Venjenz said:In classic Velious, 90% is the rezz clerics get at level 49. OK, you die in a group somewhere in the world, but your group is either lower than level 49 and/or that group doesn't have a cleric. OK, go find that 90% rezz. My cleric in p99 gets tells for rezz plenty, and often times, I am healing for a group and cannot leave. So my rezz is unavailable. Just because players can cast it doesn't mean those players will be there when you need them.
In a raid setting, it's different. You bring the rezzers because death is a guarantee, but you also need many healers. And let us say the max rezz is 90%. Ten deaths later, it's like tyou never got rezzedfrom any of them, because the 90% thing just replaces 90% of what was lost. In current p99, that's around 6-8% of a level depending. But let's say it's 10%. Even with rezz, you lose 1% exp on every death. Now, I am not sure how many times you raided max level content in an MMO, but 10-20 deaths per night is not uncommon when pushing content, and even with rezz, you're going to have to grind back exp or delevel eventually.
Point being, rezz doesn't trivialize the game. You still have to find people to cast it (and take it from a cleric in an old school MMO, there's fewer of us than other classes because the job is tough in groups and worse solo), and you still lose some exp.
We don't really have the information on this to know much of anything in terms of how it plays out in Pantheon. What we do know is cleric aren't going to be the only source of resurrection in Pantheon (currently all healers + paladin are stated to have it), though they are currently the only with mention of exp restoration. I do have a hard time imagining cleric will again be the only source of exp resurrection (IIRC Vanguard gave all healers equal XP rez) due to how heavily that tilts groups toward clerics over other healers for any high risk content.
We don't know how raids/high end grouping are going to work either, but I can't imagine it will be quite the same as on-demand instanced MMOs where you can easily throw yourself at a raid 20+ times a night. At 90% you could die 100 times before having any tangible repercussion. That seems pretty trivial and absurd to me, definitely not a risk/penalty to worry about. Even a 50% xp rez would afford raids/groups +/-20 attempts in one sitting which seems fair enough before requiring players to break and recuperate. No banging yourself against the wall until it works out.
I have been catching up on this thread and just wanted to throw something completely new into the discussion. I am not saying this is better or worse than anything else but I just want to challenge people's assumptions a bit.
What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
I think sometimes we fall into the trap of evaluating ideas and concepts based only on whichever games we personally played or enjoyed the most, and we don't think outside the box as a result. So I would challenge all of you to actually think through this and see where it leads. I am not saying this is what I want for Pantheon, but just posing it as a question in the hopes that it might lead the conversation in some new directions.
Nephele said:I have been catching up on this thread and just wanted to throw something completely new into the discussion. I am not saying this is better or worse than anything else but I just want to challenge people's assumptions a bit.
What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
I think sometimes we fall into the trap of evaluating ideas and concepts based only on whichever games we personally played or enjoyed the most, and we don't think outside the box as a result. So I would challenge all of you to actually think through this and see where it leads. I am not saying this is what I want for Pantheon, but just posing it as a question in the hopes that it might lead the conversation in some new directions.
I wouldn't play. Items would have to be dropping all over the place as if the game were Diablo 3, if they didn't that would be a massive insult/disrespect to the time investment of the players (would still be insulting though). There would be a far higher incidence of toxicity in groups, plus you'd have the extreme level of power it would give to griefers/unsavory players.
Actually, it sounds like a battle royale game but one that requires way more wasted time.
Nephele said:What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
Nobody would ever agree to the definition of 'special'. What one person thinks is a 'special' item could be another person's vendor trash. Players are already so risk averse that any discussion of death penalty brings out a thread with dozens upon dozens of pages with few people really coming to any concensus on what is an appropriate penalty. Losing all/most of your gear upon any death would spell the instant death of this game.
To compensate for such a harsh penalty you would see guilds doing everything they could to monpolize any and all content so that their members have multiple sets of everything. Competition for content would be cutthroat to say the least. Raids would be zerged just to minimize the chance of a wipe and god forbid someone deliberately trains your raid and causes a wipe, that could set a guild back months in terms of progression.
Even today with high speed (and reliable) internet you can still experience a disconnect, or a power outage..or any number of issues that are beyond your control. And you want to be punished that severely for such an event? No, that is just going too far.
