XP changes, death matters?

Discussion in 'Feedback Archive' started by Jesper Daelin, Feb 4, 2020.

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  1. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    This is an exact reflection of how I feel.
     
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  2. Antrax Artek

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    We lost death penalty even in PVP, i think PVE one will never be reintroduced.
    But i still have hope for the PVP one, ransoms, points, honor, faction points, karma, anything but something needs to be added.
     
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  3. Spungwa

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    For PvP I think the Archeage (old one not played unchained) had the best option.
    There where schedule PvP events, winning side got twice the reward the losing side did. So everyone gained for participation, but the winners got more. With this kind of mechanic everyone is happy.
    Note i'm an ex Eve player (13 years) so i'm used to loss, but in a game like this, I think the above is a better way to go.


    Regards
    Spung
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2020
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  4. Gadfrey Zukes

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    I vote for death consequences.

    My favourite game experience was dying in UO and having to run back to town, get resurrected , go to a bank to get my 2nd best gear on, then run back to my corpse and frantically try to re-aquire my good gear while dodging the monsters that took me out in the first place.

    I know it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. The adrenaline and struggle made everything more visceral. No game since has given me that drive to survive - and the feeling of reward when you barely survived an encounter - or even when you didn’t, but still managed to recover most of your stuff in time.

    Bring that kind of death to sota please!
     
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  5. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Please don't !
     
  6. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    If death must have meaning for some of you, just make it something OTHER than xp's.
    Until you feel the sting of losing 1mill xp's on death, and then more on the next death.... until you don't want to take any chances on dying, which means you don't ever "test yourself" and grow... until then, don't assume to speak for anyone but your non-combat self........
    If a penalty for death is necessary for a few of you (and you are the few), then make it something that hurts YOU.
    I suspect that those calling for a return to a xp death penalty didn't lose a mill on a single death.... Gimme a break.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2020
  7. Andartianna

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    If you want death taxes go inflicted them on yourself. Leave the rest of us out of your S & M fantasies. It was a bad thing before and still is a bad thing now. Leave PVP alone it's been great with no ransoms I have been pvping a ton more.
     
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  8. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Amen, Andar.... AMEN
     
  9. Lazlo

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    There is still a little bit of penalty when you die. You lose some time and take gear damage. It's not a big deal, but it's not nothing, and it's enough that I don't like dying and try to avoid it.

    Can't say big death penalties ever gave me some sort of adrenaline rush or whatever. Doing long corpse runs to avoid losing massive amounts of progress back in the day in old MMOs mostly just sucked, which is why they eventually evolved away from that.

    SotA is also one of the easiest games ever to progress without even risking death in the first place. How many things in the game can you not just run away from, and what can you get from dangerous places that you can't get from curb stomping trivial content all day? There are a lot bigger risk vs. reward issues than this...
     
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  10. Anpu

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    What is the specific purpose to implement a death penalty?
     
  11. Numa

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    Basically for nostalgia to a time when multiplayer online games were in ASCII, a 56Kbps modem connection and death penalties were harsh.

    It's a setup for adrenaline junkies which most people aren't nowadays.

    Not a good match for todays F2P games - try to imagine Fortnite with a death penalty. It really won't work.
     
  12. Lars vonDrachental

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    Sorry for using your post but this was an often used wording against decay that was out of my perspective totally exaggerated. The first death was the most expensive one but you needed to be between adventure lvl 70 and 80 to “lose” more than the for this purpose implemented daily 10k exp login bonus on dying. This way everyone still bound to the main quest did not have to care about decay.
    Every following death was...I think the half of the prior one and this reduction was reset after one or two days. This way as a more advanced avatar your first death maybe would have cost 100k exp and the summary of the following 100 deaths on the same day would have been another 100k exp. Of course if you were beyond lvl 80 and highly specialized your death expenses raised but as far as I remember even for high lvl avatars this was just in the hundreds of thousands for the first death and this way you lost maybe 1 or 2 hours.
    Just if you would have played once a month for just some hours with a high lvl avatar the statement of losing a months playtime would have been true.
    But just as you said the feeling to lose playtime (or the constant discussion about it) reduced the number of playing avatars and most of the remaining ones did nothing dangerous. I guess it would be not different today and this way I would say the loss of exp is nothing to implement in SotA anymore.

    I'm surprised...as this suggestion is basically the same mechanic as the old decay just in reverse. Instead of losing exp you already got you would not get experience until your dept is cleared...but all in all you would still "lose" the same amount of exp...or do I misunderstood your suggestion?

