I don't think an alternate ruleset server should be considered when it comes to a "core" aspect of the game. I have seen that same thing suggested for pretty much anything and everything where people disagree. Don't like the idea of regional auction houses? Give me a special server without them. Don't want a severe death penalty? Give me a special server without it. Don't like open world competition? Make me a server that caters to my preference. Don't like the idea of having an appearance slot for gear that can be toggled on and off? Special server! This is just my opinion but I feel these special servers should be pretty limited overall. PVE/PVP/RP are the only major distinctions that I can think of that warrant a special ruleset.
kreed99 said: I didnt ever consider the fact that once you hit max level the exp debt would only matter if they increased levels down the road.....
Why is that? Perhaps if you accrued a bunch of debt right before an expansion with level increases, sure. But any other time, you'd likely just pay it back through normal grouping and what not. You don't cease earning experience at 50.
Debt shouldn't be something you can put on layaway for 2 years (or however long it is between expansions that raise the level cap) -- saw this in EQ2. XP loss is a major component of the death penalty all the way up to max level and it should continue being important once you get there. While you are leveling from 25-26 debt matters a lot. If you are level 50 and can't grind to 51 then debt is meaningless until the level cap is increased. Pure XP loss should be a thing at all levels (with the possibility to de-level) or people will just rush to end-game as fast as possible. This is because the XP component of the penalty is completely trivialized at max level in a debt only system.
kreed99 said: Ya like maybe once you incur enough exp debt for a full level worth you start the delevel process?
Well yeah, but that's just becomes straight xp loss from 50 to 49 at that point, doesn't it? Maybe a blend of level loss and xp debt once you've hit the level loss cap, whatever that is.
Anyway, the article posted above really explains the death penalty importance far better than I could! There is such a wide spectrum of opinions on it. It will be interesting to see what their take is. All I know is I've seen corpses in the streams!
According to the 1ad7's mensionned article, I think delevelling is a frustrating yet effective method of warning a player : Maybe you're not good enough for thoses new challenges, secure your play from now.
Even as a crappy rogue ending dead in solo hide&sneak runs for exploration, dyeing in bottom of deep dungeons (I missed the hole from an inch, thank you lord ! ), I didn't excessively de-level and never found it frustrating to the point I would log off or quit. I took it as a "I shouldn't have done this, that was reckless and dumb. I should plan my travel ahead."
I don't think I ever met a player stuck at a determined level for more than days because he kept dieing. Maybe thoses left the game but then, it's probably not their game if they can't learn and improve.
Don't forget we also had 96% exp rezzes in EQ after each wipe, many with their own click stick. So every wipe you're losing 4% exp and on really bad nights you might be looking at 15 wipes? Which would be 60% of a level (that's a bad night). I remember the average being around 20-30% of your level and if you only lost 12% that was considered a really good night. And then you'd get all of that back the next day in a good group run. It's like a beautiful, happy-grouping cycle. =)
I think exp loss and de-leveling is a great mechanic and it gently forces people to really think about what they're doing. It's like a sweet kiss from death saying "you can do it" with an evil smile. It causes you to respect the environment in a way that makes an MMO feel wildly alive.
Avaen said:I think exp loss and de-leveling is a great mechanic and it gently forces people to really think about what they're doing. It's like a sweet kiss from death saying "you can do it" with an evil smile. It causes you to respect the environment in a way that makes an MMO feel wildly alive.
I just will never feel that way. Hopefully I can deal with it and the rest of the game is fun enough that it will be marginally tolerable. If not... guess that's it for me.
Naunet said:Avaen said:I think exp loss and de-leveling is a great mechanic and it gently forces people to really think about what they're doing. It's like a sweet kiss from death saying "you can do it" with an evil smile. It causes you to respect the environment in a way that makes an MMO feel wildly alive.I just will never feel that way. Hopefully I can deal with it and the rest of the game is fun enough that it will be marginally tolerable. If not... guess that's it for me.
