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Make death penalty inversely proportional to the challenge
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355
I've sometimes said that the problem with a harsh death penalty is that it deters players from attempting anything challenging. If something is hard enough that you have a 50% chance of failure, and the cost of that failure greatly exceeds the rewards for winning, the the expected value of attempting the challenge is a large net loss for you. Instead, you'll be pushed to stick to things where you're virtually guaranteed to win.
The solution to this is to make the death penalty for failing on hard things very light. But that doesn't mean that the death penalty in a game has to be universally very light.
In PVP ranking systems, we understand this. For example, if a college football team takes on the #1 team in the country and loses a close game, they're not going to precipitously tumble down the rankings. Lose to a mediocre team and you might well find yourself unranked in a hurry. But the rewards for beating a top tier team are correspondingly much greater than winning a guarantee game against some team from a lower division.
The same can be applied to death penalties in MMORPGs. Die to elite mobs, or in group content, or to something far above your level, and get a mild slap on the hand, perhaps less than the implicit cost of having to run back from where you respawn. Die in solo content designed for your current level and face a somewhat harsher penalty. Die to mobs far below your level and get hammered with the loss of hours of progress--but this takes screwing up badly enough that real players hardly ever do it.
The solution to this is to make the death penalty for failing on hard things very light. But that doesn't mean that the death penalty in a game has to be universally very light.
In PVP ranking systems, we understand this. For example, if a college football team takes on the #1 team in the country and loses a close game, they're not going to precipitously tumble down the rankings. Lose to a mediocre team and you might well find yourself unranked in a hurry. But the rewards for beating a top tier team are correspondingly much greater than winning a guarantee game against some team from a lower division.
The same can be applied to death penalties in MMORPGs. Die to elite mobs, or in group content, or to something far above your level, and get a mild slap on the hand, perhaps less than the implicit cost of having to run back from where you respawn. Die in solo content designed for your current level and face a somewhat harsher penalty. Die to mobs far below your level and get hammered with the loss of hours of progress--but this takes screwing up badly enough that real players hardly ever do it.
Comments
I usually worked back then but now most games don't have any death penalty and the challenge on none raid content have dropped a lot so it rarely work now.
I think you should balance things on all 3 parameters if you want a floating death penalty, so some challenging stuff could still have a pretty tough death penalty but then it would offer better loot so at one end you have the easiest stuff where dying cost you and the loot ain't good while the hardest stuff have good loot and low death penalty.
I agree with how you are thinking, players should be encouraged to try the harder stuff but you don't want them the roam the easy content not caring if they die or not.
We could of course discuss exactly how the death penalty should work (I am partial to a percent chance of losing an equipped gear, close to zero at the hardest stuff but high at the top one myself, it would be easy to implement and scare people way more then XP loss and with your idea we wouldn't see stupid stuff like players wearing crap stuff to hard content).
Anyways, good idea. :proud:
Let's be honest there is NO death,so let's call it a KO status.
So what is being KO'd like in real life?Wobbly knees,dizzy,feint .weak,possibly stunned/out for 2-10 seconds and the after affect is weaker in every fashion from strength to reflexes,dexterity etc etc.So that is how it should be treated and the result should mimic it as such.
Yes there is some plausible realism in a ghost like shard sort of idea but to me that idea is old and boring.
If you really died your gear would drop,so then any player or mob could come by and take it.I can't remember what game i played but the mobs would actually take your gear,then when you came back you could hunt them down,kill them and that same gear would drop so you could reclaim your lost gear.
I like to feel a game has integrity,so i don't want players to make a mockery of death,treating it like it is meaningless,i like to see a real impact.So no ghost runs but instead perhaps you revive in the nearest church in a city.That long run back with no gear would have an impact so that players will show some care in how they play.If dying carries no penalty then players will just challenge to the very maximum because they know they have nothing to lose.
When you have nothing to lose,it is NOT a challenge.it is gifted easy mode.
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With a good formula based on level and a difficulty factor you can get it right. Number of players in a group also factor in when you are in the open world. Needs some balancing work to get things right of course and you could even have a death penalty meter in the UI to scare players even more.
You could of course use a similar method for XP loss instead, but it is not nearly as scary as losing something good. And the chance to loose something is way more exciting then always losing it.
Or in situations where someone tries to gank someone and they get killed by a very low level mob.
