Nihimon said:Zorkon said:... it needs something more than just exp loss and an unnecessary corpse run.
It sounds like you're saying any temporary loss is insufficient, but I'm convinced beyond all doubt that anything permanent is too much. For those of us who plan on doing progression content - that is, trying to figure out the hardest content without spoilers - death will be inevitable. Loss of xp with the threat of de-leveling is very significant if you're likely to die half a dozen times in one night. If my character is being repeatedly defeated like that, then I, as a player, should feel defeated, too. I shouldn't be able to endlessly throw myself at the same progression content until we finally figure it out. Spending another night or two trying to win that xp back so I can bear to lose it again the next time we hit the hard stuff is meaningful. But if those half-dozen deaths have a permanent negative effect on my character, I'm not even going to try - heck, I probably wouldn't even bother playing the game.
This ^^^^
Any permanent effect and I would walk too. FYI played EQ from release lost countless exp/levels in the group and that was enough.
Did not Brad say that they wanted to remove the "tedium"? Placing every item after a corpse run, exp loss, possible camp loss seems like salt in the wound and the epitome of tedium.
Nihimon said:Zorkon said:... it needs something more than just exp loss and an unnecessary corpse run.
It sounds like you're saying any temporary loss is insufficient, but I'm convinced beyond all doubt that anything permanent is too much. For those of us who plan on doing progression content - that is, trying to figure out the hardest content without spoilers - death will be inevitable. Loss of xp with the threat of de-leveling is very significant if you're likely to die half a dozen times in one night. If my character is being repeatedly defeated like that, then I, as a player, should feel defeated, too. I shouldn't be able to endlessly throw myself at the same progression content until we finally figure it out. Spending another night or two trying to win that xp back so I can bear to lose it again the next time we hit the hard stuff is meaningful. But if those half-dozen deaths have a permanent negative effect on my character, I'm not even going to try - heck, I probably wouldn't even bother playing the game.
Temporary loss is fine, I'm against gear loss. But if you dont lose gear then that is a HUGE blow to how we respected death in Early EQ.
And this statement of yours "Loss of xp with the threat of de-leveling is very significant" pretty well states my position.. EXCEPT Brad has stated he's leaning twords no threat of level loss
Your comment "Spending another night or two trying to win that xp back" as I append to my original post, as it is (yes I know, subject to change) Brad stated in this last stream he gained 4 levels at PAX... what was PAX 3, 4 days? So a level a day... and I'm sure that was with deaths so it's not a night or two, it's a handful of kills per death, couple hours for a zero fest.
I just belive without gear loss and without deleveling (IF you loose enough experience not on every death of course) it's going to be like it is in EQ now or wow with gear repair... your character has 85000 Plat but "oh no".. you have to pay 3 Plat to repair after 10 deaths. And all the signs of that being the case are there already.
I'm going way off topic these comments are more appropriate in the death penalty thread where I'm pretty sure I've already made them in the past... my point in THIS thread was only that I agree with the OP that they need something more.
Zorkon said:... my point in THIS thread was only that I agree with the OP that they need something more.
Perhaps I misread your earlier posts - wouldn't be the first time. I'll try harder to understand, and ask you about anything I'm not clear on.
Zorkon said:Temporary loss is fine, I'm against gear loss. But if you dont lose gear then that is a HUGE blow to how we respected death in Early EQ.
This is a little confusing. It sounds like you're recommending gear loss, but you also say you're against gear loss. Are you just trying to capture the idea of something other than gear loss that recaptures the same sense of loss that gear loss caused before?
Zorkon said:... (yes I know, subject to change) Brad stated...
I'm really glad you added that parenthetical :)
Re: Brad saying he's leaning away from level loss - I may be totally missing the mark, but I have the sense that Brad is mostly worried about the meta of players drastically changing their playstyle early in a level when they're at the highest risk of de-leveling. I think a system that required a significant amount of xp debt before de-leveling would properly address that meta. I'm thinking of a system where it takes, for example, 50,000 xp to level from 24 to 25. You would only de-level back to 23 after losing all the xp you'd previously gained in 24, and then also "earning" an additional 50,000 xp debt in 24.
