EQ Never

Part of the reason death penalties worked at creating suspense is it forced the player to be more aware of his immediate surroundings or suffer the consequences. I think you can do that without death penalties though.

One simple way would be to vary mob speeds. One of the reasons modern mmos are so lame is that every mob and player has exactly the same run speed. Which really doesn't make any sense. If some mobs could chase you down and own your sorry behind if you got withing their aggro range then that would create a similar sense of suspense. And force the player to be on the lookout for mobs that they can't get away from.

Add to that equation varied aggro ranges and leash distances. Use a more common sense approach that considers the mob's motivations (is it a mother lion protecting her cubs? or a guard protecting his post?) when deciding on their leash distance and aggro range.

Another thing to fix is the social aspect of aggro. Being able to single pull mobs from camps of supposedly intelligent npcs doesn't make much sense either.

If devs just used a little more common sense in the basic design of mmo's it would go a long ways towards making them enjoyable and engaging again. And much of it doesn't require massively complex coding to accomplish.

kudos_sl said:

Buy your corpse back for the low price of $15. Optional 3 easy payments of $5 available!

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Maybe I played EQ in bitch mode too long but the idea of losing everything I've worked for always sounded terrible to me. As an optional hardcore server, that'd be OK I guess. I'd love to hear their definition of permadeath.

kudos_sl said:

Buy your corpse back for the low price of $15. Optional 3 easy payments of $5 available!

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I want to laugh but I know SOE. You might be right...

gogojira_sl said:

Maybe I played EQ in bitch mode too long but the idea of losing everything I've worked for always sounded terrible to me. As an optional hardcore server, that'd be OK I guess. I'd love to hear their definition of permadeath.

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Well Raiding would be non existent if that's the case. Who'd risk losing it all on a bad pull?

Yeah, if it's having a permadeath server, then sure, go nuts; if it's something he's talking about as a core element of gameplay, then it gives me pause, although I'd want to get a better idea of the big picture before passing judgement on it.

Flipmode_sl said:

Well Raiding would be non existent if that's the case. Who'd risk losing it all on a bad pull?

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I figured the greater suggestion there is the inevitable open world PVP and getting my ass shanked. I love PVP in shooters, etc., and while I don't mind it in MMOs, that's not exactly where I get my kicks.

Didn't they have some permadeath PvP server where the first person to 50 won some stupid fucking prize?

Or was that a level reset server? I forget.

Very doubtful it will be anything drastic. Star Citizen has perma death but the way it's designed doesn't really make it hurt. There are any number of ways to do perma death without it scaring the panties off the player base.

kudos_sl said:

Probably lose all your items but keep your levels + skills. You will probably have to re-purchase the things you already got microtransactioned on for 99 cents or something. I'm sure Smedly will find some way to jew this game into the ground.

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Who knows. I don't find PlanetSide 2 to be offensive with Microtransactions but buying a helmet in PlanetSide 2 and buying a helmet in EQ are two totally different things.

Grim1_sl said:

Very doubtful it will be anything drastic. Star Citizen has perma death but the way it's designed doesn't really make it hurt. There are any number of ways to do perma death without it scaring the panties off the player base.

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You're right here. This is supposed to be their big, grand return and Smedley has made a couple of comments about how much the company has invested in it. A raw permadeath only game appeals to niche which damn sure wouldn't draw the big numbers. We'll see their definition of permadeath soon enough.

If it is a core element of the game it is something similar to Pokemon in that you get "knocked out" and if you don't do X then your dude goes poof. Maybe something similar to EQ1 bodies that would poof after a certain time if you didn't loot it.

Everquest was punishing in the early and mid game. Late game however, death was not the grim specter it had once been. This is because by the time the player was max level or approaching it, they had hopefully established a good network of allies and friends that could help them when shit met fan.

The Everquest death penalty system penalized loners and new players more than anyone else. And that seems pretty appropriate really, for a social game.

Demon Souls and Dark Souls were also mentioned in the Salvatore article. These are games that keep getting called punishing and brutal. Really though, they are rewarding and thoughtful. The games quickly put the breaks on the player who is just starting out and forces them to think before acting. The game basically tells you, "You just ran into this situation unprepared and look what happened... this time go slow and see what happens." without actually saying anything.

And when you do finally "get it" and start mastering your strategies for survival, suddenly every minor victory feels like a reward. And when placed in contrast to the struggle you experienced, it lets you see how far you have come.

The stress and fear of wandering around in a dangerous and deadly world creates a great atmosphere and really brings people together to overcome obstacles. I think if a modern game were to take all of the nifty socializing and organizing tools of current gen games and pair that up with deadly and dangerous world encounters... that would make for a really compelling experience.

