO needs a lot of things, but a death penality is the LAST thing it needs. Literally. If everything else is great, THEN you can consider it, but as the shell of a game as it is, thinking about a death penality is just a sign of the total loss of reality Crytic suffers from.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
If STO wishes to keep true to the episode-style of gameplay, why not make losing a ship similar? Perhaps sitting in an escape pod until they are rescued, or landing on the surface of a nearby planet and setting up a beacon until another ship shows up? I understand a player would want to get right back in to the game, so these don't need to last as long as you'd see in a typical Star Trek episode, but it is a thought. Since the game revolves around instancing every mission, it shouldn't be too much to have one of these scenarios randomly occur after your ship is toast. Also, in regards to how much of an encumbrance on a fleet this would be, give other players the ability to rescue the pods with their own ships in order to hasten the process. Just my 0.02 on the subject.
Great idea, maybe we should get more bridge officers and each time there is a death a bridge member gets hurt and replaced.
Also how about the captain gets emegency teleported to a base so he can get one of his other ships to mount a rescue, once you have recovered your standed men you then have to do some kind of mission to regain the ship you lost in battle.
Now there should also be something for a death in away missions, maybe use something similar that what is used in Dragon Age where you have injuries which effect you or the bridge officers performance
They should of made STO a sandbox and maybe something simliar to WW2 online where player controlled space affects the boarders of the federation and klingon empire.
Doesn't EVE already offer that?
Yes but I am talking about actual system/planets being controlled were neutral or already controlled by federation/klingons.
Like it any war, key points and cities are generally valuable targets.
Personally i think the original team before cyprtic took it over were on the right track.
As I keep saying to people; if you like EVE, play EVE. That might have made it a better MMO, but it would have been less "Star Trek". There are other IP's that are focused around space war and battles like that, but to me Star Trek was never really about fighting a war, it just included some occasional skirmishes.
You're missing the point, in STO lore, the federation is at war with the klingons, so if they're going to make the game with the federation in a war, they could make it more better like i said. STO is ruined imo.
Meaningful death penalty? How about A death penalty. I'm not calling for anything too extreme, but there's got to be something.
there is one, you crew is dammaged and that effects your shield and hull repair rate
This kind of penalty is the most any MMO needs. Anything else is just a time sink, regardless of how they spin it. When I die in a single player game, I just go back to my last saved position (and I save before every single fight). I see no reason for MMOs to have anything harsher than that. The gear degradation seems reasonable.
When I was playing Wow, if you wiped in a raid, everyone had to run all the way back to the instance, and then all the way back through the parts you've cleared (if no moronic respawns occurred). I found that brutal and utterly unfun. Surely no player actually enjoys a penalty like that? Thus, it's an intentional time-sink put in by devs to keep us paying longer, and nothing more.
BULLSHIT. STO needs a lot of things, but a death penality is the LAST thing it needs. Literally. If everything else is great, THEN you can consider it, but as the shell of a game as it is, thinking about a death penality is just a sign of the total loss of reality Crytic suffers from.
Amen brother.
I agree I love the game and they do need to keep working. I could really care less about a death penalty I think its enough that your crew is penalized and your hull repair rate it lowered keeps you for jumping right back in just long enough to feel the death effect in my op
I don't play STO but death penalties are a constant debate in all MMO titles. My feeling is if they are going to add one in STO it's probably better to do it sooner rather later.
I play EVE, where the death penalty can be pretty severe. Some like it and others don't but one thing is for sure, there is an entire economy based on it. Loss, gives a sense of fear which in turn drives the adrenaline which makes PVP fun for some and a system to avoid for others. It works in EVE because of the economics, the players and the game was built with PVP at the center of game play.
When I think of STO I can't help but think of my time at COH/COV. I really enjoyed the old PVP system in COH/COV although it didn't have any death penalty. Was that a reason why PVP was avoided by most in COH/COV, because it was pretty much pointless? Or, was it pointless because of the type of player who played COH/COV, PVE centric base? That is the question for STO, who's your base? My guess is PVE players with casual PVP.
