Searril said:So just like that we’ve gone from “we need to have a harsh death penalty like EQ” to “the death penalty in EQ was a total joke.”
I rest my case.
Wrong. It was BOTH in EQ.
If you were low-mid level, an early/fresh server player, didn't have many/any cleric friends, or otherwise didn't have good luck then dying sucked (especially hell levels) and not being able to find a rez in the few hours allowed (or heaven forbid you accidentally loot all items from your corpse) really stung. Harsh death penalty.
If you had some good cleric friends/a large guild or were raiding then dying was most often laughable for you. A corpse run was the worst thing you had to deal with (they weren't that bad) and for half the classes a corpse run amounted to a whole 2-5 minutes as it was common to bind outside whichever zone or even within for some.
Nephele said:Thank you - I believe you are one of the few people who've read what I posted and actually understands what I'm trying to say Vandraad. Too many people see an "idea" that they don't like and just focus on saying why that "idea" won't work. The "idea" wasn't the point at all. It's my bad, I assumed that people would understand I was just using the "idea" as an illustrative device, but oh well.
Here are some things I was really hoping to get people to realize/understand/talk about (after this I'll go back into lurk mode for this thread since I need to get to the office anyway):
1) Item loss only stings as a penalty to the extent that the game makes it hard to recover from it. In a game where recovering from item loss is not difficult, it's not as big as a deal.
2) By the same token, XP loss is the same way. XP loss and de-leveling are only "harsh" if it's very difficult to recover from it.
3) For a death penalty to "matter", it depends on lots of other aspects of the game. For item loss, that's how items are acquired, how frequently they're acquired, and how the power level of those items scales from less desirable to more desirable items. For XP loss, that's how XP is gained, how fast it can be gained, and how much character level affects performance.
For the people who are concerned about de-leveling as a penalty, I submit that it only really hurts if level *really* matters to your performance in fights. If all level does is give you a few more skill points on your caps, but it doesn't actually control what items you can equip or use, does it hurt that much to lose a level temporarily? Sure you might hit a little less. But you can still use your uber sword of awesomeness and that's what is determining 90% of your damage output.
For the people who are concerned about item loss, that only really hurts if you're losing something that significantly increases your capability *and* is difficult/impossible to get back. If that uber sword of awesomness you had was in the neighborhood of +20 in stat values, and the next best sword is +12 - that's a pretty big difference. But if the difference is more like +7 vs. +9 - that's not so big.
4) We should be thinking about the challenge experience we really want the game to drive for players. One of the important functions of a death penalty is to prevent players from using death as a tool or taking it for granted. That means we need a death penalty to prevent people from using it as a quick teleport. That's pretty easy to achieve. But should we really also be expecting players who are trying to go learn a raid to die 20 times doing it? That feels an awful lot like taking death for granted to me.
Something I remember a LOT from EQ was the evac spell. I'd be down in a dungeon with a group, things would start to go bad, and we'd all hug the druid or the wizard for the evac. Sure, sometimes one or two of us died before the spell went off. Sometimes we wiped. But most of the time, that evac happened, and we were back at the zone line or safe spot, and we were all saying "whew, we made it". To me, creating that sort of experience, where players can survive/escape by the skin of their teeth, is FAR more important than creating an experience where the clicky rez stick is the most important item on your raid because of the number of rezzes that need to occur.
What I would like to see from Pantheon is a meaningful enough death penalty that players don't take death for granted - even when trying to learn raid fights. Doing that also means giving players the tools (like evac) to avoid death - and depending on what form that death penalty takes, giving them the tools to recover from it when it does happen.
