Death Penalties

I dont think that you can get revived at a position where you are able to get killed, so that invulnerablility is not necessary.

Upon dieing, you are unable to pick up items for 3 minutes(or whatever others feel is a reasonable amount of time) or until you slay the creature that killed you.

A debuff for 10 mionuts which reduces all the players stats by 30% or something and maybe % of exp being lost aswell

I think a loss of XP and a debuff would be best, games without a death penalty are a turn off but maybe not as much as ones with too strong a penalty.

All depends on what mode of difficulty it's set to.

Thought of something that could work out quite nicely to give you a *very interesting death mechanic.

1. Some kind of checkpoint-like NPC, a bard to retell your achievements, a wizard that can feel your aura ect... So you can create a save state of sorts that creates a respawn state.

2. This is where it gets interesting. You can gain experience and items, obviously, between the time of the "save" and your death. So there should be some kind of threshold of XP based on League that you can loose. On so you may be able to loose at most 3/4 of a level or some thing like that. And 4/10 (scale down by level?) newly equipped items remain unaffected.

3. Now the extra stuff in limbo, that extra 1/4 of your level or 5th new item (if you actually passed the threshold), does something to the world. Have there be some kind of conflict between the re-creation of your previous state and the memory of your current (dead) state. So those lost experience and items create a tear that can optionally be entered to fight in a bonus arena or some kind of shadowy challenge. Doing so can result in regaining the lost stuff in a sort of chaotic way. The reward should be randomized a bit so that the item may actually have been improved slightly, or destroyed all together. And the XP gained may send you back to pre-death levels, or simply remained at your save-state.

How about being transported to the Afterlife {instance type thing} where you fight a few waves of mobs on a time limit. According to how quick you do it determines what penalty you take.

I originally wrote a number of ideas. Then I removed everything but the one I really like best:

Add a self-esteem stat. If you die, you loose self-esteem. Low self-esteem reduces your abilities to use your skills effectively (something you can see in everyday life). Achievements like avenging your death or a killing spree can restore your self-esteem.

Making death a 1) new challenge and 2) opportunity are both great ways to do it over purely penalizing approaches. The suggestions of an extra "death stage" to gain back lost assets are good. I also like the idea of revenge - the spirit of your killer could follow you into the death world and you would have to face it. As to opportunity, many WoW players remember the first time they died in Blackrock Depths and saw a ghost that gave an important quest - this kind of thing here and there would be excellent. Also, it's always more interesting when the death experience is related to the area where you died, not just a random disconnected mini-stage. Finally, none of this should take more than a couple minutes (at least, not without providing some sort of reward above and beyond "avoiding a worse death penalty").

I see a lot ppl saying penalty and loss of, but actually that's the way nearly all other games went and i guess i can with confidence say that all players hated the way to either lose something or have to run back and forth or even worse fight barehanded towards their dead body to go on.

Some ppl here said something interesting like make surviving more interesting. Absolutely my oppinion, if you are good (staying alive while active fighting/moving) you can gain for example:
- more xp in a way of a multiplicator (maybe even interesting for a statistic/ranking) who brought the multiplicator higher BUT it would have to be reasonable like monsters on the players level or not to far under ofc!
- better drops perhaps based on the same system
- as a motivation it could be cool to give a chance of rare gems if you bring the multiplicator high enough

Undeniable will the multiplicator have to be reset after the first death, or at least decreasing in steps bigger then the gain from killing. That way it would not be all lost but still hurting. Leaving the game or camping for to long should also bring down if not even reset the multiplicator, as it should basically only reward the active and "not" waiting players.
Two ways to make it not to powerfull:
- camping/inactivity can completely reset the multiplicator
- log out -> (form of inactivity ofc) will reduce the multiplicator by a certain amount, either 25% or perhaps more, that way it would not be as hard for player that need to interrupt and leave then for player that just camp and do something else beside.

Camping, chatting or just plain standing around is nothing you can forbid ofc, but it's certainly nothing that should influence the multiplicator positive.
Thinking of spammers or worse it would be perhaps best to either make it an option giving the player the chance to stop/freeze the multiplicator by choice or do so in save locations. There are a lot possibilities and ways to make it fit and fair, but as i can't yet judge about all the factors ingame i think this should give already a basic idea.


Oh, and there is ofc nothing wrong to set a kind of bonus on the revenge against the mosnter that killed you ( if you can find it again that is ;p)

Try to stay away from the penalty system and go the support way, is proven to motivate and hold interest up longer then the negative opposide ;)

Thanks for taking the time to read my oppinion, perhaps i can soon get a more (inside game) view and therfor more informations for suggestions .. cya

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PatBu80 wrote:

Some ppl here said something interesting like make surviving more interesting. Absolutely my oppinion, if you are good (staying alive while active fighting/moving) you can gain for example:
- more xp in a way of a multiplicator (maybe even interesting for a statistic/ranking) who brought the multiplicator higher BUT it would have to be reasonable like monsters on the players level or not to far under ofc!
- better drops perhaps based on the same system
- as a motivation it could be cool to give a chance of rare gems if you bring the multiplicator high enough

...

I really like this rare drop idea for staying alive in a fight!

The multiplier should slowly go down to one, while not fighting, though. Upon death it might be sensible to set it to 0 and you'll have to grow it back to 1. Now it just needs a name that doesn't kill the immersion. My self-esteem idea doesn't quite fit.