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Topic: Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/16/2003 10:21:19 PM PST
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ireynoso
Gateway: WoW
61. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/16/2003 10:21:19 PM PST |
and what if your out of charges on the ToR? and the player dies, is he forced to wait for a normal rez? or can he just release like how he does now? and if he releases as the player does now.. does he have to pay any sort of cost for not using the ToR?
AEBMEIER
Gateway: WoW
62. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/16/2003 11:02:51 PM PST
WEll, part of the FUN to me is RISK. As it is, there is no RISK involved in the game. That's not saying it isn't fun now (it is) , but I would like to see more risk, because risk adds to the reward.
just my 2 cents
mmaxwell
Gateway: WoW
63. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 12:15:01 AM PST
I guess if you run out of charges on the ToR, then you're SOL and you wake up where you were standing, or you get a normal rez if you're in a party.
But this is a lot of talk over something that isn't likely to be implemented anytime real soon. I don't think that the designers wanted folks to be able to blink across continents in an instant, which means we're likely to see a change in the way bind stones work. What that might be, I don't know.
cfeist
Gateway: WoW
64. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 1:53:13 AM PST
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Q u o t e:
WEll, part of the FUN to me is RISK. As it is, there is no RISK involved in the game. That's not saying it isn't fun now (it is) , but I would like to see more risk, because risk adds to the reward.
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Huh? There is still plenty of risk taking in WoW. Just because you don't pay a severe death penalty and have to retrieve your corpse doesn't make certain zones, mobs, quests less risky.. However, the result of risk taking in WoW are much less painful, and in my opinion, is a major reason why WoW is so much more fun than any other RPG on the market. I believe a number of people have summed up what I feel already, so I will save my breath. It boils down to having FUN, and right now, WoW is a perfect example of a FUN GAME.
ireynoso
Gateway: WoW
65. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 8:48:28 AM PST |
So if you have no ToR left, you get to auto rez automaticlly right where you die?
is this after the 5 mins?
so thats forced downtime?
" don't think that the designers wanted folks to be able to blink across continents in an instant,"
and thus the travel by death. the designers don't want travel by death, and thus why it's an issue.
"which means we're likely to see a change in the way bind stones work."
bind stones are not the problem, the problem is not having a penatly for death, if there is not death penalty, then there will always be an issue with abusing death as means of travel.
Now do you see what what i suggested actually works out well?
Buying back your XP you lost at death from a NPC CS, and the cost of coin depends on your level.. so a level 10 guy would have to pay.. 50c or soemthing.. and it's increases as the levels go by.
mmaxwell
Gateway: WoW
66. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 9:28:10 AM PST
Wow, you're just determined to browbeat anyone who doesn't agree with you, aren't you, ir? You demand alternate suggestions and then hammer on them incessantly once they're offered.
I reiterate. You're not interested in any ideas but your own. You're not interested in debate on the issue. You're interested in misreading at every opportunity and putting words into people's mouths. I'm not advocating forced downtime, never have. The only thing I'm advocating is a minimizing of death penalties, period. But then I don't want people to take fall damage either...
I might point out that your plan doesn't change travel by death, ultimately. Once I hit say, level 10 or so, it's never going to be too hard for me to come up with the NPC body retrieval fee. There will still be travel by death, only there'll be a minimal fee attached to it. That certainly won't dissuade people. If they're willing to pay 1.5 S for a griffon ride from SW to Westfall, then they'll pay 2 S to zap from Redridge to Westfall (as a number of quests require you to do). They'll do this particularly if they're goal-oriented players who don't have a lot of time.
So long as death involves teleporting a body to a safe place, folks will use that to their advantage. You'd have to make the body-retrieval-fee prohibitively expensive in order to keep the deterrent in place. The only solution to death-travel is having bodies res where they lie, which has its own host of problems.
