Death, Dying, and Exp Options

[Honis]

I had a brainstorm for a "new" idea for death, dying, and exp.

Do it the old-fashioned way, with save points.

Everyone remembers playing console RPG's and saving at particular points in the game. We could implement this also.

When your character dies, you respawn at the last place you saved. You lose the exp you gained, items you acquired (losing items may be a bit much), and completed quests.

This could help encourage people to save and then explore a high-risk area at little or no risk (now scouts/rangers that can sneak won't be alone). It will also discourage running through a high-risk area to finish a quest just before dying (something I have done several times in FF XI and EQ2).

Of course there should still be a revive system so that the tank in a party isn?t screwed out of hours of exp. At some point we could even add an item that is a portable save point (untradable/sellable and can only be got through an extremely difficult high-level quest). I should have a reset time on it so that someone doesn't macro saving every 5 sec's.


note: By EXP I mean, any points gained for any skills.

note2: Items that where bought or traded would not be lost due to death. Only items dropped by fallen creatures or for quests.

note3: The actual quest would not be lost due to death. (save>>get quest>>die>>still have quest in list)


This thread is to present ideas for a death, dying, and exp system. Add your own ideas as well as sage me :D.

[xardy]

this wouldn't really give you a penalty for dying. People that like to gank other people would just save before ganking them and if they die they don't lose anything. It wouldn't make the world dangerous for people, they just save when doing something dangerous and when they die nothing is lost.

[Honis]

Thank you for reminding me about the PvP factor that has been talked about. I'm in the grey area about it because the project is still in the brainstorm phase. If this death system is used, it should be governed based on the penalties for killing/being killed.

I see your point about death becoming less dangerous but it could be setup so that you can only save X amount of times a day or save once every X:XX. I'm just looking for ways to be different from other MMO's. As far as I know, nobody uses a save system. Also, exp rewards or item drop rate can increase the longer a PC has not saved.

I do see another problem with this system. Role players won't like the idea of waking up just as if they had been blacked out since there last save.


Here?s how FF XI and EQ2 handle death:

FF XI
- Lose 10% of your experience to next level (Current Exp ? 10% * Exp till next level) (the X% may be wrong, it has been awhile)

EQ 2
- Develop an Exp debt. You die and gain some amount of debt. You can continue gaining actual Exp but some of it goes to pay off your debt.
o In a nutshell, amount of exp gained is gimped till debt is paid.
o Debt can be paid over time while logged out (Total is dissipated over 3 RL days)

Personally, I liked EQ 2?s way, but I usually paid my debt by not playing since it was a guaranteed way of avoiding more debt.

[exocrine]

I don't think "saving" in an mmo would work very well, it's just too open to abuse. An unscrupulous player could save his game, give all his gold to a friend, die, respawn, give all his freshly respawned gold to his friend, die, respawn, ad nauseum.

Of course, none of this stuff even matters if PW doesn't use XP loss as a penalty for dying. Frankly, I don't even see how it could. XP loss works fine in a class/level based advancement system such as FFXI/EQ2, there's (usually) only one pool of xp to drain. But in a skill based system like the original WISH, it just wouldn't work.

Personally instead of an xp penalty, I'd rather see something along the lines of what WISH did. They handled death by giving players a 10% (?) penalty to all their skills/attributes for a period of 30 minutes. If a player died more than once in that time, the penalties would overlap creating 20, 30, even 40% and higher penalties. Dying was still a pain in the butt, but it didn't cause anyone to stop playing for 3 days, or run back to town every 10 minutes over a obsession about not losing xp.

[Honis]

How?
All trades are final. You die with zero gold, you respawn with zero gold. If you get a friend to be a "safe" pack mule for you, then more power to you.

If you mean:

Saves>>Finishes a quest>>gives reward to friend>>dies>>Recompletes quests.

Then you bring up a good flaw in the system. I guess the best way to handle this is by taking quest loss out of the equation.








Make it so they can only save once every game day, or once every 2 hrs (true tme).


Thank you for telling me how the Wish death system worked. I had only died once in the game and didn't notice a skill difference because I was usually crafting or gathering materials.

I really don't like % systems. It was effective in FF XI because you HAD to earn the exp back and HAD to be in a party to gain exp (this is all very painful if you had gimped sub jobs or bad equipment at high levels.)
EQ 2's just seemed to make me feel like I was playing with a mild hangover until the debt was worked off.