Anyway, I think I'll bow out of this thread now. I feel like I've said all I really can, and people will either get what I'm talking about or they won't. Plus, I gotta go do far more boring things irl anyway :(
I think I understand where you are coming from, Nephele. When you compare games like EverQuest and EVE, they really boil down to the same principals of time and opportunity loss, which is true for almost all MMO's (or possibly games in general) and the debate comes down to the severity of these mechanics. The only difference between EverQuest and EVE are in how these principals are applied through game design and mechanics. Death in both games result in a disruption of your progression, which is not preferred by anyone, for obvious reasons. Suddenly you are faced with the penalty of having to cope with the conseuquence of death, rather than doing something to advance your character (opportunity loss). In either game, when you die, you suddenly find yourself in a different location with none of the equipment you originally had and now are forced to adapt and recover. The biggest difference between the two games is in how they handle time loss. In EQ, the penalty was a loss of experience that you had to spend additional time to regain. In EVE, the penalty was loss of ships and items that you had to spend additional time to replenish. Either way, you were spending time recovering the loss of a scarce resource. Again, the core principals (time loss and opportunity loss) are the same in both games, just handled in different ways. And EVE has stayed pretty true to these core tenets throughout the years, and continues to be a fairly successful MMO.
I also want to point out that while it's true that 90% and 96% ressurections really eased the experience loss penalty, they weren't exactly trivial in the sense that people had to earn them, either at higher levels or through very difficult and arduous quests. They were a right of passage that had to be earned. The epic res stick especially was not an easy thing to complete. It wasn't as though clerics were tossing out 96% res at level 1. It wasn't until Kunark (I think) that they could even get the quest and then it took a while after that before they became ubiquitous. I think it's important that people understand how much effort went into obtaining these things and that they weren't just given to them.
Lastly, it wasn't just about trivializing death. It was also about making each class bring their own unique value to the group, which is no small feat on the part of the developers when dealing with 12+ classes. But this is what makes the group dynamics interesting with the various tools for dealing with death, or death avoidance (in your evac example). Coping with death, or avoiding death, changed depending on what your group makeup was, and that made it very fun and interesting. Death was a key ingredient to a broader recipe of group inter-dependence and the difference between classes created interesting variations of how to tactically deal with it.
I hope the minimum XP loss per death will always be at least 5% in Pantheon. I can appreciate the sentiment that players had to earn powerful rezzes in Everquest but it's really bittersweet when you think about it. The last thing I want to see when I progress my character to a really high level (or help someone else do the same) is for the game to get easier. Death should always sting but it's my opinion that it should sting even more at max level. I have played so many games where the community gets complacent at max level and I attribute a lot of that to the trivial death penalties I have seen. It's a night and day difference when XP is universally viewed as a precious resource.
Parascol said:I also want to point out that while it's true that 90% and 96% ressurections really eased the experience loss penalty, they weren't exactly trivial in the sense that people had to earn them, either at higher levels or through very difficult and arduous quests. They were a right of passage that had to be earned.
Both the 90 and 96% resurrection spells (levels 49 & 56 req) were available on easy to reach vendors, no epic or questing necessary. The epic was only for a manaless cast of the 96%.
XP loss is just very inconvinient and a sufficient enough penalty. "Hell levels" were not needed and was the reason I could never replay all the way through vanilla EQ. They were literally designed to just generate more revenue without having produce more game content and the XP loss while progressing through a hell level was unfathomly counterinuitive to feeling like "your time" is being well invested by playing "a game" that you are not having "fun" with (unless you are one of those people that like mindless grinding). edit: Because hell levels required you to kill the similar NPCs over and over and over for several days. (The opposite of adventuring/exploring/questing/crafting).
On a similar note to XP loss, I was lvl 30ish and died in Cazic Thule on my SHD back in 1999 when I got a call from the Red Cross that my father was terminally ill in the hospital; I immediately got on a plane from San Diego to Maine. I attempted to log in once or twice from ME but the AoL dial-up connection was too horrible so I just waited 3-4 weeks later after returning to CA to log back into the game. Upon doing so I discovered that the majority of my equipment had vanished... I permenantly lost a lot of my gear that I had worked very hard to accquire (at the time was a near full set of bronze armor and a Dark Reaver). I think item loss is way too harsh of a death penalty. If a corpse sits for too long and server lag is a concern, the corpse should dissapear to a graveyard or morgue or something to be retrieved at a later date.
Iksar said:Parascol said:I also want to point out that while it's true that 90% and 96% ressurections really eased the experience loss penalty, they weren't exactly trivial in the sense that people had to earn them, either at higher levels or through very difficult and arduous quests. They were a right of passage that had to be earned.
