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Death Penalty
There's a serious problem that's been present in Achaea for quite some time, and that's the lack of any real death penalty. Hardly anyone gives half a damn about experience points anymore. On a tangential, yet similarly related note, the benefit of resurrections whether it be through the flame, grove, alchemist, or devotion have all drastically declined from past times. None of these resurrections offer any benefit sans time, which I always thought was poor implementation. Now that cave resurrection is exactly the same as all other types, there's no real incentive to help your friends and allies - Which in the past, a major cornerstone of org interaction was looking after each other in this way. The current functionality discourages player-bonding and teamwork. The following system that I am going to suggest will solve both the problem of "lenient death penalty" and the problem of "resurrections mean nothing" simultaneously.
My suggestion is simple. Here are the basic bullet points:
- If a player dies and embraces death, they will incur a 10% cumulative death penalty, that can stack to a maximum of 50%. This penalty will directly reduce the player's health by this amount.
- If a player reaches 25% death penalty, they will lose 2 from every stat except for constitution(because a penalty to health is already being assessed). If a player reaches 50%, they will lose 4 from every stat except constitution.
- A player will regenerate 1% of death penalty every IC day. Thus, they will regenerate 25% per RL day.
- A player that is resurrected through -any- means(even through the flame) will incur NO death penalty. A player that starbursts will likewise incur no penalty.
Optional ideas:
- Slaying a player, whether it be a burst or whatever, will result in a 5% regeneration of death penalty.
- Slaying denizens, or rather, gaining experience from denizen slaying, will cause death penalty regeneration.
The above is the basic premise of the idea, and I believe it helps to regrow a serious void present in Achaea's current environment. The proposed system disincentives death without outright -costing- them anything, as the death will simply fade away with time. The system encourages org-bonding and teamwork to gather each other's corpses. The system also factors into group conflict, by giving the winning side a legitimate advantage in weakening their opponents. Currently, as the death handling in Achaea stands, there's no reason for a good part of the game's core playerbase to care at all about dying. This method of penalization doesn't disadvantage the person long-term - Simply puts them at a short-term loss. In addition, it affects all player's equally, whereas the current system of experience loss affects low-level players far, far more than it affects high level players(because non-dragons care about experience loss, while dragons do not). It'll cause people to take dying more seriously, while still keeping the punishment fairly reasonable.
Thoughts?
Edit: Also, I know that this idea might not come across all that well with the playerbase, given that it doesn't exactly -favour- the player, but I do believe that the idea is good for game design, and will promote a healthier atmosphere in Achaea long-term.
Comments
Making death mean something is a good idea, because it's very obviously gone too far the other way in the past couple of years, but I don't think a percentage reduction in health is a good way to do it. We'd just have the same scenario we had back when textp was all the rage: nobody would engage in the conflict the game is designed for because the stakes are too high.
Still seems a bit rough, but I personally like the overall idea. Might have to be toned down here and there, but on first glance it looks like it would discourage some of the more prominent tactics coming to light currently. (Killing allies to get relics) And some older tactics (i.e. killing dragon citymates/ordermates to drop shrines faster)
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. This is the most combat fighting I've seen, well, ever. Where is the evidence that the current state of death discourages team bonding? I'm always seeing people on CT running for corpses (although this could just be my perception).
I do think that there is a reduced benefit to things like devotion rezz and grove rezz, but I can easily see this being fixed with making grove rezz a mobile skill. There is added benefit in not having to embrace death (saves time) and I think this is seen mostly in group situations now that all cities have some type of rezz ability with the introduction of alchemists.
I see your point in saying that death no longer has a dramatic penalty, but does it really need to? I see a lot more people willingly going into city defense, and going on group hunts to more dangerous areas allowing for a richer experience of what Achaea has to offer. Get jumped in Annwyn? Sure you lost some experience but instead of seeing red and qq'ing, I think young players are more inclined to think "Hmm, that sucked, but how can I avoid that next time?" Admittedly, you can have a similar experience with your changes, but I think the current way of things makes players a lot less fearful of death and more interested in delving into Achaean combat (which used to be reserved for a select few). I think with the changes you are suggesting, we would see a large number of people avoiding combat all together again so as to save their experience, with only a select few highly talented combatants (like yourself) being more or less "in charge", especially with the relaxed pk rules.
TL;DR Keep death the way it is, maybe make grove rezz a mobile skill.
people can't handle dying already without raging or crying.
please, no.
The penalties for dying come in the form of what you're fighting over: be it room destruction, relics, etc.
People shouldn't get penalized for going into a losing battle for the sake of conflict. I prefer risking death over sitting on my thumbs in a city chitchatting and bringing nothing to the game. If there's more risk to dying (especially compounding death), there's less for people to do and people will login less or login and do less.
