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New take on an old penalty
Rungar
Member RarePosts: 1,132
I was thinking about death penalties in mmos and I was trying to figure out ways to make my favorite, the corpse run, more interesting and palatable to players by adding some gameplay. Here are my ideas.
When you die you leave a corpse and all your items on it except one item "your lucky charm". This item of which there would be a number of choices has an effect that kicks in after you die (you click on it). There would be a number of charms you can find and each one has a unique effect.
1) Polymorph Totem: When you die, after you come back you transform into one of 3 different animals to help you get back to your corpse easier. The stealthy rat, the flying crow, and the speedy fox. The polymorph lasts 15 minutes (or until you touch your corpse). You dont know which one youll get each time you die and you can cancel the effect at any time. 1 hit and you die again.
2) Amulet of Prismatic Invisibility: When you die the amulet gives you one kind of invisibility: Invisibility to undead, Invisibility to animals, Invisibility to humanoids. Which one you get is random and lasts 15 minutes. It can change focus at any time randomly.
3) Unstable Portal Token : When you die you can activate the unstable portal token and it will transport you within a certain range of your corpse...most of the time.
4) Blinking Pendant: When you die you can activate this and it will transport you a short & safe distance away from a mob that has aggroed you. It has 0-4 charges.
5) Stunning Pearl: When you die you can activate this and it will stun the next mob that does damage to you. It has 4 charges but the stun is variable from 2-5 seconds ( 10 s recharge) and there is a 5% incremental ( 5/10/15/20) chance it will stun you with each activation.
6) Vial of Purple Liquid: When you die you can activate this and it will increase your runspeed at the cost of one of your regeneration stats ( health, stamina or magicka) for 15 minutes.
7) Bag of mixed bones: When you die you can activate this and it will summon a pet that will defend you for 15 minutes. There are 3 possible pets, The wolf, the panther and the hawk. There is a chance that they will flee at the first sign of trouble.
8) Weapon signet: when you die you can activate this and it will summon a weapon for you. There is no telling how long the weapon will last or what weapon you will get. Hopefully you dont get the mystic spoon.
So the idea here is that we will only have the corpse run as the death penalty and the lucky charm is kind of a helper that can run out of luck. You can use any one you want and can deactivate it at any time. After its been expended you have to recharge it to use it again. Its basically a boon with a chance to add insult to injury. Most of the time it would give a real benefit but you have to leave a little space open for the unknown.
There would also be a corpse summoning npc service but it wouldn't be practical to use it too often as the npc will notice and adjust prices, which wont necessarily be gold.
There would be no other penalties for death.
When you die you leave a corpse and all your items on it except one item "your lucky charm". This item of which there would be a number of choices has an effect that kicks in after you die (you click on it). There would be a number of charms you can find and each one has a unique effect.
1) Polymorph Totem: When you die, after you come back you transform into one of 3 different animals to help you get back to your corpse easier. The stealthy rat, the flying crow, and the speedy fox. The polymorph lasts 15 minutes (or until you touch your corpse). You dont know which one youll get each time you die and you can cancel the effect at any time. 1 hit and you die again.
2) Amulet of Prismatic Invisibility: When you die the amulet gives you one kind of invisibility: Invisibility to undead, Invisibility to animals, Invisibility to humanoids. Which one you get is random and lasts 15 minutes. It can change focus at any time randomly.
3) Unstable Portal Token : When you die you can activate the unstable portal token and it will transport you within a certain range of your corpse...most of the time.
4) Blinking Pendant: When you die you can activate this and it will transport you a short & safe distance away from a mob that has aggroed you. It has 0-4 charges.
5) Stunning Pearl: When you die you can activate this and it will stun the next mob that does damage to you. It has 4 charges but the stun is variable from 2-5 seconds ( 10 s recharge) and there is a 5% incremental ( 5/10/15/20) chance it will stun you with each activation.
6) Vial of Purple Liquid: When you die you can activate this and it will increase your runspeed at the cost of one of your regeneration stats ( health, stamina or magicka) for 15 minutes.
7) Bag of mixed bones: When you die you can activate this and it will summon a pet that will defend you for 15 minutes. There are 3 possible pets, The wolf, the panther and the hawk. There is a chance that they will flee at the first sign of trouble.
8) Weapon signet: when you die you can activate this and it will summon a weapon for you. There is no telling how long the weapon will last or what weapon you will get. Hopefully you dont get the mystic spoon.
So the idea here is that we will only have the corpse run as the death penalty and the lucky charm is kind of a helper that can run out of luck. You can use any one you want and can deactivate it at any time. After its been expended you have to recharge it to use it again. Its basically a boon with a chance to add insult to injury. Most of the time it would give a real benefit but you have to leave a little space open for the unknown.
There would also be a corpse summoning npc service but it wouldn't be practical to use it too often as the npc will notice and adjust prices, which wont necessarily be gold.
There would be no other penalties for death.
.05 of a second to midnight
Comments
- you die, you respawn with your gear. If you reach lvl 40 per se without dying your character gets a cool halo or super cool unique skin. Each 10th level it gets upgraded. You can also have different levels of halo based on deaths 1, <5, < 10, etc.
Also, if you die as many times as equal your level, you get a halo equivalent of a dunce cap.
Going through an MMO with a hardcore death penatly where you die and you char is gone or put in a new league is rough and really only works in games where you can exit out in a nanosecond like path of exile.