But I'm going to say that this discussion stopped being useful a long time ago. Perhaps we should find something else to pick on and then come back to this once we've had some more time to consider it. Let's tackle another burning issue, like...why aren't Priests allowed to wear leather?
rshrider
Gateway: WoW
67. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 9:46:02 AM PST
Body retrieval sucks. It sucked in EQ and it would suck if they put it in WoW. I cant even count the number of times I died when I was close to logging for the night and then I got stuck with a 30min-1hr corpse retrival. And of course theres the issue of camping some place safe for the night so when you log in you dont get gak'ed right away and spend another 30min getting your corpse. Then there's the lag issue of all the bodies around. Especially when you get some bored moron that makes a lvl 1 char and keeps suiciding to see how many bodies they could stack up...
Exp loss sucks.
Reguardless of how brilliant the uber guilds think or say they were, the one reason they defeated the bosses long before everyone else was persistance. They had and were willing to spend the time dying over and over to figure out an encounter. Its why all of the "2nd & 3rd" tier guilds stayed 2nd and 3rd tier. I was in an uber guild and lets face it, when you encounter a hard boss you end up dying alot to figure out the encounter. Loss of exp thrashes the causal player.
Ive said it before and Ill say it again, make a hardcore mode(or server) and put in major exp loss on death, steeper exp curve, double mob hps, and let all the powergamers pick that server if they want. They can have the prestige of being uber because they beat the game when it was really hard and brag to their buddies about how L33t they are..etc..etc. The rest of us like the game the way it is now.
Edit: Oh yea and about traveling quickly all over the game world: I never understood this about EQ or any MMO that tries to make it take a long while to get places. The friggin point of a massively MULTIPLAYER game is so that people can hook up and play!! Making it take 30+ minutes to get to your group of friends so you can play together(Evercrack) is moronic at best.
[ post edited by rshrider ]
BEaslick
Gateway: WoW
68. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 9:46:09 AM PST
Maybe I have an unusual perspective. Just before I got into the WoW Alpha, I purchased FFXI. So I now have two, wonderfully new games to entertain me, and each have been competing for my attention since day 1. FFXI has a straight 10% exp loss for death, AND you can loose your level (this is opld school and severe). WoW just returns you to your bind with a bit of rez sickness. I enjoy both styles, to be honest. However, I find WoW's style more arcade, and less "invovled" . It is a number of things, including the more lenient death penalty that make up this feeling. When I want to do some serious gaming, integrate with a team to do interesting things, and feel very challanged, I pick FFXI. When I want to casually game, like I come home from work and I am really tired, I don't want to deal with people, and don't want to take a lot of time, I play WoW. I play FFXI to WoW 6:1, and if I had to pay for both, I probably would have dropped WoW until I got bored with FFXI.
Levelling in WoW to me seems easy. There are a lot of things to kill, everywhere, and they so far have been easy to single out. The battles are fast, and just about any tactic you use allows you to kill atleast one mob before resting, which means you really don't have to use much in the way of tactics at all. Last night I was running around with my bare hands, casting no spells, and melee'ing things as a level 8 Warlock! I can cast damage over time spells but I can juse as easily, eaasier in fact, use my main bolt spell over and over until my target dies. I can throw myself headlong into any stupid situation with little or no regard for tactics or strategy because if I die I just respawn and do it again. I have to kill Maven what's his name in the middle of the Scarlet camp? I blast in there with guns balzing, throwing everything at him, dying just after he does, and compelte the quest. I trail across the contryside with little respect for the creatures around me, training things for fun, jumping off cliffs, and largely being a total moron in just about every situation because there is no drawback whatso ever for doing so. The game feels geared to 13 year olds, and judging by the rampant kill stealing, it seems they may be out there in force.