Both the 90 and 96% resurrection spells (levels 49 & 56 req) were available on easy to reach vendors, no epic or questing necessary. The epic was only for a manaless cast of the 96%.
Fair enough, but it's still something that had to be earned, even if it was just levels. Either way, it was part of the core design at later levels. They just balanced the time/opportunity loss between experience and corpse retrieval.
Darch said:XP loss is just very inconvinient and a sufficient enough penalty. "Hell levels" were not needed and was the reason I could never replay all the way through vanilla EQ. They were literally designed to just generate more revenue without having produce more game content and the XP loss while progressing through a hell level was unfathomly counterinuitive to feeling like "your time" is being well invested by playing "a game" that you are not having "fun" with (unless you are one of those people that like mindless grinding). edit: Because hell levels required you to kill the similar NPCs over and over and over for several days. (The opposite of adventuring/exploring/questing/crafting).
Eh, I feel that's applying a modern view on a different time period. I don't imagine they were designed to generate more revenue without having to produce more game content as back then there was no real concept of end-game (especially not like there is today) and raiding wasn't even really a thing yet so much as it was a idea/concept being tried out. Hell levels were just mini accomplishments and shared experiences for players to commiserate over; two levels worth of exp in one as sort of "milestone" humps.
Iksar said:Darch said:XP loss is just very inconvinient and a sufficient enough penalty. "Hell levels" were not needed and was the reason I could never replay all the way through vanilla EQ. They were literally designed to just generate more revenue without having produce more game content and the XP loss while progressing through a hell level was unfathomly counterinuitive to feeling like "your time" is being well invested by playing "a game" that you are not having "fun" with (unless you are one of those people that like mindless grinding). edit: Because hell levels required you to kill the similar NPCs over and over and over for several days. (The opposite of adventuring/exploring/questing/crafting).
Eh, I feel that's applying a modern view on a different time period. I don't imagine they were designed to generate more revenue without having to produce more game content as back then there was no real concept of end-game (especially not like there is today) and raiding wasn't even really a thing yet so much as it was a idea/concept being tried out. Hell levels were just mini accomplishments and shared experiences for players to commiserate over; two levels worth of exp in one as sort of "milestone" humps.
They got rid of hell levels in Luclin, but the hell levels are listed below with the level just before max level depending on expansion were basically quadroupled experience required (why if not to extend the time it takes for a player to advance and severely compounding the death penalty?):
edit: I agree it may not have been to "generate revenue" but more along the lines of stretching the content without having to create more content by forcing players to grind in 1-2 areas per level.
Darch said:They got rid of hell levels in Luclin, but the hell levels are listed below with the level just before max level depending on expansion were basically quadroupled experience required (why if not to extend the time it takes for a player to advance and severely compounding the death penalty?):
edit: I agree it may not have been to "generate revenue" but more along the lines of stretching the content without having to create more content by forcing players to grind in 1-2 areas per level.
They only smoothed out the exp requirements from 50+, the pre-50 hell levels stayed and it still took the same amount of time from level 1-60.
September 4, 2002 3:00 am
** Experience Changes **
- We have smoothed out level progression from 50-60. This should mitigate the "penalty effect" that occurs in levels 51, 54 and 59. Note that it will cost the same experience to level from 50 to 60 as it did before. Also, death experience loss will appear different in some levels. This is an unfortunate side effect that must remain to prevent some experience exploits.
As for stretching existing content...isn't that what all experience gains are about if you dumb it down and choose to look at it that way? It seemed to work well for EQ anyway as most players didn't cap out before Kunark hit and fewer still hit 60 by the time Velious came out. Pretty much the only people crying for more content were the cutting edge hardcore raiders. (Also you often spent far more than 1-2 levels grinding in the same areas regardless)
Iksar said:Darch said:They got rid of hell levels in Luclin, but the hell levels are listed below with the level just before max level depending on expansion were basically quadroupled experience required (why if not to extend the time it takes for a player to advance and severely compounding the death penalty?):
edit: I agree it may not have been to "generate revenue" but more along the lines of stretching the content without having to create more content by forcing players to grind in 1-2 areas per level.
