Possible ideas to add risk and choice to death decay even though its going away.

I know death decay is going or gone and may or may not be replaced with something else (it probably will be replaced with something. what, I don't know) but me and the guys were talking about it and we had two ideas of how to "keep it" but give some choices regarding what happens to it. now I personally did not have an issue with death decay. I have a high level toon with many gm's and when I died it was painful but I was like "meh" it is what it is and I simply moved on with my day and in the long run it did not hinder my advancement in any way shape or form. That being said, my idea was to treat death like being flagged pvp. When flagged pvp you gain an experience boost and so you have to decide if the reward (the increase in experience gain) is worth the risk of being killed by another player. So regarding death decay. you choose to be (flagged as having death decay) or what ever you want to call it and in so doing you gain an experience boost. So the choice becomes is the added experience worth the possible loss of experience when you die. If you did NOT want to have decay you simply turn it off and would not get the bonus. Thats one idea. The other idea was to treat death decay as a gold sink or as if you were killed by another player. when you die, you have the option to "buy back" your experience with gold. that way the "risk" still exist in death but you have the "choice" of what the penalty is for dying. This notion that there should be "no" penalty in dying is something I can't get behind and so in looking at both of these ideas, I personally like the second one. myself. Like I said at the beginning. death decay is gone, unfortunately. long live death decay , and may or may not be replaced with something else but I was just curious what everyone thought of the above ideas. cheers and thanks in advance for your feedback.

 

I think that's a good idea, and I agree. Death is failure and it shouldn't feel nice.

Even though death decay bothers me a lot because I have limited play time and don't like grinding, I will still miss it dearly if it isn't replaced.

If death decay were opt in, perhaps those who opt out could go back to standard exp while double exp remains for those of us who prefer to continue playing in standard mode.

This might be problematic from a programming perspective, though.

 

Well there is so much more we could do to replace it. Such as when achievements come in many types of achievements regarding dying to earn. For example an achievement for not dying in 1 day, or two weeks, or not dying in 30 days and titles regarding death dying and not dying. A title Deathmaster could be awarded for some achievement for example. In the game Project Gorgon they reward you for dying in an achievement. It is not the end of the world or staying alive incentive game breaker that we don't have decay. There are many many ways for staying alive to matter to give risk verses rewards. Mostly decay was risk and unpleasant for most and enough is enough. Too many complaints say decay had to go so it did. We are just choosing another way that will be right for the game, whatever that is.

 

I kinda like the idea of optional challenge being rewarded. Itll likely make some other folks who feel entiled cry unfair, but if you have to argue that risk vs reward is unfair, you just really prefer building a house of cards with glue.

 

The only thing Death Decay did effectively in SOTA is decay the population.

 

Yeah @ShurTugal this is an elaboration on the thread that @Patchup made https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/one-option-for-replacing-decay.144964/ Just to give you more context to what we were talking about.

 

Yes and this is the perfect reason for discussion on ideas, Port could do an achievement like how lotro had where you have to get to a certain level to get certain deeds. It could have potential.

Regardless though of what percentage did and did not like it, it is clear that this decay will always be something that has had different opinions either way.

No decay as standard I can agree with being the new norm, and it is nice to lose no exp on death. However, adding an optional mechanic that could reward the risk of having a "hardcore mode" would be neat. The code for decay will be taken out but will always be available to them unless they just completely remove it all. In principle it could be interesting to have a check / balance in place such as "if(hardcore mode==1) Run Code else Do Nothing. Now of course there are performance constraints and this may be too much work/too expensive. However like with anything ideas come from spitballing ideas as we all know.

Again like Chris said we are going to get something in the future, so maybe it could work out to go a different way than just plain punishment.

 

I think that before you can determine what a good penalty is for death, you have to define what the goal is. In my opinion, adventure experience was already solved when attenuation went in. At high level, maximum experience gain rate never increases, while cost of skills still increases exponentially. I'm not going to actually do the math, but by my estimates, maxing all skills would take roughly a zillion years.

If the goal is to make it so that death has some meaning and that players derive some extra excitement from having fear of their enemies, there's really no limit to the things you could do. I think that the important thing to keep in mind is that meaningful doesn't have to equal miserable, and denying a goal is generally better than taking away something already gained.

I also think that it's possible to have penalties that are greatly determined by environment. For example, imagine an adventure scene similar to compendium, with a nice reward for conquering, but with a death penalty of ejection and lockout for some period of time. The death is meaningful, because you don't get the reward and you can't just keep trying, but at the same time, you're not losing something you already had like gear or experience that you then have to go back and do again. Likewise, if you're just fighting some generic gray wolf or bandit, a dramatic penalty doesn't make sense because it's not a very dramatic situation with dramatic rewards. By using the environment to set penalties in different ways, you can make some places scarier than others and try out lots of different things in different places without freaking everyone out.

 

As much as I liked it and thought it was an elegant mechanic, this is true.

[edit] As an anecdote, I told a friend about decay and it actually caused him to try it out. He doesn't play, however, because his Internet connection sucks (the best he can get in his area is WiMAX, which has terrible ping times and it's woefully inadequate).

 

agree with @Greyfox death decay and ransoms are among things that are responsible of loss of players. lack of armor artifacts as well (give me a reason to farm that is not xp!) now that artifacts can be enchanted, it would definitely time to allow players to farm their stuff, pass it to enchanters and master workers to have something less costly and would make boss farming more rewarding (not everybody is million gold rich and not everybody like crafting).