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EQ next!! who want punishing death?

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  • VooDoo_PapaVooDoo_Papa Member UncommonPosts: 897

    completely situational. make a game with extremely challenging mobs where dying is part of the learning process, no thanks.

     

    and for the record, any time you use verbage like "punishing" to describe a games mechanics, its gonna turn people off. nobody wants punishing anything in their games. even if you think you want to be punished in a game, im sure youll get over that novelty pretty quick

    image
  • darkhalf357xdarkhalf357x Member UncommonPosts: 1,237
    Originally posted by augustgrace

    Well over a decade ago when I was playing UO, I would have agreed with you on punishing death.  But then I had no real responsibilities, plenty of free time, the arrogance of youth, and there weren't many alternatives to compare UO to.  

    Older now, with work, a family and a house to take care of, my gaming time is precious and I have no desire to spend that time doing corpse runs or earning back lost gear/exp.  

    I even tried going back to UO a couple years ago, and the same activities and penalties I enjoyed years ago, just felt like work.  These days I want to have fun during my gaming sessions.  I don't want to spend my time polishing my e-peen or pursuing grindy activities.

    ^This ..  For us older gamers its not as attractive of a feature as it once was when we were young.

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  • AvanahAvanah Member RarePosts: 1,615

    nt

    /100000 char

    "My Fantasy is having two men at once...

    One Cooking and One Cleaning!"

    ---------------------------

    "A good man can make you feel sexy,

    strong and able to take on the whole world...

    oh sorry...that's wine...wine does that..."





  • AeliousAelious Member RarePosts: 3,521
    Originally posted by Torvaldr
    Originally posted by adam_nox
    So many great things that can be in a sandbox game, and this is what people call for?  I just don't get it. 

    Me either.  It makes no sense to me.  Then again I'm pretty out of touch with the average gamer.

    The funny thing is I read this nostalgic reminiscing for hardcore death penalties on the forums and how it's so appreciated.  I never recall one person I PK'd in Lineage thanking me afterwards for the challenge and 3 months of xp setback or the 10 mill adena armour drop I got from them.  Not once, ever.

     

    Wow, yeah I imagine the reaction was much different image.  The idea of having a death penatly system isn't to make your life harder after you die, it's to give you more incentive to not die in the first place.  Similar to the excitement of OWPvP when you're looking over your shoulder.  It needs to be in moderation or an imaginatative addition, such as Rungard is talking about, but I think it could work.

  • TheocritusTheocritus Member LegendaryPosts: 9,739
          I like how EQ handled death in the old days....IT made you respect what was going on around you, and you had to learn how to play (often with others) to stay alive......I'm just not sure if 13 years later the player base would be able to handle it......I jsut dont see todays communities taking time to go help other players like they did with corpse runs in old EQ.
  • TamanousTamanous Member RarePosts: 3,025

    Players more familiar to modern themepark or even just zoned mmos may not grasp the importance of death penalties in open world sandbox games. It is critical certain systems are in place to avoid issues.

     

    My first mmo was Asheron's Call which was one of the largest seemless (more or less) world ever created. PVE and PVP progression are both affected by how death is managed. When a game is nothing but shared play you simply cannot have instant recovery from death. It trivializes pve and makes area control (the primary purpose behind open world pvp) impossible. There absolutely must be a system put in place emulating attrition or you have nothing but endless zerging which affects both pve and pvp especially when both are combined into one and have overlapping effects.

     

    AC handled this by binding stones which were only located sparsely and out side of towns but with multiple options to choose from to avoid camping. Upon death you lost items which forced you to run back or suffer greater loss (if not already looted). You also gained a vitae or life penalty you had to work off so if you died many times trying to zerg something you had to give up for a while until you became full strength.

     

    Although not all options from AC would be needed (perhaps loot loss may be too hardcore of an option for at least more pve oriented servers for EQNext) but the death penalty in that game solved some serious issues. Players suffered a time penalty (to head back to body), a power reduction penalty (to stop zerging objectives endlessly until they win) and a loss of at least something the player cared about, wants to regain and creates fear of death would should exist in any immersive, world emulating game (be it vitae, xp loss, money or items). There could be many other issues come to light cause by death and the ability to recover from it too fast or too slow. The right balance is required for reason far beyond just penalizing the player for wrong choices.

