I've been talking with friends and co-workers about MMOs and their death penalties. WoW has ghost mode, WAR has stat penalties etc. Well one guy came up with the idea of permanent death. Once your player dies he's dead forever or a certain amount of time (ex 3days). These death penalties would be for certain high end dungeons not general play. I was wondering what you guys think about MMO death penalties? Ideas? Complaints?
Wasn't there supposed to have been previews of a Roman-set MMO with something like that? You could be crucified in-game and the character was dead forever? Or did I imagine it?
EVE Online's death penalties put me right off the game permanently. Losing fittings, no matter how well your ship was insured, having to save up for the insurance in the first place, stats loss if you neglect to get a clone. It just served to turn the game into even more of a grind fest.
I think WoW's death penalty is good because its only a minor drawback of running back to your corpse. I don't think I would like a game like you described.
There definitely needs to be more penalty for death other than the standard time loss. EVE online is enriched by its decision to not totally refund ship cost and contents when I played it. Something along the lines of death penalty might be that you start your character at a certain age, 16 maybe and he/she has a preset number of years to live in the game world. If you die you accelerate the process (lose a few years maybe), something like that.
Diablo 2 employs this for only the crazy brave. it's called "hardcore" and rightly so. if you die, you die. that's it. no ifs. no buts. no matter how much you whine and complain to blizz.net about dying due to lag your character will never ever ever ever ever be playable again. all items on that character are lost forever, and that means the uber rare stuff to. it totally changes the way people play the game. characters have stupid high armour and health levels, play low risk tactics and at the slightest ping of lag they'll drop out of a game and start again. it's that risky. oddlyl enough, iirc, the last time they reset the ladder, the first character to reach level 99 was a hardcore character. that's ballsy. i never tried it myself. i don't have the cajones.
In runescape if you died you would normally lose your items except for the 3 most valueable, in pvp if you attacked first and died, you would lose everything. In diablo 2, they have a hardcore mode, where you make your char, and once you die, your dead forever.
If you had a 3 day wait on deaths in WoW nobody would ever have been able to level past about 32 And if it was only raiding, by the time you got to the first boss most of your people would be lost, the game would have to be dumbed down significantly so as not to really really really annoy everybody.
WoW's system works fine tbh. If I was paying a fee to play a game every month, and they introduced some sort of 3 day death I would cancel my account. Simple as that! I pay my fee to PLAY the game not to get locked out for doing something wrong!
Coincidentally I was having a similar discussion at work not long ago. I think we decided that much like D2's hardcore mode, it would be acceptable to have a server ruleset that was geared for perma-death, but ChromeX is right, you can't enforce massive penalties like that on customers. That's a pretty fatal business decision. That said, I think it'd be interesting to see a mainstream MMO introduce it as a ruleset. I'd be up for giving it a go. I can imagine the play style to be completely different.
IIRC the original SWG rules before the NGE had this for Jedi, 3 deaths and that was it, your Jedi Died. Been some time since I played though so my memory may be a little hazy.
Permanent death would put off many, many people in a traditional MMO, hell, even XP loss is a right PITA. However, if the mechanics of the game meant that dieing and losing a character wasn't a huge deal then it would be fine, but not many people will play an MMO where if their character who they spend 2 years grinding with dies permanently, they wouldn't be happy.
Same. Dying can be very dispiriting; WoW makes sure it's an appropriate punishment/inconvenience for sucking, without putting you off too much. Games where dying is SERIOUS BUSINESS usually just make me give up within 3 attempts (like Operation Flashpoint...ooh, there's no limit to my hatred of that game!)
I get upset when I have to wait for a new round to start in a fps because I died, never mind permanent death. If a company wanted to do that, as someone stated above, make a server dedicated to a hardcore type thing. We sure as hell wouldn't be rushing in, and the pvp just wouldn't work since everyone would be too scared to die, and no one would charge in. On top of that, online stores would charge premiums for high level characters that they somehow managed to power level to a respectable level, with decent gear to survive most situations. It just wouldn't work for the hardcore gamer, as they would probably put their own foot through their monitor when they died and it would just be a landslide going straight down.
I would be all over perma-death in MMOs. That, and an MMO that encouraged actual role-playing, instead of servers full of 14 year olds dancing and spouting memes.
Hardcore is the only way to go. I love EVE but the death penalty is way too low. I think alot of "casual gamers" couldnt handle it, but people like us would love it. I remember the Hardcore in Diablo, it added ALOT to the game, and winning the game meant something. Doubt it will happen in general though, the MBA suits who make these decision are too cowardly in their RLs to green light something that might upset the kiddies. Yours in HARDcore Plasma, Star*Dagger
No, they're just not masochists. Think about what you just said, very few people would buy into an MMO where permanent death was forced on all players. Remember D2 isn't the same, Hardcore was a choice. Who in their right mind would make a game that would make them little, perhaps even no money? It just wouldn't make any sense, after all, you need money to make games, to make money you need a business.
I used to play Hardcore in Diablo 2, and I'm pretty sure it was my favorite way to play the game. The people are friendlier, and your successes really feel good. Granted, when I died I'd just walk away from my computer and not touch the game again for at least a week, but it added something new and interesting. I don't think that type of gameplay should be forced on people, but I'd love it if more games had it as an option. EDIT: As I recall, death didn't always mean you lost all your items. If you were playing with a friend, you had the ability to allow them to loot your corpse, and they could return your gear to you later. You still lost a significant amount of time, but you could start over without having to use low-end gear.