Vandraad said:Nephele said:What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
Nobody would ever agree to the definition of 'special'. What one person thinks is a 'special' item could be another person's vendor trash. Players are already so risk averse that any discussion of death penalty brings out a thread with dozens upon dozens of pages with few people really coming to any concensus on what is an appropriate penalty. Losing all/most of your gear upon any death would spell the instant death of this game.
To compensate for such a harsh penalty you would see guilds doing everything they could to monpolize any and all content so that their members have multiple sets of everything. Competition for content would be cutthroat to say the least. Raids would be zerged just to minimize the chance of a wipe and god forbid someone deliberately trains your raid and causes a wipe, that could set a guild back months in terms of progression.
Even today with high speed (and reliable) internet you can still experience a disconnect, or a power outage..or any number of issues that are beyond your control. And you want to be punished that severely for such an event? No, that is just going too far.
In Nephele's defense, perhaps he/she is unfamiliar with just how often you will be dying in PRotF if it is even remotely as challenging as vanilla EQ. You will die. You can likely expect to die at least once per 10 hours of "combat" play time. Probably a lot more often than that for the first few months after release... and then definitely WAY more often than that once you start getting into raid progression.
Iksar said:Searril said:I already covered the other part of the game. And I'm going with the assumption that Pantheon will have adequate rezzes (90%+).
90%+ makes death a total joke and they may as well not have a penalty at that point.
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.
Nephele said:I have been catching up on this thread and just wanted to throw something completely new into the discussion. I am not saying this is better or worse than anything else but I just want to challenge people's assumptions a bit.
What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
I think sometimes we fall into the trap of evaluating ideas and concepts based only on whichever games we personally played or enjoyed the most, and we don't think outside the box as a result. So I would challenge all of you to actually think through this and see where it leads. I am not saying this is what I want for Pantheon, but just posing it as a question in the hopes that it might lead the conversation in some new directions.
The game would be a ghost town as nearly everyone cancels their subs. That’s how it would be.
Searril said:Iksar said:Searril said:I already covered the other part of the game. And I'm going with the assumption that Pantheon will have adequate rezzes (90%+).
90%+ makes death a total joke and they may as well not have a penalty at that point.
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.
90% rez was given by the Cleric Epic weapon that came out after the first expansion... so yes, after over a year of heartache, the death penalty was alleviated if you knew a cleric with their epic weapon (which was a priority for guilds to get). So with that said, those of us playing for the first year, before the majority of the population is max level with really good gear, leveling will be a f***ing nightmare for us. We will be the trailblazers that play the game without maps, we will be the ones learning the NPC mechanics (through trial and error, and error, and trial, and error) and teaching it to others. We will be the ones playing through the game without the 90% rez just a mouseclick away...
edit: this is what makes me upset about the people's complaints about "hardcore vs casual" when only those of us playing for the first year will even experience the difficulties that will inevitably be changed after a couple of expansions... And some of the people talking about being "hardcore" didn't even play vanilla EQ or are misremembering what the game was like; or the fact that they only "endured" the hardships because there was no other MMORPG to compare it to.
Naunet said:philo said:Not just in this post, but most things I hear you asking for makes me think you aren't in the standard demographic that this game is targeting. Hopefully you will find some things you like enough to stay with it for the long run. Who knows, some of the systems that you might disagree with now could grow on you.There are only two things that could actually be deal-breaking for me: having the only leveling option being grinding mobs for XP, and XP loss/deleveling. Two things out of an entire game. The latter I am willing to wait-and-see on, to determine how impactful it will be on my personal game experience (though not particularly hopeful).
So, time will tell. :)
I encourage you not to have "deal breakers". Keep more of an open mind. Especially if one is exp loss on death. That is pretty much a given. It is lvl loss that is still up in the air.
We also know that grinding mobs will be the primary way to gain exp...though maybe not the "only" way. I'm concerned if those are your "deal breakers".
Darch said:Vandraad said:Nephele said:What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
Nobody would ever agree to the definition of 'special'. What one person thinks is a 'special' item could be another person's vendor trash. Players are already so risk averse that any discussion of death penalty brings out a thread with dozens upon dozens of pages with few people really coming to any concensus on what is an appropriate penalty. Losing all/most of your gear upon any death would spell the instant death of this game.
