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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."
I don't like the idea of not dying. I think it would be a lot more interesting for all involved if death were permanent in these games.
In that case, the new guy wouldn't be at such a disadvantage to everyone who's been playing for years. The advantage to playing for a long time would be to build skill at the game, instead of acquiring items.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Am I the only one who is having hard time seeing what's the difference between this and just losing your head and spawning up at a safer place?
It's just a matter of few words on the status line(you die/you collapse), seriously, whats the difference? hyping up you to get into it?
playing a troll would really suck though, especially after getting stoned...
though maybe those wussies should just play more nethack instead. that would teach them that a mere @ sign gets much more meaningful if you can't get it back when you die.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The fact that everyone is essentially immortal has always bugged me about online games too. Yes it would be a bummer to lose all of your hard earned skills and baubles, but the absence of perma-death sure ruins the already tired stories these games have. If everyone in Dereth/Velious/Rubi-Ka/etceteraland can come back from the dead, the concern about being overrun by the bad guys seems, well, less than concerning.
And by the way, Middle Earth Online developers:
What is the difference (in MMOG terms) between "death" and "collaps(ing) into unconsciousness and wak(ing) up in a safe place"?
Look ma, no tpyos^H^H^H^H^H^H . . . oh crap.
Sorry for the pun. When I played Ultima Online back in 97-00 when you died some of your stats and skills you worked hard to improved were reduced. Get killed too often in a short period of times and you pretty much went back to a 'newbie' in terms of skills and stats.
Of more concern was that fact that the items you carried did not 'respawn' with you. They were frequently looted and you had to buy/acquire new equipment.
This was several years ago however, so the rules may have changed.
In Star Wars Galaxies when you die, you get cloned back into a cloning center somewhere in a city. If you store your clone data you can choose which city to clone to. If you do not store your clone data you end up in the nearest cloning center but you wake up with massive wounds, which you heal by sitting in a medical center and hanging out in a cantina (must do both). That can easily be a 15-30 minute penalty.
When SWG originally launched, you had to do the classic "naked run" out to your body to retrieve your items. Or you could give consent to someone to get them for you. There were bugs with bodies disappearing, so SWG was changed to eliminate the need to run out. When you were cloned, you had all your items.
The latest incarnation of SWG has you keeping your items when you clone, but they decay. Die enough and your items become useless. You can avoid the decay by buying insurance on your items beforehand.
During the period of no penalty to death, player-player combat was rampant. It really changed the experience. Kind of fun to do some dueling, but the cities became all dueling, all the time. The day item decay was introduced dueling virtually disappeared. The gaming experience is much more in line with the Star Wars experience now.
Designers need to get out of their heads that death in a MMORPG or MUD is merely an inconvenience. Like anything else in the game world, it should have a function. In ME online, that function is merely to take the 'dead' character away from the action for a while.
In EQ, death is a pain in the butt not only because it takes you out of the action and sucks your XP, it creates a whole new aspect to the game-- the corpse retrieval. In hardcore MUDs that have this (with NO rezzes), this creates panic as ALL the loot you have could be down in lvl 50 of the mines or wherever. Yeah it can suck but its a great way to have drama.
Same with perma-death. I like the idea of 10 lives, and once you lose the last one you have to 're-roll' to a less powerful char of say 1/2 your xp. The game changes from death 1 to 10 as you go from relatively brave to a coward.
I could also say the same about pvp looting. Nothing like getting ambushed and looted in a dungeon and then grabbing your buds and hunting down the poor SOB mercilessly as they try to exit the place.
Most new games that you pay $15 bucks a month for feel that such a penalty outweighs the 'investment' us suckers make. But I do think that the games are much, much less interesting as a result.
I think MMORPG's should adopt the standard MUD design where you die with minimal stat impact (maybe some XP loss) but come back naked. Having to run back into a nasty area to retreive stuff from your corpse was the single biggest reason why everyone played carefully and tried not to die. Contrast this with the PS2 Everquest game. No one cares the least little bit about dying. The XP debt is too small to be significant and after you can coach everywhere the walking time back to the area isn't significant either. You could solve the PvP situation using the standard MUD method as well. You have to be in a guild that is marked as PvP before you can kill other players or be killed by them. This way the people who want PvP can have it and the other people who want to play in peace can do so. Why don't MMORPG's do this?
The consensus (of the higher modded posts so far) seems that death penalties in games should be considerably higher. Maybe some games will exist for these 'hardcore' people.
I am not one of them. I want to have fun in a game. I don't want it to be more then an inconvenience.
