A stupid idea I had a long, long time ago

[Stormwaltz]

The last time I worked on an MMG, I thought of a less-offensive way to offer permadeath as an option.

The normal way to play the game is with respawn. Character dies, you get a minor penalty (repairs, xp debt, whatever).

"Hardcore mode" has permadeath, but is balanced by two things:

• Increased kill XP (maybe +50%), to partially offset the expected attrition rate.
• A slightly higher level cap. Greater risk, greater reward.

Characters would have to be created as "hardcore" from the get-go. No switching back and forth as you progress through the game. The XP boost is kills-only because I expect there'd be risk-less quests in the game (Fed-Ex, arr-pee, contents).

Like everyone else, I have a pet MMG design on my hard drive. Is this worth including, or should I junk it?

[schild]

No switching back and forth as you progress through the game.

I don't know of any game that lets you switch. If here is one, they're not doing hardcore right.

XP debt is never a solution. It's a design cop out. Repairs (making death a money sink) is an adequate one.

[Salamok]

something else that might fit is no twinkage (aka no equipment trading at all) and increased diablo style loot frequency.  If you are leveling in less kills you need to equip somehow and running into super twinks would suck in a permadeath situation.

[Nebu]

You'd have to add a mechanic that discourages the farming of low greens.  Some players will go the perma-death route, but play it as safely as possible until they get to cap.   Perhaps after a certain level you can only gain xp from fighting white or higher con mobs.  That would keep the blood flowing.

[tazelbain]

I don't see how you can balance perma-death characters mingling with Immortals.  *cough* swg *coug* jedi *cough*

[DLRiley]

Permadeath = lame
Lame + anything = lame
Permadeath + elaborate xp system/level system = lame

Future food for thought, in general anything that is permanently gone = bad.

[schild]

Permadeath = lame
Lame + anything = lame
Permadeath + elaborate xp system/level system = lame

Future food for thought, in general anything that is permanently gone = bad.

For you.

I personally welcome hardcore modes in MMOGs once they actually get "playing requires" skill thing in check. Which may not happen for another 5 years.

[damijin]

As much as I'd like to see permadeath chars running around amongst the casuals in co-existence, here's the issue.

If the benefit of being permadeath enabled is a good risk/reward ratio. Lots of people will do it. If they do it for that reason (just trying to be as strong/advance as quickly as possible), and eventually die, they will quit when they lose everything.

If the benefit of being permadeath enabled is not a great risk/reward ratio, no one except a few loons will do it, and it will honestly have been a waste of time to include.

Permadeath/hardcore has to be segregated to it's own server, it's own special world of rules. It is an appealing idea to many people, the niche is not a myth. People would play it. But it can't coexist with non-hardcore in the same virtual space.

[DLRiley]

Permadeath = lame
Lame + anything = lame
Permadeath + elaborate xp system/level system = lame

Future food for thought, in general anything that is permanently gone = bad.

For you.

I personally welcome hardcore modes in MMOGs once they actually get "playing requires" skill thing in check. Which may not happen for another 5 years.

I would love a hardcore mode, you know mmo's to get harder and actually require thinking and less snoring, but I don't think permadeath is required to make people play with their brains on.

[schild]

You need to make sense of what you just wrote and how that is possibly a valid response to me considering what I quoted.

[pxib]

I largely agree with damijin. Any benefits and bragging rights have a hard time balancing out the high cost of failure... especially when failure can involve having a sudden power outage during a thunderstorm.

[Wasted]

Do you have an idea on an endgame if any?  Raiding and pvp just require too many deaths to make permadeath viable, unless instances/battlegrounds had special death penalties that affected both types of characters equally.

Having different parts of the world that have different death penalties could actually be an interesting way of giving players choice over the sort of risk/reward they want to engage in.

[Grimwell]

Re: power storms driving death

That point is always raised, because it's very valid. Nobody want's to get hosed for a random event they can't control that's external to the game. My 'fix' has been to counter with a "Nine Lives" approach. Nine deaths (or any other fixed number > 1) and you are done forever with that character. That allows for one or two stupid "I should not have pulled that." mistakes, a power outage or two, and a few other random moments. As the final death gets nearer, the intensity rises.

I did this as an experiment on EQII something like a year ago (manual deletion) and it worked fine. Other folks tried it too for fun. You don't have to wait for magical code to delete a character, so permadeath is easy to simulate after a fashion.

[ezrast]

Having different parts of the world that have different death penalties could actually be an interesting way of giving players choice over the sort of risk/reward they want to engage in.

Until the localized permadeath penalty becomes the ultimate cockblock for people who don't want to risk their characters just to see the endgame content.

[Fargull]

I like games that have branches, things to do in between the moments where you are aiming for X goal.  In Wow this is achieved though alts, as the leveling curve is not so steep as to discourage the addition.

