Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by UOlover

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by UOlover

The title of the post says challenge. Harder gameplay is a challenge, harsh death penalty is a challenge. It very well can be inconvient for someone and joyous for someone else. Changing one word as the thread evolves allows for completely different meanings and for each person to find some truth in their posts heh.

But as the example given about the Bridge, nothing about the Lava, change how easy/hard jumping over it will be. Its the same difficulty.


 

 It''s a challenge you have to deal with it. Now you and other people may view it as an  inconvenience and other people may view it as something awesome. But it's still a challenge.

but its challenging not having to deal with it as well. Matter of fact, the difficulty would not have changed at all, if we swapped the DP.

so again, my point stands. the Gameplay is the Challenge, not the Penalty for death. you are confusing the two.

 If you don't die there is no challenge from a harsh death penalty

Originally posted by Swanea

So say a raid takes X amount of skill and has no Dealth penelty.   My group of average players attempt the boss 100 times, and beat it because we wipe and instantly rez.  We are pretty great!

What is this mysterious (and poorly-designed) MMORPG which lets you graveyard-zerg a raid boss?

Any decent MMORPG has anti-zerg measures in place.  When you wipe, the boss resets and you have to start over.  So if your group doesn't have X amount of skill you'd never beat that boss.

Originally posted by Swanea

So say a raid takes X amount of skill and has no Dealth penelty.   My group of average players attempt the boss 100 times, and beat it because we wipe and instantly rez.  We are pretty great!

So another group does a raid that takes the same X amount of skill with a DP of credits/Small XP loss/item decay.  They wipe 9 times as they form a strategy that they discuss and reform.  They beat the boss on the 10th try.  They are pretty great.

A final group attempts the same raid boss with X skill required, but with a DP of you lose all your armor/weapons if you die.  They quit the game.  They are pretty great, in a different way.

 

When you add some sort of DP, as long as it is not extreme, you push players to improve quicker.  My group would attempt a harder boss, and because wiping doesn't matter, we learn a bit slower since we have no real reason to worry about dying.  Someone in the group walk in the fire and wipe us? Oh well! We instantly rez, go again, no worries.

The second group is pushed to be better quicker, for the risk of losing money, xp, or their items decaying.  It's not something that breaks many people, but it's another incentive to be better quicker.

 

There are plenty of examples you could make of this in real life.  But those aren't exactly the same thing as a virtual world.  As some points brought up in this thread sound very silly when compared to a fake death.  What matters in relation to the game is TIME.  Not money/xp/item decay, but the time spent having to make up for those things.  If you are motivated by TIME to not have to work to replace what you lost to DP, it can help you improve.  Sure wiping over and over is the loss of time, but it's not mulitplied by having to go out and fix your stuff/xp/get more credits.

And this really does come down to opinion.  YOU might feel no DP is the challenge.  You might feel perma death is the best.

Try playing Darkfall. Or Eve Online, in Eve if you lose your ship it could take a month of grinding to get it back.

You have a plethora of options, enjoy.

Originally posted by UOlover

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by UOlover

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by UOlover

The title of the post says challenge. Harder gameplay is a challenge, harsh death penalty is a challenge. It very well can be inconvient for someone and joyous for someone else. Changing one word as the thread evolves allows for completely different meanings and for each person to find some truth in their posts heh.

But as the example given about the Bridge, nothing about the Lava, change how easy/hard jumping over it will be. Its the same difficulty.


 

 It''s a challenge you have to deal with it. Now you and other people may view it as an  inconvenience and other people may view it as something awesome. But it's still a challenge.

but its challenging not having to deal with it as well. Matter of fact, the difficulty would not have changed at all, if we swapped the DP.

so again, my point stands. the Gameplay is the Challenge, not the Penalty for death. you are confusing the two.

 If you don't die there is no challenge from a harsh death penalty

The most common death penalty is XP loss.

Exactly what challenge that does that present players?

As I said earlier getting back is not a challenge at all. You simply go back and do the things that you've already done.  Seems like a yawn situation rather than a challenge of any sort. :)

Originally posted by Scrogdog

Originally posted by gainesvilleg

Roguelike games are very fun and have a fairly large following.  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup a great up-to-date example.

The death penalty there is PERMANENT death.  No saves.  Start over.

VERY VERY fun and of course this death penalty makes it more challenging.  If you were able to reload and keep going pretty much anybody could beat it.  As it stands now most cannot.

Roguelikes prove that even the harshest of death penalties can work, if the game is interesting enough and diverse enough to warrant many many play-throughs...

A fair point and this is where some of us might be tripping over some concepts here.