I have real reasons for hating a flat % system, but it is extreemly simalar to my rants about flat % income tax systems. I can get into it on request though.


I actually started this thread to get people to explain what they do and don't like about death systems in MMO's.
So I ask:
How do other MMO's handle death and what do you like/hate about it?

[xardy]

saga of ryzom just had an debt system where all xp you get go inthere untill the debt is gone. Bad system if you ask me.

Eve online has an clone system, well if your ship gets shot you lose it unless you have an insurance witch cost money. But if your pod gets killed you can get a clone that you made, but you still loose all your items and xp that you gained since you made the clone, allthough you can get your ship back with the insurance company. I think you could call these clones a save system. Becaus what they do is save your current skills and xp. But they cost money so aren't overused.

In mourning they had the idea of permadeath and you playing along as your own son or daughter i beleave, sounded intresting. Good for role players to.

In wow you just become an ghost and need to run all they way back to your corpse from the graveyard. I really hate this system.

I beleave in the first beta of wish you had bind stones at towns and you could bind yourself to it and then when you die you would respawn there without your weapons. But then you could go find your corpse and get your items back or ask some1 to do a corpse recal. Allthough this system was used to get back to a town fast, like go buy something in a town across the continent, die , ask a friend to do corpse recall or do it yourself if you stored the required ingredients in the bank.

Well thats some text, but i don't like any of these systems really, allthough the eve one is pretty good it can't be used in PW i think.

[exocrine]

I really don't like % systems ... I have real reasons for hating a flat % system, but it is extreemly simalar to my rants about flat % income tax systems. I can get into it on request though.


What better place to explain?. Especially since I don't think I've read your opinions on income tax.

I get the feeling that I didn't exactly get my point across earlier. In WISH, nothing was actually lost, you merely played at a 10% handicap for 30 minutes. If you died again within that 30 minutes, you got an additional 10% for 30 minute handicap that stacked with the fist one. Once those 30 minutes were up, the 10% handicap went away and you were back to normal.

[Luna#039;s Requiem]

An idea just crossed my mind... I remember a topic a while back about Gods (and Divine intervention), so maybe that can influence the penalty you recieve upon death.. For example, maybe if you do a lot of things to help your God, (or a God), then your punishment would be less severe, but if you did a lot of something like theiving or backstabbing, your punishment at death would be a little more severe..

However, I like the idea of the 10% handicap for 30 minutes or something of that nature..

[Honis]

Here is a breakdown of a flat tax system:
Low Level: Skill is at 9, lose 10%, your at 8.1
Mid Level: Skill is at 50, lose 10%, your at 45
High level: Skill is at 100, lose 10%, your at 90

As you can see, as your skills increase you have a larger pool to lose exp from, thus death is felt less by the higher level.

If the % was setup in a tiered manor (much like the USA's income tax system) then the higher levels will feel a drop in skills much like the new guy will. (Since the creators run the entire system, high levels finding loopholes will be less likely.)

I also don't like being gimped for X:XX amount of time. I would rather just be a real gimp, and work through it.




I understood, I'm just in favor of actually losing something so that death will be "feared." Even though the death system in FF XI is hated, it instills enough fear to force strategy while fighting (ie. damage dealers HAD to deal damage, the tank HAD to control hate, etc.) In EQ 2, strategy seemed to be severely lacking. As an experiment, I did nothing but basic attacks in party and nobody knew (I was a scout/predator ). I started doing my thing later and people would make comments: "Wow, that skill increase I just got is really kicking in!" This should probably be addressed in thread for determining how partying will be "forced" fun.

Note: Addressing my incompetence, when I say lost in relation to Wish, I meant temporarily lost.


Another question: In the Wish death system, what would happen to a tank in a party?

It would seem to me, that there could become a continuous spiral down for him.

[xardy]

An idea just crossed my mind... I remember a topic a while back about Gods (and Divine intervention), so maybe that can influence the penalty you recieve upon death.. For example, maybe if you do a lot of things to help your God, (or a God), then your punishment would be less severe, but if you did a lot of something like theiving or backstabbing, your punishment at death would be a little more severe..

However, I like the idea of the 10% handicap for 30 minutes or something of that nature..

But wouldn't thieves have there own god? Wouldn't this thieve god reward them and give them a less severe punishment? Or are we only having one god and he is good and everything you do wrong is beeing punishd?

