Ghroznak said:Zyellinia said:Over my (too many) years I've had a few cases of barely having time to type "rl **** got to go" before logging off and running for the door, let alone the time to finish any sort of corpse run/drag/equip and run back to town to log out scenario.
What kind of job did you do (still do?) ?
Sounds like an on-call job..where you are called into work, at a moment's notice. I worked as an on call health care worker for about 8 months, til they made me permanent and gave me regular hours. On call means you stick by your phone, and your refusals are very limited, in my case ...3 refusals and they don't call you any more. That was back in the days where there weren't cell phones/mobile phones, so you were pretty much stuck in the house ..for the call periods which were slotted as 3 or 4 times a day. :)
Cana
kreed99 said:I worked retail and mostly at night/evening. So ya. I missed chances for rez’s and back then we didnt share account info ever... and i played a monk so i would just have a friend make me some wu’s and get back at it. This was all before i had really good stuff like my wu’s trance stick. Once i got those i never rot’d again
I will admit most of the time i wasnt overly cautious about my FD skills either. So i would explore places i shoukdnt have.... sometimes i would get so lost i couldnt have found my corpse if i tried. It was a different game in the beginning. And i didnt know necro’s for a long time. Like when velious first came out i was around 35 on monk exploring velks.... just saying...
I would advise not ever sharing your account info..its worse today, with hackers and ..and others that will steal your credit card info and your account to add to their botting teams. In the old days..if you remembered to do so..you could /loc and get the coordinates for where your corpse fell..I guess not everyone was aware of that back then. Thing is to alert someone right away if you died in an out of the way place, so that you can get help to recover your things. That's why its good to join a guild, let folks know if you are in trouble. :)
I was originally for the exp debt over level loss, but the argument for lack of impact at max level is too strong. Someone suggested here or on mmorpg.com that there be a point where you achieve a certain amount of debt that the delevel occurs. I like that idea, but I think a simpler solution along the same lines exists:
Regular exp loss, a la Eq, but you don't delevel unless you drop below a certain percentage of the previous level. Basically levels would come with the "buffer" built in. For example, if it was set at 80%, if you leveled you could afford 2, maybe 3 deaths without a rez before you delevelled again. This would:
1) Eliminate what I feel is a bad experience where you level and then you're suddenly forced to be extra careful because the penalty for death is disproportionately large until you've had a chance to earn a buffer:
2) The punishment for bad gameplay would be more evident, because once you did delevel, you'd actually have to go grind out that last 20% of the previous level again before you got your level back.
This would also eliminate the level bouncing that could occur when you just gained a new level and temporarily lost it each time you died while waiting on a rez.
On permanent item loss - I'm not a fan. I think there should always be some mechanism for getting your gear back, even if it's unpalatable. For example, give people a way to summon their corpses in town, but if they do, all exp on the corpse(s) is lost. Perhaps even have them pay an additional exp penalty for the act. Again, this shouldn't be the "preferred" method of gear recovery, but it should exist to cover extreme cases where corpse recovery isn't viable. Having something like this in game would probably drive down cs tickets as well.
kreed99 said:I will admit most of the time i wasnt overly cautious about my FD skills either. So i would explore places i shoukdnt have.... sometimes i would get so lost i couldnt have found my corpse if i tried.
Mandatory video just for that comment about losing your corpse :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDkvy9sKuY
I've read a lot of this thread, so I know that what I'm going to mention was covered repeatedly, but I am going to add a little to it all.
I like level loss as a penalty; however, I do empathize with the woes that come with such a system.
IF level loss is not a thing, then an experience debt system would be great; however, this leads to the problem with a max level character zerging because experience means nothing now.
What if we (yes "we," I believe we are all part of making this game) brought in some older D&D mechanics, wherein some of the max end super spells/skills/crafting requires an xp component to use or perform? This would give a max level character a reason to want to hold on to that precious commodity.
I can see (and would be fond of) a system where end game players have to add a little of themselves into their trade: a crafter could need to literally put a little bit of their essence/soul into their work to make the truly best gear available, a tank might be able to sacrifice some of his essence/soul to make some kind of heroic last gasp effort to save the party, a healer can pour himself into that emergency last minute heal that saves the wipe...etc.
Making experience into a pseudo currency/commodity could be a way of making it more important to hold onto for even the highest level characters.
