Death Penalties

The devs could easily just throw some xp penalties into the game and call the death system done. Probably not many people would complain about that either.

I think, though, that the devs are looking for a more "interesting" way to handle deaths. Everybody has death penalties. What is interesting about that? The most interesting ideas I have read in this thread (TBH, I have not read all entries) revolve around "life rewards", as opposed to death penalties.

Now, I am not the most creative guy in the world, but I'll just take a stab at this.

A central focus of this game, that is different from all the games I've ever played (at least seems more fleshed out), is the skill-gem system. How about if death is worked into this system?

For example, say everyone has a "life" gem that grants some appropriate skills. It grows in power the longer the character stays alive. This can be a nice, slow, steady growth. At certain points, perhaps new skills are granted. Maybe other interesting things like, hmmm, a choice of gifts from the gods or perhaps the character gets to choose the direction the gem continues to grow. Anyway, when a character dies, the gem drops back to 0. That is not to say that earned rewards need to be earned again, just that the gem will not advance any further until the character has re-achieved a living length of time that equaled the best time of before. Voila, the character's life gem can now begin to grow again.

This system is both reward for living (increased power), and penalty (having to repeat "living time" upon death).

Someone who has not died in 150 hours of game-time will surely feel penalized when they die and their life gem countup starts over! Yet, they still benefit from the rewards they earned by living for 150 hours.

That's all I have for now, although I could probably sit around for hours and flesh it out further. :P

Interesting idea. Actually i see this getting implemented into a hardcore mode. Like keep your gem alive mode. Where your gem help make you stronger as the longer the league lasts.

Again with the timer penalties. What's to stop someone from leaving the game running overnight or for several days to get through the death penalty and super-power their gem?

Yeah, that occurred to me later, tpapp. Good point.

I am sure there are ways to make sure players aren't idle. I am just as sure there are hacks (macros), to defeat them.

Maybe the gem only grows during active combat? I am not sure "in combat" is a player status or not, or if it could be easily implemented.

I can still think of ways players might defeat this. If they engage a guildie in PVP combat and just stand far enough away from each other that they cannot hit or be hit, for example. Or unequip weapons and slug it out (maybe neither could ever actually slay the other). Restricting "in combat" to PVE would defeat this, but would rob players who are primarily interested in PVP, of their life gem rewards.

What if each type of creature had a specific attribute they targeted in the player and when killed by said creature the player took a hit to the attribute?

For instance zombies are slow moving creatures that taint your blood, so if killed by one (or a group of them) you would lose a certain amount of speed and maybe have a blood taint that would slow (or stop) your health regeneration.

Another example, being killed by skeletons would make your bones more brittle and you would take more armor ignoring base damage.

I find that exp penalties just guarantee you're going to play more, but not necessarily increase the difficulty of the game, make you rethink your strategy, or help you to come up with new and better ways to do things.

Interesting idea ACLerok. I suspect this is also a means of adding to the economy by allowing for more trade items. These would be geared toward mitigating, or eliminating the specific de-buff types you detailed. A skull for the "brittle" de-buff. An antidote for death by poison. A winged sneaker for a speed de-buff.

The de-buffs should fade over time.

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killendino wrote:

Interesting idea ACLerok. I suspect this is also a means of adding to the economy by allowing for more trade items. These would be geared toward mitigating, or eliminating the specific de-buff types you detailed.

As long as the items aren't very common. If everyone except new players could just go and pop some instant item then what would be the point?

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killendino wrote:

The de-buffs should fade over time.

Absolutely. Or maybe they'd have to kill a certain number of said creature that inflicted them with the ailment and take trinkets from those kills to an NPC to be cured. That way if there's a quest to be done, it keeps them on the line for that quest or else they'll still have that ailment.

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tpapp157 wrote:

Again with the timer penalties. What's to stop someone from leaving the game running overnight or for several days to get through the death penalty and super-power their gem?

A captcha could pop up on screen if the server notices an individual doing something repetative for a certain amount of time in order to mitigate a 24x7 grind.

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ACLerok wrote:

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killendino wrote:

The de-buffs should fade over time.

Absolutely. Or maybe they'd have to kill a certain number of said creature that inflicted them with the ailment and take trinkets from those kills to an NPC to be cured. That way if there's a quest to be done, it keeps them on the line for that quest or else they'll still have that ailment.

Actually, the task to kill a certain number of foes is way better then a fading timer, because the timer will slow down the game as players will just wait till it fades out.
However there is still one problem: What happens if you die in a PVP battle? If you get a penalty on your health/mana/attributes/something else it will mean that if you loose a round you will be weaker in the next round and so on. There are two possibilitys to solve that: No penalty for PVP-deaths, or only xp-penaltys...

First of all I would like to see separated PvP and PvE penalties, obviously. Considering PvE:

Sacred has a good reward for staying alive (keeping your Survival Bonus high) by raising Magic Find. I propose to make certain treshold for SB, after which high-end items start to drop. For example, Chaos Sphere can drop only if ALL memebers of the instance have SB>85%, Exalted Orb - if SB>95%, and it takes hours or even tens of hours (depends on the difficulty or league) to get SB back to 95%. And even if no penalty is applied this will make players looking for high-end items to be very cautios. Oh, and monster difficulty raises with SB, making it easier to die. This will eliminate massive farming of high-end items, since staying alive at high SB will be a matter of the good skill. But mostly important is that if one from the party dies he has to quit instance (since drop takes into account lowest SB in an instance), forcing players not only to maximize their killing speed, but also to keep an eye on the mates resquing them from the dangerous situation.

And just few ideas about death penalties:
- penalty on loot distribution (you are less likely to get that item if died recently),
- skill cooldown increase - temporal effect,
- character rating reducion (has no effect on gameplay)
- permanent loss of specific costly bonuses or items (Implants in EVE Online). You can buy them back instantly but it's not cheap at all.

And please, no corpse running routine - I find this so annoying and useless.

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A captcha could pop up on screen if the server notices an individual doing something repetative for a certain amount of time in order to mitigate a 24x7 grind.

These are my thought on captchas

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/life-style/2010/10/20-awesome-captcha-comics-somewhat-nsfw.html