Hi, I used to think that a large death penalty was good game design for MMO but now I dont. After all a death penalty isnt FUN and therefore shouldnt be part of the game design. I do however feel that some kind of alteration must occur if you die otherwise you wont care if you die. Some things that could happen when you die: 1) Your body errodes, when you die enough times you are completely erroded and are now a skeleton for a few lives, if you dont die for a while you are restored gradually. Your skills and abilities will be a reflection of your fleshy self - skeleton archer/knight (skeleton horse). There are skeleton only quests and bonus xp for pking. 2) Bitten X times by a vampire? Become a vampire for a few lives. 3) Ghost, Zombie, WearWolf and whatever else you can think of. These alterations would open up interesting content which will be challenging beause you only have a few lives as that creature. If you died alot in pvp you would be put out of commision for a bit which only seams fair. 4) Your long lost brother shows up on the scene and you now control him. You can make small alterations to his appearance and tinker with his stats which will be a variation on your character. 5) You control your son/daughter who inherits all your gear with the "Saints Gear" buff but you loose a level. Some may still consider these things a death penalty but imo they are a gameplay twist. What do you think?

You're missing the most obvious way around it - adjust the gameplay so that death isn't on the line; players just aren't in a position where they are likely to die.

For example: you could follow the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh type path and have your players wander the world collecting and battling with pets, cards or some other device.

Edit: or are you more interested in what the player loses when they lose a battle? I don't think it need be too severe. If you the contest route, you could make it near anything; lose some money, lose a playing piece/card/whatever, etc.

What I dislike the most when it comes to punishments for dying in online games is that not all deaths comes from something the player can influence such as lag or disconnects.

As an example of this you can imagine the player grinding some mobs for one reason or the other. In comparison the player may be much more powerful than one of these mobs and can kill them easily enough but if the player disconnects in the middle of the battle he might get killed anyway just because his character isn't fighting back.

So as I see it there should definitely be some disincentive to dying but nothing too severe. What it is depends on the game and what there is to be lost etc.

When someone sits down to play a game, they want to play it. Putting obstacles in front of them that prevent them from playing the game does not improve their play experience.

In Everquest, when your character died, you had sometimes a very long run back, naked. Sometimes this was nearly impossible and you might lose hours of real time begging others for help. This frustrates the player and bothers others. In addition, you lost experience, which was even more time lost.

One of the reasons that World of Warcraft, a direct inheritor of EQ, is so successful is that they have dispensed with the severity of the penalty while retaining some of it. That is, you must still run back, but you are no longer forced to do so in a vulnerable position and you do not suffer losses beyond a minor in game monetary expense (less of a time penalty than experience loss).

To me, this suggests that people prefer lesser penalties. In addition to the problems mentioned above about character death from technical problems, one of the most aggravating forms of character death is mistakes of other players. The primary feature of an MMO is being online simultaneously with others, so designers naturally try to enforce that feature on gameplay by requiring you to be with others (role definition, frex). But as the saying goes "Hell is other people." - in any group, are there more people you'll want to spend time with or more people you'd rather not? Still, this is a core feature of the genre.

Perhaps another way to re-interpret the death penalty in MMORPG games then would be to make death less painful in situations where you work together. This follows the guideline of reducing death penalties without eliminating them and encourages cooperative play passively. To put it in WoW terms, perhaps dying in a full group gives no repair penalty to equipment, for example.

The only resource you have with an MMO to date is time. You can only penalize the player by taking away time spent by them or making them pay a time debt. You could try making the player spend money (not the character, the player) to recover their losses, but I think that might be met with some resistance by players.

I'll keep this short, but as one who tends towards hardcore games and gaming styles, I'd say that games without death penalties are less fun than games with extreme death penalties. I measure fun by difficulty and what I've overcome. If I have overcome nothing, or rather I have only overcome that which I was guaranteed to overcome, I find no interest whatsoever. Defeating a monster that can deprive you of everything you've ever done is far more rewarding to me than defeating that same monster if it cannot deprive me of anything but a few minutes of gameplay.

WoW is a joke in my eyes, EvE is fantastic.

The point I'm making is that your initial premise is faulty - death penalties are fun for certain audiences. Keep your audience in mind when making this kind of decision. If I got a cookie for dying in Eve, rather than loosing all my gear, I'd go play something else. Immediately.

EVE has a population of 150k to 300k. WoW has a population of 9M to 11M. It seems pretty clear that the WoW model is more appealing than EVE. And a part of that model is ease of game play (which includes death penalties).