I feel that the original death penalty they had talked about and even started to implement in closed beta was near perfect. This was the system that if your ship took heavy enough damage or if your ship was destroyed, you would permanently lose some of your crew. Your crew helped you maintain peak efficiency and hull repair rates, and in order to maintain peak efficiency you had to 1) take care of your crew so they didn't die, and 2) replace your fallen by recruiting more at a starbase. This was to be done at the rate of 1 starfleet merit per crewmember.
During beta, they kept assuring us that they were still working on it, so noone really made a big deal that it wasn't in. They even made a pretty large effort to install crew requisitions "vendors" in all the starbases (originally in closed beta it was just one or two vendors in a couple starbases). Then open beta and the headstart period came around and all of a sudden the crew requisitions officers turned into noninteractable NPCs and not a single word was said from Cryptic as to what was going on, or even why they changed their minds on the subject at the last minute (if that was the case).
There are a surprisingly vocal and adamant group of players that are against that type of system, who apparently want no significance placed with the people who operate their ships. They are perfectly happy to zerg rush instances and just throw themselves at an enemy over and over again with no repercussions. They argue:
I don't want to have to go back to a starbase after every mission! - This can be avoided by learning to be a better player so you don't get your crew killed off in the first place, but the way the initial DP was set up, you still don't have to go back to a starbase and replenish your fallen crew. They don't keep you from operating, they just keep you operating at peak efficiency. If you're really good (ST:III, anyone?) you can run with a skeleton crew or no crew at all! You won't be able to repair yourself very well (unless you've got Bridge Officer powers that are superior to the regen rates anyway), but if you were so hot you don't need repairs it wouldn't matter, would it? (As an aside, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm usually going back to a starbase after at least every other mission anyway to drop off loot at the bank/exchange, train officers, adjust costumes for promoting officers, etc...)
This is unfair to fragile Escorts since Cruisers never die! - This is false because the cost is per crewmember, and there is balance here. The glass cannon Escorts may get themselves blown up more frequently, but they also have very tiny crews. Cruisers may have more durability, but they also have a LOT more crew. If they die or take hits that kill their crew, the cost they pay for their crew is much higher. But again, the ship's crew doesn't prevent you from operating, they just help you operate BETTER.
This isn't going to stop zerg rushers from zerging! - No it probably won't, but let them do so... at the cost of their regen rates. If it matters not that they're going to die anyway, then they probably don't care about their crew. But for people who do care about peak efficiency and/or the state of their crew, what this does is give them another layer of depth to think about and another layer of complexity to keep the game from feeling like a cheap arcade shoot'em up (Star Trek: DAC) where you insert another coin to continue.
However, there are some things that would need to be fixed/adjusted before their original DP proposal would actually be viable:
There needs to be consistency in what kills/damages crew and by what amounts - supposedly kinetic damage should be killing crew, yet there are reports that this is highly inconsistent. Players can have no shields and take a torpedo hit with no effect on their crew, while with full shields up and an energy beam hit, suddenly a large portion of their crew is gone. Upon death, the amount of crew lost needs to be a percentage, not a fixed amount as well.
Disable permanent crew loss in PvP zones. This is the only area I think that a DP wouldn't work. Most other games also disable DP in PvP areas in some way, shape or form, and I think that would be fair here as well.
Enemy Sensor Contacts - in the higher areas, these random encounters are NOTORIOUS for zoning you in the middle of an overpowered superfleet (especially when that particular instance is waiting to reset), where they already have your shields down and your ship half destroyed by the time you've got control of your ship again. They need to adjust spawn points or Superfleet pathing areas so you don't instantly get blown up before you have a chance to react.
Either way, right now the current DP of a 10 second respawn timer is a joke. It adds absolutely no immersion, and doesn't make anyone feel any consequences for their actions, or influence them to approach a challenge in a different way. There is no benefit to playing smarter rather than harder.