I'd prefer the idea of an imposed time-out from pk resulting from too many deaths. Not sure what the exact scale should be, but I think I'd like pk to be a more strategic thing, for people in orgs- being killed too much over nonsense puts you out of the running when you're trying to participate in big fights, and it makes getting hunted for being a douche more punishing, since, if you die too much, you can't pk for a while. Penalties shouldn't be too long, max 24 hours or something.
Reminds me a bit of Demon Souls/Dark Souls death mentality. I kind of like it it. A couple questions that would need to be answered, just because I feel like being annoying:
Also, I feel just regeneration of 1% over an IC day is not enough, if you can't reasonably bash the penalty down. It would eventually lead to players quitting for the month because they died too many times and have to wait for their death penalty to relax. I know on an exploration kick, I tend to easily die a few times, and if I'm far up north, on an island, or on Meropis, chances are I'm not getting a rezz from someone. Anyone who does serious PK in the game, or theft, ends up dead a lot, and they aren't going to be rezzed. Except for the forestals.
I like the idea, but it'll need a lot of work to make sure it's a penalty that matters without being so overbearing that people won't want to play anymore, or at least take huge breaks from the game while they wait their penalty down.
Yeah, maybe if you're already level 107 you don't care about losing textp, but I know I get bummed out every time I die and definitely wouldn't want it to be any worse.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Some of you have some valid concerns, but it's pretty obvious that some sort of change does need to be made to the system. It's been in a broken state for years now. If you don't like my original idea, that is perfectly fine, however, I'd like for this thread to be the foundation for discussion about what should be done about the stated problem. Discuss ideas for how we can fix the current apathy towards death and resurrection.
Sticking with my original idea, I'm confident that with some number tweaking and other mechanics for how'd it work, such as not incurring a penalty when dying under certain circumstances(idm, in your home city, on Nish, etc), that it could be a good change.
Striking part of the original idea, this penalty could instead be instituted only for a limited amount of circumstances, such as dying to denizens.
For the people complaining that it would be too "griefy" or some such, I think it's important to remember that people don't get upset about dying. People get upset about being killed. The part that causes people grief is being forced to submission by other players. People dislike losing in any game. This idea isn't about making players suffer. It's about building a healthy game balance.
While they're some valid reasons for why the original idea could be negative, this certainly isn't one of them. You completely misunderstand the foundation of the idea. The idea would actually increase your influence on the game, as dying would affect you relatively less(as observed by other high level players) than it affected you before. If dragons are currently virtually unpunished by death, and you are being punished, then adding an -equal- punishment towards both groups only makes death favour people of your type -more-, not less.
Back before I went dormat, 7 RL years or something, dying was a big thing. People would walk deathsight and run as fast as they could to gather their friend's corpses, then furiously spam CT / OT / HT etc for someone to rez. Death was a BIG DEAL (capitalised because it really was). Back then, dragons could only get to level 100, and your ranking was how far into 100 you could go with your last kill at level 99.99. I used to get really annoyed about dying, so much so that I avoided PvP as much as I could.
Now, at level 105, I lose around 0.3% for a death. I can bash that back in under 20 minutes. I wouldn't go as far as to say it trivialises death, but it certainly makes it much less painful. I still struggle to get out of the mentality of "oh death is such a waste of XP", but that's my conditioning from playing before my dormancy.
XP loss for non-dragons is still hard to take, there's a far greater mental barrier to get over between losing 0.3% at level 105 and 30% at level 75 (made those numbers up, not been level 75 for a long time). Perhaps rather than it being a set value of xp that's lost, it's a set percentage - death costs 5% of your current level, then the penalty is the same regardless of your level?
Not really a fan of the idea that death causes negative effects on stats, the psychological effect on the player from dying is likely to induce less risk adverse behaviour in them trying to regain the xp as fast as possible, does that really need to be compounded by tying one of their character's hands behind their back?
tl:dr - there should be some adjustment to XP loss, higher for dragons, lower for non dragons, but not as severe as the OP
Oh actually I did completely misunderstand the original post, thought this was meant to be additive, not a replacement to the current death penatly. Sorry about that!
The reason I dislike raising xp-loss as a solution to the problem is because that promotes tedium. I think it's best to look elsewhere for a solution.
It is supposed to be 'in addition to' the current death penalty. But like I explained, the change would still favour you over high level players.
For those chars in an order, there's also the essence loss from PK, let's not forget that additional penalty
Isn't order essence widely considered to be utterly ludicrous in implentation and in need of a revamp? Not that it has much to do with the core death penalty either way.
