Originally posted by TheScavenger Should MMOs remove the death penalty? It never really made sense to me. Especially in the older MMOs. You are dead! Lose 25% of your stats and/or skills! (usually a debuff for x amount of minutes or needing to earn x amount of exp/kill x amount of monsters to remove it) This never made sense. Okay, so I die...I lose 25% of my ability...how am I supposed to kill anything to remove the debuff? Even if it is just 30 minutes...that just means I can't play for 30 minutes? Especially since most MMOs penalize you for killing weaker stuff than your level/skill...so...this seems very counter beneficial Then if all your gear is damaged...how are you supposed to continue in a dungeon or a raid or do anything? gear is very important in almost all MMOs...I guess go and repair it...but usually...ESPECIALLY for tanks...its so expensive, sometimes you cant even afford to repair it all. And then it runs into the same problem as losing stats/skills...but even worse...because gear is usually way more important...so without fully repaired items, again...you are penalized so much, you can't do anything. So going back to the original question...should MMOs remove the death penalty? Or, at least change it to something that still lets you...you know...still play the game even if you die?
But if we don't die, how do we get the buff in the raid finder!?!?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
What death penalty? Anything that has released in the last 8 years doesn't even have a death penalty. Dieing in todays MMOs is totally meaningless. Remove the death penalty? It already was removed years ago.
Originally posted by Robokapp OP I will point out in the most honest way possible why it makes no sense to you: you're looking at it wrong. "So I died...I lose 25% xp...how am I supposed to kill anything". whoa whoa whoa. you started at death ? let's back up another 3 minutes. you're alive. you're seeing a pack of wolves. Do you engage ? it's an important question because you might die and lose 25% xp and run into the problem you stated. why should you fight them? what are the odds you'll win? what are the risks? do you know these wolves well? are you risking it ? is it worth it ? if no death penalty...run in, die, respawn, kill survivors. Booooooring
The only game I levelled to cap in was WOW. You just described in 10 words my entire strategy there.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
There used to be this thing called risk vs. reward in MMOs. Dying used to mean something, where today, I use it to get a free teleport to town. Without the lows, there can never truly be the highs.
It should be different for each MMO. Obviously, 9.5 million people enjoy not having a death penalty in WoW, while some hardcore players enjoy a game where everything is on the line in every fight, such as in EVE.
The harsher the death pentalty, typically the fewer players.
For instance, when I played COD 2 heavily, I could pull up a list of servers. 90% of them were softcore team death match with zero respawn timer. A very small percentage of them, were hardcore mode, search and destroy with one life and no respawning. I played S&D exclusively because it was a lot more tactical than spawn, charge firing dual pistols, die... repeat ad nauseum. However, the vast majority of players just want constant gun shooting action with no penalties.
you mentioned COD but I'd like to mention counterstrike.
it's old, it's a decade past its prime but by God we all loved it.
what happened when you died ?
Honestly, I don't know! lol
I may be one of the only FPS players on earth that never played it.
Was it harsh?
well the game was played in rounds. varied by server but about 10 minue rounds. Once you died you could cycle thru the camera views of other players or 'free' but you stayed dead. round ended when time was up, bomb was disarmed/exploded or one team died entirely.
so when you died you'd stay dead the rest of the round.
and if you were like me and died first...and smoked a cig after each death in anger...well you'd do a lot of looking and not a lot of playing. because you'd be alive for 1 minute every 10 minutes.
That describes the Search and Destroy mode in Modern Warfare 2 exactly. That must be where they got the game mode from.
My overarching point is that the vast majority of gamers aren't looking for that. Most of them just want carefree play time without any consequences. It's one of the reasons that the average WoW player doesn't even have a single max level character yet. Most players these days aren't looking for that harsh unforgiving world of EVE or Ultima Online. They want their cake and eat it too.
I don't see the pendulum swinging the other direction any time soon either. You won't find any big publishers going after a niche market, they all want to steal Blizzards crown and they'll pander to the lowest common denominator all day long in order to do it. I mean, look at SWTOR. It's a freakin carbon copy of WoW with lightsabers.
The more hardcore games, if you're into them, are mostly labors of love from independent publishers that don't usually have mountains of capital and hundreds of devs. How many people have ever even heard of Darkfall or Perpetuum Online? Both very hardcore games... both labors of love... both relatively obscure.
What a ridiculous question. Why do MMOs all have to be the same? Seriously, utterly stupid question. I have no idea why someone feels that all MMOs should remove or add such and such feature and all be the same.