When a person sits down to play a game, they want to engage in the main action of that game. For a fantasy adventure game, that is fighting monsters (or other players) for magical treasures. If you put something in the way of that experience, you will alienate people who play that game. For example, if I have to fill out a form every time I want to kill monsters, I will quickly decide it is not fun. And death penalties do just that; prevent you from playing the game.

The art of the penalty in these games is to provide something annoying without being too annoying. WoW has clearly hit a better balance in this regard as far as reception in the marketplace is concerned.

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Original post by Telluric EVE has a population of 150k to 300k. WoW has a population of 9M to 11M. It seems pretty clear that the WoW model is more appealing than EVE. And a part of that model is ease of game play (which includes death penalties).

You totally missed my point. Of course WoW is more appealing to a casual audience. And, it's true that the casual audience is much larger than the hardcore audience. WoW has, however, very few hardcore players and is considered something of a joke in other games. "Go play WoW you carebear" does not suggest a universal appeal.

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death penalties do just that; prevent you from playing the game.

You've overlooked something here. Not all gamers play just to receive treasure - I certainly don't feel any reward for having getting tossed a cookie that's exactly the same as everyone else's. Casual games are typically about simple rewards such as this. Hardcore games usually focus on something else, something that often requires a death penalty for it to have any meaning. The existence of the death penalty makes it worth playing, quite the opposite of what you're suggesting.

I mention hardcore and casual/softcore games so frequently because of an issue that's quite prevalent in game design (namely these forums) but often gets totally ignored. A lot of people come up with a premise that is far more suited to and could only be made to work by hardcore players, but then layer on a lot of softcore things that would chase those same players away. That, and the fact that audience analysis is what's most important, not appealing to the most people. The odds of an independent developer "killing" WoW (or any other major game) are very, very slim. Making a game that targets the same, broad audience but does not deliver as well (how could it, if you are competing with a multi-million dollar design team?) doesn't make sense. You wont get those millions of players suddenly diving into your game, when they can have WoW just as easily.

Instead, game designers should target a specific audience and give them something that other games don't or can't. Make the perfect game for a specific audience, and you will have a loyal, dedicated fanbase who aren't likely to abandon you for the next trinket that comes along. Target a broad audience with gimmicks and cookies, and you will have a lot of content WoW players... playing WoW.

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The art of the penalty in these games is to provide something annoying without being too annoying. WoW has clearly hit a better balance in this regard as far as reception in the marketplace is concerned.

WoW targeted the casual audience. EvE targeted a hardcore niche audience. I'd say that EvE has attracted a larger percent of it's target audience than WoW has, to be honest. The numbers only seem skewed the other way because there are more casual players than hardcore wones.

In my game, which has an audience of 0% of WoW or Eve, I don't let the player die. It was a design decision that has yet to play out (so to speak).

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Original post by Zouflain I'll keep this short, but as one who tends towards hardcore games and gaming styles, I'd say that games without death penalties are less fun than games with extreme death penalties. I measure fun by difficulty and what I've overcome. If I have overcome nothing, or rather I have only overcome that which I was guaranteed to overcome, I find no interest whatsoever. Defeating a monster that can deprive you of everything you've ever done is far more rewarding to me than defeating that same monster if it cannot deprive me of anything but a few minutes of gameplay. WoW is a joke in my eyes, EvE is fantastic. The point I'm making is that your initial premise is faulty - death penalties are fun for certain audiences. Keep your audience in mind when making this kind of decision. If I got a cookie for dying in Eve, rather than loosing all my gear, I'd go play something else. Immediately.

I remember in UO that having to get back to recover your stuff (after racing to get to a 'healer' to be reconstituted (resurrected)) often became an adventure in itself. It was interesting and involving -- added to the game where players often had little enough after a while to keep them from dying of boredom.

Losing your stuff gave a reason to maintain spare equiptment and gave the crafters a real reason to exist. The possibility of loss also kept people from only using their best (hardest to get or most $$$) equiptment all the time.
That presented the ongoing problem of what to equip (again giving the players something to ponder).


When death has a real penalty, then the players are forced to moderate their actions and seek alternatives instead of the chronic 'who cares if I die'
attitude that causes players to more quickly get bored and quit.

You've probably put it in a better way than I did, but that's almost exactly what I meant. And a lot of game designers don't take the consumption (or lack of consumption) of resources into consideration. So many games want crafting systems for instance, but because everyone who wants something can get it and keep it indefinitely, there really isn't a point to being a crafter. It's "WTS>Sword of Ubber Rare" "No thx already have".