Quote Originally Posted by Xzen
Death penalties have not encouraged players to get better in the past and it wont do it here either.

Failing an encounter and not making progress is punishment enough for most people and forces them to learn or never complete it.
Ohhhhh I strongly beg to differ.

In my time playing XI, I hardly *ever* saw people playing caressly or not trying to improve their strategies or tactics to succeed at something.

Of course, this is also before having Power-levelers in a "standard party setup" became the norm and players actually worked through things themselves without any outside help to keep them alive... I suppose that could have changed things. I know at some point, the mindset changed from being "okay, we wiped... let's change our tactics" to being "okay, we wiped, let's get a PL", and further to "the Dunes is impossible without a PL". A PL allowed players to play carelessly and make mistakes that would have certainly wiped them were a PL not there. PLs were one of the worst things to happen in FFXI.

Prior to that, though, if a groupI was in died due to a poor strategy or bad decisions,, changes were made to correct it. If one player consistently kept screwing up or being careless, they were told to knock it off or be kicked because they were screwing it up for everyone else. In most cases, they stopped screwing around.

Your last statement often comes up and sounds wonderful in theory... In reality, though, the only people I've seen consider wiping as "punishment enough in itself" are the serious raiders and those who pride themselves on being able to take things down without wiping, etc. Aside from that, more times than not - in MMOs with no real penalty for dying (and I've played myriad of them) - people simply don't care if they die because they know there's nothing more to deal with than a negligible repair fee and maybe a few minutes of running time. Hell, in some of them people will die on purpose to get around faster; they call it "graveyard hopping" among other things in WoW.

Again... that should never happen. With a meaningful death penalty where something is actually at risk... it would happen *a lot* less.