The crew bar as it stands is just an arbitrary meter that goes up and down with no influence from you, the captain, with no visible effect on the ship. Supposedly the crew still affects repair rates, but you can't tell, because even if they are depleted, they get regenerated so fast that you don't see any effect it would have had with your repair rates. Or you die, and then your crew comes back anyway.
How about some meaningful content to go with the meaningful death?
I dont know about you but I for STO I would prefer wounding as opposed to out and out death let engineers and doctors aid in getting ships back up and running in some battles let ships drift in space hoping their fleetmates can come repair them or tow them back to a shipyard and if thats not quick enough they can allways send out a distress signal that summons a repair tug or if there really desprit they can abandon ship and swap to a undamaged ship the latter options have more penalty than having a fleet mate repair them such as loss of some points.
having STO built like an arcade game with infinite lives is about as dumbed down as you can get.
perhapse you should go back into beta and do it right this time.
sure feels like star wars galaxies "new game expirence" all over again.
hmmm star trek galaxies.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
BULLSHIT. STO needs a lot of things, but a death penality is the LAST thing it needs. Literally. If everything else is great, THEN you can consider it, but as the shell of a game as it is, thinking about a death penality is just a sign of the total loss of reality Crytic suffers from.
The game is in need of meaningful ANYTHING. Right now it's just a generic combat MMO with a Star Trek skin. Ranks are meaningless except to get ships and skills; skills are meaningless except for destroying your enemies. Dialogue is meaningless except to choose your rewards.
Personally it doesn't matter one way or another. I play other MMOs with death penalties, and I don't think that a death penalty has made them more enjoyable. Right now I think the development team needs to focus on fixing the bugs in the system, and adding content. If anyone saw the video on YouTube where Jack Emmerts discribed what STO would contain, it was supposed to contain three parts: combat, exploration and economy. We have the combat portion, such as it is, but exploration is bland, un-inspiring with virtualy no gameplay, You enter systems that are supposed to be unexplored, but strangely enough have Federation outpost on them. And most of them degenerate into combat scenarios anyway. STO is very bland when you put the phaser down.
The economy portion is non-existant. It would be pointless to have equipment destroyed if there is no economy there to replace it. Sorry, but scanning anomolies and taking them to Memory Alpha is not an economy, it maybe acceptable as a stop gap, but if they intend it to be the economic system it will not do. Exploration and economics is not even close to what was described in the presentation at the 2008 Star Trek convention. And, don't even get me started on sector space! This is what STO needs more then a "Meaningful" Death Penalty. I rather see resources spent on finishing the game rather than reworking the game mechanics to implement a death penalty,
I will make one proposal though, one I don't believe would cause a major redesign of the combat system, just turn off respawn. If you are defeated "GAME OVER" You will need to start over! If you in PVP you lose, no PVP points, even if your side wins the battle, that would probably discourge zerging. It may not be ideal, but would not divert much to it's implementation, and something else can be substituted later when the other missing parts of the game are in place.
If you'd been in beta you wouldn't be surprised. Really the only thing Cryptic fully delivered on was starship combat. Everything else they dropped the ball on. The game is made for shoot-em-up fanboys, plain and simple.
Comments
Heaven forbid you saddle your gamers today with a death penalty. That is pretty much what I see in most of the new games coming out. I think the problem arises from so many players coming from FPS games where there is basically no death penalty.
I think the best death penalty I have seen was in AC1. You lost some of your more expensive items on your body and had some minor stat loss. The items were recoverable if you could get back to your body, the stat loss could be recovered by just gaining more experience. which was inclusive with the experience gained toward the next level.
I think a death penalty should have some meat to it because without such, the game represents little challenge.
I always liked SWG's penalty (black bar), as well as the methods of healing it (socially). On top of that weapon and armor decay added even more incentive to stay alive. Those days are gone I'm afraid, now it's as you say, like fps's an instant return to action.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
BULLSHIT. STO needs a lot of things, but a death penality is the LAST thing it needs. Literally. If everything else is great, THEN you can consider it, but as the shell of a game as it is, thinking about a death penality is just a sign of the total loss of reality Crytic suffers from.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Aye captain. Sensors confirm this game is in self destruct mode. Red alert, abandon ship.