A big part of feeling that sense of accomplishment is achieving something with that kind of death penalty in tact. I understand where you are coming from Naunet but it's not really the same thing. I'm not sure if you actually read that article on loss aversion but it's a very powerful article and one that really resonates with a lot of people following this game. I think the dreadful feeling of XP loss is magnified when acquiring that resource (XP) is deemed tedious and boring. I think it's imperative that "the grind" is fun, challenging, and has a lot of replay value. As long as you maintain a positive buffer you'll be able to take calculated risks.
In games with a death penalty I find that even normal encounters become very exciting and thrilling. For example, you could be going into a distant canyon to gather a specific herb, but the mobs there agro and they are capable of killing you...You have to carefully navigate your way through the canyon watching out for agro. Now the act of gathering materials becomes a challenge. There are countless tasks that are humdrum in modern MMOs but just simply adding a death penatly makes everything more rewarding.
Avaen said:
I know, it can be quite rough sometimes. There were nights that I just wanted to unplug my machine to make it stop. It's that sinking feeling that you're losing this precious resource that you worked so hard for, probably wiped the previous night for, and now it's slipping through your fingers and there's nothing you can do because your guild needs you. Yes, there's definitely that feeling. But now fast forward a week later...you have all of that experience back, probably more, and now two of your guildies have the Flaming Sword +2 which now propels your raid's DPS exponentially. You feel a huge weight lift because now you know the next time you face the boss, you'll be able to down it 1 minute faster and this causes the amount of wipes to go down dramatically, therefore reducing eperience loss.
The feeling of accomplishment runs deep and it stays with you. They're memorable and solidified into the world and the community. It might grow on you!
Thank you, and well said
Pilch said:In games with a death penalty I find that even normal encounters become very exciting and thrilling. For example, you could be going into a distant canyon to gather a specific herb, but the mobs there agro and they are capable of killing you...You have to carefully navigate your way through the canyon watching out for agro. Now the act of gathering materials becomes a challenge. There are countless tasks that are humdrum in modern MMOs but just simply adding a death penatly makes everything more rewarding.
Precisely! I remember mining ores in FFXI and it was some of the most fun I have ever had in an MMO. I compare that to my time in EQ2 where the entire harvesting sphere felt like nothing more than a chore. It's a night and day difference. The impact it has on the economy is also pretty awesome. Harvested resources were actually worth something in FFXI as were the crafted goods that required them. The difference is that harvesting in FFXI was really dangerous and required me to be on my toes to make the most of it. I could have paid a 5 year old to harvest for me in EQ2. There were several things in play here. The death penalty is a really big one but it was also the dangerous world. I feel pretty strongly that the vast majority of content should be designed for groups. If you are a solo player that can navigate through dangerous terrain then good for you but there will always be a major risk for doing it. Again I compare that to my experience in EQ2 ... by the time the second expansion came out the vast majority of overland content was designed for solo players. It was pathetic. Everything about that game went downhill as they catered more and more to the solo player and instancing. I want to see mobs that will destroy solo players and resources that are finite.
Avaen said:Don't forget we also had 96% exp rezzes in EQ after each wipe, many with their own click stick. So every wipe you're losing 4% exp and on really bad nights you might be looking at 15 wipes? Which would be 60% of a level (that's a bad night). I remember the average being around 20-30% of your level and if you only lost 12% that was considered a really good night. And then you'd get all of that back the next day in a good group run. It's like a beautiful, happy-grouping cycle. =)
I think exp loss and de-leveling is a great mechanic and it gently forces people to really think about what they're doing. It's like a sweet kiss from death saying "you can do it" with an evil smile. It causes you to respect the environment in a way that makes an MMO feel wildly alive.
I think you rez back 96% of the lost experience. So say you lose 10% a death (it varied based on math of the previous level, but using 10% to keep the math easy) and you rez back 96% of that 10% so you lose .4% of actual level exp each death. So 15 wipes would lose you 6% of the exp for a level which was still a lot but not out of control. It was worse taking 1 death without a rez, which is why clerics got paid big money to come out to whatever backwater you died in and rez you.