They only smoothed out the exp requirements from 50+, the pre-50 hell levels stayed and it still took the same amount of time from level 1-60.
September 4, 2002 3:00 am
** Experience Changes **
- We have smoothed out level progression from 50-60. This should mitigate the "penalty effect" that occurs in levels 51, 54 and 59. Note that it will cost the same experience to level from 50 to 60 as it did before. Also, death experience loss will appear different in some levels. This is an unfortunate side effect that must remain to prevent some experience exploits.
As for stretching existing content...isn't that what all experience gains are about if you dumb it down and choose to look at it that way? It seemed to work well for EQ anyway as most players didn't cap out before Kunark hit and fewer still hit 60 by the time Velious came out. Pretty much the only people crying for more content were the cutting edge hardcore raiders. (Also you often spent far more than 1-2 levels grinding in the same areas regardless)
Luclin came out in 2001, by 2002 most everyone was already lvl 60 so their exp "smoothing" only affected new players which is more to an earlier point that I made that the penalties applied at the release of the game will likely only affect us and be changed later.
Stretching the xp by "forcing players to grind" worked well for EQ because there was no competition.
Darch said:Luclin came out in 2001, by 2002 most everyone was already lvl 60 so their exp "smoothing" only affected new players which is more to an earlier point that I made that the penalties applied at the release of the game will likely only affect us and be changed later.
Stretching the xp by "forcing players to grind" worked well for EQ because there was no competition.
Way off topic now I guess but regardless of smoothing it took the exact same amount of time to level before and after the changes so it seems pretty benign. But if grinding is seen as such a negative to someone then in general MMOs might not be the right genre; if it's all about getting to max level/end-game and the journey is meaningless then yeah I can see it being irritating to those people.
Iksar said:Searril said:So just like that we’ve gone from “we need to have a harsh death penalty like EQ” to “the death penalty in EQ was a total joke.”
I rest my case.
Wrong. It was BOTH in EQ.
If you were low-mid level, an early/fresh server player, didn't have many/any cleric friends, or otherwise didn't have good luck then dying sucked (especially hell levels) and not being able to find a rez in the few hours allowed (or heaven forbid you accidentally loot all items from your corpse) really stung. Harsh death penalty.
If you had some good cleric friends/a large guild or were raiding then dying was most often laughable for you. A corpse run was the worst thing you had to deal with (they weren't that bad) and for half the classes a corpse run amounted to a whole 2-5 minutes as it was common to bind outside whichever zone or even within for some.
I believe you remember incorrectly and I believe the number examples I gave are quite accurate (and also line up with what is experienced on vanilla private servers that are set to closely match original EQ). So I'll happily leave it to the readers to decide which of us remembers more accurately.
I also think that having reduced XP rez (less than 50%) would help players to "move one".
We often spent countless time trying to get a rez because it was 96% of the loss, but maybe we should get used to forget about it and grind back withouth spending an hour messaging every single cleric.
If the content is truly going to be challenging than I believe we will need those 90%+ rezzes, I men I see guilds lining up and getting kicked off the planet when I think of raid content, multiple death/wipes, mayhem everywhere. And if you don't give a lot of the Raiders a good rez % than one you limit the amount of times you can attempt the raid boss before giving up due to delevel in or close to it, than also what you bring to the easy in rezzes you can put into the challenge of content simple as that, and also let's have an understanding back in eq people didn't know who to play an mmo like we do today so to think we aren't going to have a rezzing friend is not going to happen for the most part. I say yes to 90%+ rezzes if the content is truly going to be that challenging like we want it we will need it to be there.
Riahuf22 said:If the content is truly going to be challenging than I believe we will need those 90%+ rezzes, I men I see guilds lining up and getting kicked off the planet when I think of raid content, multiple death/wipes, mayhem everywhere. And if you don't give a lot of the Raiders a good rez % than one you limit the amount of times you can attempt the raid boss before giving up due to delevel in or close to it, than also what you bring to the easy in rezzes you can put into the challenge of content simple as that, and also let's have an understanding back in eq people didn't know who to play an mmo like we do today so to think we aren't going to have a rezzing friend is not going to happen for the most part. I say yes to 90%+ rezzes if the content is truly going to be that challenging like we want it we will need it to be there.