Great idea, maybe we should get more bridge officers and each time there is a death a bridge member gets hurt and replaced.
Also how about the captain gets emegency teleported to a base so he can get one of his other ships to mount a rescue, once you have recovered your standed men you then have to do some kind of mission to regain the ship you lost in battle.
Now there should also be something for a death in away missions, maybe use something similar that what is used in Dragon Age where you have injuries which effect you or the bridge officers performance
Doesn't EVE already offer that?
Yes but I am talking about actual system/planets being controlled were neutral or already controlled by federation/klingons.
Like it any war, key points and cities are generally valuable targets.
Personally i think the original team before cyprtic took it over were on the right track.
As I keep saying to people; if you like EVE, play EVE. That might have made it a better MMO, but it would have been less "Star Trek". There are other IP's that are focused around space war and battles like that, but to me Star Trek was never really about fighting a war, it just included some occasional skirmishes.
You're missing the point, in STO lore, the federation is at war with the klingons, so if they're going to make the game with the federation in a war, they could make it more better like i said. STO is ruined imo.
there is one, you crew is dammaged and that effects your shield and hull repair rate
This kind of penalty is the most any MMO needs. Anything else is just a time sink, regardless of how they spin it. When I die in a single player game, I just go back to my last saved position (and I save before every single fight). I see no reason for MMOs to have anything harsher than that. The gear degradation seems reasonable.
When I was playing Wow, if you wiped in a raid, everyone had to run all the way back to the instance, and then all the way back through the parts you've cleared (if no moronic respawns occurred). I found that brutal and utterly unfun. Surely no player actually enjoys a penalty like that? Thus, it's an intentional time-sink put in by devs to keep us paying longer, and nothing more.
Amen brother.
I agree I love the game and they do need to keep working. I could really care less about a death penalty I think its enough that your crew is penalized and your hull repair rate it lowered keeps you for jumping right back in just long enough to feel the death effect in my op
I still think there needs to be the ability to die before adding death penalties...in PvE, it takes a lot to actually die...
Check out the MUD I'm making!
I don't play STO but death penalties are a constant debate in all MMO titles. My feeling is if they are going to add one in STO it's probably better to do it sooner rather later.
I play EVE, where the death penalty can be pretty severe. Some like it and others don't but one thing is for sure, there is an entire economy based on it. Loss, gives a sense of fear which in turn drives the adrenaline which makes PVP fun for some and a system to avoid for others. It works in EVE because of the economics, the players and the game was built with PVP at the center of game play.
When I think of STO I can't help but think of my time at COH/COV. I really enjoyed the old PVP system in COH/COV although it didn't have any death penalty. Was that a reason why PVP was avoided by most in COH/COV, because it was pretty much pointless? Or, was it pointless because of the type of player who played COH/COV, PVE centric base? That is the question for STO, who's your base? My guess is PVE players with casual PVP.
I feel that the original death penalty they had talked about and even started to implement in closed beta was near perfect. This was the system that if your ship took heavy enough damage or if your ship was destroyed, you would permanently lose some of your crew. Your crew helped you maintain peak efficiency and hull repair rates, and in order to maintain peak efficiency you had to 1) take care of your crew so they didn't die, and 2) replace your fallen by recruiting more at a starbase. This was to be done at the rate of 1 starfleet merit per crewmember.
During beta, they kept assuring us that they were still working on it, so noone really made a big deal that it wasn't in. They even made a pretty large effort to install crew requisitions "vendors" in all the starbases (originally in closed beta it was just one or two vendors in a couple starbases). Then open beta and the headstart period came around and all of a sudden the crew requisitions officers turned into noninteractable NPCs and not a single word was said from Cryptic as to what was going on, or even why they changed their minds on the subject at the last minute (if that was the case).
