
Originally Posted by
DarthTaru
Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right for a moment and say that a death penalty doesn't make one any better at the game. If that were so, why even bother having to home point? After all, "what a waste of time having to run all the way back." And if that were the case, would players, then, also not be improving at the game? How about having automatic reraise on everyone at all times? Would the community reach the same skill level in years to come? If death was merely a five second delay in whatever it was that we were doing? Why even take damage from mob attacks?
Obviously, the death penalty made players much more skilled and much more efficient in whatever it was they were trying to do. In XI my main was BLM and I spent the majority of my best years in that game soloing, duoing, and trioing difficult challenges using skills that I learned (and continued to learn!) out of necessity to avoid death. There is no way, as I see it, that I would of been soloing limbus or Brothers in an environment that did not punish me for making mistakes. Even simple lessons that now seem fundamental, obvious even, were learned with my survival at the forefront of my thinking.
If two identical men on identical lots of land were told to hunt but one was brought food every day and one was threatened with starvation, which would you guess would have become the superior hunter?
No penalty for death just results in a lazy and stupid playerbase, period. You can say that the death penalty did not make NM's more difficult and in some ways that might be correct. When I had Tiamat claimed, I was not necessarily concerned with XP loss and more concerned with looking like a motard in front of a rival linkshell and/or losing claim to another. However, the skills that brought me to Tiamat to begin with were learned much earlier, and learned because there was something on the line.