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Comments
Keep in mind, there's any number of ways that the numbers or rules could be altered into a proposal of a similar vein. I threw together the actual numerical mechanics of the OP in like 3 minutes - The general idea is what I'm supporting, not any particular implementation.
To tl;dr what I believe the goal is in general - Embracing death should have a more serious penalty. That's the only thing that's really set in stone, and if that one, seemingly simple goal is achieved, then you fix both the problems of death apathy and resurrections both at once.
To put in perspective an example of the problem, I'll just use myself as a simple example. Back in the day, when dying was more of a serious thing, I -always- kept starburst up. Always. Nowadays, I constantly forget and die all the time without it. But do I care? Nope, not in the slightest. I just type 'embrace death' then walk off and get a drink. It doesn't even matter to me in the -slightest-. I think this is the general feeling I get from most players, as well, particularly high ranking players. People do not value their character's life.
Some of you are saying that this would shut people out of combat altogether, but I really don't think that's true. You're only taking short-term losses that will regenerate all by itself. It's not that big of a deal if everyone in the game is dealing with some occasional death penalty - And the heavy PKers/raiders are going to be the ones dealing with it more often than not. Let's say the change goes in - Are you really going to not get involved in combat due to it? If you die in a fight and have to embrace death, then so what? Your character is temporarily slightly weaker due to the death(s). It's not the end of the world, and it's something that all characters would deal with.
The original numbers may have been a little off, as I said. It could be a little harsh if you got built up to a 50% penalty. Perhaps instead, there could be some sort of exponential increase, where your first death in a given time period is free, then on subsequent deaths you take very small penalties, which eventually compound into larger penalties after more deaths. Could lower the cap to 25%, so that you regenerate a max penalty in one RL day.
As far as if health and stats are actually the proper commodity to punish - I'm not sure what else you could do other than experience. Spit out ideas though.
Santar, you really have put out a thoughtful idea that doesn't force people to go bash their xp back up for hours (although it does remove people from a fight to an ongoing group battle to an even greater degree than is currently true), but I just don't feel that the deaths are completely meaningless. Nim once described adventurers as vampires, which is quite accurate. We kill denizens for our xp, never age, and don't die permanently. To us, it really is more about being really irritated, and perhaps a bit embarrassed that Ashtan destroyed CC again.
I think that what @santar proposes is quite harsh. However, he has a point.
I remember that when @Sothantos rejoined Shallam after a being abducted and seduced by Mhaldorians, there was a proper RP trial. He was sentenced to death for treason etc… and he was slain by the Judge. I was there, OOCly thinking…well, no big deal of a punishment in the end. He came back from the cave or whatever just fresh new. In that case, I felt death penalty sort of fake.
Maybe what @santar proposes (whit some modifications, clearly) could be applied only to duels in the arena.
Just to be clear (unless I've missed some huge event somewhere) the above was Ashtani, not Mhaldorians!
Stories by Jurixe and Stories by Jurixe 2
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But the fact that it takes away XP loss will incentivize players to participate in PvP more often, to take greater risk (up to a certain point, where the death penalty now becomes too high).
This is one of the bigger issues I see: XP loss actually deters players from taking risks (which largely means engaging in PvP). Nobody wants to lose 2 hours of work because he got ganked, and I'm fairly confident that "wasting player's time" is one of those game design no-nos.
With this design, or something similar, the penalty has significance, yet is temporary and does not destroy hours of previous effort on the part of the victim. At worst it means the victim can no longer fight as effectively for x amount of time, but there's nothing preventing the player from engaging in other gameplay activities at the very least, and they won't be angry at having lost hours of efforts at least.
It should be noted, however, that current limitations on death penalties should be maintained as well: Sanctioned raids should not result in these penalties, as otherwise the cumulative penalties could greatly weaken city defenders to the point of being completely dominated. Similarly, events with no XP-loss should not incurr a death penalty.
In any case, a very interesting design, Santar. Penalties should be toned down, but overall I like it.
But would it be worse? No XP loss means you don't lose your progress.
The penalties probably are too severe as proposed, you don't want people just plain quitting because they died. But some flavour of it would at least give some balance to death penalties.
Regardless, the current system where people trying to level up are actively discouraged from fighting, while level 100+ players don't really care about death is massively flawed.
Ideally, we'd want a system where everyone is equally punished by death, and which doesn't waste player's time.
Oops. That'll teach me not to post before reading the full thread.
While I like the proposal (though toning down the stat losses), it should be as a replacement to XP loss, not in addition.
