i'm starting to get the impression that some posters aren't reading the other posts.  They seem to be throwing their post in without seeing what we're talking about.

At no point that i'm aware of has the OP or anyone else said "we like HARSH death penalty".  The op asked WHY there are death penalties.  NOT, I like HARSH death penalties.

In fact i think it's safe to say NO ONE likes harsh death penalties.  No one likes losing hours of game time.  And now that we can all/most agree to this lets move on to the original post k?  WHY are there death penalties?

Good point ^^^

Well i guess Death penalties are there to provide a kind of challenge to the game.

The heavier the death penalty the more fun the game is for me, without death penalties, most mmos are just bad shallow turn based puzzle games

i liked the death penalties in tibia, die and lose at the least hours at most several days worth of work, people were genuinely scared to die. i think it had a 10% of total exp penalty, and since it had no max level guys were sometimes dying and losing tens of millions of exp (days or weeks worth of hunting and gear and money), that made the open pvp especially good. Everyone at high level knew about everyone else on the server on first name basis because of what they could do to eachother. Sort of enforced role playing.

Ideally id have a 50% of total exp death penalty in a game personally. In games with very little penalty or none ie WoW, guild wars, eq, i got bored after a couple days.

Originally posted by sacred_band

The heavier the death penalty the more fun the game is for me, without death penalties, most mmos are just bad shallow turn based puzzle games

i liked the death penalties in tibia, die and lose at the least hours at most several days worth of work, people were genuinely scared to die. i think it had a 10% of total exp penalty, and since it had no max level guys were sometimes dying and losing tens of millions of exp (days or weeks worth of hunting and gear and money), that made the open pvp especially good. Everyone at high level knew about everyone else on the server on first name basis because of what they could do to eachother. Sort of enforced role playing.

Ideally id have a 50% of total exp death penalty in a game personally. In games with very little penalty or none ie WoW, guild wars, eq, i got bored after a couple days.

I'd go with that, provided there was some point to PvP, like a game wide Faction vs Faction war. Dying in the defense of some strategic outpost has a certain poetry to it. Dying and lossing 50% of my XP in some bastardized version of CTF, no thanks.

I'd also be inclined to add some sort of non combat way to earn XP, like practice matches with friends or general training. 50% XP loss is a bit steep if the only way you can earn the XP is by risking death. Every nations army offers some degree of non combat training to thier troops before putting them in the fire after all. I dont think a 'go get shot at and if you survive you'll be better for it' doctrine has much appeal.

Personally though, as far as death penalties go I'd steer clear of XP loss. To me, XP is literally experience, even when you loose a battle you get more experienced, in some cases a loss is far more an eye opener. I'd have the corpses fully lootable (though in the act of killing your target you're bound to completely ruin some of his gear, armour with holes in it's pretty useless you know) and after that have a recovery period. Like actual injury recovery, you start off pretty weak and gradually regain your former strength, the length of which would probably be determined by how WTFBBQed you got. Being hit in the face with a V2 rocket for instance would require a significantly longer recovery period them someone who fell down some stairs. That, coupled with the loss of everything you had on you at the time, would probably give a sufficient DP to make my ideal game possible.

Originally posted by PhelanL
They should make casinos where they don't take your money.  It would be more fun to gamble if you didn't lose anything.