Originally posted by Robokapp OP I will point out in the most honest way possible why it makes no sense to you: you're looking at it wrong. "So I died...I lose 25% xp...how am I supposed to kill anything". whoa whoa whoa. you started at death ? let's back up another 3 minutes. you're alive. you're seeing a pack of wolves. Do you engage ? it's an important question because you might die and lose 25% xp and run into the problem you stated. why should you fight them? what are the odds you'll win? what are the risks? do you know these wolves well? are you risking it ? is it worth it ? if no death penalty...run in, die, respawn, kill survivors. Booooooring
You mean you don't do that anyway, regardless if there is a penalty or not?
we dont. you know we don't.
Hell, I only play cause fighting wolves is fun. What other point should there be? Not winning is punishment enough, isn't it? What if I don't get a rush from a high death penalty? What if its merely an inconvenience?
Ugh...the inconvenience rebuttal again.
Death penalty with some substance (xp loss or gear damage) makes that fight that much more exciting and scary for many people. That sense of what could happen if you lose, Sure, if you die it really sucks...but if you win, it's that much more gratifying.
Death penalty with some substance makes you think before you act. Otherwise you can just Rambo into a fray because if you die nothing happens. That's just boring...to me anyways. Should be consequences for stupidity...like rushing a group of 6 enemies solo and expecting to come out unscathed.
Having to wait to respawn your character after you die, would also be included as a penalty. Removing the death penalty would open the flood gates to all sorts of issues, as there would not be any risk involved in playing the game. You would simply have an MMO filled with constant zerg battles with no substance or strategy, which mind you already occurs in many MMO's anyways. The death penalty makes a player reconsider there possible fatal choice and insights a form of strategy to insure the safety of there in game character.
If you are constantly getting frustrated by the fact that you are dying, and having to forfeit your hard earned coin in game, maybe you should reconsider your actions more carefully. If you are running with a group, trying to complete a particularly hard raid and of course somebody doesn't pay attention and wipes the group, you should probably remove yourself from that group or that player in order to avoid death.
I knew a guy who played EVE online for a while during my time of playing, and he was silly enough to not back up his clone. A couple of months of playing EVE who was attacked and his pod was also destroyed, in those months of playing he lost it all in a 30 second encounter. I personally love harsher death-penalties; it seems to filter out a majority of immature players.
Originally posted by FallguyArmy I think a better question to ask is, "What benefits do death penalties have in the progression of character leveling in MMOs?"
it's simple.
let's say a questgiver asks you to kill he scary wolf that's terrorizing the village.
the developers can easily make a wolf. It's not very easy to make the wolf scary though.
but if the wolf can kill you can dying sucks...suddenly the wolf just got scary a little, didn't it ?
No?
It just means that the wolf is annoying.
Until MMO developers implement a decent death penalty system similar to Demons Souls in which you learn and improve based on dying (and the game adjusting itself accordingly), all what death penalties amount to right now are nuisances for most players and joy for those who are masochists, both of which are hardly things a company sould be proud of when advertising their game.
Originally posted by FallguyArmy I think a better question to ask is, "What benefits do death penalties have in the progression of character leveling in MMOs?"
it's simple.
let's say a questgiver asks you to kill he scary wolf that's terrorizing the village.
the developers can easily make a wolf. It's not very easy to make the wolf scary though.
but if the wolf can kill you can dying sucks...suddenly the wolf just got scary a little, didn't it ?
No?
It just means that the wolf is annoying.
Until MMO developers implement a decent death penalty system similar to Demons Souls in which you learn and improve based on dying (and the game adjusting itself accordingly), all what death penalties amount to right now are nuisances for most players and joy for those who are masochists, both of which are hardly things a company sould be proud of when advertising their game.
jesus christ. there's no masochism involved in valuing death penalties
jesus christ. there's no masochism involved in valuing death penalties
So why do you value death penalties in MMOs? What would be the benefits? You said it yourself previously that you don't like them, they frustrate you, and that you admitted they're an inconvenience. Yet, you said you appreciated their purpose. So what purpose does death penalties serve?
jesus christ. there's no masochism involved in valuing death penalties
So why do you value death penalties in MMOs? What would be the benefits? You said it yourself previously that you don't like them, they frustrate you, and that you admitted they're an inconvenience. Yet, you said you appreciated their purpose. So what purpose does death penalties serve?
They make your accomplishments meaningful.
When you wipe out a hostile fleet of ships in EVE Online, they don't respawn in a new ship and come right back to the fight. You just blew up their ship. It's gone. Adios. Time for them to buy a new one and and the modules and guns that go on it. You accomplished something. They now no longer possess a game item that they once did.
When you kill another player in most modern MMO's... well ok. Cool. All you really did is teleport them to a different part of the map. Awesome I guess.
Personally I prefer games where death has a consequence. It gets my adrenaline flowing more, it makes the fight much more tense. Especially if I'm risking losing something really big and expensive and difficult to replace like a deadspace fitted Machariel that I sometimes fly when I'm feeling especially courageous.
These games are in the extreme minority, but I tend to gravitate towards them for the meaningful consequences of living or dying.
