Hello forums,
Firstly, I’ve battled just never posting this for fear of the kind of attacks I’ve seen on the forums. So lets just polite as possible. Also, feel free to move or delete this Kilsin if it’s taking up room. I see other posts like this but felt like this was a bit more specific.
A lot has been said about death penalties recently, and sadly I’m not on the death penalty boat. Nope. And I’d like to make a space to seriously talk about why to me ‘death penalties’ aren’t as important as some might think.
Failure is fundamentally the ‘tool’ we are talking about. And that is a really broad feeling-Failure. I want to take a step back, to the ‘golden age of Video Games’ (the 80’s & 90’s). Lets look at games like Sonic, Zelda, Street Fighter etc.
Now I know Bomberman and Megaman and Mario Brothers aren’t MMORPG’s, just to clarify, this doesn’t matter when we are discussing ‘failure’ in ‘video games’ because MMORPG’s fit in nicely. Failure in these classics wasn’t that difficult. What WAS difficult … was the ‘gameplay’. Puzzles, Level make-up, the AI of your opponents– all of those things were the ‘meat’ of the game that made ‘challenge’. Also, Dying and Death were not often used as a ‘challenging’ or ‘engaging’ touch to the game.
These games are not ‘worse’ for having little to no death penalty, in-fact when asking people if adding permanent heart container loss & item loss when you die in Zelda is a good idea, it’s quite frankly a common response to get laughed at. (I was, that and a shocked face with a slow ‘no’ with head-shaking back and forth)
The people I talked with about this feel (including myself) we would rather have a focus on challenging levels/fights/puzzles rather than the focus on … corpse retrieval, item loss, fighting for hours to regain lost xp and sometimes lost levels, and the thought of impending future deaths to repeat the same process … and having somebody tell you ‘because this is fun’.
When I fail at something, I feel it. Me personally. I can feel it. And it makes me feel sad, and sometimes angry. Sometimes I don’t want to play after failing a lot only because I realize that I’m not in the right mind-set. Or, I just need to get away from it and do something else. But in any of these cases ‘failing’ is a personal feeling. Something you don’t need to force a player to feel.
When you want to go from point A to point B and C is in the way, C becomes your design point. Make C entertaining and difficult. Make C, the obstacle, the reason why the game exists in the first place. B only exists to get players to run into C. Challenge.
When you played Zelda, was getting the triforce the reason you played? Or was it the challenge of the levels? Does adding in permanent heart loss, permanent character loss, item loss, having to wait a ½ hour till you can play again …does any of these improve the levels in some way? Or just prevent you from doing them?
Fast forward to 2004, World of Warcraft comes out, CRUSHING Everquest and any other MMORPG. The game was terrific! The best MMORPG experience you could have! Now it’s 2016 and players are sick of it, so many that Blizzard stopped releasing their subscription numbers.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-will-no-longer-report-world-of-warcraft-s/1100-6431943/
What happened?
A lot happened.
But it wasn’t the lack of a huge death penalty that ruined WoW. Just like adding one to Zelda, Bomberman, Halo, Soul Calibur, Metal Gear Solid … Tera, Neverwinter, or RIFT won’t make any of those games better. It was how ‘easy’ the challenge was. This is the root of the problem.
I will be satisfied if there are servers which have heavier penalties and servers with lighter penalties as Brad mentioned in a previous thread. I care that everyone have a game they can play … if others find death penalties rewarding in some way, I want them to have that rewarding game also.
I’m sorry if disagreeing with a majority of you really lands me in a fryer. But, I’m being very honest. I’ve never cared for death penalties, and the only reason I’m going to be playing Pantheon is for the lore and the promise the game will be ‘challenging’. I’ve seen too many fun games become easy and played far too many ‘easy’ games which promised to be challenging. I want a challenge. But I sure as hell don’t think there is something meaningful about death penalties and that’s the bottom line.
-Todd
there is a group on this forum that feels tedium is the highest form of entertainment. but you are not alone, i for 2, believe that difficult and interesting content is exponentially more important in the formation of a difficult and interesting game.
Raidan said: Todd, I can respect that you don't like or want death penalties, but using NES games as your argument aganist them makes it void. Many (Most) NES games had brutal death penalties - permadeath in the form of finite lives, which is much more harsh than any of us are proposing for Pantheon. If death were similar to a NES game, you could be ressed 3 times then have to reroll. In a NES game death penalties were meaningful as they forced you to become a better player, use strategy, learn enemy moves or you had no chance. This also translates to MMORPGs.
