Death Penalty

[Rentahamster]

WOW thats 51 pages. Will read.

Yeah. There were a lot of good points made.

I think I came up with a fairly good compromise between reward/punishment.

Upon some more reflection, I agree that rewarding people with the "staying alive" bonus for being AFK or just for not playing in a while is a bad idea. My initial outline was also a tad too complex. It could use some simplifying.

As far as it being too easy to die and being really hard to achieve the "still alive" buff, that's sort of what I was going for. I wanted to make it relatively rare to have, so that you don't see everyone and their mother running around with the buff active. I also wanted the buff to not be that strong, so that it's not so bad when you lose it, but I still wanted the player to feel the sting of the loss of all that invested time.

I've rethought my idea and think that a hybrid of mine(http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ll=1#post21748) and Stilla's (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/2097-An-open-discsusion-on-the-consequences-of-death?p=21796#post21796)idea would be interesting.

New Take on Death Penalty:

All SP that you gain as a battle class also contributes to fill up a separate rank up bar that has 5 tiers: rank 1 - 5.

Each rank takes 20,000 SP to reach, so to reach Rank 5, you'd need to accumulate 100,000 SP as any combination of battle classes without dying.

There are six bonus buffs that you can choose from: +5% atk, +5% def, +5% m.atk, +5% m.def, +5% eva, +5% acc, -10%MP cost, +10%TP gain, +2%SP gain

At Rank 4, you can choose one. At Rank 5, you can choose two, and you also get some sort of visual enhancement to your character to indicate your lack of dying. You can change your buffs around at anytime, but there is a 30 min cooldown.

If you die:
You lose 2 ranks
You lose 3 anima
You are inflicted with Weakness

If you die and get Raised:
You lose 1 rank
You are inflicted with Weakness

Again, I want the number of Rank 5 status people to be rare, and to actually be an indicator of skill, because it's hard to earn, and takes the same amount of effort to reach as going from class rank 49 to 50. That way, losing your rank 5 status is also a bit of a sting.

I also realize that some classes like tanks and mages are going to be more susceptible to death than other classes, but hey, those are the inherent risks that come with those classes, so you just grin and bear it.

I fleshed out a few more ideas about this on my blog.
http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...entry?e=155429

Some additional points:

Here's a quick summary of what I'm trying to achieve here - I want a system that rewards players (but not too much) for staying alive, rather than punishes players for dying. I believe that the bias should be towards positive reinforcement as that makes for a more enjoyable gameplay experience. I believe that the method below gives hardcore players (who usually want a death penalty) a reason to care more about not dying, mainly by stroking their egos, while also having death have a real impact on time invested. At the same time, casual players can continue going along throwing themselves at whatever enemy they want no differently than they do now (almost).


Let me put the anima loss into further context. I had envisioned this change along with other changes to the game so that anima wouldn't be such a scarce resource as it is now.

What I wanted to do was to punish the player for dying only a little, and taking away SP is out of the question. That would be too harsh, so the next best thing would be anima.

Now, about my other changes to the anima system so that this would not be as terrible as some have suggested:

I would have all returns done while still alive cost 0 anima. Yoshi-P mentioned that he wants a solution to death porting, so this would be the easiest way.

Also, I would expand the number of favorite locations to 5. Perhaps make a quest that grants you more favorite locations, or something.

Reduce the anima cost of a teleport into a different region from 6 to 5.

Implement other modes of transportation like Chocobos and airships.

This way, the loss of anima still stings a little, but it's not really that bad. It's also not as soul-crushing as losing SP and ranking down.