Dead characters need to be able to walk through doorss

I just died in the Ravensmoor dungeon and I couldn't get back to the beginning of the dungeon because the doors closed, so I was forced to sit and wait for an extreeeemely long time until my character came back to life. That is not fun.

 

Yeah there needs to be a Ankh at either sides of each gates like that.

The problem of allowing ghost forms to pass through the doors is that people can kill themselves to just skip content (like control points).

 

In dungeons and control points, they could put in an option upon death to select "Return to previous Ankh" or "Release spirit" to return you to the entrance.

 

Yea there should be a "respawn" option.
Sometimes I cant find the ankh...

 

No no and NO, they should not be able to walk thru doors. There is no reason for it.

 

I died in a duel in someone town keep. The front gate was closed. I could not escape the building to get to the ankh, and I could not even use the chat interface to tell someone to open the gate (which is another gripe, why can't I guild chat when in spirit form?) I think that there is a reason to allow passing through doors when in ghost form, when there is no access to an ankh in your location.

 

Special situation, and the problem there is the chat closed out, should be able to talk in guild or party even as a ghost. But this is still no reason to be ale to walk thru doors

 

I don't think you should be able to go through doors (which allows exploits to skip content) but I do think that if there is a door that closes, there needs to be an Ankh near it or at least an option to respawn at a previous one manually.

Being stuck in ghost form in a closed room is not fun and there needs to be a solution to fix that.

 

I think there should be an option to spawn at the scene entrance for a fee. If there was a gold/high durability fee it would curb people's use of it as a replacement for stuck, but would save a lot of frustration when someone gets stuck inside a house or in a spot where there is no ankh. I ran into a problem with this issue where I died from fall damage, but the place I died was behind a wall, so my ghost was stuck (and there is no /stuck in ghost form). I had to wait for the death timer and received the death penalty anyway, so it would have saved some time if I could just chose the penalty ahead of time.

 

What I miss is the Ultima 6-style doors. There are closed doors, locked doors, and magic locked doors. Closed doors would allow you open them (or walk through them as a ghost), locked doors would allow you to open them if you had the key (or walk through them as a ghost with the key), but magic locked doors you can't open without a spell or NPC interaction, like the Ardoris gates (and ghosts can't pass through them at all). This would allow each area to be properly gated, including to those who are ghosts.

 

I would be happy if the respawn wait time was at least halved.

 

I discussed this here.

We don't need an ankh or a respawn button for this; that's not the right solution for this kind of problem. It's not that there isn't any ankhs in range (there are) or that the timer is too long (it isn't). It's just the door is closed and we can't go through it.

UO got around this issue specifically because you could walk through doors. Either let ghosts open them or pass through them and the problem is completely solved.

 

Yet letting people through doors OPENS UP (get it? "open"?) more problems than it solves... where as placing more ankhs or even adding a respawn button simply requires more attention from the developers manually place more ankhs or a bit more code to script the button.

If you're only looking straight at the problem, sure, it fixes the problem of not getting through doors but the issue isn't even that: it's about reaching ankhs and not waste time.

Adding more ankhs is a level design thing. Letting ghosts through doors is a game design thing. The nuance is important.

 

Letting ghosts through doors you could click to open shouldn't be an issue. Doors that block content (i.e., keyed or require scripting to open) should continue to do so for ghosts. As far as I've seen, normal doors are mostly aesthetic anyway, so having them block players from reaching an ankh are bad.

There does need to be a button to release your spirit and resurrect, incurring whatever death penalty, as the wait time now is quite long if you do get stuck, or just don't want to wait. I don't think it should be shortened, however; it can take time to reach an ankh, which is far more desirable. Also, prevent ghosts from leaving a scene; resurrecting between scenes is a bug that leads to naked-death-runs to reach otherwise difficult sub-scenes.