[Bird]

An idea just crossed my mind... I remember a topic a while back about Gods (and Divine intervention), so maybe that can influence the penalty you recieve upon death.. For example, maybe if you do a lot of things to help your God, (or a God), then your punishment would be less severe, but if you did a lot of something like theiving or backstabbing, your punishment at death would be a little more severe..

However, I like the idea of the 10% handicap for 30 minutes or something of that nature..

But wouldn't thieves have there own god? Wouldn't this thieve god reward them and give them a less severe punishment? Or are we only having one god and he is good and everything you do wrong is beeing punishd?

--- Sorry xardy, i made a little error trying to quote your message but in stead i editted it without knowing it, hopefully its as it was now :oops: ---

but on topic, i dont think thieves had there own god. they changed to become thieves more out of desparation. for example, they went more like this: "No food, no shelter, what has this god ever done for us? **** him, im gonna obay his rules no longer and are gonna make life alot easier for me"
think they believed in the general 'God' but desided to not live by his rules and accept the consequences in the afterlife

They could how ever create their own hero, for example, the thieve that founded a big thieve guild could be remebered and by his rules the game could be played, dont think that would make him a god though :P

[exocrine]

Huh? I don't get it. By your example, the skill level 9 newbie loses .9 skill points but the skill level 100 powergamer loses 10 points. I fail to see how a higher level character would "feel it" less, he would in fact "feel it" much more. Especially when you consider that each of those skill levels will likely be harder to regain at higher levels.




I hate to break it to you, but these two concepts don't work together. If death presents "little or no risk" of a penalty, it won't be "feared". But if death is feared, then few people would explore a "high risk area". The fact of the matter is that overly harsh "death penalties" are not fun. is not fun.

To illustrate, I'll present one of my favorite WISH moments as it would have occured had death been "feared":

(me): I heard Threnallis has been over run by goblins and wolves. Want to go free the town?
: **** no man, we might die. I'm going to stay here and fight these low level mobs instead.

Does that sound interesting to you? Since I knew that dying would not ruin my whole day, I had no reservations about running off to my seemingly certain doom (I did in fact die multiple times). If death had been harsh, that day would have been bland and uneventful, instead it has become one of my strongest memories of the game. Do you see what I'm getting at here?



Post one up, I'll be happy to argue with you about grouping too :twisted:... Seriously though, go for it, I don't think it's been discussed much at all so far.



You've asked the right person, Honis. I almost always took on the "tank" role in groups, simply by virtue of having better armor than most of my friends. And yes, dying multiple times in rapid succession would more or less put you out of commission for a while (but it was still preferable to losing a whole bunch of XP each time). Which is why mages with healing spells were so important, if any group member died too often the entire group suffered, especially if it was the main tank. In turn, mages had a vested interest in keeping teammates alive, not just to avoid attack, but to maintain the group's effectiveness. Because if a group was gimped into sitting around and waiting, nobody had any fun.

I won't even get into the nightmarish bind-point runs. Suffice it to say, mages with ressurection spells were worth their weight in gold. :wink:

[GageEndal]

I think that a degrading mental state would suffice for being knocked out (I hate saying killed since you aren't dead) for a time. Right at first you would take a 50% loss to all skills that would last for 1-2 minutes and then it would be a 25% loss to all skills for about 10 minutes, then it would be a 10% loss to all skills for 10 minutes and then you are back to normal.

I've been knocked out a few times, that's about what it feels like.

[Honis]

Assuming GageEndal's setup (previous post).

Make it so that the time regulating the % you initially get is based on the what knocked you out. The stronger something is in compairison to your vitality determines times your dazzed.

For example:
I'm a little n00b gnome and I walk into l33t giants cave.
A giant doesn't just hit me, he "knockes me out" in one hit. That should cause me to stay dazzed longer once I got back up (or went back to my last "home point.") than say "baby bunny" knocking me out just outside a city.

I'd say the times that GageEndal gave would be good for getting knocked out by an even match. Add 5 -10 for each time from the giant hit. Subtract about half for getting knocked out by the bunny (assuming you had a higher skill than a newb.)

[StaticGrazerr]

Lets see, how death should be handled. Hhmm, well I'm partial to the old run to the nearist healer as a spirit and get ressurected by a healer or Ank.
But I like the idea of mabye doing so kind of Rite of Passage method. I think that would be rather interesting, if not only for the higher up levels. Where you have to preform a simple task for a spirit or god to return to your life, or just donate an item to a spirit or diety.