In FFXI, I am cautios. I almsot alwasy travel with a gorup of fellow players for prtection. There are several parts of dungeons we have yet to see because of the risk of dying, but are planning to see one day. The encoutners are hard, and you are almost always trying to devise new ways of handling something. There are debates on tactics, and methods, which debuffs to use, how best to employ your party's resources. Encounters require palnning. In one case, we had to kill a dragon at around level 20 as part of our mission. We tried it once, came close to defeating him, but were wiped out. We spent the next three levels training together, and discussing tactics, and growing stronger for our next bout with dragon. When we finally took him again, and won, we were all on an incredible high. It was one of the best gaming experiences I had in along time, sinc ethe early days of EverQuest ...no one died, but some were close...we were so happy, it was SO intense. We were so jazzed we formed a guld afterwards, we all felt so close. If FFXI had WoW's death penalty, we would have just kept going and attacking the dragon over and over again at level 20, until we finally defeated him, becuase there would be no penalty for death. We would have been frustrated, it would have been tedious, we would have defeated him ...eventually. We never would have had that overwhelming sense of accomplishment that comes from using the correct tactics and effectively working as a team, defeating the "risk" of death.
They are different games, and each game is good in its own right, but in the end, I prefer soemthing more like FFXI. It is just weak to me to port back to your bind point to sell by dying deliberately. But I will do it, because it is convenient, and there is no drawback to it.
..just my two cents.
kwerle
Gateway: WoW
69. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 10:18:26 AM PST
BEaslick, out of curiousity: what level have you reached in WoW?
Does FFXI have a /played feature? What is the real ratio?
RHSIA
Gateway: WoW
70. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 10:27:21 AM PST
Hehe, FFXI would be my perfect example of what NOT to do in a next-gen game. FFXI was so casual unfriendly that 3/4 of our guild left the game before the first month was up.
I stuck it out for over 120 hours, and spent probably 100 of those hours mindlessly grinding at mobs. Every time I took a risk by trying something even slightly off the beaten path, I was rewarded with -10%xp and a possible level drop. The level drop is not that big a deal when you boil it down to numbers, but it is clearly a form of *psychological* punishment. What this does is ultimately force you to constantly play it safe, killing the same mobs over and over to level. Even when you hit a good pace, people will complain they are bored and want to try something slightly harder. Result? Group wipeout and more wasted time. So then they learn their lesson and go back to safe grinding. If that's your idea of fun, more power to you. But my sense is that the general MMORPG audience, and the newer casual gamers, have grown weary of this style of play. The changes in EQ (and the popularity of LDoN) are clear evidence of that.
The fact remains that while you do get a sense of accomplishment with *calculated* risks (such as the dragon example where you had to level up 3 more times to kill it), I submit you can have just as much (if not more) excitement with uncalculated risks, taking chances and winning (or losing) without being penalized. It's all in a) your mindset and b) the content you are presented with.
dlyons
Gateway: WoW
71. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:00:31 AM PST
"Death penalties aren't fun. It's fun to NOT have a death penalty and progress the way I wan't to without worrying about what happens."
sounds like...
"Work isn't fun. It's more fun to win the lottery and not have to go into the office, and not have to worry about what happens."
(there's a reason why they aren't in quote format, no one said this to such detail)
Both situations feel too fake to me. Don't get me wrong, if you win the lotto and want to give me all the cash, I'll take it...but still...too fake (it gets BORING without balanced risk vs reward, even when it's something as basic as survival).
Give me SOME realism. (and I'm not a masochist because I want a death penalty for the same reason I'm not one for wanting falling damage at certain drops...u figure it out)
-D
--Tanner--
---Ashen---
rshrider
Gateway: WoW
72. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:30:05 AM PST
hehe we've been through this battle before dlyons
Ill stick by my suggestion. Make some servers hardcore and others normal. If you feel you need the challenge then select a hardcore server (not diablo type hardcore when death is perm, just with death penalties and slower exp curve) and allow the rest of us to pick a normal server(the way the game is now). Everyone has already suggested it for pvp types where there is a server for full pvp and the rest are partial pvp, I dont see why the powergamer vs casual gamer cant work the same way.
