Originally posted by Neherun

I can't wait for this thread to be swarmed by people with insults to your like of thinking, OP.

 

And yup, I want major death penalties. The game has to offer the rush.

And i don't. I don't play games that i have to replay portions again and again (xp loss).

The solution? Have an option. Like hard core in D3.

In fact, you should play hard core in D3 .. that is the as big as a death penalty can get. I won't waste my time on it though.

Originally posted by madazz

Originally posted by ice-vortex

Originally posted by madazz

On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.

Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

And die, and have massive lay-offs, and then upset their small community by shutting down. That's why Everquest is still going strong where as all teh unsuccessful games are shutting down, or going F2P and then shutting down. 

Actually Everquest went to a Free to Play Model earlier this year, and I don't remeber them having corpse runs last time I subbed either. Then again, always being a tank in these games I accepted death as an inevitability a long time ago so death penalties don't really concern me one way or another.

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Originally posted by Cochran1

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Originally posted by madazz

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Originally posted by ice-vortex

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Originally posted by madazz On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.

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Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

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And die, and have massive lay-offs, and then upset their small community by shutting down. That's why Everquest is still going strong where as all teh unsuccessful games are shutting down, or going F2P and then shutting down. 

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Actually Everquest went to a Free to Play Model earlier this year, and I don't remeber them having corpse runs last time I subbed either. Then again, always being a tank in these games I accepted death as an inevitability a long time ago so death penalties don't really concern me one way or another.

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Same here, although taking repeated deaths in a bud guyk run back in the day as a troll SK were brutal lol

Originally posted by ice-vortex

Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

What games are that? EQ had 600k subscribers after the game was about 4 years old, concurrent users, not total, total it runs in the millions.

Which 4 year old games have 600k subscribers? Not many.

Which games still have 12 servers after 11 years? Not many.

GW2 probably doesn't even exist anymore in 11 years.

SoE released stats in their 10 year anniversiry video, 12 million characters were created in EQ.

60,000 people applied for beta

You can say a lot of stuff about EQ, that you didn't like the death penalty, that you didn't like the gameplay, claiming it wasn't successful just makes you ignorant.

EQ was the most successful MMO at the time, not UO, not Lineage, not AC, not DAOC, it wasn't until WOW came out that a game surpassed EQ in subscribers. What's more, those WoW designers were EQ players.

The problem with harsh death penalties is that it means devs make pve content that is considerably easier, because dying all the time would be demoralizing.  

Im more of a medium penalty guy, so that pve leveling can be more entertaining,challenging.

Originally posted by ice-vortex

Originally posted by madazz

On that note, I hope EQ Next gets a real death penalty. Screw the carebears. They don't even know what they want which is evident by the poor cycles of games that have been coming out.

Yet games that are considered unsuccessful have more subscribers  than Everquest ever had.

You can't really compare EQ with anything today.  The market size was miniscule.  It has also been pointed out by SOE that over 5 million people have tried EQ.  Not too shabby.

Harsh death penalty ends up being boring to me, not exciting.

Unless... maybe some version of permadeath. But in this thread people are asking for lame shit like xp loss and corpse runs. That's just an extremely boring version of a death penalty.

Either go hard on the death penalty and design a game around it or make it minimal in my opinion. This corpse run/xp loss/money loss is just a retarded middleground that never should have happened.

I've got to side with the harsh death penalty (major exp lose and possible loot drop).  I played eq1 for years, and dying was a quick way to ruin your day but I loved the immersion that the death penalty brought. I remember grinding for hours just to lose all the exp to one single death. I'm sure that it doesnt sounds like fun to some gamers who joined the scene in the last 10 years, but it build community and accountability. If you die deep in some dungeon, you had better have some friends to help you get your corpse out, or you are looking at replacing your whole set of equipment. It makes people think twice before being a jerk or ninja looting some gear.

I actually had it happen with my first character. I died, and then moved states and wasn't able to log in for a some time, lost everything and had to start over fresh. I know, again it doesnt sound like fun to some, but you REALLY get attached to your character when you can lose it all. 