That's great.. For pk.
What about those who enjoy something other than pk, like hunting, or exploring.
I'm in a hard to access place hunting I die once with burst, then again a short time later, with burst. Okay I'm having a really bad time hunting. Now I can only hunt for so long/ HAVE to pvp...
Or am I missing a point entirely?
Oh, I agreed with it when I thought it was supposed to be a replacement (though I do agree the numbers need looking at, but numbers can be balanced).
See the problem with XP loss is that it functionally says "hey, remember those things you did? Now you didn't do them." That's literally backwards, and therefore I cannot view it as a good game mechanic. It makes sense in the context of arcade games and roguelikes where death means starting over from scratch, but in an RPG, it's penalizing people with grind.
People already have to grind to accomplish things, why should they be penalized with more grind?
I think it'd be super clever if PvE deaths penalized you in PvE for a short time and PvP deaths penalized you in PvP. Not anything long-term - enough to say, hey, take a break and do something else, and enough to let a side have a resolute victory in some large scale combat other than the other side feeling burnt out.
Actually that last part is super important. Right now, death costs EXP, which most adventurers have tons of. Sure, losing a level or two might be awful, but even level eighty-somethings have over eighty of them to lose. Adventurers essentially have an absurd limit to how long they can fight for - the loss really just hits the players, who have to deal with PvP for X hours when they'd really like to quest a bit or snuggle bears or something, and then later on deal with PvE for Y hours if they want to regain their losses. The characters themselves only care if the player wants them to, and who likes roleplaying a loser?
I dare say the entire point of having a roleplaying system is to let people who otherwise would only ever want to win have a mechanism to decide who wins and when - and thus who loses so that can happen. Achaea currently doesn't do that all too well - it's getting better at it in terms of collateral, but players are encouraged to not care about death (for good reason - getting angry at losing is poor sportsmanship!), and that reflects a bit strongly ICly as well.
The solution to people not taking death seriously is more gruesome deathsights.
I'm more scared of death in Achaea than I am in real life because of the crazy shit you see every time you let your mind be touched by Lord Thoth.
The ultimate solution, whatever it is, would have to be not only mechanical changes but those changes would have to somehow affect the psyche of the player-base. What that basically means is, 1. implement mechanical changes that create harsher outcomes if you die, but include cupcakes and unicorns at the other side so people don't spiral into major depression when they're "griefed". 2. Force them to listen to 12 hours of Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz to help them adjust to the changes.
This is not a troll. Lil Jon helps. Need to fix the problem where the actual problem is - the minds of the player-base. Mechanical changes without Lil Jon will just make an already whiny+bitchy player-base worse.
Death is a risk. Risk drives attitude and actions.
I think risk is terribly important. You should be apprehensive about doing something dangerous. Then you should do it anyway. Doing it in spite of the risk is what makes it badass. If there's no risk, it's not badass. If you aren't really afraid of failure, because the stakes are low or unheeded, then you aren't doing something risky or dangerous, you're doing something silly and amusing.
Risk is a deterrent from doing dangerous things constantly. When your target is another player faction, this plays into the idea of giving people downtime to regroup, time off from being a target.
Risk needs to be something that an individual cares about: exp, gold, reputation, abilities, possessions, comfort. Not everyone values the same things, which makes it hard to standardise the system, and which I think is from where past issues have arisen (eg. how do you discourage a thief from stealing when they don't care about dying?).
Death penalties have been lowered and lowered, presumably to encourage people to participate in dangerous situations. But now they are not much of a disincentive.
I don't like the initial suggestion of temporarily losing stats or max health. You aren't really risking or losing anything, you're just being shackled for a while after dying, until it wears off. Technically I suppose this is comparable to losing exp and being able to regain it, and maybe that asset - stats, and the capacity for action they provide - is the most valued asset that some people would care about losing. But it just doesn't seem to fit, IMO.
If people have nothing that they care about risking, and you're unwilling to go hardcore and threaten assets like equipment, then maybe give them something new and threaten to take it away.
No real suggestions of my own, just those thoughts.
Have it take longer and longer to get back from praying after each consecutive death within an IC day.
Now this puts value on resurrection skills and punishes repeated dying.
We've made some steps in the right direction, but Imperian penalizes death even less than we do. This is a little excerpt from a thread called "Why should I be scared of death?" from started by another fairly new character. I love the following responses from it:
Jeremy said:
Those in orders do have a punishment for death. Maybe pushing more people to get involved in orders will help with that. I know looking at my -3 mill essence really pushes me to get better at not dying in combat.
