It's a neat concept but very frustrating in application. I've read that Sony Online Entertainment's Wizardry Online has a feature just like that, but it's the kind of feature that promotes an extremely hardcore player base. Unless said items are easily retrievable and/or attainable, you can expect a game that'll attract a small niche of players who may stay a while. Anyone outside this niche are more likely to quit in a short amount of time. Implying that this is a multiplayer game we're discussing of course.

It's a neat concept but very frustrating in application. I've read that Sony Online Entertainment's Wizardry Online has a feature just like that, but it's the kind of feature that promotes an extremely hardcore player base. Unless said items are easily retrievable and/or attainable, you can expect a game that'll attract a small niche of players who may stay a while. Anyone outside this niche are more likely to quit in a short amount of time. Implying that this is a multiplayer game we're discussing of course.

Two very popular games: "Runescape" and "Realm of the Mad God" has this feature too.

Once you've gone down the road of dropping loot all the time with no recourse, you've created a game where you can't have meaningful differences between like items (e.g. swords) for like players (players with more money obviously can buy better equipment, and there are plenty of ways for rewarding more money to more advanced players). This may be your design, I just want to point out that the drop-loot-all-the-time model is somewhat at odds with the RPG staple of gaining better equipment.

Two very popular games: "Runescape" and "Realm of the Mad God" has this (drop all items upon death) feature too.

It is risky to argue that a feature, because it is contained in a popular game, is automatically a good feature. A feature lives in the context of a whole game. It might be good in one game and very bad in an other game.

I agree. Which is why I am not making that argument. I am only stating a fact that seem to be overlooked by the previous two posters. (and I didn't realized I spammed the same reply twice because it was very early in the morning :p)

You need to define the context with this in mind. E.g. if your items are really generic, drops often and are just more like tools, then item drop is really ok. On the other hand, if you have many unique items (to which the players get attached), seldom item drop and equipment which serves as instrument to make the character unique and special, then item drop could be very frustrating.

I think Runescape got away with haqving item-drop-on-death and unique/special equipment by allowing for 3/4 items to be saved. This allows generic drops to be sacrificed and avoid frustrating players by making them lose unique/special items. (Realm of the Mad God, on the other hand, tend to be more niche and hardcore than Runescape because they force you to lose your unique/special equipment)

Do you think allowing for 3/4 saves is a good way to do it? Or would it be better to simply not have unique/special/rare items?

A map with no players on it had all item drops cleared every 5 minutes. If you died 25 seconds before the map was cleared, your corpse only lasted 25 seconds. If you died 10 seconds after a map was cleared, your corpse would last until the next clear in 4 minutes and 50 seconds. This was an unintentional side-effect of maps clearing monster drops that nobody wanted to pick up, but we liked it so we left it in.

This can be easily amended with a two-pass cleanup to be less "aggressive". Flag all corpses as "delete on next turn" every 2.5 minutes, and delete all corpses already flagged. If you die 10 seconds before a cleanup tick, your corpse will still last 2 minutes 40 seconds. In the best case, if you die immediately after a cleanup tick, your corpse lasts 5 minutes.

This is what I'd do, it has practically the same overhead but isn't nearly as frustrating in the worst case.

I think Runescape got away with haqving item-drop-on-death and unique/special equipment by allowing for 3/4 items to be saved. This allows generic drops to be sacrificed and avoid frustrating players by making them lose unique/special items. (Realm of the Mad God, on the other hand, tend to be more niche and hardcore than Runescape because they force you to lose your unique/special equipment)

A map with no players on it had all item drops cleared every 5 minutes. If you died 25 seconds before the map was cleared, your corpse only lasted 25 seconds. If you died 10 seconds after a map was cleared, your corpse would last until the next clear in 4 minutes and 50 seconds. This was an unintentional side-effect of maps clearing monster drops that nobody wanted to pick up, but we liked it so we left it in.

This can be easily amended with a two-pass cleanup to be less "aggressive". Flag all corpses as "delete on next turn" every 2.5 minutes, and delete all corpses already flagged. If you die 10 seconds before a cleanup tick, your corpse will still last 2 minutes 40 seconds. In the best case, if you die immediately after a cleanup tick, your corpse lasts 5 minutes.

This is what I'd do, it has practically the same overhead but isn't nearly as frustrating in the worst case.

I wasn't the programmer for that project.

There weren't corpses per se, the items that were equipped just fell on the ground like regular monster loot (Any non-equipped items didn't fall to the ground, but one random item from your inventory also was dropped). There are plenty of ways it could've been fixed, but we never got around to it. The project was abandoned in 2010, after four years of sporadic work.

The project was abandoned in 2010, after four years of sporadic work.

Oh wow. Was there something like a post mortem written about it? I would love to read and learn from it.