That sound like a good thing to me. I see nothing wrong with a raid force starting a fight with a dragon and he KILLS them, they are done for the night.
Zorkon said:Riahuf22 said:If the content is truly going to be challenging than I believe we will need those 90%+ rezzes, I men I see guilds lining up and getting kicked off the planet when I think of raid content, multiple death/wipes, mayhem everywhere. And if you don't give a lot of the Raiders a good rez % than one you limit the amount of times you can attempt the raid boss before giving up due to delevel in or close to it, than also what you bring to the easy in rezzes you can put into the challenge of content simple as that, and also let's have an understanding back in eq people didn't know who to play an mmo like we do today so to think we aren't going to have a rezzing friend is not going to happen for the most part. I say yes to 90%+ rezzes if the content is truly going to be that challenging like we want it we will need it to be there.
That sound like a good thing to me. I see nothing wrong with a raid force starting a fight with a dragon and he KILLS them, they are done for the night.
Wasn't saying anything about the dragon KILLING them, as before you can rez someone they would have to die first. I'm talking about a day where a guild takes a huge chunk of the day and they try to go on a 4 hour binge trying to kill him, do you realize who many wipes can happen in a 4 hour period of time, and without the rezzes having a high% than it would make these kind of binges impossible, especially if they had as a goal in mind that they were going to kill him that way and learn the mechanic and everthing else that is going on
Players shouldn't be able to have 12 hour binges of attempting the same encounter over and over. We should have an XP buffer to work with and lose 5% XP per death minimum. It's the same story with every MMO ... the vast majority of content is beaten within a couple months of release. That's what happens when you don't have a real death penalty. Risk vs Reward becomes extremely skewed because the "risk" is always the same. When you stand to lose something, the more difficult content poses a greater risk and feels more gratifying to conquer.
Zorkon said:That sound like a good thing to me. I see nothing wrong with a raid force starting a fight with a dragon and he KILLS them, they are done for the night.
This may "sound like a good thing" in theory, but in practice nothing would kill this game faster than not being able to progress until your entire raid outgears/outlevels the content you are trying to defeat because you basically get one attempt before losing your levels (effectively weakening your force for the subsequent attempts). I know it sounds cool and "hardcore" but people will quit the second another MMO came along (and there are quite a few other MMOs coming out in 2020 that look like they will be quite competitive).
oneADseven said:Players shouldn't be able to have 12 hour binges of attempting the same encounter over and over. We should have an XP buffer to work with and lose 5% XP per death minimum. It's the same story with every MMO ... the vast majority of content is beaten within a couple months of release. That's what happens when you don't have a real death penalty. Risk vs Reward becomes extremely skewed because the "risk" is always the same. When you stand to lose something, the more difficult content poses a greater risk and feels more gratifying to conquer.
Hmm I didn't say 12 I clearly said 4, which is a ton less, I do believe death penalty does need to hurt, the corpse run, the time it will take at certain events is more than punishing enough if you talking about the high resurrection %, shot I remember being in veljs lab and was expunged down the hole and died years back and it took me not minutes, not hours but 3 freaking days before I had a kind enough necromancer to summon my corpse to me, becuase is veljs lab you cant get back to the zone line without a gate potion or spell with the same effect, and there was really a safe place to drag your corpse down there loot your body and gate, especially as a warrior.
Darch said:I know it sounds cool and "hardcore" but people will quit the second another MMO came along (and there are quite a few other MMOs coming out in 2020 that look like they will be quite competitive).
Just curious, what MMOs are you refering to? I feel like I'm up to date on all the MMOs that are on the horizon but dont know of any that would compete directly with Pantheon.
Zorkon said:
I see nothing wrong with a raid force starting a fight with a dragon and he KILLS them, they are done for the night.