    I would say not a bad but a more realistic game design. But it is generally ok if the majority do not like that much realism...just as I wouldn’t like it if I had to find from time to time a place to poop ingame…even if we already have the needed decorations in SotA. ;)

    @Topic
    I would say the risk vs reward concept is following the idea that it is good to have barriers you have to overcome and that every enemy should be always a challenge. Of course this way it is possible that you maybe never overcome a set barrier either because of your fear or personal skill and for those the game has to offer other ways to play like quests with meaning but at lower risks (you don’t try to kill a dragon and instead free a kidnapped maid from bandits), crafting or entertaining (both to at least partly support the ones who risk their virtual life’s).
    (Oh and just to mention it the risk has not always to be the danger as in some situation also the time could be the risk. E.g. taking the quest with the maid it could be the goal to free her as fast as possible as else you risk that she is injured or could be already sold as sacrificial to some occultists...and maybe this way creating a new sub-quest to also fight the more dangerous occultists. But you will just know if you are in time if you reach the end of the quests as the "timer" and the result is not visible.)
    While the reward concept is quite the opposite. There you can achieve everything and all you need is just time to get enough exp. At some point you are simply strong enough to challenge even the strongest enemies without even thinking about it. This is opening all content for everyone even if it takes some years to reach the needed lvl but making the content also…well more boring…if the lich killed you or you killed the lich is not really important at some point.

    Aside of losing exp there where a lot of suggestions made during the development that could be used as result of a death e.g. you could get injured. A sprained arm might heal within 1 h but reduce your strength by 20%. If you keep on fighting your arm might even break and needs 1 day of healing and is reducing your strength by 45% (both arms broken = 90% reduction). To cure you need either a craftable potion, have to visit an NPC healer in settlements and pay some gold or have to wait...maybe lying on your own bed might reduce the needed cure time.
    The chance to get an injury might be based on the overhead damage of your death blow. E.g. you have 100 hp left and a strike of 130 damage is killing you. 130 – 100 = 30hp overhead damage = 3 % to get a random injury and if the chance to get injured is above 100% you might get more than one injury. In a later step those injuries might be even visible with wounds attached to your avatars body and by adjusted avatar movements (e.g. hobble).
    (Oh...and just as reminder: All numbers are just examples!)
     
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  13. Adam Crow

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    No it was well over a million in the original setup for the highest level players. (Xp rate was half of what it is now and we were capped at 1 mil for a long period of time while this went on). Originally everything below 99 was in a certain group and your death tax was the same, then if i recall correctly the penalty formula doubled at 100 and then doubled again for skills above 120.

    The specialization thing was added much later and only cut the penalties in half for your 2 specializations. When that change went in, they also made it so you only lost half of your penalty on first death. And then half of that on the next and so on.

    So originally it was extremely punishing for anyone with skills above 100. I was losing around 500k and I wasn't even close to the top level players at the time. I had most of my skills at 99. It sucked pretty bad and if your xp pool was empty when you died a bunch of your skills would actually go down. It had nothing to do with being realistic, it was just a horribly punishing and frustrating setup.
     
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  14. kaeshiva

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    Under the old decay system, it was entirely possible to log on, play for a few hours, and be worse off than when you started. You made better net progress by not even logging on. That was my essential problem with the system - I've never felt that death should be pointless, nor trivial (in some games, people just commit suicide to save themselves walking somewhere. This is dumb.).
    The diminished penalties didn't do a lot to mitigate this, because my first death would easily set me back my progress for the whole afternoon, and was so frustrating I'd pretty much not attempt to do again whatever killed me. The side effect of this was anything I couldn't confidently steamroll, I avoided. This meant trying out new things, trying out new builds, learning and wiping to figure out mechanics - it all had far too high an entry cost, if I knew I'd have to go grind trivial crap for four hours "just to see if" I can kill a 'whatever' yet. It was a complete waste of my time. We also saw trickle down from this when say, someone needed help killing something, and you'd hear the crickets chirping because the higher level players weren't willing to risk hours of their playtime in the event of someone getting them killed.

    The higher level you were, the worse it was - and yes, I was at the point where I was losing over a million for a death, and for well over a year restricted my gameplay to activities that had very little chance of killing me as a result. Worse still was dying to getting stuck, to bugged mechanics, because your skill bar froze up or glitched out, because your teammates did something stupid, and so on. The scaling of this system meant that for Player A, it was a joke of no consequence, and for Player B, it ruined their entire day. And it did very little to keep power-grinders in check because the amount of playtime they could invest doing high exp yield repetitive activities easily mitigated the losses.

