Quote:Original post by Derakon
To a certain extent I can play more cautiously, for example by spending more time shooting things and less time in melee, but a) I have to take risks to finish the mission, regardless of how I play, and b) a more "cowardly" playstyle has hidden risks, too. For example, the longer I spend in a given fight, the more likely I am to make a mistake and get hit; thus, it's in my own best interests to kill the enemies as quickly as possible. However, cautious play by shooting enemies is a slow way to kill them, so I'm increasing my exposure. In other words, no matter what I do, there will always be danger, so the game retains its tension and excitement.

Which is fine as long as the game designers correctly predict the exact level of difficulty to put in. Which they usually don't, and never do consistently. By mandating a minimum difficulty level, you're setting your players up to resent you. This is something Chen's flow theory stuff was getting at--players will happily choose their own optimal difficulty level, as long as you don't fuck with them.

Quote:Original post by terminateIt also deeters people from working together. You lose one person early on in the fight, forget trying to help the others, I am running out of here so I don't die, seeya suckers. In addition, many groups or guilds would constantly be unable to do stuff because two or three of their players decided to play yesterday and accidentally got killed.

Extreme death penalties also prevent people from going into new content. People want to play the game, not go into unknown or new content and risk getting locked out for 3 days.

Why try to beat CoolNewMonster when I can beat up OldMonster for 1/2 the xp with little or no risk?

I used to play Maple Story, and if there's one thing that doesn't make a game fun, it's having the whole thing be one big spreadsheet, and calculating the XP per minute you get at various activities, with the knowledge that every second spent doing or going somewhere else i time wasted. Level grinding and perfectly familiar game content is the problem in most games. An excuse for people not not explore every inch of all the content in the first week the game is out would be, in my opinion, a good thing.

And if you cut and run when one of your teammates bites it, then that fits right into my idea, of people showing self preservation and not just metagaming through situations.

Perhaps there could be two types of character in the game in question: a 'normal' character, one with standard health (I don't like magic, so don't ask about mana :)), and a 'hero' character, unlocked after attaining the level cap and completing a high-end quest with a normal character, that has far more strength and health than a normal character, but one that will be damned to the Underworld for incremental periods of time (starting at 15 minutes and ending at a maximum of six hours) for each subsequent death.

I like the way Diablo handled it. When you died, you'd lose all your stuff and a portion of your money. Plus, you'd get respawned at the next town which usually meant you had to walk a very long distance back to where you died, unless you had built a town-portal in time. The nice thing about this was that while you'd lose your stuff, you could reclaim it by walking back to your dead body and pick it up again. This was annoying enough for you to always make sure you wouldn't run out of health potions or to run away if the situation asked for it. Yet, it wasn't so annoying that you wouldn't keep playing after it happened.

I really don't see the point in punishing the player just as I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to save at any point in a single player game. Some people are very serious about games, other just want to be distracted for a while... you should always cater to both groups. And with your 72 hour punishment idea, you'll actually lose both.

While I don't completely agree with Sneftel that you can't make games to hard, I do agree that it would cause a major drop in population, and also that people will gravitate to what they are after.

A game with a super harsh penalty is not going to be completely empty. Some players will want to play it. Just not the majority. I liked how Ultima Online handled things awhile ago (haven't played in years, so not sure how it's currently handled), in that they had one super hardcore server that had perma death, and the rest (and the majority), did not. But it was almost always empty.

I personally love games that penalize the player harshly, but that's just me. I dislike the fact that many FPS's lose strategy because a player dies, respawns, goes back, dies, respawns, goes back, actually manages to kill you before you CTF, repeat. Or in MMORPG's, how anyone can take down the super Uber boss just by reading a strategy someone else posted online. But at the same time, disconnects happen, along with other things that you shouldn't punish the user over.

Older games use to give a number of lives to the player before the game was over. Now, if it's a persistant world, I wouldn't say you have 5 lives for the eternity of the character. You could always die by 5 disconnects over a period of a month. But maybe a revolving timespan. You have 3 lives in a 24 hour span before you have to take a 72 hour break. If you disconnect once, you still have more chances to play. If you disconnect 3x in that period, well, maybe you should be contacting your ISP about connection issues instead of complaining to the game developer. Or maybe something like the first death gives a 1 min break, death 2 gives 10 mins, death 3 gives 30 mins, etc, up until a point where you get a 72 hour break (as that would be maximum), but when you hit that count, due to the amount of time you'd need, it would reset by the time you came back.

