A Little Pain with my Pleasure

[EinSoFZ]

Great job assuming you will be able to steel cyclone you 40k exp in 20 mins. /clap

Why would you need 40k? Ever.

[Altena]

Consider this situation (and it will happen a lot)

You run into the first room to kill the trash mobs. You kill half of them, party wipes
You run back into the same room, kill the other half, party wipes.
Run into the 2nd room etc etc

You get to the boss, get it to 50%. Party wipes
You run back to the boss, he is at 75%, you get him to 25%. Party wipes
Run back in, he is at 50%, you kill him.

repeat...

This is by no means a successful run. Sure you beat the boss, and got the rewards but that is by no means efficient.

The more times you fail the faster you learn. The more times you succeed, the faster you perfect. I would love to see a linkshell complete a 17min AV/CC run the first time they ran through it. It doesn't happen unless you speed up/perfect every aspect of the run.

[Pseudopsia]

I know real life limits some people, but it also doesn't limit others. I know plenty of players who have all day to play. Dungeon bosses (I hate the "raid" term) can indeed be killed with enough bodies thrown at them. Get back there before they reset / regen HP and you have less of the boss to kill. Doing this repeatedly, will get the boss down over time and be the cause of some pretty unconventional wins. I don't expect the EXP loss to be implemented, in fact I am almost certain it won't see the light of day, however I do truly hope there is some form of failsafe to stop people from repeatedly skipping over the core part of a dungeon. While it might be annoying or frustrating to repeat the dungeon, that just gives you more reason to be successful when you get to the boss. Sure there are those learning phases where you will wipe repeatedly, but I would hope that the dungeons are fun enough to want to repeat the core, not just spam the last fight.

I am going to assume you played a lot of WoW and I did not. 2 hours however is an extremely long time to beat a boss. Especially once a strategy becomes apparent. To be honest I think the removal of time limits in dungeons was the worst idea they could have made. You will have people leaving their computer running in the zone just so they can skip over the core parts of the dungeon, and coming back the day after to continue where they left off. Uncapping anything can be dangerous, and I am sure that if there aren't any form of penalty on death, time restriction, respawn, or any fail safe to stop this from happening then you will have a lot of people cheaping out on actually playing the content.

A game isn't all about the reward, it's the path that you took to get there.

Yes I did play about 5 years of WoW, after FFXI, till then end of Lich King expansion. I was in a raiding guild that got up to the second last boss on heroic. Bosses would reset completely and the room is locked till the raid wipes. So there was no throwing bodies at a boss constantly to beat it. I played GW2 and you could keep the boss engaged to beat them dying continuously, GW2 dungeons were done poorly. Depends how SE implements boss resets. If they lock the room like WoW there is no way to throw bodies at a boss to win.

If ARR raids are anything similar to WoW then it's going to extremely bad to have players deleveling. Getting all 24 people to buffer exp before raid will be nearly impossible.

[Altena]

Yes I did play about 5 years of WoW, after FFXI, till then end of Lich King expansion. I was in a raiding guild that got up to the second last boss on heroic. Bosses would reset completely and the room is locked till the raid wipes. So there was no throwing bodies at a boss constantly to beat it. I played GW2 and you could keep the boss engaged to beat them dying continuously, GW2 dungeons were done poorly. Depends how SE implements boss resets. If they lock the room like WoW there is no way to throw bodies at a boss to win.

If ARR raids are anything similar to WoW then it's going to extremely bad to have players deleveling. Getting all 24 people to buffer exp before raid will be nearly impossible.

As I said, I am fine with it if there is some form of fail safe to prevent throwing dead bodies at stuff to get the job done.. I am not going to have a cry if they never introduce EXP loss, but some form of penalty for repeated deaths should be present. If you played XI during the abyssea era, then you would know how bad zombie killing mobs got. You could practically solo anything in the zone if you had the time / patience, just by throwing yourself at it until it died.

The alternative to still introduce EXP loss on death would be to disable dlvl'ing in an instance (I think I mentioned this) but allow it in the field. In other words, cap EXP loss to 1/xxxxx EXP, but if you died in the field it would force a dlvl. This could roll over to either primals or dungeons and wouldn't really set the party back.

Anything to stop this endless catapulting of dead bodies at something. At least a discouragement.

[Pseudopsia]

I agree /10chars

[Hulan]

The River Styx or The Sanzu River

An Examination of the Death Penalty

I'd like to take a moment from our regularly scheduled bickering and take this chance to really dig down into what the death penalty means, what purpose it should be serving, and humbly present an alternative.

I believe, differences of opinion aside, that we all agree that fundumentally the Death Penalty serves the purpose of incentivising good play. Though, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it punishes poor play. It gives us a reason not to continually throw ourselves into the maw of the unknown, be it wilderness or beast. This serves an important roll in retaining players. Continually dying, even if it is the most efficient way to accomplish a task, is disheartening and will lead to people feeling negatively about the experience.

Meanwhile, enforcing a harsh, overly burdensome Death Penalty will paint a - potentially untrue - picture of the game as a Hardcore game only for those who are addicted to addrenaline. So we are stuck finding a balance; we need a penalty harsh enough encourage players to think before throwing themselves at content far too hard for them, but not so hard that it will scare people away. To solve the dilemma, we have to look at what costs Death Penalties can take.



