It's been a big wonder of mine for a while now on why more MMOs don't have permadeath. While it might be player deturing, it is a very natural thing for a character to eventually die and just be dead. Let me make my case. #1) Legendary status. MMOs usually have pre-generated legends; people who have significant historical value because some game designer sat down and said "hey, this character should have historical value". Why can't a player simply become so reveered that he is held as a legend? Because he never permanantly dies. When he dies and respawns with half of his equipment that he magically dropped where he died, there is no finality, and no reason to remember that character. A game could easily have an internal legend system; characters who attain that mystical high-level in life that everyone's hunting him, and his name alone can buy followers. This is a level of involvement that I've felt is missing in every game I've ever played, including Diablo which had permadeath. #2) What to do with high level characters. Most games just simply drag on and on, and once you've hit that magical level 60, you're done. There just gets to a point where there is simply nothing left to do, everything's old hat, and you get bored with the game. At that point you either start a new character, or drop the game. And what happens to your old character? It just sits around, sometimes wasting slots you could be using on that server, sometimes just collecting dust. Permadeath gives a strong, honorable out for a level 60 character. #3) People have families too!! In real life, across multiple cultures, when a person dies, some of their belongings are packed up, and their wealth is redistributed amongst their families. Many times earthly belongings are burned to indicate the passage into an afterlife. Sometimes the body is burned, sometimes the body is buried. These things simply don't happen in MMOs. In my opinion, permadeath actually would lend the game replayability that is lacking in a lot of MMOs. Many people would play and defend their characters with such gusto as to try for legendary status on their servers, and thus, bring honor to their family. Characters would be created under the families to recieve goods from the older, passing family members. Family wealth could be pooled for the creation of towns, cities, armies, nations. The game would actively evolve a history that is created soley by the players of the game, and isn't bound to the imagination of a programmer. One last point: this isn't a very popular idea, especially when it comes to people just getting into a game; new players are often discouraged by dying often, and permadeath would amplify that discouragement at lower levels. But, this should not discourage a developer. In every situation, there is a way to deal with younger, lower level characters. Shelter them with lifeguard characters (newbie adoption [families?] or NPCs), give them items that make them automagically gain back a certain amount of health to help them get away from a situation, advance medical sciences so that a person may be revived within a certain amount of time of death (and give exp to the medic class for doing it ;). These techniques would work equally good for higher level characters as well; simply make it scale against the character's level (a level 20 character needs a level 20+ healer to have a % chance of reviving him). And then of course, there also needs to be injuries that if recieved, will simply kill you without a chance of survival (decapitation, evisceration, disentegration). Hopefully this will spur some developers into not discrediting the permadeath concept into the next generation of gaming.

Perma death is such a no no, if you do it when a player reachs lvl 60 out of a posible 60 levels, and then release an expansion later expanding the level cap you will greatly upset people that lost their lvl 60 *as a result no one will play high level characters.* and the insentive to become lvl 60 would be gone, and thus no reason to level... and destroys the leveling tredmill (which unless you have some kind of genious super idea, is the only thing ultimitly driving your mmo.)

Consider removing the concept of a level, then?

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Perma death is such a no no, if you do it when a player reachs lvl 60 out of a posible 60 levels, and then release an expansion later expanding the level cap you will greatly upset people that lost their lvl 60 *as a result no one will play high level characters.*

Seems like a relatively simple problem to avoid--just rank pre-level-cap-change characters separately from post-level-cap-change characters--and not really much of a problem to begin with, since how many times are you likely to up the level cap?

You can have perma-death in the online version of Diablo II, it is called 'hardcore mode'. But it is true that Diablo II can't really be considered a MMORPG...

Quote:You can have perma-death in the online version of Diablo II, it is called 'hardcore mode'. But it is true that Diablo II can't really be considered a MMORPG...

Quote:"This is a level of involvement that I've felt is missing in every game I've ever played, including Diablo which had permadeath."

I know of the concept in Diablo II. I also know that they really didn't give any incentive to doing this, other than just having a cool high level, permadeath character. There isn't really a leaderboard that anyone pays attention to for them. There isn't a legendary basis for them to exist. They don't get any special meaning or attention for being alive at such a high level. This is what I suggest we change.

Quote:Perma death is such a no no, if you do it when a player reachs lvl 60 out of a posible 60 levels, and then release an expansion later expanding the level cap you will greatly upset people that lost their lvl 60 *as a result no one will play high level characters.* and the insentive to become lvl 60 would be gone, and thus no reason to level... and destroys the leveling tredmill (which unless you have some kind of genious super idea, is the only thing ultimitly driving your mmo.)

Well, as I recall from my high school/early college readings, a character's stories usually get exaggerated over time, and even though someone might be technically stronger now, the old legend has such a cultural following that even though a level 100 character might have even more bells and whistles, the level 60 is more reveered. See, for example Achilles and Hercules.

I also like the idea of removing levels; it would remove the overall restricted feeling that a lot of games have, that you're just reading stats from a table (even if this is what it's doing). It, of course, makes it harder to write strategy guides and manuals for, but it also drives up knowledge of the game (certain skills can only be attained after doing certain quests, etc). Of course, an MMO to use any of these concepts would be vastly different than any other out there, so why not go the extra mile?

Kazgoroth already covered a lot of it, but the reason perma-death tends to be unusable in a MMORPG (unlike a single player RPG where you could die, but load from a previous save) is that death is too common as a possible outcome. Failure = instant death. Players can't experiment or try new things if the punishment for a slipup or unexpected surprise is having to start all over again. Even back in the old days of "hard" games, Super Mario Brothers still gave you 3 lives so that you wouldn't have start from the beginning just for not knowing that pit was there in 7-2.

A good example of how this badly effects gameplay is MapleStory (sidescrolling MMORPG). In MapleStory it takes huge amounts of XP to level up (days of work); At the same time, when you die you lose X% (~10%) of your XP. While this is acceptable up to about level 20 (level 20 is not very high - most players reach it in a week or two, and someone who has played before can reach it in less then 2 days), after that death becomes a huge, unacceptable setback. The result of this "harsh" death penality (not nearly as harsh as permadeath) is that players don't take risks - the game is reduced to monotony because you have to hunt creatures that are really below your true level, since hunting an equal offers too high a risk of death (and thus the setback is far greater then the XP gained). The only time players get to actually explore and try anything new is when they have just leveled up, and thus don't need to worry about the negative effects of dieing.

Meh, I don't know about this. The only problem is that, when you have gamers playing with a character for hours and hours to get them to a certain point, they don't want to just give that up and start fresh again. They want to keep building upon that character that they have become attached to and test him out in different environments.

Killing him off would make all of those hours not really worth it.