I agree with your sentiment, however I might approach it a different way. Instead of them be done for the night how about the dragon becomes X% more powerful for Y amount of time? So they could try again, but the dragon would be a bit stronger. This could stack a couple times.
Pilch said:Darch said:I know it sounds cool and "hardcore" but people will quit the second another MMO came along (and there are quite a few other MMOs coming out in 2020 that look like they will be quite competitive).
Just curious, what MMOs are you refering to? I feel like I'm up to date on all the MMOs that are on the horizon but dont know of any that would compete directly with Pantheon.
Ones that come to mind that are in similar Alpha phases as PRotF are Ashes of Creation, which is basically a better/newer version of Black Desert Online and Camelot Unchained which is a better/newer version of Dark Age of Camelot.
Darch said:Ones that come to mind that are in similar Alpha phases as PRotF are Ashes of Creation, which is basically a better/newer version of Black Desert Online and Camelot Unchained which is a better/newer version of Dark Age of Camelot.
There's a chance I'll play CU for PvP reasons, but it won't take me away from Pantheon, because I expect them to be different games. I'm not sure if CU will even have PvE raids, or if so, I wouldn't expect it to be very deep compared to more PvE focused games, so how is that a comparison? I don't even know what AoC is. So far as I can tell, they have some flashy proof of concepts, but I have no idea what the game is supposed to be.
But you are right, there will be players who want instant gratification and won't stay (if they even test the water to begin with). I just hope we retain as many as possible who might be on the fence. Give it a chance and put some trust in VR to know how to strike a good balance.
This topic really just needs to die at this point.
@ Darch,
I am familiar with both those games. I'm actually a backer for CU, although I have not contributed nearly as much there as I have to PRotF....
I think both of those games will be successful but I think they are for a different crowd. CU has the potential to be one of the best PVP games around.
AoC has definitely gotten a lot of hype with their successful kickstarter and all the innovative promises being made BUT there are several things Ive seen that make me think it will appeal to the base that likes the current MMOs. i.e. Cosmetic cash shop, flashy faced paced combat, silly items/mounts(I saw an advertisment for a teddy bear mount). I can only see people leaving Pantheon for that game if they were just using Pantheon as a filler MMO anyway.
You are right tho, 2020-2021 will have several good MMOs, of many different varieties.
@Parascol @Pilch
I'm not saying that people will jump ship to those two games, Parascol asked what games were coming out and I just listed 2 of several off of the top of my head. I'm hoping PRotF will be able to retain people on the fence because we will need a large community.
Here's an alphabetical list of games currently in development including our PRotF:
AdventureQuest 3D: Open beta
Arcfall: Pre-alpha
Ashes of Creation: Backer alpha zero
Bless Online: Early access open beta
Boundless: Early access, launch planned for September 11th
Camelot Unchained: Backer alpha, beta planned for July 31st
Children of Ur: Open alpha
Citadel: Forged with Fire: Early access
Crowfall: Backer pre-alpha
Cube World: Closed alpha
Dauntless: Open beta
Dark and Light: Early access
DayZ: Early access
Divergence Online: Alpha
Dual Universe: Pre-alpha
ECO: Early access
Edengrad: Early access
Eleven: Closed alpha
Ever, Jane: Open beta
Fallout 76: Beta in October
Gloria Victis: Early access on Steam
Global Adventures: Closed beta
Just Survive: Paid early access
Legends of Aria: Closed beta, open beta in June
Life is Feudal: Early access
Line of Defense: Early access, removed from Steam
Occupy White Walls: Closed alpha, coming to Steam
OrbusVR: Early access
Osiris: New Dawn: Early access
Pantheon: Backer pre-alpha
Pathfinder Online: Subscription “early enrollment”
PixARK: Early access
Project Genom: Closed alpha
Project Gorgon: Early access beta
Rend: Alpha testing
SamuTale: Closed alpha
Star Citizen: Backer alpha
Stash: Backer alpha
The Black Death: Early access alpha
The Repopulation: Early access alpha
Valiance Online: Alpha
Wild Terra: Steam early access
Worlds Adrift: Early access