The various forms of death penalties MMORPGs

Blacknd

Of the types listed, which best suits you?

I personally would love a system similar to Demon's Souls, ie: You're definitely not immortal, you can die easily if you don't pay attention and if you do, you lose progress, but if you learned from your mistakes you can reclaim the lost progress. You also suffer an HP penalty after death until you achieve a feat (slaying a boss or another player).

Overall though, I feel that death penalties in MMORPGs have become too lax, characters are essentially immortal both in mob difficulty and what happens if you die. If you die in a solo situation due to misjudgement, you can just respawn, heal up, and tackle the mob again with (probably) no penalty, short of repeated deaths.

Laserwolf

I'm still a fan of perma-death, not for your main character, but for companion characters. When it comes to Star Wars: TOR, I'm most interested in the companion characters and very much hoping that they are as deep and interesting as the ones from the Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or even the KOTOR games. Of course having the possibility of your companion character permanently dying would mean they would need be randomized and couldn't be fleshed out enough to really make you care about them. It's sort of a catch 22 in that regard, but even having a fairly dumbed down companion that has been with you through dozens of hours of gameplay die without being able to be restored because you screwed up would serve generally the same purpose of a main character pemanent death system. It would be especially effective if your other companions established some sort of link to them (either friendship, romance, or maybe even rivalry) and reacted in some dramatic way to their death to pile on the guilt.

 

I also like the idea of death system that boots you to an alternate dimension(server) upon death so that you lose the ability to play with your friends unless they too die and end up in your same dimension. With each death you are cycled to the next dimension and the next until your start back over with the original one. Maybe they could include some sort of very expensive item to allow your friends to bring you back to their dimension, or even an end-game, max-level, item that when used locks you into that dimension permanently. At that point the death system could be something more like forgiving like item loss.

Of course any sort of permanent death system should not be a "one strike and your out" kind of thing, but something more like a 3 strike rule. The important thing is that you truely fear death, especially in a more open pvp type MMO, but that dying doesn't require you to completely start over from scratch. There is a lot of room in-between.

Just look at the MMORPG episodes of shows like South Park, American Dad, The Simpsons, and many others. In each of them the game they played appeared to have a permanent death system which made the games much more interesting and dramatic than MMORPGs really are. Of course WoW doesn't have anything remotely related to a harsh death system, but even though the characters clearly resurrected, South Park (in an obviously over-the-top way) made it seem like there was a permanent death system.