Re: Brad gaining 4 levels at PAX - I think this one is especially subject to your parenthetical - and happens to be where you included it, so good job ;) - but I'll also remind you that Brad was talking about something like going from level 20 to level 24. In my experience, higher levels typically took significantly longer to gain than lower levels. Or maybe I just sucked and most EQ players went from 49 to 50 in a single evening...
I'm in a different boat, and I disagree (but I'm not saying you're wrong, or your opinions are bad) with almost all of you.
Tedium is not a choice. You don't want to have to click every peice of gear you drop when you die. Then don't die. Again, I'm not thinking anyone here is understanding the choices you have.
If you die, its your fault. (The old argument of dropped conncetions, or lag aren't valid anymore)
You thought you could beat those two rats but you can't and you died, so it's you fault you died, you should pay the price. You want to push the boundries of exploration and be the progressive person of the server, and you die alot, thats your choice.
Tedious is forced on you. You dieing by your own mistakes is a choice. Being forced to loot all your gear again is not tedious, it's a choice.
This is where the adventure, challenge, heroics and fear come from. I'm choosing to bet my entire bank roll on a pair of 2's, if I lose this hand, it's no ones fault but my own, by the choices I made.
I am all for the one click re-equip, the gear will probably have some level of damage each time, perhaps a severely damaged item would have to go in the backpack till repaired so having no room would cause pain. I am also more in favour of losing a level and use of spells than exp debt, as that did sting me, exp debt never did. I would like to say I have enjoyed watching the streams very much xx
For what it's worth, I was quite happy playing Pathfinder Online where, whenever you died, 25% of everything in your bags was immediately destroyed, and all of your gear (which started with 20 durability points) lost a point of durability, until it would eventually also be destroyed. But a mechanic like that can only really work if everyone's always wearing crafted gear, so I don't think that would work in Pantheon.
Kittik said:I'm in a different boat, and I disagree (but I'm not saying you're wrong, or your opinions are bad) with almost all of you.
Tedium is not a choice. You don't want to have to click every peice of gear you drop when you die. Then don't die. Again, I'm not thinking anyone here is understanding the choices you have.
If you die, its your fault. (The old argument of dropped conncetions, or lag aren't valid anymore)
You thought you could beat those two rats but you can't and you died, so it's you fault you died, you should pay the price. You want to push the boundries of exploration and be the progressive person of the server, and you die alot, thats your choice.
Tedious is forced on you. You dieing by your own mistakes is a choice. Being forced to loot all your gear again is not tedious, it's a choice.
This is where the adventure, challenge, heroics and fear come from. I'm choosing to bet my entire bank roll on a pair of 2's, if I lose this hand, it's no ones fault but my own, by the choices I made.
Okay, so if you die your character... no, your entire account is deleted. You don't want that to happen, then don't die. It's a choice. Pony up another $60 for a new account and start right over along with the other 2 people playing the game.
I have to say when it comes to looting your corpse in Pantheon I have to agree with all the folks that are against 1 click auto loot/auto equip. My reason for this is simply the devs of Pantheon have stated time and time again that the Enviroment in Pantheon is going to try and kill you. If you die in a area where the enviroment is deadly to the players then there should be a serious risk of dieing again while your scrambling to manually requip all of your resist gear. You get rezzed under water hope you can manually loot your water breathing item before you drown.
Nihimon said:Re: Brad saying he's leaning away from level loss - I may be totally missing the mark, but I have the sense that Brad is mostly worried about the meta of players drastically changing their playstyle early in a level when they're at the highest risk of de-leveling.
If you don't delevel once you hit "bottom" of your current level then you can just die as much as you want and there is no real consequence anymore. E.g. you just hit level 30. Now you are "safe" so you can just YOLO and die as much as you want and not lose 30. In other words once you are at the bottom of the experience bar for a level you have a 'free pass' to die.
Delevel would instantly remove that 'free pass' from death penalty.
I suppose EXP debt could also be used so you sink below the zero mark for your level. I prefer actually losing a level though. Losing your level is different from just going into exp debt. Watching your number flip from 30 to 29 is both a visual and psychological moment that hits home a lot more than just "Oh, now I am -500xp".
Chiming in here, I would have to agree with both sides, yes I can see why people would want to ’scramble to loot every piece of item manually’ To create that sense of urgency yet punishment. Although I also agree that this form of punishment, is tedious and unnecessary to manually equip every single item, there must be some compromise to emulate that sense of urgency yet remove the tediousness.