Melamber said:I think you rez back 96% of the lost experience. So say you lose 10% a death (it varied based on math of the previous level, but using 10% to keep the math easy) and you rez back 96% of that 10% so you lose .4% of actual level exp each death. So 15 wipes would lose you 6% of the exp for a level which was still a lot but not out of control. It was worse taking 1 death without a rez, which is why clerics got paid big money to come out to whatever backwater you died in and rez you.
This is consistent with the stories I have heard. I think it's really important that players lose around 5% XP minimum regardless of rez quality. XP could never be considered a precious resource if it only takes 5 minutes to earn back what you lose after a death.
Imagine the game with weak death penalty... it would be another fast-food mmo where you reach max level in less than a month after release, then you clear content and get fully geared in two months, and then you people start crying because "no content" when you clear content faster than the developpers can expand the world...
To be honest, I would play the game, with a "natural" slow progression due to high difficulty, rather than an artificial slow progression from cheap mechanisms such as wow's timed-instance lockouts, or worse, archeage's infinite grind from item-break regrades, etc...
With nowadays players going min-max'ing, data mining spoilers, spreading information on strategies, etc... everyone is rushing to finish stuff 10 times faster than developpers can create new content, and that's why the MMO genre has been agonizing in the last years.
Enough of those fast-food games. Let us enjoy this game slowly, let us play this game on the long run.
oneADseven said:Melamber said:I think you rez back 96% of the lost experience. So say you lose 10% a death (it varied based on math of the previous level, but using 10% to keep the math easy) and you rez back 96% of that 10% so you lose .4% of actual level exp each death. So 15 wipes would lose you 6% of the exp for a level which was still a lot but not out of control. It was worse taking 1 death without a rez, which is why clerics got paid big money to come out to whatever backwater you died in and rez you.
This is consistent with the stories I have heard. I think it's really important that players lose around 5% XP minimum regardless of rez quality. XP could never be considered a precious resource if it only takes 5 minutes to earn back what you lose after a death.
Be sure that at high levels in EQ, even 1% exp loss was a chore to get back. At first we only had 5 orange bubbles to measure our XP, then they added a blue line representing the filling of one of thoses bubbles. The process was slow that a handfull of mobs only have a pixel of that blue bar at most.
A night of wipe where you died 15 times over a hard and long (EQ had some encounter having 1 hour duration and more), might only have cost you 6% of your total experience (with a 96% resurrection), but it took a few HOURS to get it back and that's what was great with it. Even withouth AA, you felt compelled to restock experience in preparation for hard and epic fights.
Melamber said:I think you rez back 96% of the lost experience. So say you lose 10% a death (it varied based on math of the previous level, but using 10% to keep the math easy) and you rez back 96% of that 10% so you lose .4% of actual level exp each death. So 15 wipes would lose you 6% of the exp for a level which was still a lot but not out of control. It was worse taking 1 death without a rez, which is why clerics got paid big money to come out to whatever backwater you died in and rez you.
Oh right, math is hard and so long ago! I remember it being not terribly stinging when you had constant 96% rezzes during raids. But Mauvais is right, it was a little chore to get that exp back but it was a great tool to keep players grouping together, even at max level and fully geared.
MauvaisOeil said: Be sure that at high levels in EQ, even 1% exp loss was a chore to get back. A night of wipe where you died 15 times over a hard and long (EQ had some encounter having 1 hour duration and more), might only have cost you 6% of your total experience (with a 96% resurrection), but it took a few HOURS to get it back and that's what was great with it. Even withouth AA, you felt compelled to restock experience in preparation for hard and epic fights.
I don't remember it this way. As a main puller in a raiding guild, I often died much more often than the average person on the raid, yet I never ever remember needing to go farm experience to make up what was lost during any raids. I remember it being a lot more of a pain to go farm the resources/coin for componants used during a raid than it was to regain any experience lost.