They elicit an emotional response when you're close to death. If there is a heavy death penalty and you're on the verge of death your heart rate becomes elevated and the game becomes more fun. It's not people being masachist, but about actually having stimulation for your brain.
So in other words death penalties elicit emotional and psychological responses, some for better (e.g. adrenaline rush, sense of accomplishment) and some for worse (e.g. sense of loss, burden of taking risks). But so far I still don't see how death penalities serve a purpose in actual character progression. To lose XP, items, or perhaps your entire virtual self (i.e. perma-death)... they all seem backwards. (Nevermind the adverse psychological and emotional effects that such losses can have on certain people. One only needs to hear the horror stories of accounts erased from their favorite MMORPGs.) So again, I ask, what benefits do death penalities have in improving your character in an MMO?
Originally posted by tollbooth They elicit an emotional response when you're close to death. If there is a heavy death penalty and you're on the verge of death your heart rate becomes elevated and the game becomes more fun. It's not people being masachist, but about actually having stimulation for your brain.
Statements such as these without any emperical backing are quite meaningless (outside of personal opinion). Personal anecdotal evidence is not generalizeable. Then again sure you could dig around and find something in a serious game studies jorunal out there : )
I'm still dreaming of an open world PVP mmorpg where you can level fairly quickly. To max level. Maybe 2 weeks. But die once, and you loose everything.
Real death would only occur from another player killing you outright, and they could let you live once they injure you and put you on the ground. Killing would have some kind of law or karma penalty. Perhaps even in game bounties automatically put on the players head.
But no, death penalties are good, and fine. I don't think I would be interested in playing an mmorpg without any risk at all. No mmo has ever gotten my heart pumping and my adrenaline flowing like EvE. I didn't want to loose my ship. Was EvE SUPER DUPER ULTRA exciting? I didn't think so. But it was that threat of lose that really got the juices flowing. I've never had that experience with an mmorpg before or since. Not like that.
So could the industry remove death penalties? Nah. Could they make them harsher? Yea. Not too harsh mind you, but its that threat of lose that really gives you that sense of desperation, and realness. It can be a great facilitator for immersion.
jesus christ. there's no masochism involved in valuing death penalties
So why do you value death penalties in MMOs? What would be the benefits? You said it yourself previously that you don't like them, they frustrate you, and that you admitted they're an inconvenience. Yet, you said you appreciated their purpose. So what purpose does death penalties serve?
They make your accomplishments meaningful.
When you wipe out a hostile fleet of ships in EVE Online, they don't respawn in a new ship and come right back to the fight. You just blew up their ship. It's gone. Adios. Time for them to buy a new one and and the modules and guns that go on it. You accomplished something. They now no longer possess a game item that they once did.
When you kill another player in most modern MMO's... well ok. Cool. All you really did is teleport them to a different part of the map. Awesome I guess.
Personally I prefer games where death has a consequence. It gets my adrenaline flowing more, it makes the fight much more tense. Especially if I'm risking losing something really big and expensive and difficult to replace like a deadspace fitted Machariel that I sometimes fly when I'm feeling especially courageous.
These games are in the extreme minority, but I tend to gravitate towards them for the meaningful consequences of living or dying.
Comments
But if we don't die, how do we get the buff in the raid finder!?!?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
What death penalty? Anything that has released in the last 8 years doesn't even have a death penalty. Dieing in todays MMOs is totally meaningless. Remove the death penalty? It already was removed years ago.
Bren
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The only game I levelled to cap in was WOW. You just described in 10 words my entire strategy there.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Should they? Haven't they already?
There used to be this thing called risk vs. reward in MMOs. Dying used to mean something, where today, I use it to get a free teleport to town. Without the lows, there can never truly be the highs.
Joined - July 2004
It should be different for each MMO. Obviously, 9.5 million people enjoy not having a death penalty in WoW, while some hardcore players enjoy a game where everything is on the line in every fight, such as in EVE.
The harsher the death pentalty, typically the fewer players.
For instance, when I played COD 2 heavily, I could pull up a list of servers. 90% of them were softcore team death match with zero respawn timer. A very small percentage of them, were hardcore mode, search and destroy with one life and no respawning. I played S&D exclusively because it was a lot more tactical than spawn, charge firing dual pistols, die... repeat ad nauseum. However, the vast majority of players just want constant gun shooting action with no penalties.
Honestly, I don't know! lol
I may be one of the only FPS players on earth that never played it.
Was it harsh?
That describes the Search and Destroy mode in Modern Warfare 2 exactly. That must be where they got the game mode from.
My overarching point is that the vast majority of gamers aren't looking for that. Most of them just want carefree play time without any consequences. It's one of the reasons that the average WoW player doesn't even have a single max level character yet. Most players these days aren't looking for that harsh unforgiving world of EVE or Ultima Online. They want their cake and eat it too.