     

    EQNext will be an open world with massive systems synergy and the death penalty will be of the utmost importance. There is no way it will be too "carebear" even for pve and if hardcore options exist I highly expect penalties to be more on the severe side than the light side. When an open and shared world becomes your ultimate resource for advancement in both pve and pvp, denial of area control through death is the only method of player governance outside of politically controlled areas (where pve mechanics could usurp player control ... IE. safe zones).

     

    Expect the death penalty to be very detailed and thought out and perhaps even touched upon through player driven political options.

    You stay sassy!

  • rungardrungard Member Posts: 1,035
    Originally posted by Torvaldr
    Originally posted by rungard
    Originally posted by Aelious
    Rungard

    I like that idea. Since your deity given powers are a facet of your overall combat abilities dying and losing them for a time would make you more careful for sure. At the same time it wouldn't stop you altogether like a corpse run would.

    /signed

     Basically you get to decide. You can go with all offinsive powers and very harsh penalties ( remember you need to have the rank to use them), or go all protectionist and not really have any powers to use, but i would imagine most players would be somewhere in the middle.

    The part i like the best is that it makes sense in eq lore, which i think is critical for all systems.

    To keep it interesting they could have it so that you would need to keep your deity alive, thus is a crew of players went to the planes to kill your guy you could accept summons to defend.

    Thus if your god gets knocked off, everyone that god has under them loses their powers for a bit. I suppose the god would convert to ethereal after they are taken out and they could only manage rank 1 resurections at that point until they regain their power.

    That would be fun.

    I like your ideas because they think outside of the standard "corpse run" box.  I would like to see your ideas with deity integration more than just about death penalties.  It would be cool if deities were part of your character build and progression even if not a cleric.  A paladin wouldn't be a level 0 class as much as a path a fighter or cleric could take in the devotion to their deity.  Different deities might have different paladin versions for example.

    Anyway, on the topic.  In one of the zillion fruitless discussions along this line I suggested that when a player dies they actually go to one of the underwold planes and have to fight, quest, and puzzle their way out to prevent an xp loss or some other penalty.  A very rudimentary system could have the death plane be the same for all.  In a more robust and developed system your deity and actions would determine which death plane you would have to return from.  There are a lot of possibilities here: it could be a simple fight your way out.  It could entail quests and battles.  Your party might have the option to join you and help you out of the plane.  Or you could just pay the penalty and respawn immediately.

    Anyway as far as the OP version of DP.  No thanks.  Been there, done that.

     I would stick in a system like this at a random percentage when you die. So 2-3% of the time you get the death plane, and the other 98% of the time you get the regular system.

    that would keep things interesting.

  • RimmersmanRimmersman Member Posts: 885
    Originally posted by Theocritus

          I like how EQ handled death in the old days....IT made you respect what was going on around you, and you had to learn how to play (often with others) to stay alive......I'm just not sure if 13 years later the player base would be able to handle it......I jsut dont see todays communities taking time to go help other players like they did with corpse runs in old EQ.

     

    That's why Smed is talking about the chance of an hardcore server, you would not have to choose that server.

    Quite simple really.

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  • DavisFlightDavisFlight Member CommonPosts: 2,556

    If they want this to be a social game where people take the game world seriously then yeah, a death penalty is a MUST.

    I don't want it as severe as early EQ, but certainly nothing like modern WoW clones.

     

    DAoC had a fairly good death penalty, where the first few deaths in a given level had a minor penalty, but by the fourth death, you were getting the full effect of the penalty. Recovering your body lessens the penalty somewhat.

  • rojoArcueidrojoArcueid Member EpicPosts: 10,722

    as long as its not permanent death im OK with any harsh penalty upon dying. In mmos  that dont have death penalty i dont even care about playing my character well because i just revive and keep going. Death penalty would make me cautious on every fight.

    Anything with the exception of permadeath is acceptable in my book.





  • nariusseldonnariusseldon Member EpicPosts: 27,775
    Originally posted by Neherun

    I can't wait for this thread to be swarmed by people with insults to your like of thinking, OP.

     

    And yup, I want major death penalties. The game has to offer the rush.

    And i don't. I don't play games that i have to replay portions again and again (xp loss).

    The solution? Have an option. Like hard core in D3.

