If you look at all the games in the past that were widely considered hard and you notice that nearly all of them demanded a sort of "player skill check". If you do not have the skill to pass the encounter you have to try again fresh. No penalty, no setback, just try again until you improve and pass the skill check. Then, and only then, you can move on to your next encounter. Guild Wars 1 was a very challenging game when it first came out. Some missions demanded several tries with adjustments to the group build until they could be finished. People complained that the game was hard. I loved it.
Note that the game has no death penalty just like Ninja Gaiden Black had no death penalty, or Dark Souls had no death penalty (*) or Megaman or Bubble Bobble etc. MMORPG death penalty in the form of EXP/gear loss really isn't challenge. Certainly not for everyone. Personally I think its just an annoyance and many times just outright unnecessary. However, it gives a thrill to some people without which they cannot enjoy the game otherwise. In any case, death penalty is a separate thing from challenge and difficulty.
In all MMORPGs, without scaling, limiting the number of participants or level adjustments there is no challenge. In a generic MMO you can always outlevel your content or bring more friends. Devs have been trying make challenging content for years but some players have dismissed them for various reasons for example to an MMO purist instances have no place in an MMORPG no matter how many advantages they bring. They simply refuse to play them.
I feel that OP's list of what makes things difficult in MMOs tied to the way generic MMOs are made. What if there are no aggro bubbles but line of sight aggro? Should encounters be designed in a way that a completely unrelated random event can decide success or failure? Do you want to divide character builds into PvE builds and PvP builds where the PvP builds come always on the top? Does the game revolve around manipulating mob AI aka tank 'n' spank? Why should these things be locked? If we completely change how we approach some of these age old mechanics that most take for granted can we solve some fundamental flaw in the basic design? Or more importantly: can we have vastly different games? But mainly I just had an issue with how OP approached difficulty through (what I think is) a generic model of a MMORPG.
One way to add skill and difficulty to MMORPG is to add something which some people may refer to as "twitchy elements". Take Starcraft 2 for example: There is a certain level of knowledge you must attain to be succesful in it. This knowledge includes build orders, unit stats, game mechanics, knowledge of the map, knowledge of your opponent etc. Even if you knew all of these by heart you can always improve your execution. In Starcraft 2's case this is strategy, tactics, situational awareness, multitasking, speed of execution, being good in micro and maintaining your macro at the same time. No matter how good you become you can always be better. Any FPS game is a good example of this aswell.
The twitch doesn't necessarily take away from the knowledge-side of difficulty. Nothing says it is so.
(*) You did lose all your un-allocated EXP if you died twice in a row but the main "penalty" was that you had to do that 15-30 minute run/encounter again until you nailed it
Its like you didn't even both to read what I wrote. You are comparing apples to oranges. An instance is a separate game totally separated from the rest of the static world in which it exists. You are comparing a complete game to a single part of another game. Dungeons in virtual worlds are not isolated game aspects or games in and of themselves like raids in themeparks.
As for always being able to get better, thats bullshit. You cannot always become better. After you play 10000 games you are suddenly going to spike one day and be able to topple much better players. Even if you argue for incremental improvements, after 10000 or less, the actual number is effectively irrelevant, another 1000 games are unlikely to see you taking on opponents you couldn't beat after your first 10000 games.
As long as you keep comparing a full and complete game with a small part of another game you are going to be stuck in this weird twilight zone.
After you die in LoL you still have to travel back to the lane right? Well when you die in a virtual world you have to travel back to your previous location too. It just happens that virtual worlds are larger than LoL.
One thing people don't seem to get is that the death penalty challenge isn't what happens after you die it's what happens before you die. With very little death penalty you are more likely to charge into any situation without hesitation because there is nothing to lose by doing so. With a stiff death penalty you are more likely to think every situation through before you enter. You are more likely to use strategy to get it right the first time instead of dieing repeatedly until you get lucky. The challenge is NOT dieing at all.
Bren
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
One thing people don't seem to get is that the death penalty challenge isn't what happens after you die it's what happens before you die. With very little death penalty you are more likely to charge into any situation without hesitation because there is nothing to lose by doing so. With a stiff death penalty you are more likely to think every situation through before you enter. You are more likely to use strategy to get it right the first time instead of dieing repeatedly until you get lucky. The challenge is NOT dieing at all.
Bren
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Death penalty is death penalty regardless if it's in a sandbox or a themepark. My statement holds true for both types of games.
Apparently the "hard" games are the one where, when you mess up, you are forced into an activity that is not fun.
The less fun the activity the harder the game.
You see its "hard" because its hard to jusitify to yourself why you keep playing a game that isn't fun.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
There is a term in developmental psychology for the point in a child's life when they realize that not everyone likes the same things as them. A lot of people on this forum apparently skipped that step.
No one says YOU PERSONALLY are required to like death penalties. And you have literaly DOZENS of MMOs which cater to no death penalty. Why then do you find it necessary to forbid the players who enjoy death penalties from having just a few games with them?