To compensate for such a harsh penalty you would see guilds doing everything they could to monpolize any and all content so that their members have multiple sets of everything. Competition for content would be cutthroat to say the least. Raids would be zerged just to minimize the chance of a wipe and god forbid someone deliberately trains your raid and causes a wipe, that could set a guild back months in terms of progression.
Even today with high speed (and reliable) internet you can still experience a disconnect, or a power outage..or any number of issues that are beyond your control. And you want to be punished that severely for such an event? No, that is just going too far.
In Nephele's defense, perhaps he/she is unfamiliar with just how often you will be dying in PRotF if it is even remotely as challenging as vanilla EQ. You will die. You can likely expect to die at least once per 10 hours of "combat" play time. Probably a lot more often than that for the first few months after release... and then definitely WAY more often than that once you start getting into raid progression.
LOL Darch, I appreciate it but you don't need to defend me. I played EQ from 1999-2004, and I've played many other games before and since. I remember exactly how challenging it was. I also think I have a pretty good handle on where Pantheon is headed in terms of the frequency of death, since I've been active around here for a few years now. Appreciate it though :)
When I post off-the-wall things like this I do it intentionally - either to make a point, or to get people to think, or both.
Some things everyone should think about:
1) There actually do exist MMORPGs that have this sort of death penalty, and they are actually successful - albeit, not to the level of, say, WoW, but they keep their servers running. They work for two reasons: First, they introduce players to the concept that they're going to lose their stuff very early on, and so players "grow up" in the game just knowing and expecting that it's something that can happen. That doesn't mean that players don't try to avoid death, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't sting like hell when it occurs, but when it does happen, there's far less ragequitting because the player was prepared for the eventuality. Second, these games make it relatively easy to re-gear - at least, with basic stuff. That means that most basic equipment, regardless of its power level, is treated as a commodity. It's routine for players to keep extra stuff stashed away in case they die and need to re-gear quickly, or to use an "insurance" system so that they get some/most of it back for a cost, and risk aversion becomes more about not using that super-expensive thing you happen to have becuase you don't want to lose it, rather than simply not attempting the fight at all. Again, I am not saying this is how Pantheon should go - but it's interesting to me how many people panned the concept immediately without thinking about how you actually make it work in an MMO. Because while it's certainly not mainstream, it has been done fairly successfully. Again - people need to think outside of their own limited experiences.
2) Quite a few people in this thread have argued against options that allow players to always, reliably be able to recover their items after death, yet observe the general reaction people have when I suggested that we go the other direction entirely and make it so that players always, reliably lose their items on death. Funny that, isn't it? Does this mean that item loss is acceptable for people only when we think it can't happen to us? Or does it mean that item loss should truly be off the table 100% of the time? Because I feel like there's a distinction there that we tend to gloss over.
Anyway if anyone would like to see what I feel the death penalty should be for Pantheon, you can find it about halfway down Page 24. My opinion hasn't really changed. I was just hopeful that I could maybe get some people to look at the question in a different light for a change :)
Venjenz said:Iksar said:90%+ makes death a total joke and they may as well not have a penalty at that point.
In classic Velious, 90% is the rezz clerics get at level 49. OK, you die in a group somewhere in the world, but your group is either lower than level 49 and/or that group doesn't have a cleric. OK, go find that 90% rezz. My cleric in p99 gets tells for rezz plenty, and often times, I am healing for a group and cannot leave. So my rezz is unavailable. Just because players can cast it doesn't mean those players will be there when you need them.
In a raid setting, it's different. You bring the rezzers because death is a guarantee, but you also need many healers. And let us say the max rezz is 90%. Ten deaths later, it's like tyou never got rezzedfrom any of them, because the 90% thing just replaces 90% of what was lost. In current p99, that's around 6-8% of a level depending. But let's say it's 10%. Even with rezz, you lose 1% exp on every death. Now, I am not sure how many times you raided max level content in an MMO, but 10-20 deaths per night is not uncommon when pushing content, and even with rezz, you're going to have to grind back exp or delevel eventually.
Point being, rezz doesn't trivialize the game. You still have to find people to cast it (and take it from a cleric in an old school MMO, there's fewer of us than other classes because the job is tough in groups and worse solo), and you still lose some exp.
I have to agree, I'm sure when EQ made 96% rezes they weren't thinking about the grp content but the raiding aspect of the game, so where it might of made group content feel trivialize it was nesscary for raiding. I remember playing eq when the new expansion was VoA and was raiding and still ended up losing 30% of my exp just trying to clear one raid just having and that's with 96% rezes as well.
