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50 First Deaths - On Designing MMO Respawning
Thanks to the New York Times for its article (free reg. req.) discussing the nature of death and regeneration in massively multiplayer gaming. The author points out: "Designing death is not a simple matter", explaining: "If the 'death penalty' in the game is too severe... you may stop playing the game and, even worse, stop paying the monthly subscription fee for it. But if the penalty is too light... what's to stop you from engaging in reckless behavior... and then growing bored and dropping out anyway?" It also reveals, courtesy Turbine Entertainment's CEO, that "The online role-playing game Middle-Earth Online, expected later this year, will exclude death entirely" - instead, characters "will collapse into unconsciousness and wake up in a safe place."
permanent death may sound like a great idea, until the griefers start coming after the newbies. Imagine you're paying $15 a month for the following: You've played for a couple hours, gotten your first new Shiny Short Sword of Light +1 and Leather Armor of the Cow from some zombies you just killed. Maybe you've even leveled up once or twice. You're on your way back to town and along comes Mr. Eight Level AssClown who kills you (or better yet, is dragging a 5th level monster along who you have no chance of defeating). Bam, you're dead. start again. You've literally spent 2 hours with nothing to show for your character.
Permanent death is nice in games like Diablo, where once you've finished it normally, you can take on the challenge of being hardcore like that. But permanent death on a server filled with not only lag, but also griefers is not a way to entice people to pony up X dollars every month.
Now imagine you've spent a couple months on your character, collecting quite a range of unique powerful weapons and then you die. That's like a Ph.D. being sent back to kindergarten and forced to take school all over again, before anyone will hire him. furstrating to say the least.
Would you play these games if they had Perma - Death? .. my guess is not.
.. they'd have to make the games so easy .. that it would suck ass. The whole point of being able to die and come back is so that you can learn from the specific encounter you died at, and figure otu how to do it better.
So for people who do in fact like leveling up characters in pokemon/tomigatchi sorta pet ways and take pride in the accomplishments... we kinda like the fact that bad luck won't ruin everything we've worked countless hours on.
There is way too much in these games to say death is permanent. If it was permanent
There is a certain amount of pride in not dieing a lot. I know in DAOC they have a running talley of PvP deaths.. So people see that. It really is all about pride in ownership/imaginary accomplishments.
Who makes you Sig?
> permanent death may sound like a great idea, until the griefers start coming after the newbies.
If that's the only barrier, why not implement a system to discourage griefers from coming after newbies? Seriously, why don't we have bullies _actually killing people_ in real life? Because they'd be carted off to Kiddy Prison.
One of the reasons people don't break laws is because of the punishments. If you don't want your players engaging in anti-social behavior, prevent those players from being a part of society. Have actual character jails, where offenders can be "helled" (to borrow a MUD term) for a period of time proportional to the severity of their crime.
Couple that with a character death system that "respawns" permanently dead characters as offspring (children, clones, whatever) that inherit the possessions of their parent-figure, and you've got a way to pass on the material goods from character instance to character instance.
You'd still lose all of the dead character's experience, but in a non-"level-oriented" system, you can make that a hell of a lot less painful (heck, you could even have the "children" start with a certain percentage of inherited skill).
Part of the populace's reluctance to engage in PvP is that, generally speaking, these games have immature PvP systems. I think the majority of the problem, however, is the totally anti-PvP crowd's desire to harp on any potential negative experience to their gameplay.
-lw
Mods: Disagreeing with me != my post Offtopic / Flamebait.
World without hate or war, invaded. Tragic?
Would you play these games if they had Perma - Death? .. my guess is not.
.. they'd have to make the games so easy .. that it would suck ass
Depends on how it was done, I suppose. If death was permanent and common then it probably wouldn't be much fun. But if death was a very unusual outcome, then I'd probably play because I would expect the developer had found something more interesting for players to do than mash on the keyboard and kill hordes of imaginary Tolkien knock-offs.
If it was permanent
OK, but how is that any different than making it easy by eliminating death altogether? As someone pointed out earlier, that means you can take all kinds of foolish risks without fear of losing too much. That meets at least one definition of easy. I don't think these games are hard, just time consuming, and that's where permadeath becomes an irritant for people. I'd be frustrated too if I spent half my waking hours pumping up a character only to lose him/her after six months. However, I don't have that much time to commit and I'd like to see a few more games that eschew the EverQuest model and focus on providing an interesting story.
I know I am in the minority in this opinion, but that's life.
Look ma, no tpyos^H^H^H^H^H^H . . . oh crap.
welcome to your opinion.. I was just pointing out why perma-death is kinda foolish idea for the target audience these games are trying to appeal to.
.. is you loose in game gold when you die. It gets expensive if you die too much .. many times taking away the money you made from fighting if you made any at all. Thats a pretty good penalty for not dieing.
.. the allure of some of these games for large Epic encounters is working as a team to do something in a very unique way, sort of a puzzle to figure out how to do it right. You're definatley not going to figure it out the first time.. and you'll most likely die... but you keep going back to figure it out right.
