SPIRIT ARMOR
Hello everyone this is my first post and because I believe this is a really great idea that just popped in my head I wanted to share it with the community. When you die you either respawn naked (no faction with diety) or with spirit Armor which will be 4 levels below ur current level depending how much faction you have with your chosen diety, can only be as powerful as current level and never more powerful than your current level. Ex.Favor to your diety can build up like an xp meter over time and it levels up spirit armor or you can go pray to your diety to build it up faction for increased spirit armor. Or maybe you go on a quest to retain your spirit armor if your a fighter class, becomes castable when you die. Spirit armor could also be a cleric/late game paladin spell, gives armor equal to persons current level who just died. Spirit armor is only powerful enough just to get by. It wears off in 24 hours, a day cycle then your naked again or it can wear after 24 hours real time to give people more time if they have to logg off after death or something so its forgiving in that way, do your corpse run tomorrow. (Depending on diety you could do different spirit weapon/armor set and different colored spirit armor, Wisdom dex stats and Blue glow spirit armor for Tunare?). This way you actually do die and spawn naked which is alot more believable, than seeing people respawn in full plate armor and take off with there Jboots! That will kill the game for alot of us. Its reaaly cool when you hear that a guild is going on a raid, next thing you know you see them all popping up naked at there soul point. It immersses you in the game to see that. "That dude just died, lol"..If they respawn in SPirit Armor we will know they just died because they will be wearing spirit armor or naked if not earning diety faction. Its not as powerful and doesnt last forever. Its a good consequence for without punishing people and they can build it up by doing quest for your diety or whatever. Its Perfect! The armor can glow and look traslucent through the body make it look like its a gift bestowed from the gods because they favor you for your good deeds to them. BY increasing your favor the gods grant spirit Armor longer duration. Pvp Battles in spirit Armor would be cool. KNocking off a dungeon boss in spirit armor and diety gives you more favor or an achivement. C'mon guys!!! What do you think? I love it personally...
Interesting.
I don't hate it, I think it needs a lot of brainstorming but it does address some of the IMHO game breaking issues with the current plans for the "token" corpse runs they plan now where you can forget your corpse and loose virtualy nothing.
Two big points for me, I'll have to read over it again when I'm not just on my phone and I can actually see it.
thanks for sharing.
Maybe eventually earn AAs on your "Spirit Armor" from tons and tons of diety faction. Like a small sow to get you back to your corpse faster or see in the dark, corpse run related AAs. That would be cool..What do you guys think?
IMO:
On Dec 8, 2016, Aradune mentioned:
" No permanent corpse or item loss, regardless of what system we end up with -- i can say that for certain right now. (Unless it was on a special 'iron man' shard or something). "
That original public design goal has since been clarified, iirc, such that your inventory items, not your worn items, can be lost. What the word 'item' meant wasn't originally clear.
A summary of my contribution to the topic here. A design goal of what I propose is to keep people consuming content, even at max level. But, that doesn't mean that is a design goal shared by the Pantheon dev team. It's their barn to build or burn down, so to speak. :)
And the source thread from 2019, here. There have been some really good community ideas regarding a death penalty, over the past 9+ years.
The spirit armor idea isn't bad, it just doesn't align with their current public design goals. Adding more feature or scope creep to the project is.. likely not ideal.
As feedback to a pure theorycrafting idea, I would say: What about characters that choose no deity? Similarly, what about players who play not-during-prime-time?
Or what about players who live where their Internet can be out for 24 hours, randomly? Or players that travel for work, or are deployed, or work shift work, or any number of other scenarios where an I-lose-everything timer makes paying customers potentially not want to login again, and cancel their subscription..
Objectively, if the goal of spirit armor is to make getting back to your corpse an easier goal, providing the player with their equipped items (and not their inventory) accomplishes that same goal.
There is a chasm of grey area between the spectrum extremes of purely fun and purely punitive. Keeping mechanics like the death penalty on the fun side will attract (historically) a larger paying demographic than the punitive side. Yet, it's important to design to your target audience, and if money is not your primary motivator, you can be as punitive as you wish. The consequence of more and more punitive and less and less QoL is fewer players/customers, paying or not.
@Vjek
i went through his message again, nowhere did I see anything about permanent gear loss. Nor did I bring it up.
Denial of usage (it's still on the corpse) yes, it's not lost, you just HAVE to go get it, unlike current plans where you can forget it and move on.
Corpse runs are dynamic content for all except the "Rush To Max Level" crowd that we already know are toxic to an MMORPG, not something to be bypassed (read handholding)
This idea sounds extremely convoluted and would only serve to incur a lot of unnecessary development time. Your idea is basically a suggestion to make the respawned character weaker until they get their corpse, but it relies on a set of gear with fixed stats, that in no way takes into account the gear the character was originally wearing. This would be hard to balance, especially at max level. If you want to make the character a bit weaker somehow, just give them a % stat reduction debuff until they retrieve their corpse. It bypasses all of this feature creep mess that you have suggested, and also actually takes their existing items into account.
That being said, I think the currently planned death penalty is just fine. People continue to underestimate how much of an incentive xp recovery will be, as well as recovering the money, special bags, and inventory items on one's corpse. Considering this is going to be a game where different types of encounters and different types of environments are going to require varying strategies, the motivation to carry multiple sets of specialized gear is going to be high.