Nephele said:I was quite intrequed by your Idea. Like you said "think outside the box" your idea wouldn't be so bad if Pantheon wasn't all about gear (and I hope it's not) if gear was so uniform that any readily available breastplate was only a few AC points more than another. If there really was no BIS by more than a point or two.Darch said:Vandraad said:Nephele said:What if permanent equipment loss was an expected part of the death penalty?
Perhaps *special* items could be soulbound so that they respawned with you, but what if you lost the majority of what you were wearing or carrying when you died, and part of recovering from death was re-gearing yourself?
How would this potentially change the way players approach content? How much less acceptable would that make death in general? And is that really a bad thing?
Nobody would ever agree to the definition of 'special'. What one person thinks is a 'special' item could be another person's vendor trash. Players are already so risk averse that any discussion of death penalty brings out a thread with dozens upon dozens of pages with few people really coming to any concensus on what is an appropriate penalty. Losing all/most of your gear upon any death would spell the instant death of this game.
To compensate for such a harsh penalty you would see guilds doing everything they could to monpolize any and all content so that their members have multiple sets of everything. Competition for content would be cutthroat to say the least. Raids would be zerged just to minimize the chance of a wipe and god forbid someone deliberately trains your raid and causes a wipe, that could set a guild back months in terms of progression.
Even today with high speed (and reliable) internet you can still experience a disconnect, or a power outage..or any number of issues that are beyond your control. And you want to be punished that severely for such an event? No, that is just going too far.
In Nephele's defense, perhaps he/she is unfamiliar with just how often you will be dying in PRotF if it is even remotely as challenging as vanilla EQ. You will die. You can likely expect to die at least once per 10 hours of "combat" play time. Probably a lot more often than that for the first few months after release... and then definitely WAY more often than that once you start getting into raid progression.
LOL Darch, I appreciate it but you don't need to defend me. I played EQ from 1999-2004, and I've played many other games before and since. I remember exactly how challenging it was. I also think I have a pretty good handle on where Pantheon is headed in terms of the frequency of death, since I've been active around here for a few years now. Appreciate it though :)
When I post off-the-wall things like this I do it intentionally - either to make a point, or to get people to think, or both.
Some things everyone should think about:
1) There actually do exist MMORPGs that have this sort of death penalty, and they are actually successful - albeit, not to the level of, say, WoW, but they keep their servers running. They work for two reasons: First, they introduce players to the concept that they're going to lose their stuff very early on, and so players "grow up" in the game just knowing and expecting that it's something that can happen. That doesn't mean that players don't try to avoid death, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't sting like hell when it occurs, but when it does happen, there's far less ragequitting because the player was prepared for the eventuality. Second, these games make it relatively easy to re-gear - at least, with basic stuff. That means that most basic equipment, regardless of its power level, is treated as a commodity. It's routine for players to keep extra stuff stashed away in case they die and need to re-gear quickly, or to use an "insurance" system so that they get some/most of it back for a cost, and risk aversion becomes more about not using that super-expensive thing you happen to have becuase you don't want to lose it, rather than simply not attempting the fight at all. Again, I am not saying this is how Pantheon should go - but it's interesting to me how many people panned the concept immediately without thinking about how you actually make it work in an MMO. Because while it's certainly not mainstream, it has been done fairly successfully. Again - people need to think outside of their own limited experiences.
2) Quite a few people in this thread have argued against options that allow players to always, reliably be able to recover their items after death, yet observe the general reaction people have when I suggested that we go the other direction entirely and make it so that players always, reliably lose their items on death. Funny that, isn't it? Does this mean that item loss is acceptable for people only when we think it can't happen to us? Or does it mean that item loss should truly be off the table 100% of the time? Because I feel like there's a distinction there that we tend to gloss over.
Anyway if anyone would like to see what I feel the death penalty should be for Pantheon, you can find it about halfway down Page 24. My opinion hasn't really changed. I was just hopeful that I could maybe get some people to look at the question in a different light for a change :)
I, like you, are not saying this is as it should be. But it brings some interesting thoughts. And no I wouldn't write the game off over it.