I would not mind permadeath if it was one of those branches.  Perhaps have your main character setup as a minor noble, who can summon a number of retainers.  The retainers would be played in standard fashion, but suffer from permadeath.  Similar to pets to a degree, but are only played individually and not in cohesion with the main avatar.  They would provide an additional challenge and could rise in power.

I honestly don’t know why sporting events have not been actively incorporated into the mmorpg structure.  I would love the ability to ski or a throw the pumpkin competition in game.
The Holiday events in WOW come the closest so far…

[Stormwaltz]

So, due to massive crunching at work, I lost track of this.

For the purposes of my own project, I think I'll leave out permadeath characters in the same world. If it can't be done cheaply, I don't think it will attract enough players to pay for its own development (or its own server, if it came to that).

Grimwell made a good point about (essentially) lag death. I'm not sure X lives in Y interval is the best solution, but it's one I'll remember as a starting point.

[tazelbain]

I think first step of permdeath would be to create a finite lifespan of a character.  This would do two things: set up user expectations from the get go, and it would also reduce upside of perfect from infinity to a more manageable, concrete value.  So for the player it is not a question if you are going to die but what are going circumstances of your death.

[Soln]

when people were wondering in the early days of SWG about how to unlock Jedi (before it was even in) one theory was about death penalties.  It was hypothesized there was a hidden XP bar that filled up and was decremented by certain things, death being one of them.  It was an interesting (but wrong) play style that evolved for some players always being polite with emotes, training other players for free, and avoiding death no matter what.  Or equally being hardcore all the time by /deathblow'ing other players in duels, but again always avoding death.

Point is you don't need to re-start from zero or have a "perma" death penalty.  It might be sufficient to have bonuses that increase the longer you manage to avoid death.  An increase that is larger the closer you get before/leaving combat and the longer you've gone without ever dying.  Like the titles in LotRO, or more XP or DMG bonus or Heal bonus.

If you do pursue a perma death ideal as a hardcore 3-lives and then start again kind of design, check out what Jeff Freeman as Dundee wrote about some time ago about having "inheritance".  It was I think the idea that your player dies, but some portion of their inventory, wealth, and XP/Skills can be inherited by a new character.  So, you make it to lvl 60, die, and then restart with a fresh toon but at lvl 40 with some of their lvl 40 items and money.  Thought it was a good idea, and WoW started it in WotLK with certain gear that scales up and down with your level so highbies can donnate gear to lowbies easily.

[Wasted]

when people were wondering in the early days of SWG about how to unlock Jedi (before it was even in) one theory was about death penalties.  It was hypothesized there was a hidden XP bar that filled up and was decremented by certain things, death being one of them.  It was an interesting (but wrong) play style that evolved for some players always being polite with emotes, training other players for free, and avoiding death no matter what.  Or equally being hardcore all the time by /deathblow'ing other players in duels, but again always avoding death.

Simply having a public profile for each character which shows number of deaths should promote that sort of behaviour, among the sort of crowd that would like perma death anyways.  Each data point you make visible on a character ends up becoming a point of competition and/or status.

[Grimwell]

Grimwell made a good point about (essentially) lag death. I'm not sure X lives in Y interval is the best solution, but it's one I'll remember as a starting point.

If you use it, due to us both having corporate responsibilities, I'll accept my royalty payments in the form of alcohol and strippers at random trade shows?
 

[Famine]

Well there is that ever growing impact on the PVP communities you have to factor in here if you happen to go that route. There are such things as too much risk where player actions reflect the current systems. Everything you create has some type of impact on the player and when there is heavy loss. Like for example, you could reduce the quality of the overall PVP environment like increased ganking as opposed to honorable combat.

I think of myself as the hardcore PVP player when it comes to playing online games. I've always wanted things like this to work but I fear the impact and uncontrollable events is not worth the trade off in the long run.

[Tarami]

What about simply having one life per period of time?

During the newbie experience, you have unlimited lives and as you progress, the period after which you get a life back increases. At "cap" (or whatever might be the fully mature experience) it might be 1 death per 12-18 hours so you can still die once a day without worry. After that life has been spent, however, you're offically permadeath-flagged and will in fact die permanently if you die again within that specified period.

It's not super-neat but it's neater than having a pool of lives to pull from.

[ezrast]

Having permadeath and then having a way to make it be not really permadeath is self-defeating. Assuming that characters require any significant time investment, it will always be worth it to stop playing rather than risk losing your last life, once again turning the death penalty into a meaningless cockblock.

That's assuming your characters require a significant time investment to be meaningful. What if the experience bonus for hardcore characters was something like, oh, +5,000% ? That way you could hit cap in a day, and players could use it to screw around or try out different builds. Leveling a hardcore character this way may not be "meaningful" in the way people generally think of it but I could see players having fun with it, organizing all-hardcore raids and tournaments and whatnot.

Actually, if you designed around it from the ground up, a super-fast leveling permadeath MMO could be fun. I might have to start working on a new design file of my own...

[Stormwaltz]

What about simply having one life per period of time?

One life per level?