.. its penalty enough to have to fight back through a dungeon again, and pay the gold back for dieing, just to get back to the encounter that you died at. its not like you respawn right next to your corpse (unless of course you have a ressurecting class with you.. but well what if they die too and all that.. part of the game anyways).
I kinda don't like the foolish risk idea. My example of DAOC
However
Not sayin the games are without faults, but for some things
Totally agree with your want for a game with an interesting story though. But hey i've thought long and hard on how to really do a thoughtful story while balancing a very large real life community of people.. the concept is quite overwhelming.
Who makes you Sig?
The issue there is the ultimate goal is not to provide a safe, fun gaming environment, but rather to make money for the parent company. No one (or very very few people) is going to pay $15 a month to sit in jail (unless someone comes out with a MMO version of OZ (hmmm...that's not such a bad idea...)) so companies try to balance being strict enough so the griefers don't run off all the newbies, but no so strict as to drive off all the griefers.
So a legal system cannot following the real world courts and jails too closely.
Couple that with a character death system that "respawns" permanently dead characters as offspring (children, clones, whatever) that inherit the possessions of their parent-figure, and you've got a way to pass on the material goods from character instance to character instance.
That is a great idea.
> So a legal system cannot following the real world courts and jails too closely.
Well, it depends on what we're looking for. Part of what the generic "griefer" looks for is suspense. With actual punishment, it increases the suspsense. It's true that you probably can't jail griefers "for life", but what's the odds that the society in a MMOG would _want_ to jail him/her/it for that long? It's much more likely they'd just execute the criminal (and, heck, depending on the type of society, there might be a death penalty for less serious crimes).
We could even treat jailed characters as "dead" (albeit temporarily), and allow the player to create an "offspring" character to play (without the asset transition). That's a little more harsh than the victim gets, but it's pretty fair retribution.
I imagine such a system could be extensively tinkered with until the right balance of risk, reward, and pending legal action is reached (it could even vary area to area).
-lw
Mods: Disagreeing with me != my post Offtopic / Flamebait.
World without hate or war, invaded. Tragic?
I think the biggest problems with MMORPGs have always been their size. They are games trying to appeal on a massive scale, 1000+ people on a server at any time, 10-20 servers, with not enough people to support all the griefing, not a way to deal with newbies on a day to day basis, no way to advance anything interesting. Permadeath seems the least of the problems.
On the MUD I played, we had a pretty simple rule. Sure, it doesn't correspond with reality, but it was interesting nonetheless. We had alignments and reputation. If you killed too many humans, you can't go into the human city. If your alignment was evil, you couldn't go into the bastion of light city. If you were chaotic evil, you could kill anyone anywhere, but you could only take 10 deaths before you perma died. Anyone could go into special 'player killer areas,' where you could kill or be killed by anyone. This created a dark vs light sort of story, but people would incorporate their religion and alignments into play and actually roleplay. CE characters were few and far between, but they existed and were interesting to see people play. This is something I rarely saw on most MUDs, the integration of roleplay which i found to be the most interesting part.
Neverwinter nights is a starting point, but when are we going to see more games that allow creative people to build the games and police them themselves? When are the 'Gods' (Implementors) of the game going to play an active role, coming down and saying, 'You're exploiting a bug, stop' or 'welcome to my world. I am Lothar of the Hill People.'
Making money is very simple. You sell clients and servers. Servers are more expensive. You sell server space on one of your large mainframes. A server will support, say, 200 people tops before you'd need an upgrade. Mostly you don't care though, you get people to go to your server in groups of 30-50. These people interact with each other much more and the community is more interesting. The people who have the servers and the space pay a monthly fee, which they can then change and charge back to others if they wish. They make their own rules regarding the selling of items, etc.
Maybe it's difficult to program for one, but you'd find that a lot of open source and other programmers would latch on to this model and the worlds would get more interesting. If you own a client, you can go to Hell World one day and Happy Fun Rabbit Land the next. Maybe you'd charge them a monthly fee to allow access to all worlds, maybe not. Probably you'd make enough money off of selling server space and upgrades/server packs.
But instead, we have all these same retread MMORPGs which change like two things in their environment to distinguish themselves from the other dumb fantasy MMORPG. Which is too bad, really. I don't want to play an MMORPG because I rarely feel like I'm part of a tightly-knit community. I don't feel I can roleplay because everyone else is 'lol' and talking about their dog jumping on their keyboard. So I end up just bored.
Any system designed to punish player killing will be beaten. We can abstract this to "almost any rule you establish to prohibit a player from doing something, will be prodded and bent as far as the player's can."
Perhaps we institute a law saying: you kill another player you go to jail. There's always going to be a portion of the population that says to hell with laws (and they will go to jail), and then there's another more subversive population who is going to figure "well, I won't kill the newbie, but i'll backstab him, dropping him to 1 hp, while he's fighting a monster, and let the monster make the killing blow." or what would occasionally happen in diablo with people spamming abilities and completely lagging everyone else in the game, so they are helpless against the monsters who don't feel the lag.