I'm not really a fan of punishing for death, because its just a kick in the ribs at that point. You already died, that should be enough. Giving stat punishments can just lead into a death spiral in situations like raids and such. While I like the idea of attrition wearing down one side, I feel it would ultimately make people more hesitant to try things like PVP.
I do understand what you're getting at, though. Its a tough thing to really deal with, too far in either direction just makes things worse. Maybe we shouldn't make death more painful, but make resurrection more in demand? Then by default, those who embraced would be missing out or have a bigger experience loss or something.
Of course, resurrections probably shouldn't give a defense or anything, we can't have people wanting to die to get the resurrection buff. But something to ease the penalty we already get on death, maybe make embracing death take a bit more experience while resurrections only leave with something static?
Just throwing some ideas out there.
"When your target is another player faction, this plays into the idea of giving people downtime to regroup, time off from being a target."
Historically, hasn't this not been the case? When I started playing, XP loss was harsher than it is now and even so, Poergh/Shecks/etc still used Shallam as their personal bashing ground. If they died too much, they'd just come back with even more people until they made up what they lost. Obviously now you can't treat cities like midbies treat Manara, but I suspect that sort of attitude would just manifest itself again, one way or another, and it would be as terrible now as it was then.
Incidentally, because XP loss was harsh and praying was harsher, it didn't really create an environment of org-bonding and teamwork. It created a sense of entitlement, which in turn caused a good deal of friction.
Ultimately, if you don't standardize death penalties to affect something everyone needs, then you're not going to be able to create that universal apprehension that everyone seems to think is necessary. If you do standardize death penalties to affect something everyone needs as proposed in any number of cases above, you've effectively weaponized disincentives, which I can't think will make the game fun at all.
Oh, and speaking of weaponized disincentives, there's also the ISSUE system/PK rules, which only really sort of work now because death doesn't really cost much (well, at least as much as it used to cost). If you reintroduce steep penalties into the game in whatever fashion, I can almost guarantee the amount of issuing and associated OOC resentment will only increase.
ETA: Jules also mentions a great point, which is that the way to handle this is culturally, with a sort of social stigma, rather than any sort of hardcoded advantage/disadvantage. For most people, what others think of us matters. There's a reason, after all, that so few people who play the game have an ugly/mediocre/average description (excluding snowflakes, naturally!).
@Santar's basic idea is good. Though it seems to punish the non-coms who get dragged into PvP.
Let's say @Ellodin and I get slain by @Jhui while defending Eleusis. Ok, 10% penalty. Neither of us get a killing blow for the rest of the raid, so no regen there. If I'm reading what was written properly, I'd have to hunt a ton of denizens down to regen. @Ellodin, however, goes out and kills @Dunn and gets 5% back real quick for slaying a player.
Making death relevant again is a great idea, making the rez skills a viable commodity again is a fantastic idea. Not sure on the recovery concepts put forth. On the right path though!
I would like to put forth an idea from a MUD my friend used to play called Dragonsgate, now a dead game.
After a certain level, death became a permanent thing. The way to mitigate this was to earn favors from your gods, which you did by offering corpses of what you hunted. Every so much you offered gave you one favour, basically amounting to an extra life. If you died with no favours left, you "walked the starry road" your character died for good.
While permanent death in this game is something that isn't really done, and I am not advocating, perhaps some mitigation could be put forth in the same spirit of what was done in that game. We already have a system of offering with essence and the shrines, but I've never seen a god RP low essence before.
Just a few thoughts.
Perhaps a different route would be to give some incentive to the rezzer? Either experience or something? As a dragon I like to pick up people who died to non-innocents and tree them but thats just part of Greys's natural roleplaying which I do find rewarding. Forces people to briefly get preached at.
Besides, as you said, they could regain what they lost (exp) by continuing to PVP.
Did I just talk myself around to agreeing with Santar's original proposal? If stats and max health are more valued by PKers than exp, then changing the consequence of PVP death to temporary stat and max health loss poses a more threatening risk than exp loss. If you have killer-type players (raiders) preying on achiever-type players (reluctant defenders), you have people who value participating in the activity of PVP attacking people who value gaining exp. When the consequence of death is losing exp, that's only relevant to one of those two groups.
I guess that's why issues were such a thing. If you don't want to PVP, you can't retaliate by PVPing, because that rewards people who want to PVP with more of the activity. You can't really access consequences relevant to PVPers without resorting to nonviolent resistance. But if you issue, that's a source of relevant disincentives like TDFs, peacing, and shrubbing.
With such overlap between PVE and PVP systems (exp gain/loss, levels, health pools), but separation between the activities of PVE and PVP and the type of people who enjoy and participate in each, it may not be possible to standardise penalties in ways that are equally relevant to both groups without spillover.