It's an interesting idea and one that I feel can still be incorporated into the game even if it's the exception rather than the rule. One of my favorite dungeon crawling experiences of all time took place in the Ancient Cave of Lufia 2 and it was very similar to what Nephele described. 100 floor dungeon ... if you wipe, you lose everything except the "special" items you managed to acquire. I would love to see a zone like that in an MMO.
Darch said:In Nephele's defense, perhaps he/she is unfamiliar with just how often you will be dying in PRotF if it is even remotely as challenging as vanilla EQ. You will die. You can likely expect to die at least once per 10 hours of "combat" play time. Probably a lot more often than that for the first few months after release... and then definitely WAY more often than that once you start getting into raid progression.
Just because you died that frequently in EQ doesn't mean everybody will in Pantheon. Surely, if you insist on entering dangerous areas where many mobs con red and you don't think twice before attacking the bosses there, you're bound to die a lot. But if you wait a couple of levels and make sure the group is well-prepared with their oh-crap spells in the bar before taking on the same bosses you'll die a lot less. It's all about each player deciding for herself how much risk she accepts versus the perceived rewards and find playmates who think alike. Rading is probably be a different story, but that doesn't interest me much.
Naunet said:philo said:Not just in this post, but most things I hear you asking for makes me think you aren't in the standard demographic that this game is targeting. Hopefully you will find some things you like enough to stay with it for the long run. Who knows, some of the systems that you might disagree with now could grow on you.There are only two things that could actually be deal-breaking for me: having the only leveling option being grinding mobs for XP, and XP loss/deleveling. Two things out of an entire game. The latter I am willing to wait-and-see on, to determine how impactful it will be on my personal game experience (though not particularly hopeful).
So, time will tell. :)
As someone who consideres themselves a casual player, I can tell you the XP loss and deleveling where never that bad. They were part of what instilled the risk/reward caution aspect to the game, but even the couple times I deleveled, it was when I had just made a new level, and I regained it usually within the next 20-30 mins, sometimes less if I was lucky enough to get a 96% rez.
Fulton said:As someone who consideres themselves a casual player, I can tell you the XP loss and deleveling where never that bad. They were part of what instilled the risk/reward caution aspect to the game, but even the couple times I deleveled, it was when I had just made a new level, and I regained it usually within the next 20-30 mins, sometimes less if I was lucky enough to get a 96% rez.
This, definitely. The penalty isn't very harsh but harsh enough to where its quite a hassle. It makes a huge difference in the way you approach the world imo. It's the thing I think I've admired the most about EQ since I first started exploring it a year ago. My best comparison is the way unspent xp (souls) is handled in dark souls. That also isn't a huge deal but big enough to where you'd rather not die. (Funnily enough both games have you go get your corpse again).
Nephele said:When I post off-the-wall things like this I do it intentionally - either to make a point, or to get people to think, or both.
Some things everyone should think about:
1) There actually do exist MMORPGs that have this sort of death penalty, and they are actually successful - albeit, not to the level of, say, WoW, but they keep their servers running. They work for two reasons: First, they introduce players to the concept that they're going to lose their stuff very early on, and so players "grow up" in the game just knowing and expecting that it's something that can happen. That doesn't mean that players don't try to avoid death, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't sting like hell when it occurs, but when it does happen, there's far less ragequitting because the player was prepared for the eventuality. Second, these games make it relatively easy to re-gear - at least, with basic stuff. That means that most basic equipment, regardless of its power level, is treated as a commodity. It's routine for players to keep extra stuff stashed away in case they die and need to re-gear quickly, or to use an "insurance" system so that they get some/most of it back for a cost, and risk aversion becomes more about not using that super-expensive thing you happen to have becuase you don't want to lose it, rather than simply not attempting the fight at all. Again, I am not saying this is how Pantheon should go - but it's interesting to me how many people panned the concept immediately without thinking about how you actually make it work in an MMO. Because while it's certainly not mainstream, it has been done fairly successfully. Again - people need to think outside of their own limited experiences.
EVE Online has such a death penalty. When your ship gets blown up, it's gone. Everything on it or in it is gone. If your character had implants those too get destroyed. Depending upon what ship you were flying and what fittings it had, a single loss could easily represent billions of ISK lost. But in EVE you can buy insurance for your ship where you will recoup some quite significant portion of the cost of that ship and fittings. And unlike Pantheon where if you want a particular item you need to camp some named for hours, days or weeks, in EVE Online you can just run off to Jita and buy hundreds if not thousands of replacement fittings and any number of new ships. Or, if you had the blueprints and ores, you could manufacture nearly everything yourself. Ontop of that you can legally spend real money for in-game currency. So 'loss' in EVE online may appear to be harsh, in the end it can be quite trivial. The unwritten rule people follow is "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."