    It does equate to basically the same thing, (experience debt) but with a key difference: You never, ever, go backwards. Your forward progress will be stifled instead. This is a lot more palatable, particularly if the amount of potentially obtainable debt a) has a reasonable cap and b) can be ameliorated through other means.

    Example: I die, I get 500,000 experience debt. At my level, that's maybe around an hour's play doing my solo thing killing stuff in T5 and harvesting things as I go. (ie, not in a 'power group').
    This means the next 500k experience I earn is just paying that back. You could still deplete your pool to level skills if you chose, the debt wouldn't interfere with other mechanics.
    Lets say I die again. There's another 500k, and maybe I earned 50k back before I screwed up again. I'm now at 950k debt. At some point, if I keep dying, this will get out of hand, which is why there needs to be a hard limit beyond which further death doesn't screw you. I know the "old" decay system reduced experience loss for subsequent deaths, but the scale was still pretty out of whack and after you lost all the experience you'd earned that day the prospect of going and doing it all over again was not enticing. With a debt system, if you capped out your debt, that means that if you were trying to do something other than earn xp (such as trying to kill something big) - it would stop affecting you after a while and you'd feel less like you were stuck on a treadmill going nowhere. Then you either grind/pay your debt off and proceed as normal. At least you'd know the cost going in, and there would be a ceiling to how painful it would be.

    A debt system opens up a lot of possibilities, such as reducing your debt through either grinding the experience back, completing some sort of penance/quest/etc, or through use of a consumable, or even by just waiting it out, engaging in social activities such as dancing or playing music that would cause the natural reduction debt timer to advance more quickly. Or even logging off for the night, playing another character, etc. The point is that you never lose what you've earned, and while functionally, you're essentially paying it forward, its a lot easier to stomach particularly if there are other mechanisms such as consumables. This adds potential market variety and/or cash sinks as well if people want to burn debt off faster they can take a financial penalty instead.

    Ultimately? I don't think its really necessary to punish players for dying with exp loss because its essentially punishing players for playing and trying non-trivial content. An effective time-out, or reduction of effectiveness for a period of time, would be enough to make people be more mindful of what they're attempting - i.e. if you die, you're 5% less effective,if you die again before the timer's up, you get another 5% stack of debuff, and so on, too many deaths mean you now have the combat prowess of a potato and you need to either wait it out, or see above re: consumables and noncombat activities as a way to speed up the rate.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2020
  15. Scoffer

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    We could just go full circle and put the attenuation cap back in after a death. You wouldn't actually lose anything but your progress would be slowed for an hour.
     
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  16. Barugon

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    And then I wouldn't play for at least an hour. I would probably exit the game and go play something else.
     
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  17. Lars vonDrachental

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    I just did a small search and at least in this thread @Mac2 is saying he was losing 800k on first death and I guess he is a good example for the highest level players. Following your own data he was losing less than 1h on the first death and on constantly dying the whole day he was approaching a loss of 2h without passing that number.
    I'm earning way less exp with my playstyle and that way also my lvl is and was below yours but as far as I remember I started losing between 2-3k exp slightly above lvl 60 on first death and before decay was removed it was between 12-13k somewhere at lvl 70-80. Of course I was trying to avoid death as much as possible but still died a lot. However I was simply thinking more about what I'm doing and I even started to use buffs, food and all that stuff. Today I'm back to not care about buffs and at best use Strength of Earth or a similar skill on entering a scene but most of the time I forget to renew it if it is gone.
    The only real negative I personally suffered was the loss of people to play with. The longer decay existed the more toxic got the atmosphere in the forum and chat and the more people where just looking at their exp pool. Some brought their grinding to perfection, some played just safe but many simply stopped playing...and this is the lesson we have to learn from decay (and as far as I heard also from PvP)...the majority of our audience simply don't like to lose anything.

    @kaeshiva
    This way I do not think a debt-system will be seen that different as it is still visibly "stealing" the precious exp. The only possibility to give death a meaning is something indirect like the mentioned injury or other kinds of debuffs. Something that is slowing you down without a direct value of loss. But thinking about it I would remove from my suggestion the timer for injuries as this could mean avatars stop playing for a certain time just to ride out the effect. Instead you should have to do something activly to lose the debuffs like drinking a potion or paying an NPC or visite a shrine within the heart of a dungeon and if you don't do that they stay forever.
     
  18. Jezebel Caerndow

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    By the end of death decay, it was costing me 4 mil per death.
     
  19. Scoffer

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    Why would you log out if attenuated?
    You can still get loot, you can still explore, craft, decorate, queue for obsidian trials, go shopping.....There are a million things you can do in this game that doesn't involve earning xp
     
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  20. Cordelayne

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    ;)
    [​IMG]
     
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