    In fact, you should play hard core in D3 .. that is the as big as a death penalty can get. I won't waste my time on it though.

  • Cochran1Cochran1 Member Posts: 456
    Originally posted by madazz
    Originally posted by ice-vortex
    Originally posted by madazz

    On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.

    Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

    And die, and have massive lay-offs, and then upset their small community by shutting down. That's why Everquest is still going strong where as all teh unsuccessful games are shutting down, or going F2P and then shutting down. 

    Actually Everquest went to a Free to Play Model earlier this year, and I don't remeber them having corpse runs last time I subbed either. Then again, always being a tank in these games I accepted death as an inevitability a long time ago so death penalties don't really concern me one way or another.

  • pvpirlpvpirl Member UncommonPosts: 178


    Originally posted by Cochran1
    Originally posted by madazz Originally posted by ice-vortex Originally posted by madazz On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.
    Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.
    And die, and have massive lay-offs, and then upset their small community by shutting down. That's why Everquest is still going strong where as all teh unsuccessful games are shutting down, or going F2P and then shutting down. 
    Actually Everquest went to a Free to Play Model earlier this year, and I don't remeber them having corpse runs last time I subbed either. Then again, always being a tank in these games I accepted death as an inevitability a long time ago so death penalties don't really concern me one way or another.

    Same here, although taking repeated deaths in a bud guyk run back in the day as a troll SK were brutal lol

  • CalmOceansCalmOceans Member UncommonPosts: 2,437
    Originally posted by ice-vortex

    Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

    What games are that? EQ had 600k subscribers after the game was about 4 years old, concurrent users, not total, total it runs in the millions.

    Which 4 year old games have 600k subscribers? Not many.

    Which games still have 12 servers after 11 years? Not many.

    GW2 probably doesn't even exist anymore in 11 years.

    SoE released stats in their 10 year anniversiry video, 12 million characters were created in EQ.

     

    60,000 people applied for beta

     

    You can say a lot of stuff about EQ, that you didn't like the death penalty, that you didn't like the gameplay, claiming it wasn't successful just makes you ignorant.

    EQ was the most successful MMO at the time, not UO, not Lineage, not AC, not DAOC, it wasn't until WOW came out that a game surpassed EQ in subscribers. What's more, those WoW designers were EQ players.

  • ThupliThupli Member RarePosts: 1,318

    The problem with harsh death penalties is that it means devs make pve content that is considerably easier, because dying all the time would be demoralizing.  

     

    Im more of a medium penalty guy, so that pve leveling can be more entertaining,challenging.

  • LetsinodLetsinod Member UncommonPosts: 385
    Originally posted by ice-vortex
    Originally posted by madazz

    On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.

    Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

    You can't really compare EQ with anything today.  The market size was miniscule.  It has also been pointed out by SOE that over 5 million people have tried EQ.  Not too shabby.

  • BeansnBreadBeansnBread Member EpicPosts: 7,254

    Harsh death penalty ends up being boring to me, not exciting.

     

    Unless... maybe some version of permadeath. But in this thread people are asking for lame shit like xp loss and corpse runs. That's just an extremely boring version of a death penalty.

     

    Either go hard on the death penalty and design a game around it or make it minimal in my opinion. This corpse run/xp loss/money loss is just a retarded middleground that never should have happened.

  • nateslonateslo Member UncommonPosts: 49

    I've got to side with the harsh death penalty (major exp lose and possible loot drop).  I played eq1 for years, and dying was a quick way to ruin your day but I loved the immersion that the death penalty brought. I remember grinding for hours just to lose all the exp to one single death. I'm sure that it doesnt sounds like fun to some gamers who joined the scene in the last 10 years, but it build community and accountability. If you die deep in some dungeon, you had better have some friends to help you get your corpse out, or you are looking at replacing your whole set of equipment. It makes people think twice before being a jerk or ninja looting some gear.

    I actually had it happen with my first character. I died, and then moved states and wasn't able to log in for a some time, lost everything and had to start over fresh. I know, again it doesnt sound like fun to some, but you REALLY get attached to your character when you can lose it all. 

    Just my 2 cents, but long live the harsh death penalty.