When I log into a game, it's like walking into a maze. Aggro, death penalties, grind - these are all simply means of creating texture to the maze. But some of the most important walls exist only in own imagination and inexperience: some of my best game experiences come from very simple encounters that I simply didn't understand at the time or because of obstacles that existed only in my imagination, not in the game mechanics.
One thing people don't seem to get is that the death penalty challenge isn't what happens after you die it's what happens before you die. With very little death penalty you are more likely to charge into any situation without hesitation because there is nothing to lose by doing so. With a stiff death penalty you are more likely to think every situation through before you enter. You are more likely to use strategy to get it right the first time instead of dieing repeatedly until you get lucky. The challenge is NOT dieing at all.
Bren
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Death penalty is death penalty regardless if it's in a sandbox or a themepark. My statement holds true for both types of games.
Bren
In a sandbox you get into a fight even at a risk because you stand to lose more if you don't. If you fight a nullsec war in EvE to protect yourself you stand to lose ships and isk. But what happens if you don't fight? You lose everything.
That is why I keep talking about MMORTS games. MMORTS games are the only virtual worlds still around. And its 99% text based ones. Why? Because the costs are low enough to get companies interested.
If you lose a fight in an RTS you still lose your ships, lots of them and possibly planets and colonies or even whole star systems.
In a themepark its static. It costs you nothing to not fight. Because nothing changes and their is no territory. And in cases where there is, you DO have a death penalty. You lose the keep or relic.
That is what I am telling you. The reason Themeparks can't have death penalties is because they are lobby based coop games. Each instance or raid or dungeon is a full game. After you are done it resets and you reset. No matter who wins.
If losing in a sandbox had no penalty, and you just respawned right where you died, how could the game change? You would just fight in the same spot eternally.
Well when you die in a virtual world you have to travel back to your previous location too. It just happens that virtual worlds are larger than LoL.
I think this is the reason why people divide what is happening into the game into independant tasks. When you die in a MMORPG you will respawn and be given the ability to start again from a certain location. People naturally see this respawn location as the start of the current event/task. If after you have respawned, all the enemies you have fought have respawned as well, it will feel like a new game.
In the end you end up at the age old problem that if you want the entire playing experience to feel like a single event/unit then you will have to give it a finite start and end aka perma-death. Anything else and people will subdivide the experience into sub-games.
One thing people don't seem to get is that the death penalty challenge isn't what happens after you die it's what happens before you die. With very little death penalty you are more likely to charge into any situation without hesitation because there is nothing to lose by doing so. With a stiff death penalty you are more likely to think every situation through before you enter. You are more likely to use strategy to get it right the first time instead of dieing repeatedly until you get lucky. The challenge is NOT dieing at all.
Bren
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Death penalty is death penalty regardless if it's in a sandbox or a themepark. My statement holds true for both types of games. In a non-PvP setting death penalties are a themepark feature.
Bren
In a sandbox you get into a fight even at a risk because you stand to lose more if you don't. If you fight a nullsec war in EvE to protect yourself you stand to lose ships and isk. But what happens if you don't fight? You lose everything.
That is why I keep talking about MMORTS games. MMORTS games are the only virtual worlds still around. And its 99% text based ones. Why? Because the costs are low enough to get companies interested.
If you lose a fight in an RTS you still lose your ships, lots of them and possibly planets and colonies or even whole star systems.
In a themepark its static. It costs you nothing to not fight. Because nothing changes and their is no territory. And in cases where there is, you DO have a death penalty. You lose the keep or relic.
That is what I am telling you. The reason Themeparks can't have death penalties is because they are lobby based coop games. Each instance or raid or dungeon is a full game. After you are done it resets and you reset. No matter who wins.
If losing in a sandbox had no penalty, and you just respawned right where you died, how could the game change? You would just fight in the same spot eternally.
That's only true for PvP-based sandboxes. A Non-PvP sandbox does not need death penalties beyond simple respawn delays.
The difficulty of an MMORPG is defined by the harshness of its world
But what does this really mean? It seems really broad, and well...it is. It means that you have to consider EVERYTHING that makes your goal of "getting more powerful" more challenging when you consider difficulty. This typically includes, but is not limited to:
1. The "aggro radius" and frequency of mobs. Are you likely to get an add while you are fighting?
2. The presence of high level mobs in lower level zones. Do you have to watch out for that sand giant when you are fighting orcs?
3. A big one, the DEATH PENALTY. If dying (failing) does not act as any real setback in your goal of getting more powerful, then this drastically decreases the difficulty of the game. It would be like a racing game where crashing had zero impact on your car and you just immediately reappeared on the track going 100mph whenever you crashed.
4. The relative scarcity of loot/gold. If you are constantly flooded with enough loot to get all the best items for your level, then the game is much easier. If you instead had to pick and choose what loot to get, and sometimes couldn't even train all your skills...then the game is harder.
5. The presence or absence of open world PvP. A game is definitely more difficult when you have to worry about gankers.
6. And yes of course, the difficulty of each individual fight.
Great list. One I would add...
Speed of progression. Difficulty is also measured by endurance.