Just a thought.
The problem of not being able to get your corpse because of real life can hit anyone - and not all of us will be in large guilds or have a lot of in-game friends on when we have to log off suddenly.
Permanent loss of items is too draconian for these misfortunes but they have said they will not be doing that. Loss of experience for dying and loss of more experience if you need to use a corpse retrieval service (NPC) seems like a fair approach with or without deleveling. Experience can always be gotten back.
Update - back into "classic trilogy" EQ on the Project 1999 Veluious PVE server, and at level 10, the death penalty as it was is still the best way to do it.
I died at level 8. Lost like 10-15% of my level, respawned totally gearless, and had to find, drag and loot my corpse (one item at a time, btw), and since no clerics were around, spent another 30 minutes getting that exp back. So last night, I got done with the level 10 skill/gear/inventory maintenance and decided to run back to where I was exp grinding with some guildies (Kaladim back to Kelethin), and just running down the road in Butcherblock, the game is scarier, more tense, etc. I sneak/hide and /con everything (to see color and if they are indifferent because my sneak/hide is working), and it's simply more exciting, even with the blocky graphics, the clunky controls, the totally ancient interface, etc.
The game simply plays more exciting when a) death hurts and b) any random blue /con mob 3 levels below you can put the beatdown on you if the RNG doesn't go your way. That corpse dropping right where you die, with all that gear you gotta go fetch, and you gotta get there either gearless or with whatever corpse fetch gear you setup at your respawn point...it all matters. Just dying right near Kaladim at level 8 set me back close to 40 minutes. That penalty only gets worse and worse the higher the level and the more meaningful the content.
I have played almost every MMO made since 1998, and am back to playing a system with 1999-2001 thnking, and if P:RotF wants to make the better MMO, they should rip the death penalty page diectly from vanilla EQ1's playbook and run with it. It simply doesn't get any better.
I believe theyre gravitating toward exp loss until or unless it means losing a level, at which time you would accrue xp debt and need to recover the debted amount before xp would count towards your current levels xp loss.
Which to me is a really good idea. First, I think once youve gained enough "experience" within a level and gain a new level... you have conquered said level, this experience or wisdom for said level doesnt magically get forgotten.
So, to me gaining a level is accumulating enough experience to crystallize that required amount of experience into wisdom. That wisdom isnt lost nor forgotten as well as any abilities tied to that level of wisdom. Now current level that you are working on will require a certain level of experience to graduate to a new level of wisdom and during that level you will have ups and downs. So losing xp or aquiring debt makes sense.
Losing a level would in essence mean you got dumber and lost the knowedge it took to be current level, its abilities earned forgotten and any gear wearable would be now useless, until regaining that level.. That just doesnt make sense. Also theres the fact some would use purposefully losing a level, as an exploit.
I believe theyre gravitating toward exp loss until or unless it means losing a level, at which time you would accrue xp debt and need to recover the debted amount before xp would count towards your current levels xp loss.
Which to me is a really good idea. First, I think once youve gained enough "experience" within a level and gain a new level... you have conquered said level, this experience or wisdom for said level doesnt magically get forgotten.
So, to me gaining a level is accumulating enough experience to crystallize that required amount of experience into wisdom. That wisdom isnt lost nor forgotten as well as any abilities tied to that level of wisdom. Now current level that you are working on will require a certain level of experience to graduate to a new level of wisdom and during that level you will have ups and downs. So losing xp or aquiring debt makes sense.
Losing a level would in essence mean you got dumber and lost the knowedge it took to be current level, its abilities earned forgotten and any gear wearable would be now useless, until regaining that level.. That just doesnt make sense. Also theres the fact some would use purposefully losing a level, as an exploit.
Venjenz said:Update - back into "classic trilogy" EQ on the Project 1999 Veluious PVE server, and at level 10, the death penalty as it was is still the best way to do it.
I died at level 8. Lost like 10-15% of my level, respawned totally gearless, and had to find, drag and loot my corpse (one item at a time, btw), and since no clerics were around, spent another 30 minutes getting that exp back. So last night, I got done with the level 10 skill/gear/inventory maintenance and decided to run back to where I was exp grinding with some guildies (Kaladim back to Kelethin), and just running down the road in Butcherblock, the game is scarier, more tense, etc. I sneak/hide and /con everything (to see color and if they are indifferent because my sneak/hide is working), and it's simply more exciting, even with the blocky graphics, the clunky controls, the totally ancient interface, etc.