What's It Cost

Historically, Death Penalties are seen as costing some subset of the following three things.

• Experiance
• Money (in the form of currency or gear)
• Time

Typically, the first two are percieved as the primary punishment inflicted by a death penalty. But that isn't really true. Fundumentally, what is the most valuable commodity that a MMO player has? Time. Time is what makes the MMO world go round. Everything can be broken down into units of time. Even currency can be said to be legal tender for time in an MMO.

World of Warcraft actually played with this idea in their Death Penalty; requiring dead players to run across the world to find their corpse in order to resurrect where they died. I would argue that they had a good idea here, but a terrible implementation.



Death Penalty As Play

I would like to present the following claim: that suffering from a death penalty can be fun, and a punishment at the same time. The goal of a player is to finish content as fast as possible. The worst Death Penalty, therefore, is one that takes time away from the player's goal. Rather than incurring a loss at some later date - such as exp loss, or gear damage - another solution is to force the player to achieve some goal he/she would otherwise not have to undertake while staying in the context of gameplay.



The Afterlife

Thus we reach the title of this post and my own suggestion on the matter. I would propose a zone, called the Sanzu River or the River Styx, which all dead players go until they have completed a challange or are resurrected via a spell (like Raise). These challanges would be relatively simple, and there would be a number of them to allow for different classes.

The zone would be filled with Einherjar and Demons (yes I know I'm mixing my mythologies, deal with it), locked in purpetual, intractable combat. Players could open the door to their body by assisting to kill a number of Demons, or by saving (healing or raising) a number of Einherjar.

This "punishes" the player by forcing them to do something they otherwise would not be doing, for no reward other than escaping the zone. Meanwhile it does not interrupt the flow of play. This being the primary failing of almost all Death Penalties, they force the player to step outside of the normal flow of gameplay in order to pay the cost. Similarly, because the cost is a defered cost (in the form of partying later for exp or paying to get gear repaired), there is less of a causal link between dying and paying a cost for that death.

[fusional]

so, ignoring the mads and needless unproductive counter-flailing (wherein people who exist in alternate realities spew irrational drivel about how giving the community something which they actively use is the opposite of "contributing", which amusingly seems to suggest the direct opposite of the actual definition of 'contribution'... and/or try to suggest that because they haven't read a strategy about content they've never dipped a single toe in means somehow that the strategy was never released or is somehow rendered irrelevant as a direct result of their own wanton ignorance)...

(Sorry if its been said already, 12 pages of bickering is a lot to go through)

What would the possibility of having a set of servers listed as "Hardcore" it would need to have

- No exp rewards for quests
- Exp loss on death, even de-level
- Animation lock

That should make the "hardcore" crowd happy? Right? If not please add in whatever other features for a "hardcore" version you would need to be satisfied.

no but it's funny because the people crying for 'hardcore' penalties are largely people who are the furthest thing from 'hardcore' players. cognitive dissonance is awesome.

If it's possible to get any class to maximum level in less than a month, no xp loss at death could be big enough. IMHO.

i rest my case.

[Hulan]

I don't honestly expect SE to include anything like my above post. But I wanted to illustrate a point. That being that MMO developers shouldn't be arguing about which is better, old or new methods, but rather searching for better, and more entertaining ways to encourage players to play their games the "right" way.

[ZakarnRosewood]

Apparently I stepped in where I shouldn't have an offended a few people. I did have the word "hardcore" in quotations as this might not have been the best word for what I was trying to suggest. I see that this is a heated debate. I dont have a problem with the exp loss as long as there is no de-leveling, just my opinion though. As for the other things i suggested for a separate server system, i took those ideas out of other posts i have seen, not necessarily something discussed only in this thread.

Personally, i cant wait until beta starts so people can start playing and see what its like instead of letting their imaginations run wild and cause such heated debates. Again, I apologize for getting involved in this thread.

[fusional]

Apparently I stepped in where I shouldn't have an offended a few people. I did have the word "hardcore" in quotations as this might not have been the best word for what I was trying to suggest. I see that this is a heated debate. I dont have a problem with the exp loss as long as there is no de-leveling, just my opinion though. As for the other things i suggested for a separate server system, i took those ideas out of other posts i have seen, not necessarily something discussed only in this thread.

Personally, i cant wait until beta starts so people can start playing and see what its like instead of letting their imaginations run wild and cause such heated debates. Again, I apologize for getting involved in this thread.

if anyone's offended, that's silly. there's no reason to apologize for participating. and while i can't speak for others, my own comments weren't aimed in direct response to you- moreso you said something that i felt sort of underscored what i've been talking about all along with this undercurrent of more casual players asking for harsher penalties

(which really makes no sense)

but, yes, people absolutely are letting their imaginations run a little too wild in the downtime before beta and i'd love for some threads with structured, constructive criticism about things that actually are in the game and actually do need to be improved before release.

i for one don't understand the endless dredging and redreding up of long-dead topics that can't possibly go anywhere