Vanguard to change the death penalty

[Havelock]

Originally Posted by Man0warr

I remember SOE changing death penalty in SWG at end of beta, I never bought SWG because of that. Sitting in hospital for 3 hours after a death? :/ WTF

I wasn't in beta, but they changed the death penalty post-launch, too. I remember doing some painful corpse runs in the first couple weeks, but CR was so buggy SOE threw up their hands and said screw it and had everyone respawn with gear at the cloner.

I also remember the WoW death mechanics being monkeyed with during relatively late beta. Sigil has more time 'til launch IIRC, but they are also trying something a bit more complicated. If it doesn't work out, there's plenty of time to reintegrate the old system and tweak it in a less radical fashion. In the meantime, it's good to see some attempts at serious innovation. The genre seems stale at the moment, and nothing I've heard of the upcoming generation of games indicates any major departures from what we've seen before. EVE notwithstanding, MMOs generaly seem to stick to established design precepts.

[fucker]

Originally Posted by LikeWow!

Beta 3 is to begin before the end of the month, or Brad will explain why.

Say we're crawling through a dungeon; trash at top, nasty shit below. In EQ the death penalty is mostly linear. You always lose a static amount of exp, have to recover your corpse, but you go through more effort to CR the deeper you are. With VG’s new system, the penalty jumps from cash/recoverable exp loss at shallow levels, to a fully fledged corpse run to the bottom of the dungeon with no chance of recovering exp. From the looks of it, risk increases at a faster rate than in a crawl in EQ.

probably the death penalty change from area to area, not between parts of an area

example - 2 dungeons made for lv40 to 55. the avarage mobs are the same difficoulty

dungeon 1 gives less exp, worse loot, but has a minor death penalty.

dungeon 2 gives more exp, better loot, but has more painfull death penalty


*IF* used wisely it's an interesting feature

another example:

you can make an high level dungeon with a normal exp, normal penalty and average loots

or you can make another dungeon with "ultra assraping mobs" with godly loot, crap exp, but with a minor death penalty because you WILL die a lot in this dungeon

so, on other side, you have a much easier dungeon with normal rewards, but you suffer a penalty if you are stupid enought to die

on the other side, you have an ultra elite dungeon you can attempt with your best buddies. you know you will die a lot (and you will not gain expe) but you are willing to try because you know there is almost no death penalty and loot rewards are great, if you are strong enought


you just need to be a bit creative (more than me i hope )

[Zehn - Vhex]

or you can make another dungeon with "ultra assraping mobs" with godly loot, crap exp, but with a minor death penalty because you WILL die a lot in this dungeon

so, on other side, you have a much easier dungeon with normal rewards, but you suffer a penalty if you are stupid enought to die

This is kinda what we all hope for.

Unfortunately...

dungeon 1 gives less exp, worse loot, but has a minor death penalty.

dungeon 2 gives more exp, better loot, but has more painfull death penalty

This is more likely what we'll get.

[Quineloe]

Wow. Brad is making the game even more stupid. Who would have thought?

Can you imagine the uproar if Naxx had a 20% durability loss penalty and scholo 5%?

[Lyenae]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Wow. Brad is making the game even more stupid. Who would have thought?

Can you imagine the uproar if Naxx had a 20% durability loss penalty and scholo 5%?

One is a raid the other is a 5 man dungeon, learn to fucking compare shit before you diss.

[LikeWow!]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Wow. Brad is making the game even more stupid. Who would have thought?

Can you imagine the uproar if Naxx had a 20% durability loss penalty and scholo 5%?

The straw men would set the world ablaze.

[Vaclav]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Can you imagine the uproar if Naxx had a 20% durability loss penalty and scholo 5%?

Can you imagine the uproar if anyone on the internet ever made a meaningful analogy?

[Soygen]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Can you imagine the uproar if Naxx had a 20% durability loss penalty and scholo 5%?

Heh, this is already how WoW is, semantics aside. While the actual % may be the same for raids and instance deaths, the % of difference in what you pay for repairs is higher than your hypothetical.

[Quineloe]

woah all the Vanbois here defending this incredibly stupid idea. You sure you're on the right forum? This is the worst idea I've ever heared about Vanguard. This isn't just brown, this is borderline retarded

Can you imagine the uproar if anyone on the internet ever made a meaningful analogy?

It is, you're already paying extra for dieing in Naxx, artificially amplyifing the death penalty because it's "hard" content takes an anti-genius like brad

[holymight]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

woah all the Vanbois here defending this incredibly stupid idea. You sure you're on the right forum? This is the worst idea I've ever heared about Vanguard. This isn't just brown, this is borderline retarded

Can you exlain WHY this is such a terrible idea? My only concern is that it might be confusing to the player what the penalty for dieing might be at any given point in time.

[Itzena]

Because, given the choice between low risk/low reward and high risk/high reward in a game with xp loss or debt, people will take the former at least nine times out of ten while levelling up.

[Quineloe]

Content that gives better rewards should be more difficult to defeat. Making death take more exp / gold just doesn't make any sense.

[Digo]

Because you're punishing them for failure instead of just not awarding loot.

For the analogy lovers, it'd be like going to a carnival and having them clamp electrodes to my balls if I didn't throw the ball in the milk pail instead of just not giving me the prize. Then as I screamed and cursed, the carnie would chuckle "Ho ho, me boy! Suffering makes the prize sweeter!"

[holymight]

We don't know the extent they intend to add this to the game. I took it more as a way to relax the death penalty for overland zones and allow them to make dungeons more of a dungeon and less of a roller-coaster ride. I think most of the death penalty ideas like dropping a corpse and all that is targeted towards max level and raiding where the penalty has to change because people don't fear xp loss any more.

I think the only real way they can add this to the game without confusing the players is to make it a clear cut line such as:

overland areas: no penalty
overland POIs: very minor xp loss
dungeons: minor xp loss and minor coin loss
small raids and single raid mobs: dragable corpse drop that respawns after 15 minutes
medium raids: dragable corpse drop that respawns after 45 minutes
large raids: corpse drop that respawns after 3 hours

If they create too many different scenarios it will confuse the crap out of people. Personally I think permanent loss of a corpse is too much for a typical MMO. It does depend on how easy it is to acquire top gear though. It might very well be a reasonable penalty to have people lose corpses if you can get a decent set of gear with 3-4 hours of playing.

[LikeWow!]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Content that gives better rewards should be more difficult to defeat. Making death take more exp / gold just doesn't make any sense.

It's perfectly acceptable to have "content that gives better rewards should be riskier".

This gives the devs another way to balance encounters. When you go into an area with higher stakes, the more reward you get for succeeding.

holymight - They have stated VG will be very "loot-centric", so high end gear won't be easy to come by.