The game simply plays more exciting when a) death hurts and b) any random blue /con mob 3 levels below you can put the beatdown on you if the RNG doesn't go your way. That corpse dropping right where you die, with all that gear you gotta go fetch, and you gotta get there either gearless or with whatever corpse fetch gear you setup at your respawn point...it all matters. Just dying right near Kaladim at level 8 set me back close to 40 minutes. That penalty only gets worse and worse the higher the level and the more meaningful the content.
I have played almost every MMO made since 1998, and am back to playing a system with 1999-2001 thnking, and if P:RotF wants to make the better MMO, they should rip the death penalty page diectly from vanilla EQ1's playbook and run with it. It simply doesn't get any better.
Well said.
I do agree that blanket permanent gear loss might be a bit to far. When I think of epic quest weapons and the like. Maybe if gear had a behind the scenes rating and you kept epic or high rated items, and or quested items, but lost the rest.
But every step away from that origanal formula is a step closer to where mmo's are today that have no excitement and nobody cares about death. Experience alone in ANY amount is not enough to make me give a hoot if I loose my corpse. I know this becouse I have never raced to max (MAX=end game!) Why on earth would I want to rush there if I'm enjoying the game? Take my exp, I don't care.
The removal of de-leveling would be going too far imho. I understand 187's point and agree that at least at max level needs to de-level, but I don't think just max level is enough. The fear of de-leveling every level, and needing to be more careful is a GOOD thing, not a bad. The game NEEDS that challenge.
If there is no gear loss at all then they have already damaged the excitement level, the challenge MORE than enough. No de-level is going too far. They will need to bring in something HUGE to make up for it or its just Wow, or Wildstar or any of the other game's
vigilantee13 said:I believe theyre gravitating toward exp loss until or unless it means losing a level, at which time you would accrue xp debt and need to recover the debted amount before xp would count towards your current levels xp loss.
Which to me is a really good idea. First, I think once youve gained enough "experience" within a level and gain a new level... you have conquered said level, this experience or wisdom for said level doesnt magically get forgotten.
So, to me gaining a level is accumulating enough experience to crystallize that required amount of experience into wisdom. That wisdom isnt lost nor forgotten as well as any abilities tied to that level of wisdom. Now current level that you are working on will require a certain level of experience to graduate to a new level of wisdom and during that level you will have ups and downs. So losing xp or aquiring debt makes sense.
Losing a level would in essence mean you got dumber and lost the knowedge it took to be current level, its abilities earned forgotten and any gear wearable would be now useless, until regaining that level.. That just doesnt make sense. Also theres the fact some would use purposefully losing a level, as an exploit.
Of course you wouldn't crystallize everything, because the current loss scenario is DEATH, and the least that can happen when you die is loosing some memories. That's what exp is about, if you die, you loose X% of everything you've learnt because... HECK you DIED.
True death in games is far more punitive that MMO's standard death, the least that can happen, is that you loose something by dieing.
Zorkon said:If there is no gear loss at all then they have already damaged the excitement level, the challenge MORE than enough. No de-level is going too far. They will need to bring in something HUGE to make up for it or its just Wow, or Wildstar or any of the other game's
Was potential gear loss really a fear for people in EQ? Not even once was that a concern of mine with 7 days to retrieve the corpse. The fear of de-leveling was a very temporary fear upon freshly leveling, but even then it (and exp loss in general) was fairly easily mitigated by getting a rez.
Really the corpse runs were the thing feared/the main punishment.
I just don't see a way to make max level (or any level) characters fear death in any serious way beyond the simple frustration/time loss of a corpse run and finding a rez if you aren't grouped with a healer or capable to perform one yourself. Yeah you could tie some abilities to experience (like the Necro rez in EQ) but I don't know if that adds any real fear to the equation.
The punishment needs to fit the crime. Some people seem to want death to always feel like a stabbing, when in reality it should only feel like a punch in the gut at the worst of times and just a flick on the ear in the best of times.
Zorkon said:I do agree that blanket permanent gear loss might be a bit to far. When I think of epic quest weapons and the like. Maybe if gear had a behind the scenes rating and you kept epic or high rated items, and or quested items, but lost the rest.
