A new look at the death penalty, "life bonus".

[Ingmar]

The nice thing about xp debt is that it doesn't discourage you from playing the game. Your current power level is unaffected - you can rush back and hit the same content.

Ack, no! You've just hammered the word "GRIND" into the levelling system in 10 metre tall letters of fire. Play though all that content again, with no gain of any kind? Running to stand still? yeah minus 10 million Fun Points.

There's gain, its just half-rate gain. XP loss would do what you describe, but CoX xp debt is not quite as bad. The reason debt turned into extreme ALL CAPS grind (instead of moderate grind) in CoX is more to do with the fact that there wasn't quite enough content to get you through the levels WITHOUT taking a death penalty originally (solo at least), so when you got indebted you really ended up behind once your contacts ran out of missions. I expect with player created missions that issue is ameliorated to an extent.

[Typhon]

That's how I'm doing the death penalty in my game. Because it's an FPS, giving players a penalty isn't really appropriate so we have a killstreak that increases the longer you stay alive and resets on death. That way there's a real negative to dying but you aren't any weaker.

You might be overestimating the size of the population of people that give a shit about killstreaks. In fact, I'm not sure anyone has outside of UT (KILLING SPREE!), TF2 (You're dominated, Knucklehead!), and professional gaming.

Your reward for killing people increases with your killstreak (up to a cap). When you're on a roll, you are raking in the cash; if you die then you need to start building back up again.

After playing COD IV I'd say you definitely don't want to reward the person who is already winning with more power (I'm pretty sure you aren't doing that, but I want to make sure).  Giving someone an airstrike (or whatever) when they are already winning is just... not good.  Giving them cash to spend outside the game on things that don't directly increase their capacity to dominate is good, further unbalancing things in their favor is (again) not good.

Giving players that frequently get their ass kicked some (at first small) boost is also probably good.  Tagging them as the underdog (or some form of gentle teasing) is ok, I think most folks who aren't very good but want to play anyway know they aren't good and wouldn't mind the help (putting a big LOSER sign over their head is not what I'm talking about).

[apocrypha]

Even so, you don't call replaying a level in Mario "grind" just because you've seen some of the content before. The point I was trying to make, and didn't because I'm tired, is that apocrypha was implying that players should progress through content even while dying.

I didn't mean to imply that, sorry if that's how it came across.

My point is that simply dying and having to start over is plenty death penalty enough in a xp-based levelling game. I hate to drag WoW into this but they've got the death penalty just right. You lose a few minutes of time and a minor gear damage cost. That's still plenty annoying to most players. My girlfriend nearly always logs off and goes and does something else when she dies in WoW and she's probably closer to the "average" wow player than most posters on a gaming forum. If you add any other penalty to that death then you start edging your game away from the mainstream and into the niche market.

If niche is what you're after then fine, knock yourself out, go EVE/Darkfall with your death penalty. If you want mainstream appeal then making your players feel they're being punished by your game is a bad idea.

[DLRiley]

Basically if you want to make any money, kicking your players in the crotch has hard as you can is not a good idea.

[damijin]

So, I really agree that taking away the incentive to try new dangerous things in PvE is lame, because doing the shit you know is safe until kingdom come is obviously an unfun way to run the game. You can lessen that to some degree with promises of prettier shiny things for people willing to take the bigger risk:reward.

Now, for the PvP thing. I don't feel quite the same way. Yes people will avoid losing, but thats not a bad thing. If there's elements in the game worth fighting over, people will fight over them at risk of losing a PvP bonus. Sure, they may zerg it up and form huge groups to try and outnumber and out-compete each other, but I think in general, its not nearly the same problem you face in comparison to PvE. Figuring out "safe" PvP tactics is fun, because the people you're competing against are humans, and they are capable of countering whatever you come up with. The same is not true of AI.

[hanzou]

Some sort of chain kill bonus, like the one you're purposing, could be fun.  However, looking at things from a broader perspective, it is still a death penalty.

The biggest problem is the concept of the death penalty, even your fancily worded one, to begin with is that it is wholly unnecessary.

As Wasted said, unless death is reduced to a seconds long animation, followed by a full heal (essentially making everyone invincible) there will always be incentive to not die.  Dying as any outward event takes time.  Even in Mario, when you die you have to replay the level again, taking time.  The reason it didn't (some times) feel like a swift kick to the balls is because it served a sort of purpose.  When playing the game for the first time, the reason you died 80% of the time, was that you just sucked.  Forcing you to replay the level, helped you improve the skills that that level or a specific part of it emphasized.  The exp penalty in virtually all MMOs including the one you're purposing, is nothing but a swift kick in the balls convoluted by semantics.  I agree that changing the semantics certainly has a valid and significant psychological effect; however, I feel like everyone is still missing the point.

Games should be designed in such a way that player death has meaning above and beyond just being a waste of time.  The experience of dying should somehow help the player die less in the future, ideally teaching them something.  The current systems solely waste the player time/money and actually promote future death (IE loss of money leads to loss of funds for new gear while leveling).  Death needs to serve a function other than being a kick in the balls, and the entire game should be designed with this intent in mind as opposed to just slapping on a death penalty to an independently designed product.

