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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.
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.