*shrugs*
Well I tried.
Thanks for the response bud. :)
-Todd
even WoW had some death penalty, no? iirc, you could run back to your corpse (from the a graveyard, as a ghost), or rez at a graveyard and have a ten minute, minus some percentage to all stats. in vanilla i seem to remember a lot fewer gravyards than the last time i played. so if you ran back in ghost form it took time, if you rezzed and waited out the penalty and had to run back to where you were it took time, as well. but there was otherwise no penalty other than the time and item wear (no xp loss, not getting corpse lotted, etc.). there was a time, too, when gold wasnt falling from the sky in a monsoon, so repair bills could actually begin to matter, as well. but really, i doubt the death penalty had anything to do with why WoW exploded in popularity and crushed all others.
i dont mind the idea of harsh penalty, and xp loss. i would actually like to see a sort of reverse sliding scale. die to something 'easy' - fall off a cliff, get killed by a mob 10 levels below you, etc, harsh penalty. die while fighting a baddest raid mob in the game, less penalty. that at least 'punishes' poor or careless play, but has the reward of lesser penalty for people that actually try harder things.
I just want to be clear on something - I don't think any single person on these forums that campaigns for harsh death penalties has ever claimed, or is laboring under the delusion, that severe repercussions for death are "fun". The point is that it's important that decisions, mistakes, laziness, and the like carry consequences. Not every aspect of an MMO can or should be outrageously fun at every moment. But I'm not going to have another death penalty discussion, so I will take my leave.
If you haven't had a chance Todd, I would suggest reading the article that @Dullahan posted in another thread about death penalty. The author does a great job of removing the opinion from this discussion.
Nikademis said:I just want to be clear on something - I don't think any single person on these forums that campaigns for harsh death penalties has ever claimed, or is laboring under the delusion, that severe repercussions for death are "fun". The point is that it's important that decisions, mistakes, laziness, and the like carry consequences. Not every aspect of an MMO can or should be outrageously fun at every moment. But I'm not going to have another death penalty discussion, so I will take my leave.
If you haven't had a chance Todd, I would suggest reading the article that @Dullahan posted in another thread about death penalty. The author does a great job of removing the opinion from this discussion.
Thanks for this. I was reading his stuff earlier actually. I was at work at the time, I'll read the rest of it. Thanks.
edit: Yea, same thing happened at work. Reading it just makes me sad and frustrated. It's written in a way that makes a lot of sense, but then ... I don't feel that way. The guy is right when he says 'most players dispise it' in regards to the death penalty. I am one of those people. I just don't see the same value, and its frustrating. Ever gotten with a group of people and everyone is in on a joke but you aren't? You feel so left out. Xcept with this it's like ... everyone is eating seafood and I HATE seafood, and i'm like "how can you eat that stuff? it's terrible tasting!" and everyone just tells me i'm the crazy one.
-Todd
Once you experienced it you will like it :) death penalty doesnt mean you die all the time and have to recover your corpse all the time and loose a ton of xps all the time. Because if there is a death penalty ppls try to avoid it and most of the time they have success. Go for the better loot the harder spots the more risky parts of an area, you will try to find competent players, ppls will do theyre best to play well, the reward you gain is good loot, the risk you bear is having to get your corpse back far down in a dungeon. And there was always options to recover corpses from classes like necromancer they were able to summon your corpse to you but the spell needed a costy ingredient, the cleric was able to ressurect and give you back 96% of the xp lost, rogues could sneak around and recover corpses, monks been able to drag around corpses then feign dead to loose adds till you got them back.
I rarely died in EQ unless in raids but they had clerics and rogues and monks and necros if thoose classes where near, you had no real troubles getting back your corpses and most xps. It made some classes very usefull to have just because of the fact they could help you if you died.
No one that I know has ever said death, or dying, or XP penalties, or item degradation, etc, are "fun". But they add to the anxiety/apprehension/trepidation that make success that much sweeter and contribute to the overall "fun" of the experience. I hate dying. Success completing some particularly difficult challenge unscathed is what makes it fun for me.
And, +1 Sun
@tehtewd : It IS worthwhile bringng this up. It IS and will be a major point for the VR DEV team.