I dont want things to be "fake" or easy but some of us that enjoy games quite a bit also have real world commitments and we just cant put 60 hours a week into a game and its not fair to say if someone cant put 60 hr/wk into a game they dont deserve to see half the content.
You obviously favor the powergamer side and we have different ideas about what is fun. I wont try and convince you that something that is fun shouldnt be alot of effort. What I will suggest is people find enjoyment in different ways and designing a game for just one type of person makes it boring for the rest. Since the powergamers dont want to compramise I suggest a seperation. Make seperate servers and disallow server transfers. Ill play the game the way it is now(very fun!) and you can play it on a hardcore server and work for your reward. Everyone is happy end of story.
mlandry
Gateway: WoW
73. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:39:54 AM PST
(Didn't read the whole thread cause I'm at work and don't have the time/patience)
Why not just change the system so that Bind Stones are like Cell phone towers. When you die, the game calculates which is the closest friendly bind stone, distance-wise, and drops you off there when you die/release. Most people always bind at their closest one they fight at and it will effectively eliminate long distance death travel.
jhugard
Gateway: WoW
74. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:50:54 AM PST
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CHEMPEL
I've had more fun playing WoW than I've had playing any previous game, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there is no death penalty. The game plays like a GAME, not like a job, not like a duty, not like any kind of investment or obligation. The lack of a death penalty is an integral part of that - it creates a feel of adventerousness, riskiness, and general relaxed fun.
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I totally echo this opinion... I'm not even near the end of this thread, but this is exactly the way I feel too.
Jay
Beaslick
Gateway: WoW
75. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:57:40 AM PST
Sorry Kwerle, at work right now...shhhhh...don't tell anyone! I can't give you a slash /played on FFXI, but it is obscene amount. WoW has had much less game time. So far I have played up to about level 8-10 with the Humans, the Dwarves, and now the Undead. WoW has been fun, but underwhelming.
Bear in mind, I am a hardcore gamer. I like to have a really fast computer, with a top notch video card (infact two atm, one of whcih occasionally runs bots). I play FPS games, I enjoy RTS games, flight sims, and I have played almost every MMORPG out there, going back to several text base muds. I remember the launch of UO and EQ. I probably don't fit into the "casual gamer" gamer mold. I don't mind "casual gameing", in fact I felt that way myself at times, but I do grow quickly bored with games that seem menial, trivial, or without challenge. This also means I do not "grind". In EverQuest, I played on the Test server instead of their production servers because of the Test server's chronically low population, and regularly mob rich dungeons made for some very scary hunts. I dungeon crawled very tough dungeons with my single group that other people would consider raid worthy for 2+ groups, and rearely if ever "camped". I played SWG in beta, the ultimate "casual gamer" experience this side of SIMs on-line, and I hated it thouroughly. So you have to take this persepctive into account, when listening to my arguments about WoW.
I want SERIOUS challenge and extreme fun. I quickly grow tired with poor implementaitons and lack of content. I am probably the worst customer that a MMORPG company could have. I have high exptactions, I play ALOT, for a shrot time, then get bored if the game is not "finshed". I could potentially expire the game's content within the first free month, if the world is small enough and it was the only game I was currently playing.
The argument of a death penalty is basically trying to place a game between two extremes, permanat death vs. god mode. Neither game is "fun" in my perspective. And if I had to choose, I would pick God mode because no one, including me, likes to die and suffer penalties. However...
If you were playing a game chess, but each time you made a stregically poor move, and lost your peice, and you could just get it right back again and place it on the board because there was no signifigant penalty for loosing a chess peice, would that make chess a better game? Well, you could try more unusual and less safe strategies to be sure, because now you have realitvely little to loose. You might even start deliberately killing some of your peices to teleport them to the back of the board for convenience. You might try new tactics you never even consdiered before. ...but in the end, would your inevitable victory taste as sweet? Is it really worth any time at all playing such a game, where you really can't loose? Some people will say yes, and for them, I guess there is WOW.
