Home

About "death systems"

Submitted by Abalieno on December 30, 2005 - 15:17.

I was thinking:
- In general some players demand harsher death penalties (or even permdeath) so that it is more "meaningful".
- But then we also know that these games are about "learning"

Now my point is, from when "learning" is a practice of death? Isn't "dying" the exact opposite of "learning"?

I mean, even in real life, "learning" implies that you survive the process. If you die you don't learn anything at all, you are done. Game over.

Postulate: "Learning" is a mechanic of life, not of death.

Let's delve some more (but still remain on the "navel gazing" level). What's the difference between WoW's death penalities and those in other games? I already wrote a long analysis two years ago, but, essentially:
1- It's *quantitatively* small
2- It isn't incremental (here I lack the proper term, but you know what I mean)

Don't let the absence of xp loss fool you, there's no *qualitative* difference from dying in DAoC and dying in WoW. In both a death is a loss of time. This loss can be quantitatively different, but qualitatively it's still about the time. You could lose xp, but it's still about spending time to recover it. Many mmorpgs have toyed with these concepts through whimsical solutions, but they didn't really go anywhere. From xp loss, to corpse recovering, xp debts and all the rest. It's all the same. Qualitatively.

Then there's the other point. In WoW the death isn't incremental. You die once or you die twenty times in a row and you don't pile up the penalty. This is the most important element of the two, and it's where WoW's death penalty works better: these games are about learning, so it's useful to keep the frustration away and lead the player more than teach him to fear death. "Fear death" here is the key. In this game "death" is the experimentation. If you "fear death" you stick on the standarized path, you avoid risk and maintain a "low profile". No good for the game, not fun.

This is basically why the market rewarded more bland death penalties:
1- Games are about learning
2- In games you learn by experimenting, taking risks and dying. So you learn by dying (if you don't do anything wrong you learn zero, obviously)
3- The market rewards a game where the learning process is the most efficient and satisfactory: dying is not frustrating, so you can take risks and learn

Pretty much linear and logical from my point of view. "Killing" the players for good doesn't work because you are simply killing their possibility to learn. So you are killing the game itself. It would be a nonsense.

Now, why you would want to use "permdeath"? It's like selfstabbing. You would kill every semblance of game.

Let's delve on the level of navel gazing even here. What's permdeath? Another "ring a round the rosey". Nothing changes, you lose progress and need to restart. So it's again a mechanic about time. You need to redo things, so you have to spend your time to return to where you left.

So what's the actually impact of permdeath if it's concretely nowhere different from WoW's death penalty? What it would add that isn't already largely used beside the "quantitative" difference?

Imho, nothing at all. Permdeath would only make critical the replayability of the game. It's not the loss of progress that would scare me in WoW. It's the fact that if I have to redo my character, I also have to repeat all the initial levels and all that content that I've already seen too many times.

It doesn't look like a good idea. It would be really stupid, in fact.

Morale: Permdeath would be vaguely possible only in a game with a superb replayability. Which doesn't look like a common feature and would also pretty much nullify the reason to have it in the game in the first place.

Conclusion: harsher death penalties are exercises in futility.

» login to post comments

Re: About "death systems"

Chris_ (not verified) on December 30, 2005 - 17:41.

I want to see Abeliano vs Aggro Me in a cage match.

From Aggro Me's "Worst. Update. Ever." post, an excerpted quote:

The death penalty had three facets, progress (xp debt), money (armor repair) and shard retrieval. Sure, you've ramped up the xp debt portion of that a small bit, but on the whole the death penalty is much weaker now. And as for the xp aspect, vitality is so absurdly hard to burn off right now that it's basically just perma-double xp.

Shard retrieval was more than just an annoyance, it was an immersive part of the game. . . Removing it doesn't just make the game easier, it takes away a core mechanic and all the strategies surrounding it which added to the depth of gameplay. . .

In my first few weeks of playing EQII, which is the first few weeks it went live, one of the things I thought the game really got right was the death penalty. . . Since then it has been watered down more and more, including the removal of group debt which I felt was a terrible decision for reasons I outlined here. Now it is meaningless.

And there was a reason for that sting. Risk is important in any game as it heightens the feeling of excitement. It also makes rewards all the sweeter and makes you think carefully about embarking into dangerous territory. Moreover, it is a tool that teaches you the proper way to play the game.