Avoidance of losing the player's attention span is probably the most important aspect when sentencing a penalty in an RPG.

Why not take a look at how Counter-Strike, a mod of Half-life deals with their system?

The Game is setup into rounds, if you die, you are out for that particular round. The death is sometimes annoying, rather short, but the spectating ability makes the player wait around for the next round, knowing what he did wrong that made him die last round.

Throw this same scenario into an MMO. When a player dies he is able to move around and watch other players play the game perhaps until he resurrects in the alotted time.

I've always been curious on how others play the game from how i play the game. It would be great to be able to watch and learn from the best of the best, or simply just watch for pure enjoyment of that high level slaying the impossible dragon.

Of course there would be restrictions, such as a window would come up, asking the player if it's Okay with him that another spectate his gameplay. And he would then be able to set settings accordingly as to mute the player fully, or allow them to talk at certain intervals. We don't want someone spamming his chatbox in the middle of an important fight now.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Wow, call me crazy but this idea is ridiculous. Punishing the player for dying is pointless and just makes the players want to stop playing. This idea would never work in a traditional FPS game where the objective of the respawn timer is for delay or to give the other team an advantage due to a kill.

In an MMO as the OP suggested this be used for, the idea of delaying the player from playing just subtracts from the fun of the game. It does not add fun, no matter how you try to argue it. You need to quit acting like people want to kill themselves in a game. There is no player in a game that goes into PVP or PVE with the objective to die. So why would a game need to force people toward self-preservation by punishing them? Could it be that the game doesn't put a strain on the RPG elements of the game enough for the player to care? It's a gameplay problem in which the player doesn't have enough choices for self-preservation.

For an FPS what's the point of staying alive? To win? You'd think so, but some players don't realize it. Winning is the only objective to the round, so unless gameplay is changed a player will just use the incentive of winning, and not wanting to sit around for the next round, to entice them to live. Also most FPS players don't care about preserving the RPG elements that may exist in the game. The RPG elements are too weak to give the player incentive. If you got 100 points in game for each kill and 1000 points upgraded your favorite gun, then well yeah you want to stay alive and get that upgrade or unlock your next feature.

Okay first point for an MMO. We can take a mmo game that pulls in players, World of Warcraft. It has a system where staying alive is nice because then one doesn't have to respawn and run back to their corpse. But that is the problem. The game is punishing or delaying the playtime to give the attacker an advantage. Ideally a system like this would work. For instance, games like PlanetSide and others have a respawn-and-try-again system.

This system allows a player to strategically ready themselves and learn from their mistakes or try a different approach. If the whole point of the respawn is to delay the player then it's lacking something. The player's skill shouldn't be the only thing they are relying on when they go into combat. An example of this is in PlanetSide. If you run outside and get killed by a vehicle, then when you respawn you don't grab your grunt gear, you get an AV load-out. While I've only played WOW for like 2 hours, I can imagine it runs into a few instances of respawn run back to corpse respawn and attack and hope you get the advantage of surprise. If not run back and do it again.

Okay onto, some ways to fix this. Add more choices the player can make at any given time or change the goal of PVP or PVE to allow for death to have a meaning. I have to say though with games like WOW where the battles are based almost solely on items and level then it's hard to fix some problems. But in an FPS adding things with large differing advantages usually fixes this. Going back to PlanetSide, the weapons system is setup for specific situations and in different situations one weapon has a huge advantage over another. Like you'd never use a pistol as a soldier, but as for cloaker you'd use one. If you die because you can't get through a certain area you know that the strategy is broken and a new one must be. Kind of funny how some people won't learn from situations though. I mean if you were punished for trying things out how much would that suck?

I mean if your in an RPG game and you think, "I wonder what frost damage will do this earth unit" then die to see a 3 minute respawn timer. You've already learned your lesson and would gladly try another, but the game insists you must be punished for the death. Albeit some players are stupid, so a 10-20 second timer must be used. See example one: http://science.easternblot.net/images/2007/03/the_difference.png

Well that's all I'll say on this topic. Play some games like an RPG and just pretend your system was enabled. Every time you die stop playing for an hour. You should realize that gameplay is the problem and not the punishment. If you don't understand do this same experiment with an FPS game... maybe UT2004 :)

//edit, Sneftel knows what he's talking about. Before you write these kinds of threads sit down and research games or think of the players reaction. Especially if the game is really great. Do you think a player wants to wait after 72 matches of the game or 72 deaths. After that point I'm fairly sure I'd uninstall.