I like WoW, I like running around brainlessly bashing things. I liked Diablo for the same reason, and the venrable arcade classic Gauntlet. WoW is more complex then those games, but to me it gives the same feel. I like exploring and seeing the pretty graphics in WoW. I enjoy trying each class, none of which I have felt the need to place in a group, and I tend to be a very social role-player and avid grouper in other MMORPGs. I am however consuming the content of WoW at an alarming rate vs. the amount of time I have played it. I am levelling rapidly without even trying. I acutally thought exp was amped for the alpha, before I realized that this was just how the game was set up. If I did not have a much stronger distration of FFXI, I would have capped all my WoW characters. I am not saying that WoW should cater its design to me. But I can clearly see the cost of a missing death penalty in terms of strategic and tacical play in WoW (or lack there of). When you lower a penalty, there is a cost. It doesn't just make the game better with no change in how the game works. The cost to WoW is there is less risk, and risk = strategy. The less risk a game has, the less stretegy you need to counter it. If you do not need to have strategy to defeat a challenge, you start picking the most convenient tactic as opposed to the most strategic method. Like nuking somethign over and over again with one spell as poosed to carefully stretching your mana through teh use of damage over time spells. Convenince can be fun too, but utilmately, is more boring then a grinding camp in EverQuest. The less strategy a game has, the more simple the games become. It is a difficult game design decision with no clear right and wrong. All I can say, is that from my experience, WoW has a less challenging feel, and is drawing me less strongly then a game like FFXI. But maybe that is good for Blizzard, maybe they do not want their game too challenging, and chase away the coveted casual gamer market. I can understand this marketing decison. There is no way the game can be eveyrthing to everyone. And hardcore players will STILL play WoW, if maybe only for a time.
rnichols
Gateway: WoW
76. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 11:58:29 AM PST
It seems that the purpose of this "death penalty" proposed in the original post is to simply eliminate the free means of travel... not to enhance the challenge of the game.
I've played various single player and multiplayer games for about 15 years now... Everquest being the most dominant over the last 3.5 years.
While I agree that boredom, "finished it", or "too easy" was the main reason for me quitting most games, I know that the risk of dying was not what kept me focused on EQ as it has. I am a member of one of the supposed "uber" guilds in EQ and the thing that has kept me playing is the challenge to defeat the next encounter and progress to the next level of play. If WoW provides me with a challenge at every level of the game, I'll stick with it. I don't want to EVER BEAT the game.
If WoW were to implement a death penalty, it wouldn't cause me to lose interest in the game, nor would it make me feel it were more challenging. It would just be an annoyance. The real challenges in all the games that Blizzard has made thus far lied in the overcoming of a tactical disadvantage, and coming out on top. THIS is what would keep me playing WoW.
If I were faced with a choice of dying to get back to my bind point, and having 5 minutes of "death sickness" versus using a potion or scroll to teleport back there, I would pick the potion every time... provided there were no "penalty" envolved for having teleported.
Perhaps an additional concept that could be added to this "recall" idea mentioned upthread would be to implement a release delay, which prevents you from releasing your corpse the instant you die. Maybe make a two minute waiting period when you die before you can release. This might go into effect after level 10 or something.
Death porting would certainly become less viable as a fast means of travel if you had to wait 2 minutes prior to release after you died. A recall scroll or potion would be a more efficient means if this were implemented, and thus people would almost always use it instead of death.
If you find yourself stuck out in the middle of nowhere and no potions, you could buy one from a nearby player (who makes the potions with alchemy), or if you so choose, you could suicide and release yourself to bind after two minutes.
No matter what penalty you put in place, some people will still use death as a means of travel. Give them other options that are more viable, and it will decline drastically.
dlyons
Gateway: WoW
77. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 12:04:22 PM PST
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Why not just change the system so that Bind Stones are like Cell phone towers
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Can you kill me now? GOOD!