Walking may be easy. Walking to the mailbox is nothing. Walking from Chicago to Los Angeles is more difficult. It's still walking, but given the distance the endurance of the walker becomes an issue.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Well when you die in a virtual world you have to travel back to your previous location too. It just happens that virtual worlds are larger than LoL.
I think this is the reason why people divide what is happening into the game into independant tasks. When you die in a MMORPG you will respawn and be given the ability to start again from a certain location. People naturally see this respawn location as the start of the current event/task. If after you have respawned, all the enemies you have fought have respawned as well, it will feel like a new game.
In the end you end up at the age old problem that if you want the entire playing experience to feel like a single event/unit then you will have to give it a finite start and end aka perma-death. Anything else and people will subdivide the experience into sub-games.
This doesn't happen in MMORTS games. People accept that each interaction is a small part of a larger game. This may have something to do with your "avatar" "toon" "character" not actually dying here. But thats largely an issue of perception. If you just tell yourself, this is a giant RTS game where all of our side is controlled by players, you can short circuit this issue.
Also, in many RTS games, like Majesty, you can ressurect your Hero with all their gold and levels and spells. So you could conceive of the game in that manner too.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
One thing people don't seem to get is that the death penalty challenge isn't what happens after you die it's what happens before you die. With very little death penalty you are more likely to charge into any situation without hesitation because there is nothing to lose by doing so. With a stiff death penalty you are more likely to think every situation through before you enter. You are more likely to use strategy to get it right the first time instead of dieing repeatedly until you get lucky. The challenge is NOT dieing at all.
Bren
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Death penalty is death penalty regardless if it's in a sandbox or a themepark. My statement holds true for both types of games. In a non-PvP setting death penalties are a themepark feature.
Bren
In a sandbox you get into a fight even at a risk because you stand to lose more if you don't. If you fight a nullsec war in EvE to protect yourself you stand to lose ships and isk. But what happens if you don't fight? You lose everything.
That is why I keep talking about MMORTS games. MMORTS games are the only virtual worlds still around. And its 99% text based ones. Why? Because the costs are low enough to get companies interested.
If you lose a fight in an RTS you still lose your ships, lots of them and possibly planets and colonies or even whole star systems.
In a themepark its static. It costs you nothing to not fight. Because nothing changes and their is no territory. And in cases where there is, you DO have a death penalty. You lose the keep or relic.
That is what I am telling you. The reason Themeparks can't have death penalties is because they are lobby based coop games. Each instance or raid or dungeon is a full game. After you are done it resets and you reset. No matter who wins.
If losing in a sandbox had no penalty, and you just respawned right where you died, how could the game change? You would just fight in the same spot eternally.
That's only true for PvP-based sandboxes. A Non-PvP sandbox does not need death penalties beyond simple respawn delays.
Why? Provide support for this statement. You are going to lose cities in a giant RTS anyways. Bases die in RTS games. Is losing a couple stats or taking some item damage such a big deal compared to losing a building or a whole city?
In a virtual world or RTS you have to lose things. Its the nature of the game. Because the goal is for one side to destroy the other.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
The fun is in the fear of incurring the penalty not the act itself.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
People have argued that the sense of fear and the risk of loss produced by death penalties makes the game exciting.
You really should avoid the reductio ad absurdum though. How could you even randomly kill a player every 20 minutes anyways? If its every 20 minutes its not random.
Perhaps I should just say that people are arguing that games with death penalties are fun? Or that the result of death penalties makes a game fun. W/e.
If the chance of dying makes a game exciting, and you have to actually die every once in a while to make it fun, its no biggy.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
The fun is in the fear of incurring the penalty not the act itself.
This. Saying death penalties are fun is clearly understood to mean this.
Its like you didn't even both to read what I wrote. You are comparing apples to oranges. An instance is a separate game totally separated from the rest of the static world in which it exists. You are comparing a complete game to a single part of another game. Dungeons in virtual worlds are not isolated game aspects or games in and of themselves like raids in themeparks.
As for always being able to get better, thats bullshit. You cannot always become better. After you play 10000 games you are suddenly going to spike one day and be able to topple much better players. Even if you argue for incremental improvements, after 10000 or less, the actual number is effectively irrelevant, another 1000 games are unlikely to see you taking on opponents you couldn't beat after your first 10000 games.
As long as you keep comparing a full and complete game with a small part of another game you are going to be stuck in this weird twilight zone.
After you die in LoL you still have to travel back to the lane right? Well when you die in a virtual world you have to travel back to your previous location too. It just happens that virtual worlds are larger than LoL.
I'm talking games here and MMORPGs are games. And I talk from experience from many and great variety of games I've played and players I've played with. I have several friends who have played several games in multiple international tournaments. I've played games at a world championship level. When I say I've mastered games, I have fucking mastered them. You call BS on my take on player skill. Where is your gaming CV?
If that is your take on death penalty in LoL, I'd say you are grossly downplaying it or haven't realised the full extent. One death in LoL may decide the whole match. Not only you die and are out of the game for several seconds, but your enemies get a big reward for killing you in XP and gold. On top of that you lose that time to get EXP and gold same thing your enemies will be gathering while you are waiting to respawn. And while you are rotting in the ground, your enemies get a chance to push the lane, get a tower, get dragon, invade your jungle, get a baron buff and possible get a local superiority in numbers which may then lead to ganking. You want to kill those enemies because apart from the immediate reward you get a tactical advantage which may then lead to you winning the game. Snowball effect is essential in LoL.