Pantheon has no such option. We can't insure our gear against a loss as you propose, there won't be a market place filled with dozens or hundreds of that same set of armor, weapons and items you just lost. While crafting will provide some options for making your own items, I can guarantee you crafted gear will not fully match that of what will drop from named bosses/raids. You won't be able to buy in-game currency (not legitimately anyway) either.
EDIT: Even with insurance, mass market availability of ships, fittings, etc and ISK stupidly easy to come by, players are still very much risk averse and avoid a lot of fights. Most people won't fight unless they significant outnumber their opponents. Or they won't fight because unless a huge fleet with capitals/supercapitals show up players know their station/space is invulnerable so why bother undocking? And many times, even when you're faced with someone trying to take your space, people just evacuate their stuff back to Empire space because that way they don't lose anything. I've seen entire alliances literally give up at the first sign of an invader, turning over all their space with barely a token resistance.
Darch said:90% rez was given by the Cleric Epic weapon that came out after the first expansion... so yes, after over a year of heartache, the death penalty was alleviated if you knew a cleric with their epic weapon (which was a priority for guilds to get).
Cleric epic was 96% rez.
90% rez was a level 49 cleric spell.
Vandraad said:Nephele said:When I post off-the-wall things like this I do it intentionally - either to make a point, or to get people to think, or both.
Some things everyone should think about:
1) There actually do exist MMORPGs that have this sort of death penalty, and they are actually successful - albeit, not to the level of, say, WoW, but they keep their servers running. They work for two reasons: First, they introduce players to the concept that they're going to lose their stuff very early on, and so players "grow up" in the game just knowing and expecting that it's something that can happen. That doesn't mean that players don't try to avoid death, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't sting like hell when it occurs, but when it does happen, there's far less ragequitting because the player was prepared for the eventuality. Second, these games make it relatively easy to re-gear - at least, with basic stuff. That means that most basic equipment, regardless of its power level, is treated as a commodity. It's routine for players to keep extra stuff stashed away in case they die and need to re-gear quickly, or to use an "insurance" system so that they get some/most of it back for a cost, and risk aversion becomes more about not using that super-expensive thing you happen to have becuase you don't want to lose it, rather than simply not attempting the fight at all. Again, I am not saying this is how Pantheon should go - but it's interesting to me how many people panned the concept immediately without thinking about how you actually make it work in an MMO. Because while it's certainly not mainstream, it has been done fairly successfully. Again - people need to think outside of their own limited experiences.
EVE Online has such a death penalty. When your ship gets blown up, it's gone. Everything on it or in it is gone. If your character had implants those too get destroyed. Depending upon what ship you were flying and what fittings it had, a single loss could easily represent billions of ISK lost. But in EVE you can buy insurance for your ship where you will recoup some quite significant portion of the cost of that ship and fittings. And unlike Pantheon where if you want a particular item you need to camp some named for hours, days or weeks, in EVE Online you can just run off to Jita and buy hundreds if not thousands of replacement fittings and any number of new ships. Or, if you had the blueprints and ores, you could manufacture nearly everything yourself. Ontop of that you can legally spend real money for in-game currency. So 'loss' in EVE online may appear to be harsh, in the end it can be quite trivial. The unwritten rule people follow is "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."
Pantheon has no such option. We can't insure our gear against a loss as you propose, there won't be a market place filled with dozens or hundreds of that same set of armor, weapons and items you just lost. While crafting will provide some options for making your own items, I can guarantee you crafted gear will not fully match that of what will drop from named bosses/raids. You won't be able to buy in-game currency (not legitimately anyway) either.
You're following my logic but you're still thinking in terms of "Pantheon can't" or "Pantheon doesn't". That's part of what I was getting at.
My point wasn't whether it does or doesn't. My point was that it *is* possible to have such a death penalty and that it *does* work if the game is built in a way that allows players to recover from losing all their stuff.