You get a bunch you can "bank" early in your career, but as time passes the risks increase.

[Wasted]

What about simply having one life per period of time?

One life per level?

You get a bunch you can "bank" early in your career, but as time passes the risks increase.

and pay 25c to continue

[Tarami]

One life per level?

You get a bunch you can "bank" early in your career, but as time passes the risks increase.

No, not one per level. That would let some people have too many at the "endgame" and put too much stress on not dying during levelling. Atleast that's not what I meant. A "grace life", if you will, that take longer and longer to get back.

An example. I'll just talk about as if it were a run-of-the-mill diku.

At level 10 you might be allowed to die every other hour without dying permanently. So if you die at level 10, it's a-okay the first time. But if you die again within two hours, you DO die permanently. So if you want to continue playing after dying once, you go back to doing low-risk content until you get your "grace life" back. Then you can go try that thing you were doing again, again without risking permanent death. Ergo, you only die permanently if you die twice in a defined period of time.

This also gives that if you want to make content that has varying rates of death, you could slide this grace window back and forth. In PvP, you might want to reduce it to just a couple of minutes while for hardcore dungeoneering you might bump it to multiple days. It means everyone can try content but the daring can press their luck by keeping at it beyond their grace life.

[Slyfeind]

What about simply having one life per period of time?

One life per level?

You get a bunch you can "bank" early in your career, but as time passes the risks increase.

and pay 25c to continue

Best RMT idea ever!

[Grimwell]

At level 10 you might be allowed to die every other hour without dying permanently. So if you die at level 10, it's a-okay the first time. But if you die again within two hours, you DO die permanently.

Flaw: Once people are aware of a death level per hour range, if they approach it for the hour they will just quit and go play another game to avoid the death. They won't farm weak content, they will declare it frustration and quit.

LCD behavior. Don't just assume it, expect it.

[schild]

The problem with permadeath is there's nothing to figure out.

You either have it as an OPTION or you don't. That's pretty much it. It takes a very specific player mentality to enjoy hardcore mode. And even then, MMOGs are a horrible place for it unless it's of the Diablo brand (Mythos, Diablo, Fate, Hellgate, etc) or the only deaths possible are as a direct result of player action (i.e. I wouldn't mind having a hardcore option in Demon's Souls). And since there are basically no MMOGs at the moment that fit either model, hardcore mode simply doesn't have a place to exist and be reasonable.

Also, offering any sort of life amnesty is the exact opposite point of hardcore mode. So don't go there.

[carnifex27]

At level 10 you might be allowed to die every other hour without dying permanently. So if you die at level 10, it's a-okay the first time. But if you die again within two hours, you DO die permanently.

Flaw: Once people are aware of a death level per hour range, if they approach it for the hour they will just quit and go play another game to avoid the death. They won't farm weak content, they will declare it frustration and quit.

LCD behavior. Don't just assume it, expect it.

Fix:  You get +50% xp for playing a hardcore character.  You get +200% xp for the hour you're on your last life.  It would be rewarding enough more would farm lower level content and the people who wanted real permadeath could go jump off a cliff every hour for the extra xp.

[pxib]

The player, given a choice between hating himself for taking risks and hating the game for killing him will often choose to hate the game.

[Tarami]

I don't really think permadeath is a good idea in general. I don't think it's unsolvable overall but I do think it's unsolvable for our current brand of MMOs.  I'm just here to shoot some ideas and waste your time.

[ezrast]

What Schild said. The people playing permadeath characters have to be doing so because they want permadeath, not because they want more XP. In fact I'm pretty sure you'd be better off giving hardcore characters a 50% xp penalty rather than a 50% xp bonus, just to further discourage all but the most masochistic from playing them.

This might flatly contradict what I said in my last post; I'm not sure.

[Typhon]

Give people a reason to play hardcore other than just the challenge.  Have the hardcore player character mean something to the player account (call it karma, fate, wierd, whatever).  Players can use the amount of 'wierd' they've accumulated to give their characters enhanced abilities.

The whole concept I have is split between an over-world, where are the permanent characters exist (probably this world focuses on PvE and sport PvP).

Addiotnally, pocket universes come into existence (based upon user population) that contain only hardcore characters (focusing mostly on world PvP).  The really meaningful battles occur in the pocket worlds.  Death is permanent.  When one side has won, the world is 'absorbed' into the victors world (read: the world is wiped, making way for a new world. Victors get more wierd and trophies for their houses.  Possibly those victor characters ascend to the overworld).

Reverse feedback: current winners can't take as much wierd into hardcore worlds (and are therefore at an initial disadvantage).

All different sorts of hardcore worlds spawn, including some that allow no wierd to be brought in (thus giving newcomers a place to do battle against equally equiped newcomers, or people who like facing off with newbie-like characters).  Initial thought is that there would be worlds types that exists for a week, month, three months.

[Goreschach]

Give people a reason to play hardcore other than just the challenge.

The entire point of playing hardcore is challenge. Challenge and bragging rights.