Personally... I would love to see a horror survival setting in a fantasy mmo. Shit is dark, brutal, uncompromising and really effing scary at times. Especially when you start exploring underground.

Permadeath and Sandbox being tossed around now without any actual description of what those words mean in the context they are using them. I mean it drums up conversation and sparks mild controversy, but it is basically impossible to determine what they mean with those words without some kind of description of mechanics.

Regarding UO players breaking an ecosystem setup... well, that was literally over a decade ago with technology available at the time. Like all things MMO related, things haven't stayed the same in the world of technology or general game knowledge in the last decade, so I would imagine that there are ways to curtailing the breaking part to a degree. The use of triggers/phasing/instancing technology combined with better scripting and overall knowledge of how the mmo genre works would probably make it a bit better than the attempt that apparently occurred in UO. Not that I've played UO for more than a few minutes, but there was a substantial difference between it and EQ, let alone UO and something like WoW or other modern games.

I'd much rather see an attempt made than just going "well it didn't work 15 years ago, it won't work now" or my other least favorite idea "it worked 15 years ago, it will work now." Lotta shit has changed in 15 years!

EVE

Denaut_sl said:

You are totally right, everything is a trade-off at some level. I also really enjoy the type of system you are describing where there are "setup" and "execution" phases. What is nice about that is you can have them interact in a variety of ways, even to the point where the "setup" phase is a game unto itself. As always there are trade-offs, but it was part of what I really liked about the aforementioned SWG.
.

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I posted about this earlier, but one of the things WoW lost as it minimized the difficulty in terms of preparing or maximizing "pre combat assets" (Buffs, Group composition or even a plan to clear trash ect) was the ability to tweak difficulty outside of twitch and choreography factors. Essentially everything that's currently "hard" in wow right now has been shoved onto one scale--how fast can you react? How well do you keep up with the pattern? And in a lot of ways, as things get more difficult, it makes it harder for stronger players to help weaker ones--which requires more homogenous (In terms of skill) grouping.

This eventually leads to simply restricting people from your raids that you might like, and might be decent, but aren't stellar. And I really don't think that's been a great change. You used to be able to bring the ditzy rogue, or the pot head paladin, because while they weren't awesome, they did do enough to let your core group handle the higher difficulties in a fight--and with a strong leadership component, organizing groups to maximize buffs and auras (And even organize the overall guild to insure this efficiency), you could tackle a lot of problems without either forcing these people to sink or swim. And that gave all kinds of different ways to adjust difficulty, or add difficulty, without actually making the combat element of the fight harder.

For example, BWL, I suspect was as exclusive (Difficult) as current hard modes are. But there isn't a fight in all of BWL that is as difficult as most of the Cata hard modes were. BWL was difficult for other reasons, it really spread it's difficulty out over both execution (Tactics) and set up (Strategy)--a guild that cleared the trash with an efficient plan, that set it's groups, tanks and targets up well so they all worked together, had a huge advantage, even over other groups with perhaps slightly better players but worse aspects of that overall strategy.

That missing strategy element is something that really needs to be recaptured. In a way it's intrinsic to what makes RPG's great--it's not just about doing stuff in combat, it's also about different combinations of skills, buffs and spells that produce more favorable or unique outcomes. And WoW used to capture a little bit of this on a "group" scale by having group auras, buffs and other things which forced strategic choices. This rigging really helped a strong, central core of any guild "push" along it's weaker members by setting up groups to amplify strength and minimize weakness.

This kind of overall strategy was also present in fights more, too. Being able to pick who is the target for Kite-Beam 001, or Bomb 02, or picking who the fire is going to appear under, lets raid leaders put more difficulty on their stronger players and less on their weaker. Again, emphasizing strategy over simple twitch reaction time...Which allows that bridge to be built between different kinds of players (Because for us, a lot of those weaker players in combat, were far stronger gathering resources and helping the guild socially---I really hated how the game seemed to rub that kind of play out at the high end and essentially relegated those people to "derp mode".)

Itzena_sl said:

UO tried it in beta. Players broke its back over their collective knee then shit on the corpse.

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And in 15 years technology obviously hasn't advanced, at all. Our X486 rigs are going to pwn EQN's fucking dynamic ecosystem!

Itlan_sl said:

Didn't they have some permadeath PvP server where the first person to 50 won some stupid fucking prize?
Or was that a level reset server? I forget.

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The Discord server was up for a limited time and was pvp enabled with permanent death. You lost all experience and all items, except for what you had stashed in the bank. A team of Magicians with air pets camped inside the entries to Blackburrow and crushed anyone who wandered in from Halas or Qeynos. FoH had a team of ogre SK's running around. The top ranked winners were rumored to have exploited the Wayfarer instanced dungeons to level up their characters.