Just my 2 cents, but long live the harsh death penalty.

This is a subject that's near to my heart, since I remember spending hours on corpse runs during the early days of EQ.  My last experience with the game was on the Fippy Darkpaw server about a year ago, which while fun and nostalgic, did not have corpse runs.  I remember it being something of a controversy when the server was in development.

As a matter of principle, I am for some kind of death penalty.  A little bit of cash out of pocket for armor repair and a brief stroll isn't quite enough.  On the other end of the spectrum, perma-death is clearly too much.  There's a happy medium somewhere, though, and I think it begs discovery.

I'll be frank, though, if I never retrieve another corpse, that'll be too soon.  The appeal of that particular mechanic lies only among the same nostalgia that makes other clearly counter-intuitive aspects of EQ1 seem charming in retrospect.  Notwithstanding the absence of any in-world explanation for why you should be resurrected at all, yet stripped of your accoutrements, there was simply no gameplay need met by that penalty.  It was punitive for its own sake, and I think modern game design philosophy, even among those developers most fond of EQ1, advises that you shouldn't create a system that allows a customer to pay to be kicked in the teeth.

That is to say, corpse runs didn't serve to incentivize good play, didn't teach players how to improve, and didn't reward players for doing well.  If anything, they rewarded players for having friends in zone they could trust, money they could pony up to a Necro, or plenty of time on their hands.  Now maybe those are meaningful game design objectives.  However, any of those things could be accomplished without the added burden of inconvenience.  The experience loss alone could account for the time loss involved in a death without corpse runs (and you could even scale to account for the distance from one's spawn point to account for the variable difficulty in a given run), game combat systems and difficulty can incentivize grouping and teamwork, and any sandbox worth its salt ought to have a grasp on player and class interdependency without a coffin sink.

Now let me be clear: I am not opposed to tedium outright.  I don't have a problem with the game making me re-do the last day's play time if I die, and even though I also believe that de-leveling should be a thing of the past, I wouldn't object very loud if that were present in EQN.  I don't mind having my hard-earned cash compromised by my mistakes, and I don't mind needing another player's assistance.  However, I don't think any legitimate game objective is served by being prohibited from actually playing the game for a period of time after I die (i.e., due to being naked).  And I would vehemently object to their being any risk, however small, of my entire persistent time-investment in the game being obliterated due to a comedy of errors.

To me, somewhere between launch DAOC and EQII reflects about the right amount of penalty.  In both instances, you suffered experience loss (and in DAOC, you could mitigate the loss by visiting where you died), lost some cash, and had a brief (matter of minutes) idle timer attached to your ability to function.  I think this is sufficient.  I absolutely prefer experience debt to outright loss because I believe a de-leveling system results in enough abhorrent edge cases, aside from being somewhat nonsensical.  However, I would strongly advocate that experience debt stack in severity for subsequent deaths.  In COH, for instance, if you accumulated new debt, it just got added onto the end of the previous debt, so that, until it was all paid off, it took you twice as long to earn levels through experience.  I think a better system would cause the debt to overlap at the point of accumulation, up to a cap, so that a particularly reckless player could see his experience growth grind to halt. This assumes, of course, that there are measures in place to avoid splitting up groups where, for example, a tank is likely to faceplant more often than anybody else besides the healer.

Let's face it, gang: even in EQ1, there comes a point after which death was trivial.  You had a cleric on tap in any decent guild, and at that point it wasn't a question of meaningful death as it was who you knew.  That created a system of haves and have nots that's vastly more troubling to me than whether or not corpse runs are in a game.  So yeah, somewhat off-topic but I said it:  Rezzes should cap out at 50%, if they're in the game at all.  [What about raids?  Raids aren't emergent content, and they need to be gone from the industry anyway.  Bring on the flame.]  If you're not going to make the high-level folks sweat the severity of an untimely demise, you shouldn't make the low-level folks either.  Being level 75 has enough rewards and benefits already.