[Minthos]

I'm currently of the opinon that permadeath is bad, but that we should still design the game so that people don't die easily.

People have suggested going to hell or limbo when they die, and having to somehow make their way back to the world of the living.

Yellow suggested Karma based on your actions ingame.

This "idea" I propose is a sort of combination of those things.

It assumes that severely wounded characters will be incapacitated (unconscious or disabled), with the possibility of death if they recieve considerable additional damage, or if they don't recieve medical attention within a reasonable amount of time, and that resurrection will not be something one can easily do on the battlefield, even if there is no fighting going on.

When players die, they go to hell, limbo or heaven, depending on their "Karma". There could be several levels of hell (as in Dante's Inferno). Getting back to the world of the living should be a time-consuming procedure, but preferably not too boring.

Heaven should obviously be more pleasant than hell, a reward for nice and honorable characters, while the lower levels of hell should inflict increasingly harsh punishment on the cruel and wicked.

[Jaramar]

I'm currently of the opinon that permadeath is bad, but that we should still design the game so that people don't die easily.

People have suggested going to hell or limbo when they die, and having to somehow make their way back to the world of the living.

Yellow suggested Karma based on your actions ingame.

This "idea" I propose is a sort of combination of those things.

It assumes that severely wounded characters will be incapacitated (unconscious or disabled), with the possibility of death if they recieve considerable additional damage, or if they don't recieve medical attention within a reasonable amount of time, and that resurrection will not be something one can easily do on the battlefield, even if there is no fighting going on.

When players die, they go to hell, limbo or heaven, depending on their "Karma". There could be several levels of hell (as in Dante's Inferno). Getting back to the world of the living should be a time-consuming procedure, but preferably not too boring.

Heaven should obviously be more pleasant than hell, a reward for nice and honorable characters, while the lower levels of hell should inflict increasingly harsh punishment on the cruel and wicked.

Why punish evil more then good? It's a legitiment RP and has been done quite well at times.

[Minthos]

Why punish evil more then good? It's a legitiment RP and has been done quite well at times.

There should be concequences for your actions - if there were no penalties for PKing and griefing, there would be too much of it, and then it would be too difficult for non-pvpers to avoid getting griefed all the time. Thus we would have to prevent it altogether. Harsher punishments means better control, which again means we can let players have more freedom. That's what you want, isn't it?

Specifically, the idea I proposed rewards those who kills evil characters by giving them the satisfaction of literally sending them to hell. This particular point is something that can be expanded upon, for example with fancy graphics involving flames and demons coming to drag their soul down to hell and imprison it..

[Jaramar]

There should be concequences for your actions - if there were no penalties for PKing and griefing, there would be too much of it, and then it would be too difficult for non-pvpers to avoid getting griefed all the time. Thus we would have to prevent it altogether. Harsher punishments means better control, which again means we can let players have more freedom. That's what you want, isn't it?

Specifically, the idea I proposed rewards those who kills evil characters by giving them the satisfaction of literally sending them to hell. This particular point is something that can be expanded upon, for example with fancy graphics involving flames and demons coming to drag their soul down to hell and imprison it..

If you commit evil then the god of evil will want to get you up there for another round and will be cheering you on. Penalties for killing and griefing should be in the game world itself. Guards and hunting parties tracking you down and such... things that are avoidable but make being a bad guy more work then your typical griefer will want. Anyways, if we go along with the factional system then you can only "grief" those who are at war with you already.

[Pandra]

There's more then one way to grief someone though. It doesn't just involve PvP.
There's mob tagging, kill stealing, killing quest npc's, repeatedly opening trade windows, spamming duel challenges, standing on the mob's space while a player is fighting in hopes of getting them to attack you instead.... Griefers really go out of their way to annoy people, and odd as they are, I suspect they'd enjoy being sent to a hell that involved in game punishment.

Call me pessamistic, but I can already invision bragging threads involving who had to take it up the ass from a Balrog longer. Griefers do not think on a normal level. Nothing in the game is real so nothing they do in said game can have any real consiquences. Unless you do something like banning them, locking their characters or otherwise restricting them. Then they'll start screaming that they're paying for their game and they have the right to play however they want, even if it is wreaking other people's play time.

[joshpurple]

Just 'cause I'm not sure, is PW aiming for an 'All Ages' game, or '14+ years,' etc. (I'm not even sure what the rating systems are for games?).

If it's to be open to all, it might be needed to keep death, violence, gore, etc. at a min?