Permanent gear loss happens if you don't get that corpse within 7 days. That's not going too far. If you earned your epic, you'll find a way to get that corpse to the zoneline to at least loot the thing. Maybe you pester every high level rogue and necro on the server to do a drag/summon for you, and it takes coughing up a bunch of coin, and it is painful and godawful...and the next time you're in any zone that is distant, tough, filled with bad guys, etc...you'll be properly crap_your_pants scared, and that corpse run will be fueling that excitement.
Permanent item loss needs to be a legit threat. And customer service rewinds need to be on the "got called up to active duty and sent to war zone" level of excuse, else too many nice GM rescues also dilute that fear. You gotta have that fear. It's what makes these zones great.
I'm not sure I can contribute much to the discussion that hasn't already been said, but if I were designing the death penalty, here is how I think I would do it:
1) No penalty from levels 1-5ish (because people will make mistakes as they learn)
2) XP penalty that scales up from level 6-max (I think I would start at 8% penalty at low levels and scale up to ~20% at high levels)
3) If you lose enough XP to drop a level, you accrue "debt" (additional XP that must be earned back) and while that debt is in effect, you get a moderate stat/penalty debuff.
4) Items are left on corpse when you die and must be retrieved.
Mitigations:
- Resurrection spells performed by healers in the field give back experience that was lost.
- Certain casting classes have abilities that allow them to help locate/summon corpses
- Certain melee classes have abilities that allow them to sneak in and drag corpses (with consent) to safer locales.
- Certain classes have ability to manifest temporary equipment to be used during corpse runs.
- If a player cannot recover their corpse, they can use a "graveyard" option to pull the corpse to them.
- Corpses not recovered within despawn time can be spawned into the world on demand at the "graveyard", to prevent permanent item loss.
None of this is really groundbreaking, it's all stuff that's been done in games before (EQ and others).
Graveyard penalty, and proof that I might be slightly evil: The crafter in me wants for non-magical equipped gear (armor, weapons) to have a chance to be destroyed whenever the "graveyard" is used. So you get your corpse back, and all your magic stuff, but your non-magical boots might be mysteriously gone (probably stolen by some goblin somewhere). This would help drive demand for crafted goods.
Edit: I realized I forgot a sentence up at the top, and didn't catch it until now. Sorry :\
Iksar said:Zorkon said:If there is no gear loss at all then they have already damaged the excitement level, the challenge MORE than enough. No de-level is going too far. They will need to bring in something HUGE to make up for it or its just Wow, or Wildstar or any of the other game's
Was potential gear loss really a fear for people in EQ? Not even once was that a concern of mine with 7 days to retrieve the corpse. The fear of de-leveling was a very temporary fear upon freshly leveling, but even then it (and exp loss in general) was fairly easily mitigated by getting a rez.
Really the corpse runs were the thing feared/the main punishment.
I just don't see a way to make max level (or any level) characters fear death in any serious way beyond the simple frustration/time loss of a corpse run and finding a rez if you aren't grouped with a healer or capable to perform one yourself. Yeah you could tie some abilities to experience (like the Necro rez in EQ) but I don't know if that adds any real fear to the equation.
The punishment needs to fit the crime. Some people seem to want death to always feel like a stabbing, when in reality it should only feel like a punch in the gut at the worst of times and just a flick on the ear in the best of times.
Yes, potential gear loss was the ONLY fear in early EQ for me at least. As I have said before I don't care to level up fast, from 1999 @ level 1 I have always held the stance that I could not understand why people cared if they lost a little exp..
It's like life... I'm nearing 60 years now.. TAKE a couple levels from me please! But put a scratch in my SS and we will have problems!
I remember early EQ, level 12, knew some people my level and that was it. No map's, trying to make my way from Felwith to the Dock's to find this Freeport somebody told me about... took a wrong turn into Dagnors Cauldron and ran deep into a camp of Gobbies. 2 or 3 tries later I realized I could not get it alone and went back to Gfay until I finally found some help.. they cam in and slaughtered the gobs and let me loot my corpse... offered to drag them all to zone so I could get rezes, I thanked them and declined. Was just happy to be on my way. They found me quite amusing worried about the junk I was wearing, but it was ALL I had... hell the BAGS would have been a major loss.