TLDR:

Most importantly, regardless of a particular set of values and systems, the point of the whole exercise is that death should matter.  You want to avoid it because there are consequences.  The consequences, whatever they are, should reflect the fact that the game strongly incentivizes you to stay alive.  It does this affirmatively by the tools with which you're provided and the information you're given about the hostility of the game world.

The counterpoint to this whole issue is the fact that the games that had these systems, in general, placed a higher premium on character life.  If my SK died on Fippy, it was a big deal.  Something went bad, bad wrong.  The fact of death changed the way I played the game compared to how I play others, even twelve years later.  In GW2, great game though it may be, I could die a half-dozen times just crossing a high-level zone and just shrug it off.  Inconvenient?  Sure, but no big deal.  If my Druid died three times in a row on the same day in EQ1, I was ready to take a couple days off lest I destroy my computer in a fit of rage.  That's what this conversation is really about.  I want to see EQN provide me with things like SOW, HT, FD, Egress, Mezz, Fade, CH, LOH, and plain old running-the-hell-away, specifically because those things make me feel awesome when they were working and like a total idiot if I died with them available.  I don't think you have to have corpse runs to accomplish this.  But whatever you have, I want to die infrequently because the game cares about me staying alive.  The more durable the characters, the harsher the penalty can (and should) be.

Also:  No penalty for PVP.  Dying in PVP is punishment enough.

I want it like EQ1 but better as well.  I'm not sure that I want a super harsh death penalty though.  I used to think the death penalty was adding a thrill to the game.  But looking back as I play MMO's more over the years the thrill was more from the actual mob difficulty and immersive feel of the world.  The death penalty with exp loss that is regainable partially through rez is fine and even equipment in your inventory being dropped would be ok.  But overly harsh is pointless and adds nothing to the game.

Edit and offtopic:  I'm always shocked at the lack of love EQ1 gets on these forums.  I assume most of the people that remember EQ1 have moved on from MMO's.  I play recent MMO's and there's not even an attempt at an immersive world in which the players are treated like adults.

Originally posted by CalmOceans

What games are that? EQ had 600k subscribers after the game was about 4 years old, concurrent users, not total, total it runs in the millions.

Which 4 year old games have 600k subscribers? Not many.

Which games still have 12 servers after 11 years? Not many.

GW2 probably doesn't even exist anymore in 11 years.

SoE released stats in their 10 year anniversiry video, 12 million characters were created in EQ.

60,000 people applied for beta

You can say a lot of stuff about EQ, that you didn't like the death penalty, that you didn't like the gameplay, claiming it wasn't successful just makes you ignorant.

EQ was the most successful MMO at the time, not UO, not Lineage, not AC, not DAOC, it wasn't until WOW came out that a game surpassed EQ in subscribers. What's more, those WoW designers were EQ players.

LOL, yeah.  The EQ was the most popular game ever fantasy.  Put some some accurate numbers up.  Lineage today still makes more and has more players than EQ ever has or will.  It's one of the few games that has lasted 15 and is still subscription based.

rLineage today still makes more and has more players than EQ ever has or will.  It's one of the few games that has lasted 15 and is still subscription based.

Lineage doesn't even exist anymore in the West, it was shut down. NCsoft said it wasn't successful anymore, so far for your lasting 15 years.

I personally know Japanese and Korean players playing EQ to this day, in fact there are still whole japanese guilds in EQ.

Originally posted by ice-vortex

Not really.

 

The writeup What's in a Death Penalty? is an interesting take on the death penalty.

Interesting article, but too much of a generalization on how people react to harsher death penalties.

That's one of the major issues of people writing an explanatory article like that... they go off their own experiences and perceptions, which greatly limits the scope of the topic, and skews their conclusions.

FFXI and Lineage 2 both have/had harsh death penalties, and I thought it made exploration and gameplay more interesting, exciting and, of course, challenging. It didn't discourage me at all. One of my favorite pastimes is to go into an area well beyond my level or capability and see how far I could get without dying; test my knowledge of mob aggro types and range and my ability to weave safely around them.