Then you die in your standard MMORPG, you lose XP and gear. You did not lose the game, you just died. You are often not even playing the game at a disadvantage. Its just punishment. The difference is very apparent. I have no idea why you'd bring this up but to show how lost you are.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Um, I know how it works at the championship level. But in 99% of LoL games played its not like that.
Also HoN snowballs like 1000x harder than LoL. In Hon you have all the same things but also lose your own gold, and many items drop on death. Plus the items combine much more and skills too. Carrying is also way easier.
In any case each player may be more important in LoL and the time scale of the game is designed to be much shorter than an MMO. If you made a LoL map 10 times as big and with 4x as many heros then one death wouldn't mean as much.
Even if you were right which you aren't, all you are arguing is that death penalties should be harsher. If one death is even a bigger deal than you imply that dying once in an mmorpg means the whole game should be lost.
Are you wrong or are you even more into death penalties than I ever was?
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
Death penalties are not supposed to be fun. Their sole purpose is to make the player fear dieing. This makes you have to play the game in a more strategic way. This is where the fun comes in. It's figuring out how to acomplish something without dieing. What we have now is what I like to call the "Single Player Zerg". If you throw yourself headlong into any situation enough times you'll eventually succeed. This comes from having no fear of dieing. This is what my second to last post was all about even if it did go right over the head of a certain Sandbox Fanatic.
Oh... And the bit about Death Penalties only working in PvP Sandbox games is the biggest load of rubbish I've heard on this forum in a very long time. (Not directed at you nariusseldon.)
Um, I know how it works at the championship level. But in 99% of LoL games played its not like that.
Also HoN snowballs like 1000x harder than LoL. In Hon you have all the same things but also lose your own gold, and many items drop on death. Plus the items combine much more and skills too. Carrying is also way easier.
In any case each player may be more important in LoL and the time scale of the game is designed to be much shorter than an MMO. If you made a LoL map 10 times as big and with 4x as many heros then one death wouldn't mean as much.
Even if you were right which you aren't, all you are arguing is that death penalties should be harsher. If one death is even a bigger deal than you imply that dying once in an mmorpg means the whole game should be lost.
Are you wrong or are you even more into death penalties than I ever was?
Excuse me what?
It works the same at every level. At lower levels people just tend to pass the opportunity to do something with that kill. If you did read my previous post you must understand that I am against harsh death penalties, the way they often are, a punishment. Difficulty is raised by demanding a show of skill from the player and gating content that way. You engage a mission, you fail, you start from the beginning of the mission. It works well for instanced content, yet another benefit of using them. But I already know you are a purist so you automatically think they have no place in MMORPGs. Thing is though, the hardest PvE content in a MMORPG you can have is instanced. Why? Because it is tailored, carefully adjusted to a limited group of players with certain level characters.
Even if you want to include PvP into PvE it would have to work in a controlled environment where one similar group of players may "invade" other group's PvE content. That way you would eliminate or minimize things like player numbers and level difference so that player skill becomes the primary factor on who wins. You can even keep an ELO ranking system which you could use to pit players of similar skill level against each other thus making more challenging, close fights. Now tell me if you can't see any value in that?
Traditional MMORPGs are not hard. I'd go so far as to say that PvE in MMORPG is never hard, but that wouldn't be entirely true. I don't view the world as black and white as some others. I am not suggesting permadeath either because that would be outright anal in a game where you spend maybe hundreds of hours advancing your character. There's a huge difference between dying in one match in LoL than dying in a MMORPG. You'd see that if you'd stop constructing your strawmen. The MOBA equivalent of dying in a MMORPG is the loss of some of your persistent advancement i.e in LoL that is summoner experience, runes, masteries, IP or even RP - completely pointless punishment. Some may get kicks out of that but it certainly doesn't raise the level of skill you have to have to play the game.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Um, I know how it works at the championship level. But in 99% of LoL games played its not like that.
Also HoN snowballs like 1000x harder than LoL. In Hon you have all the same things but also lose your own gold, and many items drop on death. Plus the items combine much more and skills too. Carrying is also way easier.
In any case each player may be more important in LoL and the time scale of the game is designed to be much shorter than an MMO. If you made a LoL map 10 times as big and with 4x as many heros then one death wouldn't mean as much.
Even if you were right which you aren't, all you are arguing is that death penalties should be harsher. If one death is even a bigger deal than you imply that dying once in an mmorpg means the whole game should be lost.
Are you wrong or are you even more into death penalties than I ever was?
Excuse me what?
It works the same at every level. At lower levels people just tend to pass the opportunity to do something with that kill. If you did read my previous post you must understand that I am against harsh death penalties, the way they often are, a punishment. Difficulty is raised by demanding a show of skill from the player and gating content that way. You engage a mission, you fail, you start from the beginning of the mission. It works well for instanced content, yet another benefit of using them. But I already know you are a purist so you automatically think they have no place in MMORPGs. Thing is though, the hardest PvE content in a MMORPG you can have is instanced. Why? Because it is tailored, carefully adjusted to a limited group of players with certain level characters.