The Experience of learning "Dagnors Cauldron=Bad solo @12" was worth well more than that age (level=pseudo experience) loss.
Never took that wrong turn again
Nephele said:- If a player cannot recover their corpse, they can use a "graveyard" option to pull the corpse to them.
- Corpses not recovered within despawn time can be spawned into the world on demand at the "graveyard", to prevent permanent item loss.
Everything else besides this is how EQ1 classic was. Get rid of this graveyard nonsense, or at least add seriously rude graveyard penalty like a 2 hour crippling rezz sickness for cheaping out and using the "get out of corpse run, free" card.
Venjenz said:Nephele said:- If a player cannot recover their corpse, they can use a "graveyard" option to pull the corpse to them.
- Corpses not recovered within despawn time can be spawned into the world on demand at the "graveyard", to prevent permanent item loss.
Everything else besides this is how EQ1 classic was. Get rid of this graveyard nonsense, or at least add seriously rude graveyard penalty like a 2 hour crippling rezz sickness for cheaping out and using the "get out of corpse run, free" card.
I think a "graveyard" type system is needed though. Imagine the person that gets knocked offline because of a massive weather event like a tornado or winter storm in their area. It might be days for them to be able to get back online, depending where they live. It's not common, but sometimes when people can't complete a corpse run, it's really not their fault. Or, maybe less extreme of an example, but the person who dies deep in a dungeon the night before servers go down for a patch, and doesn't have enough time/support to get their corpse back before servers go down.
Curious what you think of this as a potential penalty. I originally included it just to say I wasn't going to go there, but maybe we should go there :)
Graveyard penalty, and proof that I might be slightly evil: The crafter in me wants for non-magical equipped gear (armor, weapons) to have a chance to be destroyed whenever the "graveyard" is used. So you get your corpse back, and all your magic stuff, but your non-magical boots might be mysteriously gone (probably stolen by some goblin somewhere). This would help drive demand for crafted goods.
Nephele said:I think a "graveyard" type system is needed though. Imagine the person that gets knocked offline because of a massive weather event like a tornado or winter storm in their area. It might be days for them to be able to get back online, depending where they live. It's not common, but sometimes when people can't complete a corpse run, it's really not their fault. Or, maybe less extreme of an example, but the person who dies deep in a dungeon the night before servers go down for a patch, and doesn't have enough time/support to get their corpse back before servers go down.
That's what GM tickets are for. If you legit get hit by an act of Innoruuk and cannot log in for a week, then submit a CS request and explain. Chances are good they'll be sympathetic. But that is like 1 in a million chance, and most people simply want the game to be easier, without knowing that making it easier will make it suck.
Go to zone corpse is in, find corpse, loot corpse, or lose gear. Simple, direct, challenging. Puts a premium on proper gameplay. No graveyard, no summoning NPCs. Community game, handle corpse fetches within community.
Venjenz said:Nephele said:- If a player cannot recover their corpse, they can use a "graveyard" option to pull the corpse to them.
- Corpses not recovered within despawn time can be spawned into the world on demand at the "graveyard", to prevent permanent item loss.
Everything else besides this is how EQ1 classic was. Get rid of this graveyard nonsense, or at least add seriously rude graveyard penalty like a 2 hour crippling rezz sickness for cheaping out and using the "get out of corpse run, free" card.