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Q u o t e:
Make some servers hardcore and others normal
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Please don't waste valuable resources for "please don't hurt me" difficulty servers. And the above suggestions are in no way hardcore.
What will happen is you'll end up with a clump of server types (pvp based, dont hurt me based, pin-in-my-eye-cuz-you-died-from-server-crash based, and acceptably balanced death penalty based servers)...You'll have so many people trying to get in the X amount of server Y, or Z and...it will be a clusterphuk. BAD BAD BAD idea. NO NO NO. PLEASE NO. (note I'm against this.)
and again, NO!
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Q u o t e:
You obviously favor the powergamer side and we have different ideas about what is fun.
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You missed where I wrote out how I've been a power gamer full-on in the past, but can't now, and am definately casual...I juggle around 60 hours a week of work/school on average, unless it's this week...where I snuck in waaaay too much gaming time without sleep
And your assumption that we have different ideas about what is fun is clearly wrong. We both have fun arguing with each other on the forums when we're stuck at work
(and don't argue with that...er...)
Anyways, I knew my post would get me an elbow in the ribs, but I did it anyways cuz I haven't slept in a couple days and the caffene won't wake me up. There isn't anything hardcore about the penalties suggested.
-D
--Tanner--
---Ashen---
dwalker1
Gateway: WoW
78. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 1:07:08 PM PST
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Q u o t e:
Why not just change the system so that Bind Stones are like Cell phone towers
Can you kill me now? GOOD!
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In catching up on this thread, I too thought of this (nearest bind stone resurrection) before I saw that someone else had posted it. So what do you see being the problem with being resurrected at the nearest bind stone? It would solve cross continent death-travel without costing the player through the use of a stronger death penalty as a deterrent.
I also don't see how different death penalty servers are any more of a waste of resources than PvP, PvE, full co-op, RP, non-RP, etc. servers. All of the above require special attention by way of the GMs/devs for either balancing or policing.
That said, I liked corpse retrieval in sub lvl 30 or so EQ
rshrider
Gateway: WoW
79. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 1:48:35 PM PST
Having the different servers isnt a waste of resources. Our dollars pay for those servers and just like with EQ if you release with both server types availible I think you will find most people will gravitate to the non-hardcore servers. If they dont blizzard will simply consolidate the populations of the unpopular servers and free up machines to use for the more popular ones. It wont change the number of total machines they buy or the overall population.
Dlyons,
What I just dont get is your aversion to letting people play the game the way they want. You say that if two people are playing the same game but in different places(servers) and one person gets something faster(easier if you prefer) then you it cheapens the game for you ? Why do you care what someone else does ? You ever played neverwinter nights ? people mod games all the time to make it more to their liking, do you hunt them down and make em stop ? You know Canada has 5 pin bowling, does that ruin it for you if you ever go bowling here in the states since they only have to knock down half as many pins ? Stop trying to beat people down if they dont agree that your way is the only way.
If it makes you feel better they can label the harcore servers "Im a total badass and I own you" and the normal ones "Im a sissy, please dont hurt me". Ill still play on the sissy server if it allows me to progress through the game at a decent pace without having to dump 60 hours a week into it. (and yes I know you said you arent a powergamer any more, but I also recall a line where you stated that you would jump right back into it if the uber guild system sprang up in WoW and everything got alot harder).
kwerle
Gateway: WoW
80. Re: Discussion: Death Penalties | 12/17/2003 3:10:53 PM PST
Beaslick, you've played up through about level 10, and you're saying it hasn't been too much of a challenge: you're right.
OK, no offense, but...
Try to hit 20th. Try to work your way through a dungeon that's L+2 to L+4. Then talk to me about challenge and reward in WoW.
Up to level 10, Blizz figures you're just learning the ropes, not hanging you with it. Hell, you've barely experience the res sickness death penalty as it is!
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sounds good. Keep me in the loop. I believe thats Hamers group.