Even if you want to include PvP into PvE it would have to work in a controlled environment where one similar group of players may "invade" other group's PvE content. That way you would eliminate or minimize things like player numbers and level difference so that player skill becomes the primary factor on who wins. You can even keep an ELO ranking system which you could use to pit players of similar skill level against each other thus making more challenging, close fights. Now tell me if you can't see any value in that?
Traditional MMORPGs are not hard. I'd go so far as to say that PvE in MMORPG is never hard, but that wouldn't be entirely true. I don't view the world as black and white as some others. I am not suggesting permadeath either because that would be outright anal in a game where you spend maybe hundreds of hours advancing your character. There's a huge difference between dying in one match in LoL than dying in a MMORPG. You'd see that if you'd stop constructing your strawmen. The MOBA equivalent of dying in a MMORPG is the loss of some of your persistent advancement i.e in LoL that is summoner experience, runes, masteries, IP or even RP - completely pointless punishment. Some may get kicks out of that but it certainly doesn't raise the level of skill you have to have to play the game.
You are wrong. Why would you lose summoner experience? Thats ridiculous. 1 match in LoL is equivalent to one game in an RTS or one round in an MMORTS. However many years that may be.
People have argued that the sense of fear and the risk of loss produced by death penalties makes the game exciting.
More people have argued that unnecessarily harsh death penalties ruin games.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, but players actually play games for fun not punishment.
A minority arguing for something doesn't magically make it a good idea in the broader sense of game design.
Good thing we are not advocating putting it in WoW or SWTOR then huh? Since we aren't it doesn't matter. It only matters in the specific context of a single game.
I think the OP is reading too much into difficulty... If you ask me you can define it very simply and it applies to just about ANY and EVERYTHING not just video games and MMORPG's.
I would define difficulty as a comparison of the average number of people able to complete the task/goal compared to the total number of people who attempted it.
If the level cap is 80 and the most spell power your character can have is 1000. And 90% of people will get that, then the difficulty is VERY EASY.
Considering level caps are reached by probably 90%+ of all players eventually I don't believe you can consider it a difficult goal. Generally it just takes time and I don't think amount of time invested is a good way to judge difficulty.
Generally the goal is to become more powerful, and if the only way to get more powerful is by getting raid gear (usually the case) then you count the number of players able to complete the raid.
In WoW, I think blizzard said less than 1% of players made it to sunwell. That would be a good example of a very difficult game. However they've changed things around and a much higher % of players are able to complete raid content making it much easier now.
ALL of this gets thrown for a loop when you try to rate difficulty per individual. You or I might be able to go raid an instance with one hand on the mouse and the other down our pants half a sleep no problem. While a lot of others wouldn't make it past the first boss with two sets of hands and cheat codes!
Because of that reason, you really have to base it on the average of all players involved and how many of them can reach the goal.
What is the goal of a death penalty? To give meaning to the time before death. That narrow escape from an extra add means SO much more if it might of cost you a sword that took 8 hours to get. You were running from losing 8 hours of your time!!!! That is important! This made you want to play smarter and safer and made you calculate a plan if you were going to do something risky.
Without the death penalty would I be wanting to share the story of my narrow escape? No. In fact I might be mocked for not simply dying to the spider so I could rez closer to the spot I was going to. Lame.
That said YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE A DEATH PENALTY TO GIVE MEANING TO THE GAME. Examples:
When Raiding in WoW you might use up flask timers or food buffs. You would have to run back to the fight. You would have to rebuff. You would have to get everyone recoordinated and see if they were ready. All of these things took time and made each fight more meanigful. I could go into the efforts of summoning a boss using materials that took time to gather and wiping. In other MMOs you may have to spend time keying up other players which makes you invest in them (which in turn, gives meaning to other players).
As an MMO player I seek meaningful fights. If fights have no meaning, what is the point? This is why I never liked "Battlegrounds" type pvp. It is even worse if the numbers are not even. Respawn moments later and repeat your hack and slash playstyle makes the whole game untactical. I perfered organized team pvp with rankings and replays such as GW1 had. Arena combat from WoW was a step up from battlegrounds combat because it gave meaning to victory and meaning to defeat. These types of systems give meaning to player versus player beyond that point in time.
I want more ways for my play to feel MEANINGFUL. It does not have to be a death penalty although this is one of the many ways to achieve this. I will make my next post on the actual topic of difficulty in MMOs and will relate this post to it.
Time is not a good measure of difficulty. Just cause someone needs to spend 4 weeks grinding a title does not make it difficult to get although it may be rare.
I think in a single player game there are only 3 main measures of difficulty.
1: Narrow range of viable tactics+ hard to determine correct tactic.
2: Reactions/timing/twitch play.