I disagreed with Aggro Me, and agree with you, Abalieno. I've had this argument with my wife, and it comes down to:

  • unless the game is replayable and it's trivial to reach the end game, permadeath is solution looking for a better problem,
  • as long as you're in a multi-player game, all it takes is one or two people slacking off in a group or raid, and you're going to pay the penalty for their screw-ups,
  • and the point of the game is entertainment, not to frustrate the players or punish them for taking risks, pushing boundaries, or exploring the world. Harsh death penalties work to discourage players from trying to screw up. Some players (my wife, for instance) are very hard on themselves or group mates for messing up what should be a doable fight. Others (like me) ignore lenient or negligible death penalties and run into a dragon's maw to see what's up there. For both of us, however, there is the penalty of time, and that's more precious to me than in-game gold: if I have two hours to play tonight, a 30 minute run back to my failed encounter just took away a quarter of my playtime, so how can any other penalty short of EQ1's level loss be worse?
» login to post comments

Re: About "death systems"

Innsmouth on January 1, 2006 - 01:57.

As I wrote in the other reply I didn't want to analyze the death penalty in the context of a specific game because each will have its own quirks that are surely relevant and cannot be overlooked.

For example in WoW and inside the instances there's the "respawn" that is also part of the death penalty. If you die, come back and find out that you have to clear it once again, you give up and will retry another day. The same for the armor repairs that would prevent you to rinse and repeat too many times.

This isn't about the general approach. It is about the balance between the content and the type of challenge you want to offer. So the game creates here different "instances" of the death system that are able to adapt better to the content.

About EQ2 I cannot comment because I never played it.

And as for the xp aspect, vitality is so absurdly hard to burn off right now that it's basically just perma-double xp.

If this is true, it's a broken system. SOE often does it, design leftovers that basically lose every purpose and are left in the game for no reason. Or you give the mechanics a solid purpose and function or you get rid of them. At least the game will be simpler. If they wanted to buff up the xp flow they should have done it consistently. Calling it double-xp when it's the normal flow is just plain stupid since it's not written anywhere a standard rule defining how much is "normal experience". It's just the single game to define it.

I would expect them to put it in the feature list:
- The only game whith perma-double XP! Your characters will advance faster!

My general point of view on the permdeath is that it creates a paradox. Basically permdeath would work better in a game with a very bland character progression (so that they are easily replaceable) and very high replayability. This basically means: in a game where the death would be negligible.

But wasn't the basic purpose of permdeath to make the death penalty harsher? Hence the nonsense.

The same for making your items lootable by monsters or other players as you die. It would work only in a game where these items are easily replaceable, so again compensating the risk of the loss.

Then, after all these considerations, there's lot of space to "toy". For example in my dream mmorpg I have extremely powerful artifacts that are only usable in PvP and that are fully lootable. Why this would work compared to what I wrote above? Because it serves a very precise purpose instead of being a system consistent throughout the whole game. Only an handful of players on the whole server will be able to use those artifacts, so justifying the function of that mechanic and its boundaries (restricted to special cases, so gaining legitimation and viability).

The point is about using the right mechanics where they fit better. This requires the context and the specifics to be taken into considerations. Which is why my article up there is useful as a guideline, but awful to draw specific design implementations.

» login to post comments

Re: About "death systems"

theroachman (not verified) on December 30, 2005 - 22:32.

You omitted the fact that a part of Wow's death penalty is 10% durability loss. This does 'stack' (maybe a better word than incremental). Dying 3 times results in a total of 30% of your durability lost because of deaths. Also, there is another fact you omitted: in the rare cases you die very close to a graveyard (it happens more often in PvP encounters), after a couple of corpse runs there is a timer before you can re-enter your corpse. I think this is capped to 2 minutes, but still it is a loss of time. Hence the statement "You die once or you die twenty times in a row and you don't pile up the penalty." is wrong. But I understood your point and your conclusion is valid :)

» login to post comments

Re: About "death systems"

Innsmouth on January 1, 2006 - 01:15.

Yes, this wasn't an in-depth analysis of a death system in a specific game. It was a general point of view.

I didn't include the durability loss in the example because the function of it has nothing to do with the death penalty.

The durability loss in WoW is a trick to keep the economy under control and was added in the very last month of beta exactly to "patch" that hole. It has very little to do with the "death" itself and it's supposed to be a non-issue from that point of view.

While the timer is mostly for PvP reasons and to keep the time loss more consistent.

» login to post comments

Re: About "death systems"

StrangerA (not verified) on January 1, 2006 - 11:20.

Another interesting point that I hadn't noticed until creating a new character in WoW, there's a very slow buildup to the durability/res sickness hit on fresh characters.

The res sickness doesn't apply the first time you die, and then it slowly builds up to the "normal" version we see.

So if a new player wants to experiment, and then leap right back into the game, they can, and without dealing with the nasty aftereffects of rigor mortis.

» login to post comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.