Possible solution: Still have the take all feature (to improve QoL) but also add a timer required to finish.
ex: you die, revive and head back to your corpse, click take all, and wait there till the timer finished before all gear is taken, there’s a roamer coming but moving will cancel and would have to restart all over again.
So in this sense you you get that sense of urgency and awareness required to finish. Maybe moving won’t require you to start over from scratch but instead moving only retrieves only some of the items and to retrieve the left over items would require you to click ’take all’ again?
Possibly in some environments if your not acclimated to that environment, it would make the retrieval of “take all” longer?
Riot said:Chiming in here, I would have to agree with both sides, yes I can see why people would want to ’scramble to loot every piece of item manually’ To create that sense of urgency yet punishment. Although I also agree that this form of punishment, is tedious and unnecessary to manually equip every single item, there must be some compromise to emulate that sense of urgency yet remove the tediousness.
Possible solution: Still have the take all feature (to improve QoL) but also add a timer required to finish.
ex: you die, revive and head back to your corpse, click take all, and wait there till the timer finished before all gear is taken, there’s a roamer coming but moving will cancel and would have to restart all over again.
So in this sense you you get that sense of urgency and awareness required to finish. Maybe moving won’t require you to start over from scratch but instead moving only retrieves only some of the items and to retrieve the left over items would require you to click ’take all’ again?
Possibly in some environments if your not acclimated to that environment, it would make the retrieval of “take all” longer?
This would simply need to be linked to an "equip time" attribute per item. E.g. gloves takes 1 second to equip, but a chestplate would take 10 seconds. Then when you loot all the timer starts by picking random items and equipping them. So you get a message like "Equipping chestplate", once that finishes the chestplate is equipped even if you move and break/cancel it. Then it proceeds through each item randomly until all items are equipped.
This way, if you get interrupted, you will have a random set of items equipped.
Granted, you might prioritize weapons first so that if you do get interrupted at least you have more than your fists to fight with.
This conversation really makes me think about all the MMO's I've played that had various penalties for death.
Back in Ultima Online all your items dropped to the ground when you died and anyone could come along and pick them up. As time went by they made adjustments to this where if you looted another players stuff it would flag you as a stealer and for the next certain amount of time people could safely kill you without losing reputation, thus painting a nice target on your back.
In EQ you lost Exp and all your items would drop with your corpse, but only YOU could pick them up.
Of course as we went into the WoW age of MMOs, they had item durability where it would cost you money to repair your gear as it became damaged due to death.
Lots of games have had various degree's along this spectrum. But I don't think I've seen a system where the WAY you loot a corpse is designed to be part of the penalty for dying. Yes some people may feel that EQ1's way of looting was a PITA (Pain In The Butt :-) when you were doing a corpse recovery, but this was simply because that's how the game handled looting and not because the designers specifically said "We should make it really anoying to loot all your gear as part of the penalty for dying."
And as for the Why was it this way?
Some of you may not remember (or perhaps were not there in the beginning) but from what I remember (and perhaps Brad and crew can correct me if I am remembering this wrong), when EQ was origionally being created the plan was for the pay system to be 'by the hour' and not 'by the month'. This idea was that you would pre-buy so many hours of play, and as soon as you logged in you would start using up your time. If you played a lot in a few days you could run out of time and need to buy more, but if you only played 30 minutes at a time you could maybe go months before using up your time. This was how AOL (America Online) worked in those early days. It was only later in the development of the game that they realized that this system wasn't going to be popular and they changed the plan to be the monthly subscription that eventually happend. But since the game was created with this 'pay per hour' concept in mind, they actually designed Time sinks into the game that would cause people to use more time on pointless things just so they could make more money. Of course the deviousness of this is partly why they changed their mind and didn't ever use the 'pay per hour' concept. They may have been greedy, but they do have souls, and of course realized that it would probably make their player base pretty mad.
I remember there being an interview with some of those origional devs who stated that if they could go back and do it again, they wouldn't have created so many of these Time sinks. This is partly why Brad has said several times that he wants to include some of the modern Quality of life things that are in the more current games. He doesn't want the game to be easy and hand holding. But he also doesn't want people to stop playing the game because they hate the UI or something similar.