3 Mechanical difficulty
1: So if you are given lots of tactics but only a handful or one will work it becomes more difficult. The more options the more difficult in particularily if there are limited tactics that will allow you to progress. A tutorial battle where you can hit any attack and the boss dies is easy and a battle where you must apply skill 358 which paralyzes him then skill 255 then skill 100 in quick succession is hard.
2: A game where you can enter a command at leisure is easier then when you are required to respond or react to it. The difficulty is easier if you can predict when the timings occur and harder if you are less able to predict the timings.
3: The amount of things you must press do or keep track of at once. The more things to keep track of the harder it is.
In multiplayer games there is one other difficulty factor:
4 Other people. You may have to coordinate other players to be there but in reality it is simply the other 3 things being performed by other people.
The most difficult games will be less predictable, have lots of tactical options with limited successful choices and will have multiple things to keep track of that you have limited windows to respond to be successful. Other people will also be making similar choices (either with you, against you or some of both) and their performance will factor in to whether you success or fail.
Simple games will have narrow tactical options with wide windows to respond to them and will have few things to keep track of and will not involve other people.
Death penalties and the like are simply a time sink and do not really add to difficulty. They just add incentive to perform and make the battle more meaningful.
Comments
Its like you didn't even both to read what I wrote. You are comparing apples to oranges. An instance is a separate game totally separated from the rest of the static world in which it exists. You are comparing a complete game to a single part of another game. Dungeons in virtual worlds are not isolated game aspects or games in and of themselves like raids in themeparks.
As for always being able to get better, thats bullshit. You cannot always become better. After you play 10000 games you are suddenly going to spike one day and be able to topple much better players. Even if you argue for incremental improvements, after 10000 or less, the actual number is effectively irrelevant, another 1000 games are unlikely to see you taking on opponents you couldn't beat after your first 10000 games.
As long as you keep comparing a full and complete game with a small part of another game you are going to be stuck in this weird twilight zone.
After you die in LoL you still have to travel back to the lane right? Well when you die in a virtual world you have to travel back to your previous location too. It just happens that virtual worlds are larger than LoL.
A large % of the people arguing for death penalties are sandboxers. Death pentalties make sense in sandboxes. When you argue from the perspective of themeparks against someone who is arguing from the perspective of a sandbox its a total waste of both your lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Death penalty is death penalty regardless if it's in a sandbox or a themepark. My statement holds true for both types of games.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
There is a term in developmental psychology for the point in a child's life when they realize that not everyone likes the same things as them. A lot of people on this forum apparently skipped that step.
No one says YOU PERSONALLY are required to like death penalties. And you have literaly DOZENS of MMOs which cater to no death penalty. Why then do you find it necessary to forbid the players who enjoy death penalties from having just a few games with them?
When I log into a game, it's like walking into a maze. Aggro, death penalties, grind - these are all simply means of creating texture to the maze. But some of the most important walls exist only in own imagination and inexperience: some of my best game experiences come from very simple encounters that I simply didn't understand at the time or because of obstacles that existed only in my imagination, not in the game mechanics.
In a sandbox you get into a fight even at a risk because you stand to lose more if you don't. If you fight a nullsec war in EvE to protect yourself you stand to lose ships and isk. But what happens if you don't fight? You lose everything.
That is why I keep talking about MMORTS games. MMORTS games are the only virtual worlds still around. And its 99% text based ones. Why? Because the costs are low enough to get companies interested.
If you lose a fight in an RTS you still lose your ships, lots of them and possibly planets and colonies or even whole star systems.
In a themepark its static. It costs you nothing to not fight. Because nothing changes and their is no territory. And in cases where there is, you DO have a death penalty. You lose the keep or relic.
That is what I am telling you. The reason Themeparks can't have death penalties is because they are lobby based coop games. Each instance or raid or dungeon is a full game. After you are done it resets and you reset. No matter who wins.
If losing in a sandbox had no penalty, and you just respawned right where you died, how could the game change? You would just fight in the same spot eternally.
I think this is the reason why people divide what is happening into the game into independant tasks. When you die in a MMORPG you will respawn and be given the ability to start again from a certain location. People naturally see this respawn location as the start of the current event/task. If after you have respawned, all the enemies you have fought have respawned as well, it will feel like a new game.
In the end you end up at the age old problem that if you want the entire playing experience to feel like a single event/unit then you will have to give it a finite start and end aka perma-death. Anything else and people will subdivide the experience into sub-games.
That's only true for PvP-based sandboxes. A Non-PvP sandbox does not need death penalties beyond simple respawn delays.
Great list. One I would add...
Speed of progression. Difficulty is also measured by endurance.
Walking may be easy. Walking to the mailbox is nothing. Walking from Chicago to Los Angeles is more difficult. It's still walking, but given the distance the endurance of the walker becomes an issue.
This doesn't happen in MMORTS games. People accept that each interaction is a small part of a larger game. This may have something to do with your "avatar" "toon" "character" not actually dying here. But thats largely an issue of perception. If you just tell yourself, this is a giant RTS game where all of our side is controlled by players, you can short circuit this issue.
Also, in many RTS games, like Majesty, you can ressurect your Hero with all their gold and levels and spells. So you could conceive of the game in that manner too.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
Why? Provide support for this statement. You are going to lose cities in a giant RTS anyways. Bases die in RTS games. Is losing a couple stats or taking some item damage such a big deal compared to losing a building or a whole city?