I know, and many people have already mentioned it, that death penalties are not fun. They are the 'stick'.
DEATH is the great leveller...
it is meant to put FEAR into players. But for an immersoive world you DO need both 'carrot' and 'stick'. Our job will be to educate the new player-base into seeing that. Hopefully this can be done gradually... with early XP gain just fast enough to mitigate lost xp fairly quickly without cheapening the rise.
Once you grasp that grouping for safety is the way to go... once you grasp that you need tactics ... once you start to be invested in your character and think 'how can i get better', then all becomes much easier.
But, to you and the growing majority of potential players who never played early EQ1...
... think about this: ADVERSITY and a COMMON FOE brings people together
... Ask any EQ player and :
they know a friend they met on a CR run...
they know a friend who saved them from death...
they know a WAR/puller who saved all by sacrificing himself...
they know the FEAR they felt when they saw Spectres trained to the docks
they stayed up into the night to help recover a corpse ...
they were scared pantless running through Kith in case they left a corpse there...
they know people NOW, 17 yrs later, who risked death for them...
PS : There *is* an MMO out there with perma-death ... wish I could recall the name!
Serisously, you DIE you re-roll a character! Now *that* is HARSH!
I think it's a valid point worth discussion and you have a lot of good and valid reasoning there, *but* (and I touched on this in the other recent death penalty thread) for me it comes down to the particular feel 'old-skool' folks want from an MMORPG. I really believe the death penalty mechanic is tightly coupled with that 'feel'. I'll try and summarise what I think that 'feel' is (get ready for a long one (ooer)) : -
Disclaimer 1: I'm going *try* and put it in a way that hopefully most can agree with. I know I'll fail somewhat, but hopefully get mostly there: -
Disclaimer 2: If I seem to state things as facts, I really don't mean to. If I say something like "Ice cream makes you fat" I'm implying with one group that eats ice-cream and one group that doesn't, there will be an obvious tendancy in the ice-cream eaters.
We like 'challenging' games.
Some related concepts: Difficulty. Risk vs. Reward. Sure, we like an attractive and fun game, but gain much of our enjoyment from feeling accomplishment. We are prepared to 'work' somewhat to get a better, more worthwhile 'reward'.
We like tactical/thoughtful games.
Doesn't mean we wouldn't enjoy a spectacular, on-the-rails, spoof, sci-fi shooter, but our ideal is something involving much more grey matter.
We like slower-paced games.
Mostly because it's hard to focus on the tactical play we so enjoy when you're rushing along. Socialising also is hard otherwise. We're happy with timing and reaction-speed being important mechanics, but not at the expense of planning and tactical play. We are happy to have downtime, because there's so much to do/discuss that it's needed and enjoyed.
We like inter-dependence.
This is related to all the above points. To adventure in a group where the character skills mix and compliment one another ups all the other aspects by a significant factor. The challenge of coordinating a cohesive group, the social aspect of developing group tactics and just chatting, the addition in complexity and effectiveness of group tactics, the additional need and desire to take time over stuff: All great.
We like social games.
Dungeons & Dragons would have been no fun sat on your own. At least it was *much more* fun with others, *but* if there wasn't the slower pace and inter-dependance noted above, there wouldn't be much chance (or need?) for the social side.
We like adventure!
The kind of people that like high-fantasy RPGs like 'adventure'! (In our fantasy lives, if not our real ones). A pile of gold is exciting, but even more so with a fearsome dragon on top. The view from a mountain range is lovely, but did you climb it or get a helicopter to land you there? Did you rescue that beauty from a troll or just pick her up in a tavern? I think adventure requires adversity. Without fear of failure there's little thrill from success.
We like 'meaningful' games.
MMOs give persistence and we like the feeling of belonging to an ongoing, living world/society. RPGs give customised progression and development of our characters and we identify with them and become attached to them. High-fantasy (and most others) do more than most games to attempt to 'immerse' you in something you can feel is a 'real' (if obviously alternate) world.
It's still escapisim and fantasy, of course, but because it's more meaningful to us, it's a 'deeper' and more worthwhile experience.
Ok, so I ask: Can you balance a game with an easy death penalty, but keep that 'feel'?