  • XhieronXhieron Member UncommonPosts: 132

    This is a subject that's near to my heart, since I remember spending hours on corpse runs during the early days of EQ.  My last experience with the game was on the Fippy Darkpaw server about a year ago, which while fun and nostalgic, did not have corpse runs.  I remember it being something of a controversy when the server was in development.

     

    As a matter of principle, I am for some kind of death penalty.  A little bit of cash out of pocket for armor repair and a brief stroll isn't quite enough.  On the other end of the spectrum, perma-death is clearly too much.  There's a happy medium somewhere, though, and I think it begs discovery.

     

    I'll be frank, though, if I never retrieve another corpse, that'll be too soon.  The appeal of that particular mechanic lies only among the same nostalgia that makes other clearly counter-intuitive aspects of EQ1 seem charming in retrospect.  Notwithstanding the absence of any in-world explanation for why you should be resurrected at all, yet stripped of your accoutrements, there was simply no gameplay need met by that penalty.  It was punitive for its own sake, and I think modern game design philosophy, even among those developers most fond of EQ1, advises that you shouldn't create a system that allows a customer to pay to be kicked in the teeth.

     

    That is to say, corpse runs didn't serve to incentivize good play, didn't teach players how to improve, and didn't reward players for doing well.  If anything, they rewarded players for having friends in zone they could trust, money they could pony up to a Necro, or plenty of time on their hands.  Now maybe those are meaningful game design objectives.  However, any of those things could be accomplished without the added burden of inconvenience.  The experience loss alone could account for the time loss involved in a death without corpse runs (and you could even scale to account for the distance from one's spawn point to account for the variable difficulty in a given run), game combat systems and difficulty can incentivize grouping and teamwork, and any sandbox worth its salt ought to have a grasp on player and class interdependency without a coffin sink.

     

    Now let me be clear: I am not opposed to tedium outright.  I don't have a problem with the game making me re-do the last day's play time if I die, and even though I also believe that de-leveling should be a thing of the past, I wouldn't object very loud if that were present in EQN.  I don't mind having my hard-earned cash compromised by my mistakes, and I don't mind needing another player's assistance.  However, I don't think any legitimate game objective is served by being prohibited from actually playing the game for a period of time after I die (i.e., due to being naked).  And I would vehemently object to their being any risk, however small, of my entire persistent time-investment in the game being obliterated due to a comedy of errors.

     

    To me, somewhere between launch DAOC and EQII reflects about the right amount of penalty.  In both instances, you suffered experience loss (and in DAOC, you could mitigate the loss by visiting where you died), lost some cash, and had a brief (matter of minutes) idle timer attached to your ability to function.  I think this is sufficient.  I absolutely prefer experience debt to outright loss because I believe a de-leveling system results in enough abhorrent edge cases, aside from being somewhat nonsensical.  However, I would strongly advocate that experience debt stack in severity for subsequent deaths.  In COH, for instance, if you accumulated new debt, it just got added onto the end of the previous debt, so that, until it was all paid off, it took you twice as long to earn levels through experience.  I think a better system would cause the debt to overlap at the point of accumulation, up to a cap, so that a particularly reckless player could see his experience growth grind to halt. This assumes, of course, that there are measures in place to avoid splitting up groups where, for example, a tank is likely to faceplant more often than anybody else besides the healer.

     

    Let's face it, gang: even in EQ1, there comes a point after which death was trivial.  You had a cleric on tap in any decent guild, and at that point it wasn't a question of meaningful death as it was who you knew.  That created a system of haves and have nots that's vastly more troubling to me than whether or not corpse runs are in a game.  So yeah, somewhat off-topic but I said it:  Rezzes should cap out at 50%, if they're in the game at all.  [What about raids?  Raids aren't emergent content, and they need to be gone from the industry anyway.  Bring on the flame.]  If you're not going to make the high-level folks sweat the severity of an untimely demise, you shouldn't make the low-level folks either.  Being level 75 has enough rewards and benefits already.

     

     

    TLDR:

    Most importantly, regardless of a particular set of values and systems, the point of the whole exercise is that death should matter.  You want to avoid it because there are consequences.  The consequences, whatever they are, should reflect the fact that the game strongly incentivizes you to stay alive.  It does this affirmatively by the tools with which you're provided and the information you're given about the hostility of the game world.