It IS more challenging to complete the run. However, the difficulty of the combat is unchanged.

 Difficulty of combat may be theoretically unchanged, but due to the nature of this harsh death penalty the typical player would have much higher skills/tactics than in the no penalty game.  When there is no death penalty, you tend to solve a lot of problems by just repeatedly throwing yourself at it, perhaps bringing more firepower with you and just muscle through it.

In a harsh death penalty game, you develop many more survival tacticts that are completely unnecessary in a no death penalty game.  You also tend to run away more and have a strategy for doing so.  You develop stategies for dealing with more situations.

So the combat is fundamentally different.  Some probably don't like that extra adrenaline of facing a possible death in a high penalty game, just like some don't like PVP or other game mechanic.  But to me a game without death penalty is very lifeless and artificial.

Originally posted by Swanea

So say a raid takes X amount of skill and has no Dealth penelty.   My group of average players attempt the boss 100 times, and beat it because we wipe and instantly rez.  We are pretty great!

So another group does a raid that takes the same X amount of skill with a DP of credits/Small XP loss/item decay.  They wipe 9 times as they form a strategy that they discuss and reform.  They beat the boss on the 10th try.  They are pretty great.

A final group attempts the same raid boss with X skill required, but with a DP of you lose all your armor/weapons if you die.  They quit the game.  They are pretty great, in a different way.

 

When you add some sort of DP, as long as it is not extreme, you push players to improve quicker.  My group would attempt a harder boss, and because wiping doesn't matter, we learn a bit slower since we have no real reason to worry about dying.  Someone in the group walk in the fire and wipe us? Oh well! We instantly rez, go again, no worries.

The second group is pushed to be better quicker, for the risk of losing money, xp, or their items decaying.  It's not something that breaks many people, but it's another incentive to be better quicker.

 

There are plenty of examples you could make of this in real life.  But those aren't exactly the same thing as a virtual world.  As some points brought up in this thread sound very silly when compared to a fake death.  What matters in relation to the game is TIME.  Not money/xp/item decay, but the time spent having to make up for those things.  If you are motivated by TIME to not have to work to replace what you lost to DP, it can help you improve.  Sure wiping over and over is the loss of time, but it's not mulitplied by having to go out and fix your stuff/xp/get more credits.

And this really does come down to opinion.  YOU might feel no DP is the challenge.  You might feel perma death is the best.

Instead of approaching it by instilling a fear of punishment, why not reward people for excelling or improving? Maybe increase the reward for faster completion, better accuracy, most beheadings, least amount of traps sprung and and other measures?  Two games that currently go that route are Free Realms and Vindictus. Both offer extra bonuses and rewards for completing certain objectives during the game/instance/battle, and neither of them have anything significant down the line of a death penalty.

sounds like WoW achievements to me. Lets stick with the topic of  challenge of harder gameplay and harsh death penalty. Of course if you want to make a thread about it i would certainly participate

Originally posted by gainesvilleg

Originally posted by Scrogdog

Originally posted by gainesvilleg

Roguelike games are very fun and have a fairly large following.  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup a great up-to-date example.

The death penalty there is PERMANENT death.  No saves.  Start over.

VERY VERY fun and of course this death penalty makes it more challenging.  If you were able to reload and keep going pretty much anybody could beat it.  As it stands now most cannot.

Roguelikes prove that even the harshest of death penalties can work, if the game is interesting enough and diverse enough to warrant many many play-throughs...

A fair point and this is where some of us might be tripping over some concepts here.

It IS more challenging to complete the run. However, the difficulty of the combat is unchanged.

 Difficulty of combat may be theoretically unchanged, but due to the nature of this harsh death penalty the typical player would have much higher skills/tactics than in the no penalty game.  When there is no death penalty, you tend to solve a lot of problems by just repeatedly throwing yourself at it, perhaps bringing more firepower with you and just muscle through it.

In a harsh death penalty game, you develop many more survival tacticts that are completely unnecessary in a no death penalty game.  You also tend to run away more and have a strategy for doing so.  You develop stategies for dealing with more situations.

So the combat is fundamentally different.  Some probably don't like that extra adrenaline of facing a possible death in a high penalty game, just like some don't like PVP or other game mechanic.  But to me a game without death penalty is very lifeless and artificial.

Oh I agree completely.  As I said earlier, I never quite had the same sense of danger in any MMO as I did in EQ.  It was fun. 

I can see your point above but I didn't really feel that harsh penalty made the game overall more difficult.  Certainly naked corpse runs could be very challenging and sometimes difficult.  But even if you took corpse runs out, by today's standards people would flip if they got de-leveled.