There are a surprisingly vocal and adamant group of players that are against that type of system, who apparently want no significance placed with the people who operate their ships. They are perfectly happy to zerg rush instances and just throw themselves at an enemy over and over again with no repercussions. They argue:
However, there are some things that would need to be fixed/adjusted before their original DP proposal would actually be viable:
Either way, right now the current DP of a 10 second respawn timer is a joke. It adds absolutely no immersion, and doesn't make anyone feel any consequences for their actions, or influence them to approach a challenge in a different way. There is no benefit to playing smarter rather than harder.
The crew bar as it stands is just an arbitrary meter that goes up and down with no influence from you, the captain, with no visible effect on the ship. Supposedly the crew still affects repair rates, but you can't tell, because even if they are depleted, they get regenerated so fast that you don't see any effect it would have had with your repair rates. Or you die, and then your crew comes back anyway.
The only pain that matters is hitting the players virtual wallet.
There is already too much SURPLUS in players 'banks' for such a young game... blowing up your ship should cost you something.
There seems to be a SURPLUS of officers. Random officer permanent deaths.. that would keep players more honest and suicide runs down to a minimum.
The devs could also remove all customization from ships... forcing the re-investment in the custom looks because you blew up the last one you fool
The above situations would not be game breaking and definately on-theme.
SWG/STO/(SWTOR)
How about some meaningful content to go with the meaningful death?
I dont know about you but I for STO I would prefer wounding as opposed to out and out death let engineers and doctors aid in getting ships back up and running in some battles let ships drift in space hoping their fleetmates can come repair them or tow them back to a shipyard and if thats not quick enough they can allways send out a distress signal that summons a repair tug or if there really desprit they can abandon ship and swap to a undamaged ship the latter options have more penalty than having a fleet mate repair them such as loss of some points.
having STO built like an arcade game with infinite lives is about as dumbed down as you can get.
perhapse you should go back into beta and do it right this time.
sure feels like star wars galaxies "new game expirence" all over again.
hmmm star trek galaxies.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
Totally agree
No death penalty. For all the reasons other people said no death penalty. Peace.
The game is in need of meaningful ANYTHING. Right now it's just a generic combat MMO with a Star Trek skin. Ranks are meaningless except to get ships and skills; skills are meaningless except for destroying your enemies. Dialogue is meaningless except to choose your rewards.
My vote for " Meaningful " Death Penalty
MAYBE ?
MAGA
Personally it doesn't matter one way or another. I play other MMOs with death penalties, and I don't think that a death penalty has made them more enjoyable. Right now I think the development team needs to focus on fixing the bugs in the system, and adding content. If anyone saw the video on YouTube where Jack Emmerts discribed what STO would contain, it was supposed to contain three parts: combat, exploration and economy. We have the combat portion, such as it is, but exploration is bland, un-inspiring with virtualy no gameplay, You enter systems that are supposed to be unexplored, but strangely enough have Federation outpost on them. And most of them degenerate into combat scenarios anyway. STO is very bland when you put the phaser down.
The economy portion is non-existant. It would be pointless to have equipment destroyed if there is no economy there to replace it. Sorry, but scanning anomolies and taking them to Memory Alpha is not an economy, it maybe acceptable as a stop gap, but if they intend it to be the economic system it will not do. Exploration and economics is not even close to what was described in the presentation at the 2008 Star Trek convention. And, don't even get me started on sector space! This is what STO needs more then a "Meaningful" Death Penalty. I rather see resources spent on finishing the game rather than reworking the game mechanics to implement a death penalty,
I will make one proposal though, one I don't believe would cause a major redesign of the combat system, just turn off respawn. If you are defeated "GAME OVER" You will need to start over! If you in PVP you lose, no PVP points, even if your side wins the battle, that would probably discourge zerging. It may not be ideal, but would not divert much to it's implementation, and something else can be substituted later when the other missing parts of the game are in place.
/sigh
I don't know whether it is funny or sad that they are just NOW addressing the death penalty AFTER the game has launched.
If you'd been in beta you wouldn't be surprised. Really the only thing Cryptic fully delivered on was starship combat. Everything else they dropped the ball on. The game is made for shoot-em-up fanboys, plain and simple.