Challenge: You can still make encounters difficult, yep, *but* with a weak death penalty even difficult encounters are *somewhat* trivialised as you can get near to the skill/level/gear intended for an encounter and just throw yourself against it again and again and eventually the Random Number Generator will hand you a win. Also do you feel 'risk' if you can just try again with little consequence?
Balancing content should usually involve thinking "well, if they come prepared and are careful then they are a match for this", but when players can quickly, repeatedly and with little consequence try again and again when they didn't prepare adequately or play particularly carefully and bother with tactics then how do you balance it?
I believe, because of the above, to continue to make content 'difficult' you have to balance encounters much more toward expecting repeated deaths before overcoming them, otherwise content will be pretty trivial.
That above line is fundamental to the rest of my thinking, so if I've lost your agreement there, you probably won't come with me the rest of the way hehe.
Tactics: With the possibility of rapid die-and-try-again game-play the 'need' for tactics is reduced. Of course you can be as tactical as you wish and would receive good results if you do, but a harsh death penalty encourages tactics and an easier death penalty encourages the other, since you get the same reward if you bother to use them or not.
Another side-effect is, since it is not costly, people can abuse death as a tactic. Intentionally 'train' away monsters so others can pass. Run the length of a dungeon and happily die because they can easily return to their corpse and avoid a long dungeon crawl. New tactics are good? Not if you're using them to circumvent what the devs intended and trivialise content.
Pace: I think it's inevitable that the pace goes up when dying is less costly. People will be less hesitant to just throw themselves into an encounter and see what happens. Tactics and planning (and the time to develop them) will be less necessary. People won't need to be as careful, so can move faster and risk bumping into an encounter.
Grouping: It's not going to make group tactics impossible, but members dying often is clearly going to reduce the effectiveness of and, so, the importance of group tactics. If you can't rely on members being there for half a combat, inter-dependence is bound to be reduced. IF the game is designed for heavy inter-dependance and group members drop like flies, it would be very frustrating.
Social: You can still socialise, yep, *but* with a game balanced to regular expected death, you are constantly interrupted. With the pace increased there's less chance for socialising. With the group tactics disrupted or impossible, there's less need for developing/discussing tactics.
Adventure: This is more subjective, but to me it's bound to feel less thrilling if there's less fear. Sure, it may still be spectacular and fun, but you still lose something.
Meaning: Again more subjective, but it feels less immersive and meaningful to me if you just ping back into existence like Mario. Noone's asking for it that easy, I know, but still there's a balance to be achieved.
It may all come down to that: balancing the feeling of what is "meaningful" to what feels overly "harsh" (irritating, depressing, whatever).
TL;DR: There's a lot more to MMORPG death that there is in Mario Bros :)
Evoras said:@tehtewd : It IS worthwhile bringng this up. It IS and will be a major point for the VR DEV team.
I know, and many people have already mentioned it, that death penalties are not fun. They are the 'stick'.
DEATH is the great leveller...
it is meant to put FEAR into players. But for an immersoive world you DO need both 'carrot' and 'stick'. Our job will be to educate the new player-base into seeing that. Hopefully this can be done gradually... with early XP gain just fast enough to mitigate lost xp fairly quickly without cheapening the rise.
Once you grasp that grouping for safety is the way to go... once you grasp that you need tactics ... once you start to be invested in your character and think 'how can i get better', then all becomes much easier.
But, to you and the growing majority of potential players who never played early EQ1...
... think about this: ADVERSITY and a COMMON FOE brings people together
... Ask any EQ player and :
they know a friend they met on a CR run...
they know a friend who saved them from death...
they know a WAR/puller who saved all by sacrificing himself...
they know the FEAR they felt when they saw Spectres trained to the docks
they stayed up into the night to help recover a corpse ...
they were scared pantless running through Kith in case they left a corpse there...
they know people NOW, 17 yrs later, who risked death for them...
PS : There *is* an MMO out there with perma-death ... wish I could recall the name!
Serisously, you DIE you re-roll a character! Now *that* is HARSH!
This reply is perfect. I have been waiting for a game like this for years. I don't think I can say anything else and be constructive.
Congratz Evoras on one of the best replies on this board.
For me there are only a hand full of deal breakers. Probably less than three things that would make me walk away from this game. The most important one is the death penalty. If it is not a harsh one I won't bother. I know they have not decided what that penalty will be yet, but I trust that it will be in line with something I can live with. If not then I guess my mmo days are over.