If XP-loss is retained, it won't have much of an effect on pre-dragons shying away from PvP. And fixing that issue should be one of the goals of any Death penalty redesign IMO. We want players to feel free to PvP at any time, not that they should spent 6 months focusing on PvE so they can finally turn to PvP without having hours wasted by XP-loss.
The inter-city CTFs had such a huge participation rate and everyone(mostly) enjoyed it because there was no exp penalty and there was a lot of conflict involved. Pretty sure there's a direct correlation between those two factors.
[ SnB PvP Guide | Link ]
People would actually be taking less risks. If exp loss is removed, you aren't risking anything. XP loss is the risk.
This may seem like a semantic argument, but I think it's core to what you hope to achieve.
If you reduce or remove XP loss, that won't turn every basher into a PKer. If someone wants to PVP, they'll do it because it's fun, and because a good fight is its own reward. Risk-averse, exp-valuing bashers may become more willing to join situations where they may die, but their attitudes and the aspects of the game they enjoy won't change.
I don't think you can simply say they won't change. I think many people dislike PVP not because of any particular objection to it, but because it makes hunting even more painful than it is already. You hunt a whole afternoon, join a raid or a defense, or an event, or whatever. And all of a sudden your afternoon was for nothing because not only did you most likely lose all the exp, but are even worse off than when you started your day.
I honestly would like some implementation of this system, but only if it did away with the one currently in place. Having both at the same time is definitely something I don't want to see.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Embracing death to go see Thoth -is- the penalty. It takes you away for a minute so you can get up, get a drink, stretch your legs and think about what just happened. It's a timeout added to the XP loss from dying.
I'm hesitant to agree with any stat or health losses from dying. What happens if raiders come in with overwhelming force and kill all of our defenders? Now our defenders have health losses/stat losses to deal with on top of an overwhelming force that's now got an even easier time of it. Then another group or faction sees all of the defenders dying and decides it's a good time for them to raid as well meaning even more loss of health and stats for those defenders. I see it quickly snowballing into a very bad situation that will make people want to log off altogether until their characters have recharged.
Your argument assumes equality on both sides of PVP battles which is rarely ever the case.
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
Okay, let's take a look again:
So, if my force of defenders is killed to truedeath, and the raiders grab the corpses so there's no resurrection available, what is it I'm misunderstanding?
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
@jurixe Oh, I am sorry. I though it was Mhaldor involved in the kidnapping. My bad. It would have been cooler that way (I prefer Mhaldorians). Sorry again for my misquoting.
Sorry
I'm afraid we'll have to disagree here.
XP loss is a significant deterrent to PvP, and I would say it is only the most stalwart fans of PvP who wouldn't mind losing an entire evening of PvE work in a single fight. Indeed, I know several players who would PvP more if they didn't risk losing hours of work, and I doubt they're exceptions to the rule.
There's a reason modern games eschew strong penalties like that: losing what you've worked for is a major blow, and in Achaea's case that can easily mean hours of hunting. For people who only have a few hours of playtime an evening (and sometimes only a few evenings per week), the prospect of losing the progress made in one of those evenings is enough to prevent PvP, even if they love it.
And of course, the matter is compounded by the fact that dragon+ players generally don't care about XP-loss anymore. So you have an increasingly large player base who don't mind dying and so are willing to PvP most of the time, with another player base for whom a single death can be a major setback.
That's a nasty imbalance, and the end result is an active deterrence from one of the game's main features (arguably its best) until months have been spent hunting to move past that deterrence. This can only hinder growth, not to mention that there is a vested interest in getting as many people to pvp as possible.
Thank you.
Itkovian
It is really simple. If you are worried about XP loss, just stick to bashing in Manara Burrow until you're dragon like you were taught. Don't get involved with PVP. Get killed by another adventurer? That's what the issue button is for, push it. Eventually you will ask yourself "What am I doing here? Shouldn't I just be playing a casual PVE game on my phone?" and I'm here to tell you the answer is a solid "YES. GTFO. THX. BAI."
There is also trying to learn from your deaths in PK. While I don't think everyone should be "forced" to become active PKers, there is something to learn from every death.
Sometimes, looking back on a death, there was really no viable alternative but death; fine, that sucks. However, I am willing to bet that a lot of people's deaths during fighting is due to a lack of knowledge or awareness. Try to go over how you died with someone who may know more, and maybe you can prevent it next time!
Things that I am thinking of that may cause a ton of deaths for "noncoms":
- Standing still while being shot to death.