With this in mind, (in my opinion) I really think that VR is going to design the way that you loot a corpse to be efficient and convenient, and it will have no connection to any penalty there is for death. Which will likely mean there will be a Loot all button or even an "Auto-Loot all" toggle.
And if they decide later that they want to create an extra Risk to looting your corpse as part of a penalty for death, they can simply add a 'cast time' type effect when you loot your corpse. So when you click on your corpse to loot, you get a little "Looting" cast bar for a few seconds and then when it's complete your items get looted. This would mean ALL players would have the same penalty and it would not be linked to their personal skill at looting their own corpse. They could also adjust this extra looting time whenever they want if they feel the risk is too great, or not great enough. Perhaps 2 seconds is not long enough... oh wait 10 seconds is way to long... 6 seconds will be fine.... 4 months later, hmmm perhaps 4s would be more fair.
Just some of my thoughts. Hopefully it doesn't offend anyone.
Very nice post Goofy.
You got one thing wrong, however.
>They may have been greedy, but they do have souls, and of course realized that it would probably make their player base pretty mad.<
Refusing to do it because it would have been *wrong* might be proof that they had souls. Refusing to do it because players would get mad and leave and they would lose money is just further proof of greed.
Thus, proof that some of our developers have no souls. Hopefully the sole proof. Though referring to "sole" may be proof that I am off on a fishing expedition, barefoot of course since the water might ruin my shoes' soles.
((before someone stares at me the wrong way - no I don't mean that literally, designing a game so that it won't lose money isn't proof of greed it is proof that you aren't a total idiot))
zoltar said:Kittik said:I'm in a different boat, and I disagree (but I'm not saying you're wrong, or your opinions are bad) with almost all of you.
Tedium is not a choice. You don't want to have to click every peice of gear you drop when you die. Then don't die. Again, I'm not thinking anyone here is understanding the choices you have.
If you die, its your fault. (The old argument of dropped conncetions, or lag aren't valid anymore)
You thought you could beat those two rats but you can't and you died, so it's you fault you died, you should pay the price. You want to push the boundries of exploration and be the progressive person of the server, and you die alot, thats your choice.
Tedious is forced on you. You dieing by your own mistakes is a choice. Being forced to loot all your gear again is not tedious, it's a choice.
This is where the adventure, challenge, heroics and fear come from. I'm choosing to bet my entire bank roll on a pair of 2's, if I lose this hand, it's no ones fault but my own, by the choices I made.
Okay, so if you die your character... no, your entire account is deleted. You don't want that to happen, then don't die. It's a choice. Pony up another $60 for a new account and start right over along with the other 2 people playing the game.
I know you're just trying to troll me, but if the game were worth it, I'd do it. I'd be EXTREAMLY careful to not die and there is inherant excitement in that feeling of knowing if I mess up, it's over.
Have you ever played Salem the game? Not Salem the town. (game) (there are two games named salem) Anyway, I've worked extreamly hard to "level" a toon up, spent 100's of hours on him, I messed up and then have him die and lost EVERYTHING. Got none of the stuff back, none of the items that I'd worked soooo hard for. It was rough, but I've made other, been careful and it's one of the things I really enjoy about that game.
I like playing hardcore (permadeath) mode where if you die the character is deleted. It makes any fight significant and challenging. Needless to say it is not something to do other than when solo or in a very carefully selected group of friends - nothing is more dangerous than a PUG.
But I would never select a permadeath option in a game - far too much risk of death from a major bug, an outright crash or a lag spike. I rely on my own willpower to delete after a death.
The relevance here? Pantheon will with near certainty have bugs, crashes and lag at least on rare occasion. ALL MMOs do. We don't want the penalty for dying to one of those be too high. Players will accept a penalty for a mistake or even bad luck with far more equanimity than losing a valuable item due to a crash.
And we don't want constant appeals to GMs to give items back because it was a game error that led to the death - especially when a large percentage of the people petitioning are just trying to get away with something by blaming the game.
Ghroznak said:I suppose EXP debt could also be used so you sink below the zero mark for your level.
My suggestion is to cause the de-level to occur after some amount of xp debt is accrued.