Zorkon said:@Vjek
i went through his message again, nowhere did I see anything about permanent gear loss. Nor did I bring it up.
Denial of usage (it's still on the corpse) yes, it's not lost, you just HAVE to go get it, unlike current plans where you can forget it and move on.
Corpse runs are dynamic content for all except the "Rush To Max Level" crowd that we already know are toxic to an MMORPG, not something to be bypassed (read handholding)
If potential gear/equipment/inventory/item loss isn't the intent, then.. are you suggesting or recommending corpses never decay, or.. some other mechanic that will remove the expired player corpses from the world?
vjek said:sure why not? Why would they need to expire?Zorkon said:@Vjek
i went through his message again, nowhere did I see anything about permanent gear loss. Nor did I bring it up.
Denial of usage (it's still on the corpse) yes, it's not lost, you just HAVE to go get it, unlike current plans where you can forget it and move on.
Corpse runs are dynamic content for all except the "Rush To Max Level" crowd that we already know are toxic to an MMORPG, not something to be bypassed (read handholding)
If potential gear/equipment/inventory/item loss isn't the intent, then.. are you suggesting or recommending corpses never decay, or.. some other mechanic that will remove the expired player corpses from the world?
they don't need to be displayed while the player is offline. although it would be desirable as friends could retrieve a player's corpse while they are offlin, nothing that couldn't be resolved with a simple /show command
I see three potential negatives - but I may not understand well enough yet.
1. High enough deity faction and death leaves you as well off as you were. Death should always have a significant impact on anyone.
2. Death impact may be too long lasting and severe. Death should sting but not be really incapacitating or almost no one will do anything risky.
3. Far worse - this violates Dorotea's First Law. Make no changes that may delay alpha, beta or launch unless they are necessary to produce a good game that will do well. Improvements that are not necessary can wait until after launch.
dorotea said:I see three potential negatives - but I may not understand well enough yet.
1. High enough deity faction and death leaves you as well off as you were. Death should always have a significant impact on anyone.
2. Death impact may be too long lasting and severe. Death should sting but not be really incapacitating or almost no one will do anything risky.
3. Far worse - this violates Dorotea's First Law. Make no changes that may delay alpha, beta or launch unless they are necessary to produce a good game that will do well. Improvements that are not necessary can wait until after launch.
1. I don't really have much opinion on this one as whole deity vs. gear streangh irrelevant to the concerns I have about there curr plans.
2. I dispute this as an often used fallacy. As evidence I offer Plane of Fear and early EQ. Epic heroes were made there in the most extreme conditions.
3. Partially agree on this one, with the note that the more detailed current plan is that the final death penalty is planed to be fleshed out in Beta. So would any of this actually be delaying release?
On point 2 I used "may be" quite carefully - to reflect a concern coupled with lack of knowledge as to how this would work in practice. Sting but not incapacitating is extremely vague and amorphous, deliberately so. Again, reflecting a basic conceptual approach not necessarily inconsistent with either what the OP suggests or how early EQ worked. But key to all of my comments is the word "potential" at the beginning. Intended to mean things that would have to be kept in mind if this approach was developed, but not necessarily barriers to implementation.
StoneFish said:Good idea, but I still just want to see naked people running off to get their stuff back because that made me laugh. I was running off into the wild naked and giggling often and for some reason when I do it IRL people get all huffy.
That is a good point. It was always easy to find someone that might need your help. All you had to do was go looking for the naked people!
Ranarius said:StoneFish said:Good idea, but I still just want to see naked people running off to get their stuff back because that made me laugh. I was running off into the wild naked and giggling often and for some reason when I do it IRL people get all huffy.
That is a good point. It was always easy to find someone that might need your help. All you had to do was go looking for the naked people!
The concern from the "need my gear" crowd (I disagree based on hundreds of neckid corpse runs) the issue has always been stats, not appearance. This Spirit Armor could be invisible easy enough.
VR has said for years now that, upon death, your respawn with all your worn items (weapons, armor, etc) but your inventory and money will remain on your body. Way back in the earliest days death was going to be an EQ1 style death mechanic where you respawn naked. But with VR's mindset of people playing the game in 2 hour increments, naked corpse runs fly in the face of that. I doubt that VR will change their mind and go with any other death penalty other than the one they have set their mind to of the last 5ish years.
The concern from the "need my gear" crowd (I disagree based on hundreds of neckid corpse runs) the issue has always been stats, not appearance. This Spirit Armor could be invisible easy enough.
Vandraad said:VR has said for years now that, upon death, your respawn with all your worn items (weapons, armor, etc) but your inventory and money will remain on your body. Way back in the earliest days death was going to be an EQ1 style death mechanic where you respawn naked. But with VR's mindset of people playing the game in 2 hour increments, naked corpse runs fly in the face of that. I doubt that VR will change their mind and go with any other death penalty other than the one they have set their mind to of the last 5ish years.
last 5ish years, yes exactl,
Brad McQuaid (April 25, 1969 – November 18, 2019)
May he rest in peace.
Ranarius said:The concern from the "need my gear" crowd (I disagree based on hundreds of neckid corpse runs) the issue has always been stats, not appearance. This Spirit Armor could be invisible easy enough.
I agree. The point I meant to make was that either way, groups won't need help getting their stuff as often anymore because they will be self sufficient.
yes, and that's unfortunate. not the Brad McQuade game I signed on for, closer to another WoW wannabe.