Death Penalties

This game has many unique features, no Monetary currency being one of those. In game currency drops as a penalty to me just do not make sense.

There is a fine line of harshness while addressing death penalties, you definitely want players to fear death but not so harsh as to detour them from wanting to play the game. I feel it should be more of an "obnoxious" penalty such as a "Spawn Timer", "Running Back for your Corpse",
"Stat debuff Timer" just to name a few that have been done.

I know you are trying to coin your own style of dealing with death and I did read you had planned on implementing a "Town Portal"... Maybe death would prevent you from being able to use yours or anyone elses town portal for a said duration of time? Thus making it very tedious for a player that has to run all the way back to town now for more resources.

To be honest I would lock this thread and only allow Alpha or Beta Players the option to chime in. It certainly is hard to come up with some ideas when I really am unsure to the game mechanics other than what I have heard Chris say in interviews.

Oh, maybe have an option where you don't lose experience upon death, but you lose significantly more experience with skills for it. Maybe?

I wouldn't know at the moment, but perhaps sometimes players don't want to lose experience, so they choose to lose something else. If they would choose to lose experience from their skills, it will pick at least 3(Less or more?), at random. But of course only taking experience from skills that were equipped.

Or perhaps it can equally take experience from both the player and the skills, taking less from each upon death.

I'm not sure how it would be like though. It can keep the player from getting bored from a fully leveled skill, but can be rather frustrating (But the same can be said with player experience taken.).

I can't really see items being dropped, it just seems silly. If it were really up to the player, he would rather lose experience, than his best weapon and armor. It would just immediately suck up all of the fun, really. You can always level back up, but you can never get back the hours you took looking for a good weapon. At that point, the weapon taken, we don't feel that the weapon is part of the character, rather it would feel like something we have to keep hording, which isn't something everyone should do if they want to expand with their characters.

I really like the idea of rewarding not to die!

Go building a buff over a very long time (maybe up to 24h, 168h) to maximize it's effect. I think it's important to implement a cap, so you are able to balance this.

The Buff effect can be:
* more Experiance gained
* more Magic Find
* etc.

Doesn't matter what effect you choose - it's just importat that it is appreciable.

Furthermore, it's very important to count only in-combat time while stacking. People should not Stand around. Maybe you don't count the time - count monster's killed. You can also count only when they gave you some exp (are on your level). All this limits are just to avoid abusing.

If you die, it's reseted to zero.

This mechanic also allows to get some ranking/archivments for people who don't drink and play ;-)

i think a temporally debuff of your basic stats is enaugh for a penalty. maybe a debuff that stacks up, when you die again at the time, when you already have this death-penalty-debuff.

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Trynn wrote:

I really like the idea of rewarding not to die!

Go building a buff over a very long time (maybe up to 24h, 168h) to maximize it's effect. I think it's important to implement a cap, so you are able to balance this.

The Buff effect can be:
* more Experiance gained
* more Magic Find
* etc.

Doesn't matter what effect you choose - it's just importat that it is appreciable.

Furthermore, it's very important to count only in-combat time while stacking. People should not Stand around. Maybe you don't count the time - count monster's killed. You can also count only when they gave you some exp (are on your level). All this limits are just to avoid abusing.
...

I personally like this idea. You could really use the same mechanic as the flask system to count toward the buff. To add to this though I would say add some kind of negative side affect for dying, say like slower run speed for a certain amount of time.

Personally, I think the death penalty has to be ridiculously harsh >>>to an extent<<<, that makes for a hardcore game.

Sure, losing your main weapon or something probably reminds people too much of the slightly broken EQ (Everquest) game where lots of bugs caused people havoc.

Having a harsh death penalty adds to the idea of requiring you to succeed through tests/skill, adding to the sense of danger/realism.

A good idea for this would be to have your main weapon or all of your equipped items to break. In order to repair them, you'd have to exhaust a considerable amount of currency.

On a more interesting note (concerning if your main weapon breaks/is lost forever): Since you don't have access to your main weapon/weapons, if you're short on gold, you'd have to go back to lower-level instances in order to farm enough gold to repair your main weapon/weapons (spells?) or get a new one. This would force people to re-do old content and make old content more interesting again. Also, people with defensive abilities/items such as shield would have a reason to choose or equip those things because it offers buffering so that you don't die. Offensive classes obviously still get the advantage if they are skilled enough at offense, but this can be evened out also because they take more damage. This extra layer of playability/re-playability makes things interesting imo.

People would carry backup weapons in their stash as a result. It's important to note though that if you only had people's weapons break and not destroyed forever, then they'd just farm old content to the point where they could repair it and then continue on. If the main weapon were to be destroyed entirely then it would give incentive to redo old content in order to find another weapon. Sure, they would embrace the path of least resistance to that goal but if at all possible, but somehow perhaps this could add depth/variety. Then again, it would entail the necessity to program more frequent weapon drops. This would lead to centralization of strategy around the "main weapon". So maybe this isn't such a good idea after all xD.

So the death penalty has to be ridiculously harsh, with a slight comfort zone. That's how I personally see it.

In the end personally, I would just have your main weapon drop (more volatile this way) but I guess the devs really don't like that. Plus, it doesn't penalize characters with spells/abilities.

Lastly, this takes away from the grinding aspect of the game, and turns it more into a skill/survival game (Note that this probably can't really be applied to games like Guild Wars 2 because that's an action-"MMORPG", a large persistent world where you die a lot. Even if it does have an action component in an MMORPG you sort of want the grind. Hmm, not sure I might try posting this in the GW forums too.

What you guys think?

Something I've always wanted to see in a death penalty is a reward for going back and beating what killed you in the first place. So if you recieve a persistent penalty for dying, beating that opponent / area could be a method to remove that penalty.

Some ideas:


The important thing to me though is: make it so I am rewarded for trying again and doing better.

I think they should make it where the monster that kills you steals a part of your soul=xp=<lvl

1 life, 1 death. End!

I think its fine as it is, for normal that is. I think the time needed to get to some of the "deeper" areas is enough punishment.

I have no opinion on other difficulties.