I'd be down for a 2hr rez penalty in place of not being able to play for several hours or even days in some cases. I literally deleted my first character because I couldn't find my corpse in the pitch black of Halas at night without a torch, and nobody was willing (or classes even able) to help me. My second character (Dark Elf with ultra vision) lost all of his gear because I died just a few days before deploying and couldn't get help to retrieve my corpse before I had to ship out. In the first few months of the game a lot of people are not going to have the time or resources/skills to help a stranger perform a corpse run that will take more than an hour or two because they fell off of a mountain after spending 4 hours fighting their way to an area with their groujp that has since disbanded or kicked them from the group because they DC'd and a RL friend logged in. The people calling for the super challenging CRs aren't taking into consideration that the days of spending 8-10 hours at a time in front of a computer are no longer possible for the majority of the EQ1 fans as much as we would like to fantasize about reliving those "glory days" or putting aside real world responsibilities like you could 15-20 years ago... Not to mention that all of the players in Pantheon won't be EQ/Vanguard players and will likely ragequit. Actually, the reality of doing an EQ corpse run without an already established endgame player base would make most people want to quit today. (The key part of that statement being "without an already well established endgame community that has time and tools to help.") You can argue until you're blue in the face about how hardcore you are until you are the person begging for help for a CR in an area that nobody else wants to be a corpse in. Remember, there's going to be no map... no necromancy at launch to locate corpse (maybe another class will have something similar), no teleports for likely a few months after release, no way of knowing if you will get corpse camped by buggy guards because you accidently did a quest or attacked an NPC that ruined your faction, or if your party wipes at a boss at the end of a dungeon that respawns undead every x minutes and you are in the higher end or the player level so other players can't even help you if they wanted to. People like myself will only have 2-6 hours a night to play, and dying at the end of one of those game sessions would make me start to weigh the importance of the time I was investing into a game I wasn't even able to play... and then likely going to bed angry and fuming about it the whole next day at work, knowing that my game session that night would likely consist of being a beggar looking for help for a CR and possibly accomplishing absolutely nothing after several more hours of time I could've spent with my family. Knowing I had to CR when I got back to the barracks 15 years ago was mildly inconveniencing when measuring the countless hours of fun it provided me with (especially since there was nothing else to do except get into trouble at the time). Opposed to today when I value my time much more (like most EQ1 fans today).
People that don't want some kind of corpse retrieval aid aren't considering all of the impact on the communicty or have gaming as a high life priority (which I can totally understand since it was once a high priority for me as well... a long time ago). I still enjoy gaming, but I don't have the time for 4-6 hour corpse runs anymore.
Darch said:Actually, the reality of doing an EQ corpse run without an already established endgame player base would make most people want to quit today. (The key part of that statement being "without an already well established endgame community that has time and tools to help.") You can argue until you're blue in the face about how hardcore you are until you are the person begging for help for a CR in an area that nobody else wants to be a corpse in. Remember, there's going to be no map... no necromancy at launch to locate corpse (maybe another class will have something similar), no teleports for likely a few months after release, no way of knowing if you will get corpse camped by buggy guards because you accidently did a quest or attacked an NPC that ruined your faction, or if your party wipes at a boss at the end of a dungeon that respawns undead every x minutes and you are in the higher end or the player level so other players can't even help you if they wanted to. People like myself will only have 2-6 hours a night to play, and dying at the end of one of those game sessions would make me start to weigh the importance of the time I was investing into a game I wasn't even able to play... and then likely going to bed angry and fuming about it the whole next day at work, knowing that my game session that night would likely consist of being a beggar looking for help for a CR and possibly accomplishing absolutely nothing after several more hours of time I could've spent with my family. Knowing I had to CR when I got back to the barracks 15 years ago was mildly inconveniencing when measuring the countless hours of fun it provided me with (especially since there was nothing else to do except get into trouble at the time). Opposed to today when I value my time much more (like most EQ1 fans today).
People that don't want some kind of corpse retrieval aid aren't considering all of the impact on the communicty or have gaming as a high life priority (which I can totally understand since it was once a high priority for me as well... a long time ago). I still enjoy gaming, but I don't have the time for 4-6 hour corpse runs anymore.
Go back and consider the worst corpse runs in original trilogy EQ1. Chances are good they had one or more of the following characteristics
1) The zone itself was really long and you planned on going very far into it, like doing juggs in Seb, Lord/AM in LGuk, farming various epic pieces that were single groupable, etc.
2) You forgot to bind at the nearest respawn to the zone you were going to go grind in.
3) You were in a pickup group for the night
4) You were not in a guild or have a very small friend list.
Those would be the typical reasons a corpse run would be more difficult than just setting you back the time to regrind the lost exp. But look at each one and ask if preparation, planning, patience and building a friends list would eliminate that particular factor?
Not in a guild or have very small friend list...in a group centric, community driven game? Yeah, probably need to take care of that, since they've only been saying for like 5 years that you are going to need friends to play this game.
Pickup group for the night means the folks that got your body to where it became a corpse all dispersed after the exp grind and vanished into the wind. Again, guild and/or larger friends list eliminates this factor.