Also, I agree with apocrypha that WoW's death system is one of the best designed so far, in that it 1) isn't overly tedious yet still deterring 2) it contains new content (albeit small), in 'ghost mode'.  However, I think that there is much more opportunity and potential in the concept of death that is not being actualized. 

/end rant

That being said, the main problem I see with your system is, as Typhon said, you're rewarding people who are already winning.  Min maxers are going to be able to abuse this to hit max level and rape in PvP, while the average donk is going to be stuck in grind land or be haplessly slaughtered, pushing the game towards a niche market (power gamers).

[ezrast]

Personally I prefer EQ2's and CoX's death penalties to WoW's (note: I have not played EQ2 to high levels). CoX lets you jump right back into the action (with maybe some travel time, but not much) and EQ2 at least lets you repair stuff and sell junk while your rez sickness wears off. WoW rips you out of the game and forces you to run around in a barren blue void world where nothing happens. If you're lucky you died somewhere flat and you can alt+tab while autorunning back, but if you're in a remote part of Stranglethorn or something... ugh.

[apocrypha]

Personally I prefer EQ2's and CoX's death penalties to WoW's (note: I have not played EQ2 to high levels). CoX lets you jump right back into the action (with maybe some travel time, but not much) and EQ2 at least lets you repair stuff and sell junk while your rez sickness wears off. WoW rips you out of the game and forces you to run around in a barren blue void world where nothing happens. If you're lucky you died somewhere flat and you can alt+tab while autorunning back, but if you're in a remote part of Stranglethorn or something... ugh.

Not played EQ2 or CoX so I can't comment on those, but they recently added a boatload of new graveyards in WoW and I think they made your running speed faster when dead too. You seem to never be more than 30-60 seconds away from your corpse when you're dead now.

[Hindenburg]

Conan's is better.

[damijin]

Some sort of chain kill bonus, like the one you're purposing, could be fun.  However, looking at things from a broader perspective, it is still a death penalty.

The biggest problem is the concept of the death penalty, even your fancily worded one, to begin with is that it is wholly unnecessary.

As Wasted said, unless death is reduced to a seconds long animation, followed by a full heal (essentially making everyone invincible) there will always be incentive to not die.  Dying as any outward event takes time.  Even in Mario, when you die you have to replay the level again, taking time.  The reason it didn't (some times) feel like a swift kick to the balls is because it served a sort of purpose.  When playing the game for the first time, the reason you died 80% of the time, was that you just sucked.  Forcing you to replay the level, helped you improve the skills that that level or a specific part of it emphasized.  The exp penalty in virtually all MMOs including the one you're purposing, is nothing but a swift kick in the balls convoluted by semantics.  I agree that changing the semantics certainly has a valid and significant psychological effect; however, I feel like everyone is still missing the point.

Games should be designed in such a way that player death has meaning above and beyond just being a waste of time.  The experience of dying should somehow help the player die less in the future, ideally teaching them something.  The current systems solely waste the player time/money and actually promote future death (IE loss of money leads to loss of funds for new gear while leveling).  Death needs to serve a function other than being a kick in the balls, and the entire game should be designed with this intent in mind as opposed to just slapping on a death penalty to an independently designed product.

Also, I agree with apocrypha that WoW's death system is one of the best designed so far, in that it 1) isn't overly tedious yet still deterring 2) it contains new content (albeit small), in 'ghost mode'.  However, I think that there is much more opportunity and potential in the concept of death that is not being actualized. 

/end rant

That being said, the main problem I see with your system is, as Typhon said, you're rewarding people who are already winning.  Min maxers are going to be able to abuse this to hit max level and rape in PvP, while the average donk is going to be stuck in grind land or be haplessly slaughtered, pushing the game towards a niche market (power gamers).

Good post.

Seems on the money, and I've noticed in the past that when I hypothesize about MMO systems, I tend to favor those power gamers who I've been playing along side all these years. I suppose it's not a terrible thing if I'm looking to make something niche, but, yeah... this one would be quite a bit powery.

Oh well, not like I make MMOs anyway, maybe can work this into a single player flash game somehow in a way that would be fun.

[Arnold]

AC1's Vitae was even worse, since it didn't burn off over time. You were to grind lower-level mobs until you got your stats back up.

Weren't you an AC1 dev?  I really liked that system.  With vitae+ the item drop system I thought the game really balanced the line like no other had.  It seemed to work well for both pve and pvp.

I never had to hunt lower level mobs to burn vitae unless either-

A. I was hunting mobs that were at the very edge of my abilities to take down, which usually required creature magic skill buffs to be able to do creature magic stat buffs to be able top do higher creature magic skill and stat buffs

or

B. I died 3+ times

I did have a few total meltdown sessions, some from pvp and some from pve, where I had to go way down and start from what felt like from scratch, but I deserved most of those.  Getting that far down was just usually a matter of having been very tired, playing too long, and getting frustrated.

If you were one of those guys who worked on AC1, thanks.  Great game.  I think its one biggest drawback was the buffing system.  But I don't think the original idea was for everyone to know and cast every spell, which Splitpea destroyed.  I loved Splitpea when it came out, because it saved me a lot of money, but I don't think most people realize how much it changed the game... for the worse.