In a virtual world or RTS you have to lose things. Its the nature of the game. Because the goal is for one side to destroy the other.
Except that the people who argue for death penalties find them fun. Not everyone is you.
Hmm .. most arguments i have seen are NOT arguing death penalties to be fun. They are arguing it is necessarily to make other parts of the game (i.e. when you succeed) fun. I do not agree with that view.
However, i am pointing out what you may be mis-interpreting what others are saying.
In fact, who is arguing death panalities themselves are fun? If so, that is easy. You build a game that randomly kill a player every 20 min with a huge death penalty. That would cater to that group who thinks "death penalty" is fun.
The fun is in the fear of incurring the penalty not the act itself.People have argued that the sense of fear and the risk of loss produced by death penalties makes the game exciting.
You really should avoid the reductio ad absurdum though. How could you even randomly kill a player every 20 minutes anyways? If its every 20 minutes its not random.
Perhaps I should just say that people are arguing that games with death penalties are fun? Or that the result of death penalties makes a game fun. W/e.
If the chance of dying makes a game exciting, and you have to actually die every once in a while to make it fun, its no biggy.
This. Saying death penalties are fun is clearly understood to mean this.
I'm talking games here and MMORPGs are games. And I talk from experience from many and great variety of games I've played and players I've played with. I have several friends who have played several games in multiple international tournaments. I've played games at a world championship level. When I say I've mastered games, I have fucking mastered them. You call BS on my take on player skill. Where is your gaming CV?
If that is your take on death penalty in LoL, I'd say you are grossly downplaying it or haven't realised the full extent. One death in LoL may decide the whole match. Not only you die and are out of the game for several seconds, but your enemies get a big reward for killing you in XP and gold. On top of that you lose that time to get EXP and gold same thing your enemies will be gathering while you are waiting to respawn. And while you are rotting in the ground, your enemies get a chance to push the lane, get a tower, get dragon, invade your jungle, get a baron buff and possible get a local superiority in numbers which may then lead to ganking. You want to kill those enemies because apart from the immediate reward you get a tactical advantage which may then lead to you winning the game. Snowball effect is essential in LoL.
Then you die in your standard MMORPG, you lose XP and gear. You did not lose the game, you just died. You are often not even playing the game at a disadvantage. Its just punishment. The difference is very apparent. I have no idea why you'd bring this up but to show how lost you are.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Um, I know how it works at the championship level. But in 99% of LoL games played its not like that.
Also HoN snowballs like 1000x harder than LoL. In Hon you have all the same things but also lose your own gold, and many items drop on death. Plus the items combine much more and skills too. Carrying is also way easier.
In any case each player may be more important in LoL and the time scale of the game is designed to be much shorter than an MMO. If you made a LoL map 10 times as big and with 4x as many heros then one death wouldn't mean as much.
Even if you were right which you aren't, all you are arguing is that death penalties should be harsher. If one death is even a bigger deal than you imply that dying once in an mmorpg means the whole game should be lost.
Are you wrong or are you even more into death penalties than I ever was?
Death penalties are not supposed to be fun. Their sole purpose is to make the player fear dieing. This makes you have to play the game in a more strategic way. This is where the fun comes in. It's figuring out how to acomplish something without dieing. What we have now is what I like to call the "Single Player Zerg". If you throw yourself headlong into any situation enough times you'll eventually succeed. This comes from having no fear of dieing. This is what my second to last post was all about even if it did go right over the head of a certain Sandbox Fanatic.
Oh... And the bit about Death Penalties only working in PvP Sandbox games is the biggest load of rubbish I've heard on this forum in a very long time. (Not directed at you nariusseldon.)
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Excuse me what?
It works the same at every level. At lower levels people just tend to pass the opportunity to do something with that kill. If you did read my previous post you must understand that I am against harsh death penalties, the way they often are, a punishment. Difficulty is raised by demanding a show of skill from the player and gating content that way. You engage a mission, you fail, you start from the beginning of the mission. It works well for instanced content, yet another benefit of using them. But I already know you are a purist so you automatically think they have no place in MMORPGs. Thing is though, the hardest PvE content in a MMORPG you can have is instanced. Why? Because it is tailored, carefully adjusted to a limited group of players with certain level characters.
Even if you want to include PvP into PvE it would have to work in a controlled environment where one similar group of players may "invade" other group's PvE content. That way you would eliminate or minimize things like player numbers and level difference so that player skill becomes the primary factor on who wins. You can even keep an ELO ranking system which you could use to pit players of similar skill level against each other thus making more challenging, close fights. Now tell me if you can't see any value in that?
