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."

Comments

Hmmm...

[Bluesman]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[(trb001)]

This is exactly why MUDs had newbie, or level restricted, areas. One area might restrict PvP for level 5 or above characters. Other areas may not allow anyone in who hasn't reached level 10 yet. Others may not allow level 20 and above characters in because they'll walk in, cast "Blazing Death Cloud of Might" and kill everything, including players, without thinking twice.

Frankly, there *should* be a penalty to being somewhere you shouldn't, whether you're too high or too low level. The trick is how to communicate that to players without affecting the roleplaying aspect.

--trb

Re:Hmmm...

[wgnorm]

Although Puzzle Pirates doesn't include player death of any kind, there is a clever system for discouraging unbalanced attacking of inexperienced ships. Each ship you encounter is highlighted by a color representing its ability level relative to your own (determined by stats). Red is far more advanced, green is equal in skill, and blue is much less experienced, with a spectrum of colors in between to help you decide whether to attack. Attacking reds can be a fun challenge, but most battles take place between green ships who are fairly equal in experience and skill.

In order to minimize griefing, attacking a blue ship will run a random chance of instead encountering the BLACK SHIP OF DEATH, a unbeatable ghost ship manned by undead skeleton pirates. This ship will mercilessly slaughter your crew and take all the goods in the hold ("slaughter" is a relative term, they're just eliminated from the puzzle duel).

It's a very effective and fun technique for solving this problem and new or relatively inexperienced players are rarely preyed upon. Some crews of course go out and attack blue ships in hopes of facing the famed Black Ship, but they usually get their asses handed to them, and disengage if they actually do end up attacking a blue ship unintentionally. I believe no one has defeated the latest incarnation of the Black Ship, though many have tried...

collapsing and waking up..

[gl4ss]

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.

Um . . . Death?

[smothra]

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"?

Re:Um . . . Death?

[wgnorm]

I've already hyped the great features in Puzzle Pirates elsewhere here, but I'll do so again, because it has clever solutions to so many of these issues.

In Puzzle Pirates, there is no death to speak of, but the closest you can come is having your ship sunk. This is a fairly rare occurence, since it requires that your flag be declared "at war" with the other ship's flag - a consensual act voted on by the leaders of both parties. Most of the time battles result in simply boarding the losing ship and pillaging their goods and money.

Although losing an expensive ship is a pretty big negative, the other penalty of having a ship sunk from under you is actually one that is desired by players. When your ship is sunk, the whole crew washes up on the shore of the island they set out from. Although the characters experience no actual injury or harm, on very rare occasions some characters will have a resulting eyepatch, pegleg or a hook from injuries experienced in the sinking.

This is the only way to acquire these desirable marks of distinction, and this makes getting sunk - and warfare in general - a double-edged sword, and something that players both desire and fear at the same time. As yet I don't believe there is anyone in the game world who has any of these physical attributes. This is probably because there have so far been very few declared wars. A pending update will introduce colonization of islands, which will require warfare, so there should soon be a number of pirates walking the docks with peglegs and hooks...

UO has a pretty good 'death penalty'

[MacBrave]

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.

Re:UO has a pretty good 'death penalty'

[whodunnit]

Umm,

You almost got it right. If you chose to come back to life instantly where you had just died, (in order to hopefully retreave your items) then you lost a fairly large chunk of your skills.

But, if you chose to stay a ghost and go into town to be resurected by a cleric, or by a friend then you incurred no penalty what so ever other than the loss of your items, which if you do things quickly enough you could still manage to get back to and recover.

btw, I played UO non stop for 4 years so yes I know what I'm talking about.

whodunnit

SWG and evolving death

[kherr]

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.

Death as part of the game

[Anonymous Coward]

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 like this idea but....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A fond memory....

[dmorin]

Off topic if you like, but it did remind me of something...

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."