- Continuing to attack when the fight is already lost, sometimes you should just run; I see a lot of people just continuing to maul, dsl, whatever when they're the last person in the room on their side. A lot of the time I just go..wtf, there is still an enemy in here?1?1 GANK THAT BITCH
- Sticking around too long solo-sniping/shooting, when you typically can't kill someone by straight sniping by yourself due to shield or sheer tankiness / low dps of bow (barring level 3 lupines maybe, but they can just shield.)
- Going ahead or too early, doing solo things, etc.
- Knowing when to turtle or try to escape in a melee. Typically in a larger skirmish, unless for some reason you're integral to the melee tactic, if you're being focused you need to AT LEAST turtle and hold the enemy group's focus for AS LONG as possible. Or even better, get out and recover AS FAST as possible. This uses up the enemy's time either hitting you and you're turtling/tanking, or you get out and they're holding down KICK HASAR for an extra 4-5s and you've already left the room. (Sidenote: This has happened a lot to me and backfired for myself...I leave for a decent amount of time and enter back to insta-being hit, since they're still holding their attack aliases T_T, so be careful).
There are a lot more tips that I can't quite think of off the top of my head without more thinking, but just a few examples. Sorry to go off topic a bit, but seemed a decent place to try to alleviate aversion to PvP.
tldr; Learn from the deaths that happen, use that new knowledge to die less, and keep more xp.
Agreed. There's a reason games no longer do XP loss. Removing player progress is just a bad idea.
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be penalties, of course, and Santar's approach is not a bad idea (perhaps too harsh, and of course it should replace XP loss.)
@Blujixapug
You're right that they weren't risking a relevant asset, but I'd put the emphasis more on the 'risk' than the 'relevant asset' part. They were all looking to get to dragon, so experience was definitely a relevant asset. It would have surely been a greater concern, but it was easy enough, once you were down enough to raise eyebrows, to just not risk it unless it you knew you had the numbers and they didn't. Arguably this is the least-fun instance of PK, but it's the one that dominated that era of Achaea.
It's the same kind of way with the proposed: if you get some sort of death penalty sapping your health or combat functionality, it turns back into a game of risk management, which means less spontaneous or widespread participation in conflict. Similarly, if people can forcibly (and in some cases maliciously, I'm sure) deprive you of a part of the game you enjoy and is a major cornerstone of the game's appeal for so many people, whether it's bashing or PK... well, that's not particularly great game design.
@Jhui also has a point that using health etc. as your penalty just compounds death issues (i.e., I died and now it's easier to die not only while PKing but also while bashing), which probably means people aren't going to be willing to take the sort of risks they do now when they do choose to take them.
I'm not convinced that removing xp-loss is a good idea, but I can see some merit in it - Still forming an opinion on that.
I think it could be an interesting change if experience loss were removed in favour of short-term penalties for deaths. By removing the long-term loss, people would not have to fear things like getting involved in combat and dying 4-5 times, thus losing a lot of long-term progress that they'd have to make up later. Yet, they'd still be at a short-term detriment, as there character would be weaker in some manner due to the deaths.
Also, for people referencing raid situations - I'd pretty much assume that if something like this were implemented, that it'd probably favour people that were in their home cities in some way. I think the raiders would be the ones suffering more than anyone. And people that raid do so because they enjoy combat - They ain't gonna stop over a little bit of penalty for dying.
What is the general consensus on removing xp-loss in favour of putting in more meaningful short-term penalties? Xp-loss, even to people that it does readily affect, doesn't actually mean much of anything over the course of a few deaths. I like the idea of characters being weaker after their deaths more than I like the idea of permanent experience loss
Consequences of losing in PK should apply to PK, not to PvE. Consequently, something like an extra damage taken penalty (like highdisfavour's thingy), which scales with how many times you've died within a certain time frame, or perhaps a damage-dealt-reduction, with similar conditions, seems reasonable.
And then there will be a relic made to counter whatever this penalty will be rite??
The more penalties you have, the more obnoxious it is, obv.
Edit: The relic, that is.
I like the idea of harsh short-term penalties, though I think the suggested numbers are a bit too much (either the penalties should be a lot lower or they should wear off much more quickly; I'd prefer the latter).
I'd also prefer to replace permanent experience loss with temporary experience loss, rather than removing experience loss entirely. By "temporary experience loss", I mean the lost experience is much easier to recover than it was to gain in the first place. For example, you could gain experience several times as fast until you're back to where you were pre-death, or the lost experience could recover passively so you don't have to bash at all. With that you could even raise experience loss, so people regularly lose multiple levels per raid without all the forced grinding afterwards.