But a regular MMO where you reach a high level without dying once shows other people that you haven't died once. So people on a regular MMO server have someething to achieve, so the difficulty is really that you want to limit your deaths and people can see it.
So a max lvl char in this game or like WoW is one thing but a max level char in WoW with that "no deaths" halo is another thing.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
1) you will be more careful while playing the game because its more dangerous. It is especially dangerous if you dont have your gear.
2) you get the naked shame for dying and having to run back. Its a psychological effect.
3)people think they dont need it, but these same peolpe cry about things like lack of depth, poor attention to the atmosphere of the game. Your perception does matter but there can be a point of overkill where the penalty no longer achieves its goals.
4) players have gotten weak, lazy and apathetic to the game world because nothing matters anymore. Your just a walking stat sheet.
5) players don't know what's good for them sometimes and choose easy roads which lead to disappointment.
6) Valheim and its 6 million sold is proof that there is still demand for this mechanic. It provides part of the atmosphere of the game and I think many people realize that now.
in this regard i think the corpse run is perfectly balanced. Unlike all the other penalties, it is its own mini adventure game and with the right additions could be made interesting and fun.
I don't support experience or levels in anything I imagine so all things have to be done in the gameplay.
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/488612/very-interesting-article-on-the-death-penalty-in-mmorpgs/p1
First there is no death but instead you are KO'd.What happens after you are Ko'd is where the deep system design happens and would take me too long to explain.
The basics without deisgning the whole thing is the entire group takes a hit whenever someone is Ko'd,skill points are lost and of course can be recovered over time.
As i stated there are many more levels to this design i am just going over the basics.
What i want to see is some way to give a bonus to a group that sticks together after a KO status has occurred.I do not want finger pointing or disbanding just because everyone lost skill points.I do not want a bonus to be so good that groups die on purpose.I want bonuses the longer the group does not allow any player to be Ko'd with a certain risk/reward factored in as obviously killing weaker mobs would be too eay and why i said the design needs several layers.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
You cant give Valheims success to corpse runs, I played Valheim and many of my friends also played Valheim who hate corpse runs. In Valheim all the gear was easily replaceable. Additionally the game is very easy.
When a game has corpse runs where you can lose your gear. Games that are on ez mode and have meaningless gear. Imagine if you had gear that took you a year to get then lost it to a disconnect or some grief player, or any bad player.
Meanwhile if they remove griefing as a feature, 95+ percent of the population is happy.
So can someone like myself that thinks corpse runs make games trivial, deal with some of you suggestions. Yes/Maybe, I can deal with it, but seems like a waste of time to me. I would rather them just remove it, and make people like you deal with it.
if you remove everything you perceive to slow you down you will get the end and move on much quicker especially in a level based system. You need to be thinking on the higher level. Not is this good for me, but is this good for the game, of which I am part.
i dont believe in draconian penalties for the sake of having it. It has to add real gameplay value. I would never put exp loss or skill loss or equipment loss in the game because i know from experience they are a bridge too far for most players and they prevent players from taking risks.
At the same time if I can make the corpse run fun ( which has the corpse summoning option should all else fail, so risk is actually minimal) i think people who have played alot of games will better appreciate it. You see the perception is more important than the actual pain. For most i think that it is just enough make you cautious but not overly so.
can anyone really complain that a game is boring when anything interesting has to be removed in the first place? I think my take would result in many hours of players fiddling with the trinkets until they found their favored method. People would be a little more cautious in the games and they can give out a free corpse summons occasionally or a rare find incase you get hit with the disconnect ( which seems to be the only way to possibly die
its not permadeath, its a slight inconvenience, even less so with new gameplay elements attached to it.
part of me thinks that players (not all) really want is a stat sheet to complete and that's it. No interruptions, no sidetracking, certainly no dying and most of all no consequences at all. Play, get bored quick, move on to the next pile of garbage.
debuffs are the worst penalty as it penalizes you from playing the game. Especially if you were in the process of doing something dangerous and challenging. You then have to wait because your character isn't at its optimum.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Yeah putting these artificial time wasters in just to extend the life of the game? Yeah thats a bad idea to me.
I think devs should be looking at all the time players are spending in these MMO's and ask themselves if their players are having fun. They need to be striving toward as close to 100% fun time as possible, the closer they get to that number the more popular their game will be.
Thats like going to an amusement park and the company has lines on purpose to extend your day out. I would rather just go with a fast pass spend half the day, ride all rides and leave, then sit there doing some 16 hour day full of long lines. It drags all the fun out of it.
Another example is a 2 hr action packed movie vs a long drawn out borefest 4 hr movie. Dont extend it for the sake of making it longer. There is no repeatability to the movie if my eyes are rolling back in my head in boredom.
In entertainment for me quality is more important that quantity.
And doing corpse runs is logical to you? Give me one example in the real world where you seen someone doing a corpse run after they died
Seriously thou, I am sure someone could come up with dozens or more ways to explain xp loss in a fantasy world.
While I would never force grouping on any player there should be situations where it is simply more efficient for the player seek some help once and a while. Not so much to kill the target but to watch the back.
i think the eq1 based death penalty combined with the eq1 Death mobs ( for those that played, the hill giants and griffons for example) were very effective at keeping players on their toes.
I dont think theres any need for any kind of loss scenario or debuffs. If the world is sufficiently dangerous the corpse run should be more than plenty.