Of course I also had a solid group of people I grouped with regularly, so even if I did need to regain a bunch of experience, my normal grouping outside of raid times probably took care of it without me giving it much thought. If I had only been raiding without doing any normal grouping when I played I might have had a different experience (no pun intended :-).
GoofyWarriorGuy said:MauvaisOeil said: Be sure that at high levels in EQ, even 1% exp loss was a chore to get back. A night of wipe where you died 15 times over a hard and long (EQ had some encounter having 1 hour duration and more), might only have cost you 6% of your total experience (with a 96% resurrection), but it took a few HOURS to get it back and that's what was great with it. Even withouth AA, you felt compelled to restock experience in preparation for hard and epic fights.
I don't remember it this way. As a main puller in a raiding guild, I often died much more often than the average person on the raid, yet I never ever remember needing to go farm experience to make up what was lost during any raids. I remember it being a lot more of a pain to go farm the resources/coin for componants used during a raid than it was to regain any experience lost.
Of course I also had a solid group of people I grouped with regularly, so even if I did need to regain a bunch of experience, my normal grouping outside of raid times probably took care of it without me giving it much thought. If I had only been raiding without doing any normal grouping when I played I might have had a different experience (no pun intended :-).
That probably depended of many factors : zone used for Exp recovery, gear of your teamate to hasten the debt, gametime avaliability to recover. I personally remember having to ask for a 100% rez from a teamate (AA cleric) because I would have lost my level otherwise during a raid session :D.
Maybe it was less of a pain when you had a big and full functionnal group with a high tiered gear to farm good exp bonuses zones (like sebilis or such), to me as a rogue it was usually really long.
However I don't remember dying so much as a monk main puller, my FD failed rarely but I never pulled zones like PoH / PoF where summon and pathing can generate trouble.
I'm still 100% for an exp loss, as it makes experience mechanic something you don't stop at max level, because you need to stock some for hardest moments of your game time : Wiping.
When I read here about 15 deaths on a single night or suicidal engagements with the same raid boss countless times until you finally beat him, and sensing that those were just another day playing, I begin to understand how a severe death penalty could make a game less appealing.
I doubt that I died 5 times a month on average in VG while raising my Disciple to level 45. Not because the death penalty was terrible -- it wasnt't, with graveyards and all -- but because surviving in a dangerous virtual world was the what made my clock tick. If somebody accidentally body-pulled a lot of adds causing a wipe, I got very annoyed, and if they then typed "LOL", I knew I was in the wrong group and left as soon as I could. So I don't only want a harsh penalty just to be punished for my mistakes, I also want it because it keeps everybody on their toes, carefully calculating risk versus reward before accepting a challenge.
I understand how this can be different if you're max level and all there is to do is raiding next-to-impossibke bosses, but that's a completely different gaming experience that I'm not particularly interested in.
>I doubt that I died 5 times a month on average in VG while raising my Disciple to level 45. Not because the death penalty was terrible -- it wasnt't, with graveyards and all -- but because surviving in a dangerous virtual world was the what made my clock tick. If somebody accidentally body-pulled a lot of adds causing a wipe, I got very annoyed, and if they then typed "LOL", I knew I was in the wrong group and left as soon as I could. So I don't only want a harsh penalty just to be punished for my mistakes, I also want it because it keeps everybody on their toes, carefully calculating risk versus reward before accepting a challenge.<
Exactly how I feel and try to play.
I even play "hardcore" many times in MMOs - if a character dies other than due to crash or major bug it gets deleted. This makes routine fights a bit ...less routine. And it makes hitting level-cap more memorable. Assuming I don't "cheat" and just grind trivially easy things endlessly - which I do not do that would defeat the purpose. I do the usual quests at the usual levels but with a lot more care.
The only relevance of the popularity of "hardcore" or "permadeath" play to a non-trivial number of people is that it demonstrates that the possibility of severe penalties such as xp loss or item loss for dying can make normal play more interesting and almost any accomplishment more meaningful.
Should VR decide to water it down too much it will be time to agitate for a death penalty ruleset server.