And when it comes to WoW, the only thing that game did well was to introduce a larger segment of the population to mmos. I can only hope that a percentage of the younger playerbase that never had the oportunity to experience a challenging game with flock to this one. WoW was not the greatest mmo experience ever, it was the first one that marketed and catered to the masses and had a low enough system requirement as to allow almost anyone with a computer to play. I hope they make another for those people but please don't let this game follow that model.
The agony of defeat vs the ecstasy of winning. Direct relationship.
When you reduce one, it reduces the other. Its basically physics.
In a very simple scenario. I recently started playing Texas Holdem online. People go "all in" all the time.. because...it doesnt matter, 20 seconds later they can just start over in a whole new tournament and go "all in" again. Nothing matters. Make it matter. I'm quite certain all of us are here because we do indeed want this to matter. Not oops, wrong button, not oh...hey man could you help me for a second?..but...oh ****? wait what? omg..! damnit! And then you look around and other people are looking at you with that same look that was on your face, and 2 hours later you are now negotiating based on numbers, who someone is in charge of because..real life charisma, a plan to help all of you because... just imagine Plane of Fear... bad wipe, no intel. All you know is your corpse is rotting, you are willing to negotiate right now, right now! And then people show up, other people in the same situation, with corpse-run gear and you think..wow..these guys...but.. no time, 6 people are going in, 6 awesome people and 25 people are staring at you and killing level 7 skeletons and Cindrella or whatever her name is, and trying to cast invis and invis vs undead at the same time because...its us man... its us or nothing, and you focus... ok? focus! and you do your job, and she does her job, he does his job, and teamwork happens and oh.. my...god...."they did it?" Thats its, right there, stop the game, you won. You and those 5 others just won the game, everyone literally sighed a relief... .tomorrow is cleanup, but...we fixed it. Tomorrow, after the 'Seinfeld water cooler talk' you ducked your head a little bit, smiled a little bit, felt a bond.. you felt a bond that made you not even remember that 15 minute break....who cares about 15 minutes? You and your new friends, those people, ....'hey there goes "___"... "who?" thats the guy that saved PoF man! Thats legend, that is legend, and if you werent there you don't know but guaranteed it will get easier...it always does...but not this time, this time 6 people locked that **** down, and saved the damn day.
I agree with coach. It's about the hard won successes after a wipe in a challenging zone. It's about the bond -- with your fellow players, your avatar, your gear and the feeling of "us against a challenging dangerous world". These hardships make non-trolling people really want to buff lower level characters or help with CRs and corpse retrievals, because they know how much that's appreciated. The pain and frustration of a death harsher death penalty in a challenging world have these great side effects, which is why people like me don't want easy escapes.
Edit: For me, it was the death penalty of EQ, which made the game feel more challenging (= fun, exciting) than it probably would have been without it.
Sunmistress said:The greatest cure for the death penalty (in EQ atleast)
Was playing well enough you did not die.
the greatest cure for the death penalty is not to challenge yourself. fight undercon mobs, pull slowly and, viola, no death. try and push the limits of your class and you will die, often. you will also get much better, much faster. i find no coincidence that the leaders in deaths in vanguard were mostly people in the top guilds.
for players that can play 40 hours a week, harsh death penalties will not be harsh. honestly, i am not concern much about what the death penalty will be in this game. if it is so hard that a death requires 10 hours of boredom from which to recover then VERY few will actually try anything challenging, the game will bore me, and i can move on. (based on my enjoyment of SWGs and Vanguard, i doubt this will be the case.) if death penalty is too harsh then interesting content wont be tried while interesting, but left until it is trivial. /blech
much funner socializing about how we wiped on varking for the 20th time then how we killed groups of 20 -4 level goblins for 3 hours to regain xp, for me, anyway. great thing about opinions is people can have different ones. but appreciate the OP since it likely will reinforce that the greatest shouters are not the only voices.
(might have taken 30 pulls for us to get varking and we had several people that would sit out progression nights because the middling amount of death penalty in vanguard. i got a job now, i havnt 200 hours to grind boring trash mobs just to break even; i am older now, so i dont want to.)
p.s. for the record someone did actually state how the massive tedium of EQ made it more fun as it made him feel he accomplished something, apparently that hard and interesting content didn't make him feel.