Not so much a factor of are there enough people who will tolerate being de-leveled but one of developers who can see the potential of how much more money they could make by not having it in the game.

That's why this is very much a theoretical vrs reality discussion

Originally posted by UOlover

Not so much a factor of are there enough people who will tolerate being de-leveled but one of developers who can see the potential of how much more money they could make by not having it in the game.

That's why this is very much a theoretical vrs reality discussion

I think the market might be a little more varied than you think.  More old friends of mine have comepletely abandonded MMOs than still play.  That's because we have nothing but clones upon clones upon clones.  It makes sense to say, then, that the majority of posters here are those that remain and enjoy clone wars. :)

That's just the problem with the industry.  It all cookie cutter now, few want to take a chance.  They only want the path to the the WoW pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow.

If there were different games, some old school and some not, for example, I think the industry might be a little more healthy.

After all, we all enjoy different movies and books and most genres are readily available.  Not so in the world of MMOs.  Seemingly only one taste is catered to and I think it's a darn shame.

I say UO mode, if you die your gear is up for grabs. Dying and running to a rezzer is nothing, the challenge is if your awesome gear is on your corpse and you have to get back to it before the mobs or someone snags it.

Originally posted by Scrogdog

Originally posted by UOlover

Not so much a factor of are there enough people who will tolerate being de-leveled but one of developers who can see the potential of how much more money they could make by not having it in the game.

That's why this is very much a theoretical vrs reality discussion

I think the market might be a little more varied than you think. More old friends of mine have comepletely abandonded MMOs than still play. That's because we have nothing but clones upon clones upon clones. It makes sense to say, then, that the majority of posters here are those that remain and enjoy clone wars. :)

That's just the problem with the industry. It all cookie cutter now, few want to take a chance. They only want the path to the the WoW pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow.

If there were different games, some old school and some not, for example, I think the industry might be a little more healthy.

After all, we all enjoy different movies and books and most genres are readily available. Not so in the world of MMOs. Seemingly only one taste is catered to and I think it's a darn shame.

I agree with you, but you have 99% of these developers who are not independently wealthy. Who are forced to go to publishers and beg them for money for their idea and the publisher says to them: "So let me get this straight, you're going to have a harsh death penalty in your game and that's going to prevent you from having a subscriber base the size of WoW?"

Said poor developer winds up getting no money heh.

Originally posted by ArChWind

There was similar discussion awhile back about imposing stiff penalties up to an including perma death.

 

I think one way to maybe satisfy more players is for them to be asked on character creation what kind of punishment they want and give them a server list that has that level of punishment. By placing each player in the environment they choose, they are all on a level playing field so everyone has the same DP.

 

Give them maybe 4 options.

 

1.- I want perma death.

 

2 – I want Massive DP.

 

3. - I want medium DP.

 

4. - I want no DP.

 

Of course this segregates the game community as a whole and is difficult to maintain. It would be an interesting case study though on population distributions.

The problem with that is that people generally want to change their level of risk. The optimal solution would be to find a way to allow players to make such choices dynamically during gameplay.

The OP's argument is the same...   as a harder death sentence, is "harder"..!

I would say a mix of Actually Challenging Combats mixed with a Slight Penality if dead does indeed Push some(most?) people to React better and try "harder".

Easy example is Vindictus. Some of the Bosses are Challenging fights, making you want to better yourself and the penality of death is to restart The Mission if failed....

Pretty Basic concept you'll say yes, But it works wonder, as I fight a boss i want to outbest its Mechanics and win, and also Dieing means starting over, wich Usually tend to place me on a More or less "A" Game type of play.

As for other MMOs, as long as the death penality / Difficulty of the game follows its "theme" id say people will adapt and Learn to enjoy them.

Death Penality , unless drasticly Harsh , usually is but a minor setback in the games we play.

Difficulty and Complexity of the AI (for PVE games)  Or Balance of PVP is what truely would be the bigger factor...

If everything is too easy, there is no challenge.... it makes you ask..."why do i bother? this isnt even challenging me"

Pvp balance would be mostly for people who enjoy a class, being "punished" by being Sub-par In PVP encounters determined by what they play rather than their lack of skills.

That was pretty much my 2 cents x)

Have a good Day !

I think part of the problem with this thread is that two different propositions are being discussed as if they were the same.

(#1) Is a death penalty a substitute for "challenging gameplay"?

(#2) Can a death penalty add "challenge" to gameplay?