Ghroznak said:Riot said:Possible solution: Still have the take all feature (to improve QoL) but also add a timer required to finish.
This would simply need to be linked to an "equip time" attribute per item.
Both really great ideas.
If I recall back in EQ, before it was softened there was a mechanic that affected you post your getting your gear and corpse. It was akin to a sickness or death sickness. You lost exp, had a corpse run and that was tacked on for good measure. I can tell you it not only made you think twice about running into that group of goblins, but you had to sit back and heal yourself.
I don think the gear piece was affective I do agree it was annoying, but it too had a purpose. It was to slow people down after a death event. The when you have the ability to rush in snag your gear and jump right back into a fight with no repercussions then death was and is meaningless. If you are in a group doing a corpse run it will take the group to get in some cases. Here again the social aspects of the game and if your exp has fallen off it can hurt you skill wise if the mechanic is setup that way.
I don’t thing the OP is to far off base or being unreasonable. It’s a valid question that the Devs need to look into. The terms of annoying and takes to much time should be used carefully because I think they fly in the face of the Pantheon Difference. If you want the fast paced game play, then there are a mountain of other options.
Ox
Kittik said:I'm in a different boat, and I disagree (but I'm not saying you're wrong, or your opinions are bad) with almost all of you.
Tedium is not a choice. You don't want to have to click every peice of gear you drop when you die. Then don't die. Again, I'm not thinking anyone here is understanding the choices you have.
If you die, its your fault. (The old argument of dropped conncetions, or lag aren't valid anymore)
You thought you could beat those two rats but you can't and you died, so it's you fault you died, you should pay the price. You want to push the boundries of exploration and be the progressive person of the server, and you die alot, thats your choice.
Tedious is forced on you. You dieing by your own mistakes is a choice. Being forced to loot all your gear again is not tedious, it's a choice.
This is where the adventure, challenge, heroics and fear come from. I'm choosing to bet my entire bank roll on a pair of 2's, if I lose this hand, it's no ones fault but my own, by the choices I made.
Dropped connections and lag DO still happen, depends on your service provider.. ever tried to log in to this Pantheon site after a livestream? The site slows down to a crawl, people are signing up to have a looky loo. I can't get in ..in those times. Again it also might be the fault of my isp. And if you have a doorknob in your group that wipes the team..its not always your or my fault. Not all people act with wisdom. :P
Cana
Nihimon said: My suggestion is to cause the de-level to occur after some amount of xp debt is accrued.
Unfortunately, this simply delays the CS burden, rather than removing it, if level gated content is going to be a thing.
The scenario is, the only reason de-leveling is considered a bad thing from a Customer Service perspective is players enter an area that is level restricted, they die, then they can't get their corpse and equipment that they have spent dozens or hundreds of hours obtaining. Gear makes the character in these types of games, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to lose everything valuable about their character due to something that is not their fault. (such as a power failure or storm causing an untimely death).
There is no doubt that players need to bear the consequences for their actions, but forcing them to bear serious negative/punitive consequences for something beyond their control is just asking to lose a customer.
So, de-leveling of any kind faces the same CS challenge, with level gated content. Of course, a simple solution is: don't have level gated content. And then you can de-level someone instantly without any problem whatsoever, because they can always go and get their corpse.
Another choice is to never de-level them, and have level-gated content, but have XP debt. Seems fine to me, and seems to be the way the VR devs are leaning, but I'm sure opinions will vary.
Riot said:Chiming in here, I would have to agree with both sides, yes I can see why people would want to ’scramble to loot every piece of item manually’ To create that sense of urgency yet punishment. Although I also agree that this form of punishment, is tedious and unnecessary to manually equip every single item, there must be some compromise to emulate that sense of urgency yet remove the tediousness.
Possible solution: Still have the take all feature (to improve QoL) but also add a timer required to finish.
ex: you die, revive and head back to your corpse, click take all, and wait there till the timer finished before all gear is taken, there’s a roamer coming but moving will cancel and would have to restart all over again.
So in this sense you you get that sense of urgency and awareness required to finish. Maybe moving won’t require you to start over from scratch but instead moving only retrieves only some of the items and to retrieve the left over items would require you to click ’take all’ again?
Possibly in some environments if your not acclimated to that environment, it would make the retrieval of “take all” longer?