Traditional MMORPGs are not hard. I'd go so far as to say that PvE in MMORPG is never hard, but that wouldn't be entirely true. I don't view the world as black and white as some others. I am not suggesting permadeath either because that would be outright anal in a game where you spend maybe hundreds of hours advancing your character. There's a huge difference between dying in one match in LoL than dying in a MMORPG. You'd see that if you'd stop constructing your strawmen. The MOBA equivalent of dying in a MMORPG is the loss of some of your persistent advancement i.e in LoL that is summoner experience, runes, masteries, IP or even RP - completely pointless punishment. Some may get kicks out of that but it certainly doesn't raise the level of skill you have to have to play the game.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You are wrong. Why would you lose summoner experience? Thats ridiculous. 1 match in LoL is equivalent to one game in an RTS or one round in an MMORTS. However many years that may be.
More people have argued that unnecessarily harsh death penalties ruin games.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, but players actually play games for fun not punishment.
A minority arguing for something doesn't magically make it a good idea in the broader sense of game design.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Good thing we are not advocating putting it in WoW or SWTOR then huh? Since we aren't it doesn't matter. It only matters in the specific context of a single game.
I think the OP is reading too much into difficulty... If you ask me you can define it very simply and it applies to just about ANY and EVERYTHING not just video games and MMORPG's.
I would define difficulty as a comparison of the average number of people able to complete the task/goal compared to the total number of people who attempted it.
If the level cap is 80 and the most spell power your character can have is 1000. And 90% of people will get that, then the difficulty is VERY EASY.
Considering level caps are reached by probably 90%+ of all players eventually I don't believe you can consider it a difficult goal. Generally it just takes time and I don't think amount of time invested is a good way to judge difficulty.
Generally the goal is to become more powerful, and if the only way to get more powerful is by getting raid gear (usually the case) then you count the number of players able to complete the raid.
In WoW, I think blizzard said less than 1% of players made it to sunwell. That would be a good example of a very difficult game. However they've changed things around and a much higher % of players are able to complete raid content making it much easier now.
ALL of this gets thrown for a loop when you try to rate difficulty per individual. You or I might be able to go raid an instance with one hand on the mouse and the other down our pants half a sleep no problem. While a lot of others wouldn't make it past the first boss with two sets of hands and cheat codes!
Because of that reason, you really have to base it on the average of all players involved and how many of them can reach the goal.
What is the goal of a death penalty? To give meaning to the time before death. That narrow escape from an extra add means SO much more if it might of cost you a sword that took 8 hours to get. You were running from losing 8 hours of your time!!!! That is important! This made you want to play smarter and safer and made you calculate a plan if you were going to do something risky.
Without the death penalty would I be wanting to share the story of my narrow escape? No. In fact I might be mocked for not simply dying to the spider so I could rez closer to the spot I was going to. Lame.
That said YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE A DEATH PENALTY TO GIVE MEANING TO THE GAME. Examples:
When Raiding in WoW you might use up flask timers or food buffs. You would have to run back to the fight. You would have to rebuff. You would have to get everyone recoordinated and see if they were ready. All of these things took time and made each fight more meanigful. I could go into the efforts of summoning a boss using materials that took time to gather and wiping. In other MMOs you may have to spend time keying up other players which makes you invest in them (which in turn, gives meaning to other players).
As an MMO player I seek meaningful fights. If fights have no meaning, what is the point? This is why I never liked "Battlegrounds" type pvp. It is even worse if the numbers are not even. Respawn moments later and repeat your hack and slash playstyle makes the whole game untactical. I perfered organized team pvp with rankings and replays such as GW1 had. Arena combat from WoW was a step up from battlegrounds combat because it gave meaning to victory and meaning to defeat. These types of systems give meaning to player versus player beyond that point in time.
I want more ways for my play to feel MEANINGFUL. It does not have to be a death penalty although this is one of the many ways to achieve this. I will make my next post on the actual topic of difficulty in MMOs and will relate this post to it.
Time is not a good measure of difficulty. Just cause someone needs to spend 4 weeks grinding a title does not make it difficult to get although it may be rare.
I think in a single player game there are only 3 main measures of difficulty.
1: Narrow range of viable tactics+ hard to determine correct tactic.
2: Reactions/timing/twitch play.
3 Mechanical difficulty
1: So if you are given lots of tactics but only a handful or one will work it becomes more difficult. The more options the more difficult in particularily if there are limited tactics that will allow you to progress. A tutorial battle where you can hit any attack and the boss dies is easy and a battle where you must apply skill 358 which paralyzes him then skill 255 then skill 100 in quick succession is hard.
2: A game where you can enter a command at leisure is easier then when you are required to respond or react to it. The difficulty is easier if you can predict when the timings occur and harder if you are less able to predict the timings.
3: The amount of things you must press do or keep track of at once. The more things to keep track of the harder it is.
In multiplayer games there is one other difficulty factor:
4 Other people. You may have to coordinate other players to be there but in reality it is simply the other 3 things being performed by other people.
The most difficult games will be less predictable, have lots of tactical options with limited successful choices and will have multiple things to keep track of that you have limited windows to respond to be successful. Other people will also be making similar choices (either with you, against you or some of both) and their performance will factor in to whether you success or fail.
Simple games will have narrow tactical options with wide windows to respond to them and will have few things to keep track of and will not involve other people.
Death penalties and the like are simply a time sink and do not really add to difficulty. They just add incentive to perform and make the battle more meaningful.