Too many of us voice our opinions in terms of absolutes. We close off options and possibilities because we're not willing to challenge our own assumptions about how the rest of the game will work. That leads to us thinking about game experiences too narrowly, and traps us all in circular arguments that generate massive forum threads but don't do anything to actually advance a consensus.
Just to make it extremely clear: I am NOT saying Pantheon needs an EVE-like death penalty. I am saying however that for any death penalty we can dream up, it *is* possible to build the game in a way that supports that death penalty and makes it work and that won't cause players to leave en masse (if done right).
More to the point: My first post yesterday was all about trying to challenge people's assumptions a bit (because collectively we've all made a lot of them) and see if it could provoke any new thinking. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that attempt failed.
Edit to add: Before anyone takes anything personally - What I find is that the vast majority of us agree on about 96% of how the game should be. Sometimes though we seem to not realize that we actually agree more than we disagree about things, and that frustrates me because it puts us as a community into a tree > forest problem. I really just want us all to think a bit more broadly because I think it will help us all to realize how much we all agree with each other.
philo said:I encourage you not to have "deal breakers". Keep more of an open mind. Especially if one is exp loss on death. That is pretty much a given. It is lvl loss that is still up in the air.We also know that grinding mobs will be the primary way to gain exp...though maybe not the "only" way. I'm concerned if those are your "deal breakers".
Personally, I'd rather people have deal breakers that cause them to walk away rather than have them hang around crying and potentially getting things changed in a direction I don't agree with.
I don't have a major problem with XP loss but de-leveling and item loss are concepts I have major issues with in an environment where d-bags can train half a zone on you... A little xp and gold penalty I'm willing to accept but losing my stuff because some jerk thinks it's funny to pk is unacceptable. De-leveling has issues because of stuff like gear requiring x level and others that have already been brought up in this thread.
Nephele said:Vandraad said:Nephele said:When I post off-the-wall things like this I do it intentionally - either to make a point, or to get people to think, or both.
Some things everyone should think about:
1) There actually do exist MMORPGs that have this sort of death penalty, and they are actually successful - albeit, not to the level of, say, WoW, but they keep their servers running. They work for two reasons: First, they introduce players to the concept that they're going to lose their stuff very early on, and so players "grow up" in the game just knowing and expecting that it's something that can happen. That doesn't mean that players don't try to avoid death, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't sting like hell when it occurs, but when it does happen, there's far less ragequitting because the player was prepared for the eventuality. Second, these games make it relatively easy to re-gear - at least, with basic stuff. That means that most basic equipment, regardless of its power level, is treated as a commodity. It's routine for players to keep extra stuff stashed away in case they die and need to re-gear quickly, or to use an "insurance" system so that they get some/most of it back for a cost, and risk aversion becomes more about not using that super-expensive thing you happen to have becuase you don't want to lose it, rather than simply not attempting the fight at all. Again, I am not saying this is how Pantheon should go - but it's interesting to me how many people panned the concept immediately without thinking about how you actually make it work in an MMO. Because while it's certainly not mainstream, it has been done fairly successfully. Again - people need to think outside of their own limited experiences.
EVE Online has such a death penalty. When your ship gets blown up, it's gone. Everything on it or in it is gone. If your character had implants those too get destroyed. Depending upon what ship you were flying and what fittings it had, a single loss could easily represent billions of ISK lost. But in EVE you can buy insurance for your ship where you will recoup some quite significant portion of the cost of that ship and fittings. And unlike Pantheon where if you want a particular item you need to camp some named for hours, days or weeks, in EVE Online you can just run off to Jita and buy hundreds if not thousands of replacement fittings and any number of new ships. Or, if you had the blueprints and ores, you could manufacture nearly everything yourself. Ontop of that you can legally spend real money for in-game currency. So 'loss' in EVE online may appear to be harsh, in the end it can be quite trivial. The unwritten rule people follow is "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."
Pantheon has no such option. We can't insure our gear against a loss as you propose, there won't be a market place filled with dozens or hundreds of that same set of armor, weapons and items you just lost. While crafting will provide some options for making your own items, I can guarantee you crafted gear will not fully match that of what will drop from named bosses/raids. You won't be able to buy in-game currency (not legitimately anyway) either.
You're following my logic but you're still thinking in terms of "Pantheon can't" or "Pantheon doesn't". That's part of what I was getting at.
My point wasn't whether it does or doesn't. My point was that it *is* possible to have such a death penalty and that it *does* work if the game is built in a way that allows players to recover from losing all their stuff.