    The counterpoint to this whole issue is the fact that the games that had these systems, in general, placed a higher premium on character life.  If my SK died on Fippy, it was a big deal.  Something went bad, bad wrong.  The fact of death changed the way I played the game compared to how I play others, even twelve years later.  In GW2, great game though it may be, I could die a half-dozen times just crossing a high-level zone and just shrug it off.  Inconvenient?  Sure, but no big deal.  If my Druid died three times in a row on the same day in EQ1, I was ready to take a couple days off lest I destroy my computer in a fit of rage.  That's what this conversation is really about.  I want to see EQN provide me with things like SOW, HT, FD, Egress, Mezz, Fade, CH, LOH, and plain old running-the-hell-away, specifically because those things make me feel awesome when they were working and like a total idiot if I died with them available.  I don't think you have to have corpse runs to accomplish this.  But whatever you have, I want to die infrequently because the game cares about me staying alive.  The more durable the characters, the harsher the penalty can (and should) be.

     

    Also:  No penalty for PVP.  Dying in PVP is punishment enough.

    Peace and safety.

  • MardukkMardukk Member RarePosts: 2,222

    I want it like EQ1 but better as well.  I'm not sure that I want a super harsh death penalty though.  I used to think the death penalty was adding a thrill to the game.  But looking back as I play MMO's more over the years the thrill was more from the actual mob difficulty and immersive feel of the world.  The death penalty with exp loss that is regainable partially through rez is fine and even equipment in your inventory being dropped would be ok.  But overly harsh is pointless and adds nothing to the game.

     

    Edit and offtopic:  I'm always shocked at the lack of love EQ1 gets on these forums.  I assume most of the people that remember EQ1 have moved on from MMO's.  I play recent MMO's and there's not even an attempt at an immersive world in which the players are treated like adults.

  • CalmOceansCalmOceans Member UncommonPosts: 2,437
    rLineage today still makes more and has more players than EQ ever has or will.  It's one of the few games that has lasted 15 and is still subscription based.

    Lineage doesn't even exist anymore in the West, it was shut down. NCsoft said it wasn't successful anymore, so far for your lasting 15 years.

    I personally know Japanese and Korean players playing EQ to this day, in fact there are still whole japanese guilds in EQ.

  • Greymantle4Greymantle4 Member UncommonPosts: 809
    Believe it or not I met my wife doing a corpse run in EQ. I did a summon corpse for her and the rest is history. :)
  • Pratt2112Pratt2112 Member UncommonPosts: 1,636
    Originally posted by ice-vortex

    Not really.

     

    The writeup What's in a Death Penalty? is an interesting take on the death penalty.

    Interesting article, but too much of a generalization on how people react to harsher death penalties.

    That's one of the major issues of people writing an explanatory article like that... they go off their own experiences and perceptions, which greatly limits the scope of the topic, and skews their conclusions.

    FFXI and Lineage 2 both have/had harsh death penalties, and I thought it made exploration and gameplay more interesting, exciting and, of course, challenging. It didn't discourage me at all. One of my favorite pastimes is to go into an area well beyond my level or capability and see how far I could get without dying; test my knowledge of mob aggro types and range and my ability to weave safely around them.

    I knew the penalty for dying in either game was pretty steep in terms of xp and possible level loss... but that made it more interesting. XP loss sucked but it was part of the game and it was only temporary. In the context of a game I had already spent hundreds of hours in, and would no doubt spend many, many more... having to gain some xp back was never a big deal to me. To this day, I don't understand why people freak out about it. It's xp. You'll get it back. What's the hurry?

    Regarding harsh penalties resulting in people "only doing what they know". That's a pretty weak argument the article raises, considering people behave exactly the same way in MMOs with hardly any penalty. They stick to proven strategies, they follow quest walk-throughs and review raid tactic videos. They use handy-dandy UI add-ons to reduce the chance of failure in a raid. The presence or absence of a harsher death penalty has nothing to do with that.

     

  • MMOExposedMMOExposed Member RarePosts: 7,387
    How about making Harsh DP optional to people that like that sort of thing with no bonus gain from doing so?

    Philosophy of MMO Game Design

  • adam_noxadam_nox Member UncommonPosts: 2,148
    wut... EQ never even had 600k subs, let alone concurrency which they would never give out.  wow guys. fact check time.
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