I knew the penalty for dying in either game was pretty steep in terms of xp and possible level loss... but that made it more interesting. XP loss sucked but it was part of the game and it was only temporary. In the context of a game I had already spent hundreds of hours in, and would no doubt spend many, many more... having to gain some xp back was never a big deal to me. To this day, I don't understand why people freak out about it. It's xp. You'll get it back. What's the hurry?

Regarding harsh penalties resulting in people "only doing what they know". That's a pretty weak argument the article raises, considering people behave exactly the same way in MMOs with hardly any penalty. They stick to proven strategies, they follow quest walk-throughs and review raid tactic videos. They use handy-dandy UI add-ons to reduce the chance of failure in a raid. The presence or absence of a harsher death penalty has nothing to do with that.

Originally posted by adam_nox
wut... EQ never even had 600k subs, let alone concurrency which they would never give out.  wow guys. fact check time.

they sure did, around PoP-GoD they reached 600k concurrently, you used to be able to see server player count and SoE released figures, whoever made this first graph used those original figures

what's more, SoE developers often said on the forum that their network reached those numbers when they talked about server mergers in relationship to server capacity

it also matches up with the new 10 year video they released where they mention figures

I wish I could find the old site, he had a reference to those numbers, another site took over the numbers, all of those data points were reliable, the only ones that weren't reliable were asian ones since they often gave internet cafe numbers

Do you have any facts to prove 600k was not correct in spite of developers mentioning it?

i want this game to be unforgiving like eq was as well, i don't care how many subs there are as long as my server is full.

not everyone likes that style of MMO but there are plenty of other games that are easy to play already.

for me EQ was the most rewarding MMORPG i have played to date.

the harsh death penalties and harshness of the game is the reason why.

when you accomplished something or got the item you were hunting hours (or sometime even days or weeks straight) for, it was very rewarding.

unlike most newer MMO's where getting upgrades is never a huge deal and easy to do.

Originally posted by CalmOceans

Originally posted by adam_nox
wut... EQ never even had 600k subs, let alone concurrency which they would never give out.  wow guys. fact check time.

 

they sure did, around PoP-GoD they reached 600k concurrently, you used to be able to see server player count and SoE released figures, whoever made this first graph used those original figures

what's more, SoE developers often said on the forum that their network reached those numbers when they talked about server mergers in relationship to server capacity

it also matches up with the new 10 year video they released where they mention figures

I wish I could find the old site, he had a reference to those numbers, another site took over the numbers, all of those data points were reliable, the only ones that weren't reliable were asian ones since they often gave internet cafe numbers

Do you have any facts to prove 600k was not correct in spite of developers mentioning it?

Funny you should quote that graph as a source.  In 2009 - 2010 EQ had about 100k.  On that same site on another chart (the next higher population graph with WoW and Runescape) Lineage comes in just under a million at around 950k.  It used to be much higher.  People playing outside the west actually count.

Originally posted by Torvaldr

Funny you should quote that graph as a source.  In 2009 - 2010 EQ had about 100k.  On that same site on another chart (the next higher population graph with WoW and Runescape) Lineage comes in just under a million at around 950k.  It used to be much higher.  People playing outside the west actually count.

Read my post, like I said before, that is not the original post, the person who made the first few years of that graph is not the same person who made the numbers post 2009, someone took over those numbers when he stopped doing it, the original owner only referenced if he was reasonable sure the numbers are correct.

In 2009 SoE didn't release subscription numbers anymore, nor did developers talk about numbers anymore, I assume because they weren't allowed anymore.

Numbers from Asia, were often NOT correct, because of the issues with internet cafes which means you're unable to detect who the person is, it could be one person, it could be multiple people playing, internet cafe owned the game and accounts were often free as is the case in Asia usually, or owned by the cafe.

(that's also why I don't take those numbers from Lineage serious, anyone could run into a cafe without paying for an account and hop onto a PC and play any game, including Lineage, internet cafe bought the games, not the players like in the West, does trying a game for 5 minutes make them a lineage player?)

Does that clear things up now? Anyway, I'm not going to explain it any further because I don't want to sidetrack the theard.

Don't want to believe EQ had 600k players even though developers said so then don't believe it, if that makes you happy more power to you, I really don't care either way.