Now this is a good idea. And not just the tedious individual loot idea. If you NEEDED an item right away like Velrak's senerio where you need your water breathing charm, or you need your weapon right away you could decide to individually loot that first... OR you could choose the timed random loot all button.
Zorkon said:Riot said:Chiming in here, I would have to agree with both sides, yes I can see why people would want to ’scramble to loot every piece of item manually’ To create that sense of urgency yet punishment. Although I also agree that this form of punishment, is tedious and unnecessary to manually equip every single item, there must be some compromise to emulate that sense of urgency yet remove the tediousness.
Possible solution: Still have the take all feature (to improve QoL) but also add a timer required to finish.
ex: you die, revive and head back to your corpse, click take all, and wait there till the timer finished before all gear is taken, there’s a roamer coming but moving will cancel and would have to restart all over again.
So in this sense you you get that sense of urgency and awareness required to finish. Maybe moving won’t require you to start over from scratch but instead moving only retrieves only some of the items and to retrieve the left over items would require you to click ’take all’ again?
Possibly in some environments if your not acclimated to that environment, it would make the retrieval of “take all” longer?
Now this is a good idea. And not just the tedious individual loot idea. If you NEEDED an item right away like Velrak's senerio where you need your water beating charm, or you need your weapon right away you could decide to individually loot that first... OR you could choose the timed random loot all button.
I agree, this was a pretty good idea.
vjek said:Nihimon said: My suggestion is to cause the de-level to occur after some amount of xp debt is accrued.Unfortunately, this simply delays the CS burden, rather than removing it, if level gated content is going to be a thing.
The scenario is, the only reason de-leveling is considered a bad thing from a Customer Service perspective is players enter an area that is level restricted, they die, then they can't get their corpse and equipment that they have spent dozens or hundreds of hours obtaining. Gear makes the character in these types of games, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to lose everything valuable about their character due to something that is not their fault. (such as a power failure or storm causing an untimely death).
Another option is to not have level limitted zones. If you want a zone and you want to block anyone under a certain level from getting in, then require the zone to have a flag to enter (or key or something) and make the quest to get that flag require a specific level. Therefore you get to the level, you go get the flag, then you don't have to worry about deleveling and being locked out of a zone.
kelenin said:Another option is to not have level limitted zones. If you want a zone and you want to block anyone under a certain level from getting in, then require the zone to have a flag to enter (or key or something) and make the quest to get that flag require a specific level. Therefore you get to the level, you go get the flag, then you don't have to worry about deleveling and being locked out of a zone.
I think this was mentioned before and was vehemently disliked.
vjek said:Nihimon said: My suggestion is to cause the de-level to occur after some amount of xp debt is accrued.The scenario is, the only reason de-leveling is considered a bad thing from a Customer Service perspective is players enter an area that is level restricted, they die, then they can't get their corpse and equipment that they have spent dozens or hundreds of hours obtaining. Gear makes the character in these types of games, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to lose everything valuable about their character due to something that is not their fault. (such as a power failure or storm causing an untimely death).
There is no doubt that players need to bear the consequences for their actions, but forcing them to bear serious negative/punitive consequences for something beyond their control is just asking to lose a customer.
So, de-leveling of any kind faces the same CS challenge, with level gated content. Of course, a simple solution is: don't have level gated content. And then you can de-level someone instantly without any problem whatsoever, because they can always go and get their corpse.
Another choice is to never de-level them, and have level-gated content, but have XP debt. Seems fine to me, and seems to be the way the VR devs are leaning, but I'm sure opinions will vary.
I really like this answer as it pertains to a CS standpoint, but personally I think its the playerrs responsibility to own up to the exp loss on a personal level and adjust their playstyle accordingly. For instance, if you just ding to the level to enter a harder zone it is the players responsibility to ponder the possible death consequence and not enter that dungeon untill they have a one or two death buffer in that level. This caution from having learned in overland areas when younger- and haviong to run 2 or 3 zones back to the corpse in a huge open area- avoiding the occasional roamers. Then having cut teeth in lower level dungeons and familiar with the monster density in such dungeons would be inclined to be cautious and exercise forethought as usually a first time in a dungeon or harder area means a death at some point, especially if none in the group has been there before.