I don't see the pendulum swinging the other direction any time soon either. You won't find any big publishers going after a niche market, they all want to steal Blizzards crown and they'll pander to the lowest common denominator all day long in order to do it. I mean, look at SWTOR. It's a freakin carbon copy of WoW with lightsabers.
The more hardcore games, if you're into them, are mostly labors of love from independent publishers that don't usually have mountains of capital and hundreds of devs. How many people have ever even heard of Darkfall or Perpetuum Online? Both very hardcore games... both labors of love... both relatively obscure.
Ugh...the inconvenience rebuttal again.
Death penalty with some substance (xp loss or gear damage) makes that fight that much more exciting and scary for many people. That sense of what could happen if you lose, Sure, if you die it really sucks...but if you win, it's that much more gratifying.
Death penalty with some substance makes you think before you act. Otherwise you can just Rambo into a fray because if you die nothing happens. That's just boring...to me anyways. Should be consequences for stupidity...like rushing a group of 6 enemies solo and expecting to come out unscathed.
Having to wait to respawn your character after you die, would also be included as a penalty. Removing the death penalty would open the flood gates to all sorts of issues, as there would not be any risk involved in playing the game. You would simply have an MMO filled with constant zerg battles with no substance or strategy, which mind you already occurs in many MMO's anyways. The death penalty makes a player reconsider there possible fatal choice and insights a form of strategy to insure the safety of there in game character.
If you are constantly getting frustrated by the fact that you are dying, and having to forfeit your hard earned coin in game, maybe you should reconsider your actions more carefully. If you are running with a group, trying to complete a particularly hard raid and of course somebody doesn't pay attention and wipes the group, you should probably remove yourself from that group or that player in order to avoid death.
I knew a guy who played EVE online for a while during my time of playing, and he was silly enough to not back up his clone. A couple of months of playing EVE who was attacked and his pod was also destroyed, in those months of playing he lost it all in a 30 second encounter. I personally love harsher death-penalties; it seems to filter out a majority of immature players.
No?
It just means that the wolf is annoying.
Until MMO developers implement a decent death penalty system similar to Demons Souls in which you learn and improve based on dying (and the game adjusting itself accordingly), all what death penalties amount to right now are nuisances for most players and joy for those who are masochists, both of which are hardly things a company sould be proud of when advertising their game.
jesus christ. there's no masochism involved in valuing death penalties
So why do you value death penalties in MMOs? What would be the benefits? You said it yourself previously that you don't like them, they frustrate you, and that you admitted they're an inconvenience. Yet, you said you appreciated their purpose. So what purpose does death penalties serve?
They make your accomplishments meaningful.
When you wipe out a hostile fleet of ships in EVE Online, they don't respawn in a new ship and come right back to the fight. You just blew up their ship. It's gone. Adios. Time for them to buy a new one and and the modules and guns that go on it. You accomplished something. They now no longer possess a game item that they once did.
When you kill another player in most modern MMO's... well ok. Cool. All you really did is teleport them to a different part of the map. Awesome I guess.
Personally I prefer games where death has a consequence. It gets my adrenaline flowing more, it makes the fight much more tense. Especially if I'm risking losing something really big and expensive and difficult to replace like a deadspace fitted Machariel that I sometimes fly when I'm feeling especially courageous.
These games are in the extreme minority, but I tend to gravitate towards them for the meaningful consequences of living or dying.
Statements such as these without any emperical backing are quite meaningless (outside of personal opinion). Personal anecdotal evidence is not generalizeable. Then again sure you could dig around and find something in a serious game studies jorunal out there : )
Long live /corpsedrag macros?
I'm still dreaming of an open world PVP mmorpg where you can level fairly quickly. To max level. Maybe 2 weeks. But die once, and you loose everything.
Real death would only occur from another player killing you outright, and they could let you live once they injure you and put you on the ground. Killing would have some kind of law or karma penalty. Perhaps even in game bounties automatically put on the players head.
But no, death penalties are good, and fine. I don't think I would be interested in playing an mmorpg without any risk at all. No mmo has ever gotten my heart pumping and my adrenaline flowing like EvE. I didn't want to loose my ship. Was EvE SUPER DUPER ULTRA exciting? I didn't think so. But it was that threat of lose that really got the juices flowing. I've never had that experience with an mmorpg before or since. Not like that.
So could the industry remove death penalties? Nah. Could they make them harsher? Yea. Not too harsh mind you, but its that threat of lose that really gives you that sense of desperation, and realness. It can be a great facilitator for immersion.
This sums it up nicely.
mmm and I thought death penalties were removed already 8 years ago??
yeah pretty much. hell in conan we use to jump off a cliff just to get to the other side of the zone faster. pretty sad actually.