I am not sure how much it would actually appeal to players as a mechanic or feature though. I also don't know who would be interested in this. The people who like harsh death penalties may not think it fits them. The people who don't want death penalties at all probably won't like it either.
Death penalties that go against the standard are kind of niche. I am not sure if there would be much of a market for this type of idea.
--John Ruskin
If you have a constant harsh death penalty people wont bother about the hard stuff unless the rewards are exceptional. If you don't have any death penalty people wont care if they die and not really bother to learn the game.
You can always avoid the incredible easy content this way and get little loss if something forces you to leave without logging off or have a buddy guard you.
But yeah, I did and still do think it was the best death penalty system I seen in any MMO. But I played mainly in the western beta and part of the toolkit were still in Korean back then so I missed the aligment points (and the while I played after I probably didn't pay so much attention, I felt I knew the game or something similar stupid).
I don't know if I were that chaotic but I never killed a single other player that didn't deserve it besides in pledgewars.
The Korean noob gankers at the docks and in the elven crafting cave was a different matter (evil grin), not that all of them were Korean or that I killed anyone for their language but an rather large part of the gankers did move from the Korean client to get easy prey.
Yep, not seriously but it would make even the harshest death penalty fan cry.
Best death penalty is arcade games . You dead , you lost money .
for MMORPG , no death penalty is best penalty . Though it depend on game , penalty is best tool to keep game world run good .
Look at what happens when characters in movies fail. When Luke failed to notice the Wompa he was captured, and had a chance to escape. His penalty for failure was getting side tracked and delayed. Later when he failed in his fight against Darth Vader his failure cost him a hand. Now that is what we need in games.
I'm sure any psychologist will tell you you don't need to punish someone for failure, the failure is a punishment in itself. Death penalties and death scenes are the game trolling the player. Might as well have the game say "You suck newb! Ha ha ha ha! Loser!".
Who cares how it was done before, or is being done now, we should forget that and ask how should it be done?
Lets use Rogue, where almost every character permanently died, whether they "succeeded" or failed in their objectives.
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I agree, that the death penalty should by dynamic and be determined on the challenge. Below is working Death Penalty I have been developing.
In the vast array of new age mmos, we have been seeing death penalties being mitigated. There is no incentive to stay alive. Item durability seems to be the common trend or no death penality at all. I am biased and believe that a death penality consititutes an incentive to stay alive and better players come out of that. When you wipe in groups with no death penalty, whoopdee dooo. Who cares? Right? Only real penalty is time wasted running back to the instanced or where ever you died.
I have came up with a compromise that shoots for the median of a strict death penality and a not so costly death penalty.
I think loss of experience should be scaled within the level of the character and the mob they are fighting or environmental death. Here is an example of character to mob scaling.
- If you die from a target that is within the same level from 1-3 levels of you, you will loose 7% experience.
As you can see, you will lose more experience for mobs that are within your level range. Why? Because you're at their correspond discipline level. The fights are balanced. You lose less experience when you die from higher levels mobs because of your "level of discipline" is not equal to their discipline. It's like saying, are you on the discipline level of Bruce Lee in which you have an equal chance at a victory? Absolutely not. I believe if experience loss is valued as a death penalty it needs to be fair in a pve standpoint.
I would say this would be a fair assessment on the Death Penalty if we used loss of XP as the means. I would be in favor of such Death Penalty.
I would activate 2 timers on death. The first timer would be the delay before the character would respawn, the second timer would represent a vulnerability. The first timer would start when the character died. The second timer would start when the character was actually respawned. If the character dies before the vulnerability timer expires, the next timers would be longer.
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The 5-10 minutes is good if it is the type of game where you don't need or can't have alts but if you have 10 character slots a character could be on cooldown far longer, play an alt until your character is playable again (but we all know the F2P games would sell instant revive orbs for a buck each). I think 6-8 hours could work in a game like that unless another player rezzes you.
The only problem as I see it is that dungeon and raid groups would have too long time meaning that having a player die mean you would need to get in another player, an alt of the same player or quit.
I tend to agree with the side that says any time you make someone's character unplayable is a quick way to lose a customer. But, if you could keep them playing in an alternate(content, not character) sense, you could probably make it work.
As for raids/dungeons and such, I would assume in those cases that being rezzed by others would ignore those respawn timers and bring you right back to the group.