Too many of us voice our opinions in terms of absolutes. We close off options and possibilities because we're not willing to challenge our own assumptions about how the rest of the game will work. That leads to us thinking about game experiences too narrowly, and traps us all in circular arguments that generate massive forum threads but don't do anything to actually advance a consensus.
Just to make it extremely clear: I am NOT saying Pantheon needs an EVE-like death penalty. I am saying however that for any death penalty we can dream up, it *is* possible to build the game in a way that supports that death penalty and makes it work and that won't cause players to leave en masse (if done right).
More to the point: My first post yesterday was all about trying to challenge people's assumptions a bit (because collectively we've all made a lot of them) and see if it could provoke any new thinking. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that attempt failed.
Everyone thinks in absolutes, even if they don't believe in absolutes, otherwise you wouldn't have an opinion. I can point out several absolute statements within your own paragraph.
Anyways, can Pantheon be a game made in a way that allows for gear loss upon death, and not corpse rotting, and still be able to bounce back? Absolutely. If you make the game have a ton of gear that drops, or make it to where gear doesn't mean a lot and you can do all the content naked, then sure. With a ton of gear if you save up gold, or plat, or w/e currency they go with, you should be able to just buy some gear and move on, or since gear is soo easy to get you will have several sets of gear in the bank so if you die you simply deck yourself back out with the gear you hoarded in your bank. Do I want that type of game though? No. It was specifically said that gear will matter and will be precious and meaningful to get. So Pantheon definetly can go the route you suggested, but it will not go the route you suggested.
Nephele said:You're following my logic but you're still thinking in terms of "Pantheon can't" or "Pantheon doesn't". That's part of what I was getting at.
My point wasn't whether it does or doesn't. My point was that it *is* possible to have such a death penalty and that it *does* work if the game is built in a way that allows players to recover from losing all their stuff.
I'm actually following what you are saying and agree, to a degree, that if the game is designed with such a death penalty in mind it could work. EVE Online is built with ease of recovery in mind. The developers want players fighting over control of space so mechanics are designed in support of that outlook. Yet even with the ease at which a player can replace much of what they lost when a single ship of theirs gets blown up (minus supercapitals), the overwhelming majority of players still avoid even the chance they might lose a ship even when it is a cheap T1 ship with basic fittings.
To turn this into a 'Pantheon could' reply, having player crafting of armor, weapons, etc represent the best gear a player can get yet also allowing players to easily craft everything by not limiting the number of tradeskills a player can master you can remove items/gear from the penalty of death. So you die and all your gear vanishes. As you're bound in a town you just pop over to the market and buy a whole new set because it is cheap as there are hundreds of copies of what you need readily available. XP loss then becomes the definitive pain point for the death penalty. Well that and wounding of your pride as you just wiped to a goblin.
EDIT: If gear is this common and cheap, then I have to ask what is the point then of playing? One of the major draws in games such as this is the acquisition of armor and weapons that are powerful and hard to acquire. That which is common is boring.
Vandraad said:Nephele said:You're following my logic but you're still thinking in terms of "Pantheon can't" or "Pantheon doesn't". That's part of what I was getting at.
My point wasn't whether it does or doesn't. My point was that it *is* possible to have such a death penalty and that it *does* work if the game is built in a way that allows players to recover from losing all their stuff.
I'm actually following what you are saying and agree, to a degree, that if the game is designed with such a death penalty in mind it could work. EVE Online is built with ease of recovery in mind. The developers want players fighting over control of space so mechanics are designed in support of that outlook. Yet even with the ease at which a player can replace much of what they lost when a single ship of theirs gets blown up (minus supercapitals), the overwhelming majority of players still avoid even the chance they might lose a ship even when it is a cheap T1 ship with basic fittings.
To turn this into a 'Pantheon could' reply, having player crafting of armor, weapons, etc represent the best gear a player can get yet also allowing players to easily craft everything by not limiting the number of tradeskills a player can master you can remove items/gear from the penalty of death. So you die and all your gear vanishes. As you're bound in a town you just pop over to the market and buy a whole new set because it is cheap as there are hundreds of copies of what you need readily available. XP loss then becomes the definitive pain point for the death penalty. Well that and wounding of your pride as you just wiped to a goblin.
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 :(