Forgetting to bind just means the initial travel back to the zoneline of the zone your corpse is in will take longer, but no big deal. In original trilogy EQ, you can go from the farthest corner of the world to the farthest point from it, on foot/waiting for boats, in under 3 hours. And recall, the timer is 7 days, so day 1, get back to that zone and days 2-7 can be spent trying to fetch that corpse. Is that a tough way t spend the next night, just traveling to where your body is? Yep, and that's why death is scary in games that make you loot your corpse, because you don't want to go through that foolishness every night. Here's a free pro tip - don't forget to rebind as needed.
Now to the number one reason a corpse run would suck - you took your upright, breathing body to a very scary, dangerous, far away location to do something dangerous, yet hopefully rewarding. And you did so knowing how the death penalty works. Why why why would you do that the night before you deploy overseas, or go out of town on business, or start a huge project at work that will limit your playtime for the next month, or when your wife is 8 days past her due date and could give birth at any moment, or a hurricane is inbound, or whatever fantastic hypothetical reason everyone gives for why they simply must have an easy way to circumvent a proper death penalty in an online MMO that nobody is forcing them to play right up to very last minute?
If you know you have little playtime, your high risk, high reward game play needs to happen when you know you have the next couple days to get that corpse if things go south on you. If that seems unfair, well, that's life. Why make the game easier and less thrilling because some players are impatient and cannot properly plan their gaming time around the difficulty the game presents? Here's an idea, if you know for a fact that sometime very soon your gameplay will be severely limited and not afford you the ability to do epic corpse runs...why not tradeskill, do simple outdoor stuff, or...I don't know...not play an online game and instead prepare for whatever cataclysmic event is coming up?
The summoning NPC system negates the harshest part of the death penalty. It removes any risk whatsoever you could lose your gear. That is a mistake of epic proportion where the game's ability to excite/thrill is concerned. If you totally remove that risk, you totally remove that fear, and even the toughest dungeons are now "ho hum, whatever, who cares" affairs of standard dungeon tedium. If you die to end boss deep inside dungeon...no biggie, just summon corpse and log out. What'evs. No more thrill.
Be careful what you ask for.
As a long-term advocate for harsher death penalties than current MMOs have, I still feel that a corpse retrieval system is a necessity for the times when you just CANNOT get your corpse. Contrary to what someone said above it is not simply that some players don't plan as well as others. Other people may not be willing to help especially in a PUG - and don't we want to encourage people to PUG and meet others outside of their circle of friends and guildmates? You may be called for a work emergency. Your wife or husband may need to be picked up somewhere ("sorry dear, I know your car just broke down but I can't come over for an hour I'm picking up a body" may lead to him or her picking up *your* body in real life). A kid could get sick. Endless possible legitimate emergencies - most nights (or days) none will occur but sooner or later especially if you have a family one will.
If death may mean you cannot play - at least with that character - we are less likely to PUG except in the most crowded or safest areas. We are less likely to do any content where if you die you need to spend hours begging for a group to form to recover your body and maybe in a new game no groups can or will go to where you died. There *must* be a back-up system that lets us log on the next day and actually play the game - if we are willing to pay the penalty.
Maybe I am missing the whole point - but if the game provides for possible loss of gear using a corpse retrieval system would have the same risk of loss of gear - so how does it reduce the risk? It both can and should have greater experience penalties and perhaps longer or more severe rez sickness.It should be something that a reasonable person would *not* use unless he or she could not get a corpse the normal way.
If gear cannot be lost, there is no fear. Total removal of the fear makes the game another ho hum, PUG gear grind where the gear is meaningless because you have exactly zero chance to ever lose it. If there is a summoning system for corpses, there is no need for corpse runs.
Are you saying the corpse retrieval system has the same EXACT risk of losing ALL your gear? If so, why even have it? If summoning my body means all my gear is destroyed anyway, that seems like a totally useless mechanic. Methinks the graveyard concept means maybe you lose one piece of gear? Maybe extra exp, something far less harsh than losing all your gear to corpse poof.
As I said in the other "please make death nicer and kinder since we all have RL emergencies every 7.01 days" thread - the only way that mechanic keeps te fear is if it too represents a legit threat to your precious gear. So make the penalty 1 entire level of lost exp that cannot be rezzed back and one random piece of equipped or carried (in case people think they can quickly stash all their gear in bags to avoid this penalty) gear is destroyed with no possible GM rewind, since you chose to hit that summon button. Maybe two pieces of equipped/carried gear. Something that makes you think long and hard about using that system and retains the fear.