In Dark Age of Camelot, it was best IMHO. You died in PvE, you lost some experience (but could never de-level), and had to pay to have some constitution points restored. This cost went up as you went up in level. Also, if you went back to your death site you could 'pray' at your grave to get back half of your lost experience.
I don't want to lose items I worked hard for. I don't want to de-level. I don't want to go on a run for my corpse. I CERTAINLY do not want to die and have the servers to an rm on my character.
These games should be about fun, plain and simple. An inconvenience is needed, perhaps, but nothing more. There is a very small percentage of gamers that want perma death. For those that do, spend some time playing on a full on PvP server like Darktide in AC, or Mordred in DAoC. Most of those then would change their minds.
Instead of waking up in a Safe Place why not have you wake up inprisoned by things you were fighting. Then you have to fight your way out of there.
This could even force people to group in order to get out of the prison.
Equipment you ask? Make it so you have to find some weapons to get out of the prison but once you exit it you get all your old stuff back.
Of course MMORPG's are going to suck until someone comes up with a true dynamic world, creatures, weather, cities, all of it. No more "lets go to orc camp 5 to hunt" now you have to find the orc camp. Wouldn't it be nice to stay away from one area for a long time and then come back and the city that was there is no longer there, just some ruins.
Actually it's more like cleavland winning 50 games in a row, then loses one game, which resets their season record to 0-0-0 again.
Eons ago when I had a compuserve account and the world was text over a 300baud modem I would dial in to play a networked hack-like game that I wanna say was called Island of Kesmai. There were actually a bunch of similar games over the years and I'm not sure if that is the one I'm thinking of.
Anyway, you start out in this village and wander around looking at the different text characters roam about with you. This dog, represented by a . or something like that, starts bugging me. I'm bored, unable to figure out what the point of the game is, so I shoot the dog. Suddenly the sheriff kills me dead with a single arrow.
But wait...the game doesn't stop. I stare in fascination as a symbol comes over to my body. "Holy cow," I think, "They're going to rob my corpse." Then my symbol starts moving across the screen with this other one.
The two symbols walk across town into what I'm told is a church, and presto, I'm alive again, the other player having paid to get me resurrected.
"Yeah," he says, "Don't shoot the dog. The sheriff hates that."
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Anyone should be able to PvP anytime, anywhere. The penalty for dying should be perma-death + loss of whatever items you have but you come back as your characters son/daughter who has rights to anything they had in the bank/storage.
A person should not be able to look at someones profile and see what level they are. This will actually make PvP a risk. Why? Say you have 2 level 15 griefers. Lets also say that New players spawn with a basic outfit and backpack. Sure they could just go around attacking people with the basic outfit, but if there are no safe zones they wouldn't have a good place to camp. On top of that, what is to stop a level 50 wizard from throwing on some newb garb and ganking the griefers?
If a gaming company wants to take advantage of an untapped market, they should make a PvP with no rules. I'm looking foward to darkfall which will allow a bit more freedom.
MMO's strike me now as games that have little risk for dying, and it takes forever to get any rewards (ie they are timesinks) not to much fun to me, seems more like a chat room than a game. Obviously, there is a market for these games, but there is also a market for people who want freedom, and all the risk that comes with it.
I think a better idea for death in a MMPORPG should be quite different:
Instead of creating, for example, a single character.. you create a Family, with a surname. The point would be to increase your Family's fame. Each character you create has the same surname, and owns a holding. Perhaps you begin with a hovel, and can make your way up to a wizard's tower or a keep. People will say, "Oh, that's owned by the Higraf family," not "Oh, that's owned by rEdK1ller."
Certain things, like wealth would be transferrable to other characters on the account, through the holding. This is all to prevent people from leaving the game entirely when their character dies, because death should be permanent. A character should take no more than a week of -casual- playing to become 'awesome' in the sense of 'average.' There should be a bell-curve in terms of character power and the number of characters, whereas now there is an ever rising curve, with the most players being at a very high level. Because of permanent death, it is possible to have less characters at a high power level than at an average power level.
One option, if a player does not want their character to die, is to 'immortalize' said character: they turn into an npc, and either inhabit the player's home, or wander off. If they're at a high enough power level when they retire, they could put a unique power item into the queue to be used with a quest: "Senchal's Wand of Might," where Senchal was an actual player that people interacted with.
In this way you accomplish the following things:
-A bell curve of player power levels, which leads to a more interesting game environment.
-It means something when someone dies.
-People are less apt to quit when their character dies, because although they have lost the time gaining skills and abilities with said character, they have gained capital and worth for their family.
Another interesting thing would be, when your character dies, you have the option of bringing them to life as part of an Undead horde, waging war on the realm of the living. Your character is enhanced, and cannot gain abilities, and when they die again they die for good, but you can go out with a bang.