Yes, griefing happens now is almost any game, but a permanent death is just that: permanent. I want to play, not have to re-play. My character dies, and gets ressurected with some penalty (xp, gold, item, whatever), I'll accept that. My character dies and gets ressurected as a lvl 1 with nothing, I'll quit. Hardcore should be an option not a requirement; particularly given that MMORPGS are trying to appeal to as broad a base as possible. Sure you can create subsets (hardcore, pvp, etc.), but the main game should accomodate everyone.
We're talking about a game, and because it is a voluntary act of participation to play, we don't need to be "fair" in a broad legal sense. We create a set of rules and post them, saying something like, "If you kill players, or if a player severely damaged by you dies within X number of seconds of your attack, you will be put on a wanted list for an in-game police force, who have the ability to hell you for Y minutes, doubled each offense. Resisting arrest will be sufficient grounds for this force to attempt to kill you."
We,as the gaming community in this game, can then say that that if you're in jail often enough to dislike the game and therefore quit, you're exactly the sort we don't -want- in our game. The players who want to be "bad" and accept the consequences, trying to run from the law, are welcome to do so. The players who want to whine and act without being held accountable will find no motivation to stay. Our community might end up filtering out the players least likely to enjoy being in it -- and that, I think, would be a good thing for both parties.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Regarding griefers, I never experienced that problem on the permadeath mud. Players that caused problems didn't last very long and often moved on to other muds. Additionally, since there weren't levels (Armageddon is a skill based MUD), griefers couldn't recognize and target lesser skilled players without a bit of work.
I want a MMORPG with exciting gameplay - something a permadeath system would definitely provide. Simply being 'high level' doesn't make the gameplay any more exciting - on most MMORPGs level is simply a measure of time.
I don't think this issue will ever be fully resolved. Many mmorpgers can be split into two categories: puzzle-solvers and competitors. Obviously, some have aspects of both and others are more interested in other areas, but the two categories are reasonable as a rule.
Now, your problem is that the puzzle-solvers can't tolerate being forced to redo something they've already solved. They want to hold-onto their accomplishments.
The competitors, otoh, aren't worried about that and can deal with resets, lost items, etc. It's all part of the game.
-Jeff
P.S. One last thought: can you imagine baseball where the score of your games with a team added up all season? So Chicago beats Cleveland 5-4 and wins. Next game Cleveland has to overcome a one-run deficit to win. It doesn't make sense, and that's how some players (competitors) view these games.
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
My point is there are competing interests. Or rather parties who often are working together, but occasionally have a divergence in purpose.
There's the goal of sustaining an enjoyable gaming environment--having a fun game. There's the goal of 'realism,' or keeping events logical and consistent to promote roll-playing. And in the case of commercial MMO games, there's the goal to keep enough people paying a monthly subscription to keep the game going.
In regard to death, generally we want some sort of penalty. It adds to the excitement--you are putting something on the line when you decide to charge the level 47 schmoo or whatever. It adds the strategy of the game--you take some consideration before taking a risky action. And it adds to the reward for good play--you rescue the princess without dying, and so are better off than me, who died 9 times completing that quest.
However, the penalty in most cases should not be too harsh. A realistic death is generally considered to be too harsh. In most worlds used in roll playing, someone seriously injured out in the wildness not only isn't coming back, but the corpse will never be found.
Diablo (without getting into the argument whether Diablo is MMO or RPG) has a good system for handling character deaths. For most players, the player wakes up or is cloned or resurrected in town naked. If you want any of your stuff, you either have to go get it (and potentially face whatever killed you) or have a friend retrieve it for you. In a parallel world for more advanced players, death is final. Your character doesn't come back and your stuff is gone.
In regards to griefing and player-killing, there are similar competing interests. New players generally don't want to walk into anarchy, but rules that are too strict or penalties that are too harsh tend to cause resentment even in players who don't break the rules.
I support player-killing. Not that I do it, but keeping that option open promotes realism and rightly adds an element of danger. Whether it's old Camelot or Middle Earth, our heroes aren't just going to take a nap in the middle of the forest without consideration of keeping someone on watch, nor will they automatically trust and party with anyone who happens by.
Some MUDs had a system where usually death meant dropping into town nekkid and doing the corpse retrieval dash, while characters flagged as player-killers suffered permanent death. Add in loop-hole where you don't get a PK flag for killing a player-killer, and soon little bands of player-killer-killers gather and the system, to a certain extent, polices itself.
You need to keep an eye on your fellow adventurers, but there is enough incentive for player-killing to not be common or widespread, and players might complain a little less feeling they have some power in enforcing law and order.
But hay, this stuff is never going to be close to realistic. Sure, plenty of people want to pretend to be Frodo or Aragorn. How many people want to be foot soldier #4756 who gets killed in the first wave of the first battle or tower guard #87 who stands next to a gate for 14 years before getting the plague?
If the 'death penalty' in the game is too severe... you may stop playing the game and, even worse, stop paying the monthly subscription fee for it.
Well, I certainly hope you stop paying the fee for it when you stop playing it.
Rob