Vanguard to change the death penalty

[Etadanik]

I think you're asking for the impossible. Smarter AI = you have to spend longer learning how to adapt to said AI. Randomized encounters means wipes are going to be more common. It's going to end up with a time commitment, time and time again, regardless.

What you need to fight for is not a next gen progression-based game that would require no time commitments, but a next gen game where the game doesn't "begin at level 60" - Blizzard's motto for WoW. You want a game where the journey is more important than the power gamed destination - but understand, to achieve such a game, you yourself must first sacrifice the notion that you want to be better than everyone else. People who can spend more time on a game will always be better than people who spend less, and this is something that is so fundamental as to be a law of game design.

Forget the whole competitive aspect of MMOs, and you can create a game that doesn't involve wasting more time. But then, we wouldn't be talking about risk vs. reward or challenge vs. reward in such a game to begin with.

[Elgonn]

Originally Posted by Turzem

I have visions of doing Burrower naked. At level 60. I cry.

I have visions of 10 naked people attempting to kite Burrower for a couple minutes while everyone else digs around in his last bowel movement looking for their corpse.

[Etadanik]

That sounds fun. No, really, it does. I can just imagine the guild chatter:

Guild Leader: Shit Digging Team - Have you guys found our shit in its shit yet? Cause Kiting Team can't hold it much longer! Hurry up!

[Wodin]

I'm trying to imagine doing corpse retrieval on any raid boss at all. What's the point of getting awesome gear if it all goes poof the first time you wipe on a new boss you weren't quite ready for?

[Etadanik]

Why would it go poof? Corpse retrieval in EQ seldom, if ever, ended in corpse loss.

[Transvaal]

Just give the crafters a recipe called "Giant Monster Decoy". If said decoy is destroyed by the monster, all your corpses get returned, or something along those lines. I think the last thing most people want to do is have to fight bosses while naked or in sub-par gear just to get their good gear back. But then again, the progression servers are going strong.

Either way, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Perhaps it will actually turn out to be a good (read:fun and not monotonous, annoying, etc.) way.

[Invisus]

Vanguard should give the carebear monster bashers whatever it is that makes them happy; lets keep them out of the better MMOs.

[ArkturusMaximus]

First, keep in mind that the worm would be very rare -- we're talking the exception, not the rule. Then, the people who would be taking on these kinds of mobs would have many sets of armor. They'd have them stored on the horses, in their ships, in their houses. And they would also likely have friends too, who could help them, who weren't part of the first failed attempt at defeating the mob.

If they were dying to the mob multiple times, it would wise to not attack it with your last set of armor and level up, get some better items, find some new skills, bring some extra buddies along, etc. Just going at it over and over again, not learning anything, not figuring out that the mob is simply too tough for you and your group, would be, well, dumb. One of the great aspects of having multiple sets of gear is that you can keep playing the game even if you have a corpse out there somewhere with some of you gear on it. You can keep leveling up, etc. and return to the mob later (assuming someone else hasn't killed it and released your corpses).

So basically, the scenario you described where eventually they'd be fighting naked is extremely unlikely.

So this repsonse implies a new feature of the 3rd-gen mmorpg: non-broken, appropriately balanced and tuned encounters at the get-go.

Yeah, sure.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I'll take looking forward to new encounters because of the challenge of beating them they present over deciding to simply not bother with encounters because if we lose we spend 3 hours doing a CR, or in the 'rare exception' lose our gear we spent the last 4 months farming.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Etadanik

Why would it go poof? Corpse retrieval in EQ seldom, if ever, ended in corpse loss.

Because you didn't have to kill Cazic to get your corpses back. If you did, nobody would have bothered with Fear until after Kunark opened and he became trivial.

[Etadanik]

That's just an implementation detail. Why would you think that the giant worm example would be how it'd work for every mob?

Besides, if the game is balanced for multiple sets of gear, I imagine that gear won't be nearly as hard to come by as it was in EQ. Losing a full set of gear is nothing if it only took you two days to put it together.

[Lleauaric~EW]

The giant worm he was talking about may not have been the mob that killed you.

[Wodin]

So you either fight raid bosses with shitty vendor gear and never use the gear you actually got from the bosses, or you lose it all the first time some failure forgets that healing the tank is a good thing. Yay?

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Etadanik

That's just an implementation detail. Why would you think that the giant worm example would be how it'd work for every mob?

I was taking into account it was the exception. Doesn't change my point. If the challenge of a fight suffers because of the extremity of the penalty for failure, then I consider it a poor trade.

And if the challenge doesn't suffer, then nobody is going to attempt the fight until they can ezmode it in the first place. Simply put, imagine if Onyxia consumed corpses. Do you honestly believe people would have wiped the 20+ times it took to learn the encounter rather then simply waiting until they were geared up enough to ezmode it?

[Etadanik]

That too. All mentions of the word 'penalty' aside, you could easily see how this could be used as an adventure hook:

Your raid approaches Al'Azar, the Chieftan of the Desert Djinn. You attack him, but for some reason he is invulnerable to all your attacks. He wipes the floor with you henceforth and feeds your puny bodies to the worm in question. Coming back with tattered alternate gear, you confront the worm, which is much weaker than Al'Azar. After defeating him in an epic battle without the benefit of your uber gear, the worm's stomach splits open and inside you find not only your gear, but also the magic device of some forgotten race that Al'Azar has conquered, which he thought would be consumed by the worm's stomach acid but was not. Using the magic device, you can now pierce through Al'Azar's invulnerability and slay him.

Sounds like a plan!