Now I think that pretty much everyone here would get behind a firm "no" to question #1, but the OP seems to be using that consensus to slip in a "no" to #2 as well, when it's actually a very different proposition. When the two questions are disambiguated, I think rather more people will answer "yes" to #2 than to #1.

Obviously I am in the "no to #1, yes to #2" camp. To me these answers seem so obvious as to be almost tautological. Equally obviously, Axelhilt would probably answer "no" to both questions and he would feel that his answers were so obvious. And I suspect that it is this has led him to conflate them.

Originally posted by Malcanis

I think part of the problem with this thread is that two different propositions are being discussed as if they were the same.

(#1) Is a death penalty a substitute for "challenging gameplay"?

(#2) Can a death penalty add "challenge" to gameplay?

 

Now I think that pretty much everyone here would get behind a firm "no" to question #1, but the OP seems to be using that consensus to slip in a "no" to #2 as well, when it's actually a very different proposition. When the two questions are disambiguated, I think rather more people will answer "yes" to #2 than to #1.

Obviously I am in the "no to #1, yes to #2" camp. To me these answers seem so obvious as to be almost tautological. Equally obviously, Axelhilt would probably answer "no" to both questions and he would feel that his answers were so obvious. And I suspect that it is this has led him to conflate them.

... but #2 doesn't mean a positive answer to (#3)  DOES a death penalty necessarily add "challenge" to gameplay.

Specific types of death penalty can, but that doesn't mean that death penalties (Even really harsh ones) automatically do.

It also doesn't mean (#4) Do you need a death penalty for challenging gameplay.

You can add a death penalty to gameplay at any level of challenge, from the easiest games to the hardest.

You could slap a death penalty on Tic Tac Toe, but that wouldn't make it any harder.

Specific examples of poor execution dont invalidate a concept, they only prove that the concept can be poorly executed. A game where character death leads to the publisher hiring a ninja to kill your family clearly has a bad character death penalty; that does not prove that character death penalties are inherently bad.

All we're looking at there is the other end of the spectrum from my "World of Axelhilt" example, which demonstrates that zero character death penalty can be just as bad for gameplay as infinite CDP.

As with most things, the question doesn't have a definite "yes/no" answer. Instead we have a continuous scale between zero and permadeath, with many dimensional variables (item loss, stat loss, xp loss, status loss), with a different optimal point for each individual person.

In short, where the CDP is appropriate to the style of the game, is cleanly and thoughtfully implemented (ie: issues like spawn camping are addressed) and so on, it can add to the game. It's OK for some games to have a very low CDP and others to have a very high one. As Loktofeit said, the optimum situation is to let the player have the ability to choose his own CDP. Then the basement-dwelling adrenaline junkies can have their fix, and the crybaby carebears can minimise their worries.

Originally posted by Malcanis

Specific examples of poor execution dont invalidate a concept, they only prove that the concept can be poorly executed. A game where character death leads to the publisher hiring a ninja to kill your family clearly has a bad character death penalty; that does not prove that character death penalties are inherently bad.

All we're looking at there is the other end of the spectrum from my "World of Axelhilt" example, which demonstrates that zero character death penalty can be just as bad for gameplay as infinite CDP.

As with most things, the question doesn't have a definite "yes/no" answer. Instead we have a continuous scale between zero and permadeath, with many dimensional variables (item loss, stat loss, xp loss, status loss), with a different optimal point for each individual person.

In short, where the CDP is appropriate to the style of the game, is cleanly and thoughtfully implemented (ie: issues like spawn camping are addressed) and so on, it can add to the game. It's OK for some games to have a very low CDP and others to have a very high one. As Loktofeit said, the optimum situation is to let the player have the ability to choose his own CDP. Then the basement-dwelling adrenaline junkies can have their fix, and the crybaby carebears can minimise their worries.

I never said that character death penalties are inherently bad (I'm the only person who posted since you, so I'm assuming you're responding to me somehow?), just that they are not inherently good.  Nor are they inherently challenging.

Just like any other part of the game, they're best when used appropriately.

Also, I can't think of any MMO that has =0= death penalty, at the level you're suggesting.  Maybe I'm just not familiar with them, but usually the penalty for failure at a minimum is 'you try again but possibly from the start'.  Since dungeons have respawn timers and bosses usually heal themselves when out of combat.

Also, I don't think that not wanting a heavy death penalty makes somebody a 'crybaby carebear', no more than wanting a heavy death penalty makes somebody a basement-dwelling 40 year old living with Mom.

Also, many (Or even most) things considered a 'heavy death penalty' are simply penalties of time.  Which can be especially annoying when deaths might not necessarily be your fault (Technical problems, or deaths caused by other people), and when you're short on time.