Wow, I didn’t know that. I wish I would have learned that a couple of years ago…would have saved me many, many, many headaches!

this is mine…

One, AC2 did not have corpse runs. You returned to the last bound lifestone and lost vitae, which was recoverable by XP only, not time. However, there were classes who could undo the vitae loss. Two, you could choose which lifestone to bind to. Though if you didn’t choose wisely, you could get camped in PVP. Third, you can teleport back to the last portal you ran through, provided you or a buddy have put points into portal recall or portal summon. But the point is, you have many choices to where you want to start again.

In GW, it was hard to beat an instance at 60%, esp. solo. Usually it was easier to start over and call a few friends or hire more NPCs and play smarter the next time.

Dying already makes one feel bad because nobody likes losing. But to add salt to the wounds, devs would impose harsh and tedious death penalties. There is a DS game called Zendoku, which is like Sudoku, but with pictures. You play against the AI. When one completes a box or row or whatever, the other player is punished by entering a minigame until they beat it. This takes time away from solving the Sudoku and messes with one’s concentration. There is one minigame that is sometimes unbeatable by the human player, requiring very quick reflexes, such that one would never complete the Sudoku because he is stuck in the minigame.

I love the info and have bookmarked your blog. Haver you thought of doing a vlog describing this stuff?…

In EQ2, I didn’t notice much difference from WoW, except for the small fact that having to run back to where you died to return to the action was a bit of a pain. The experience penalty was small, and somewhat less annoying than I might otherwise have thought, largely because the experience gains in game were already very large, and you could also accumulate rest-state experence (or something similar, I forget now).

The “nicest” death penalty yet seems to be in LOTRO, where you get some little temporary wound effect and a bit of equipment damage. Like EQ2, you need to run back if you want, but it definitely seems more subdued than all the other MMOs I’ve tried.

The one game which irritates me the most (that I enjoy playing) is DDO: In D&D Online you get penalized three ways: first, you die and if your party wipes or your solo, you can not rez at a waypoint in the dungeon, so you are teleported out to a tavern where you need to spend a couple minutes in recovery (time penalty). Then you suffer experience loss, which really, really annoys me because loss of experience means a bigger time penalty: you lose the time spent earning that experience, then you lose more time spent recovering that experience. Finally, #3: You re-enter the dungeon and the overall value of the adventure drops by 10% per re-entry. Which means your precious time spent in the dungeon just got de-valued. So, as a casual player who solos at least 60% of the time, it means that I feel like I’m treading water in DDO, which is terrible because I love this game’s play and structure more than any other MMO right now.

Interestingly, I noticed in the notes on the upcoming January 30th expansion that they are “eliminating the death penalty for experience.” Probably not the re-entry penalty, I bet, but I can live with that, since the re-entry penalty is to control players exiting the dungeon to reload, as it were. But this little change they are implementing has saved my subscription; I’ve started and cancelled my DDO subscription 4 times since the game was released, and each time was due to increasing frustration at the treadmill the death penalty placed me on. Now, at last, I think they’ll be keeping me if they follow through with the new update.

As an old-school paper and pencil gamer (I started with D&D in 1980) the idea of perma-death seems natural….to tabletop gaming. Partly because an organic GM can make decisions about events that a PC game can not, and partly because things move more slowly in person-to-person games, and the overall experience is far different from CRPGS and MMOs. If the purpose of a death penalty is punishment, then it needs to be seriously re-evaluated. If the purpose of the death penalty is to provide challenge (another way of saying “encourage you to stay alive to avoid punishment”) then maybe games could make sliding-scale death penalties, or servers designed with specific death penalties an option for players who want them. As I see it, the only really viable function of the death penalty in a game should be to limit the usefulness of the specific character in the situation which caused death; put another way, it’s a very mild way of simulating the fact that the PC should be out of commission in the battle at hand, unless a legitimate means (like rezzing) is ued to bring him back. This creates a mild penalty, one in which the character’s usefulness to that situation is at an end, forcing the rest of the party to carry on until the dead guy can hike on back for a later encounter.

In tabletop gaming, death doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s usually permanent, except at high levels of play (when it’s nice to have your character brought back after all the time spent playing it). The penalty for death is making a new character and waiting for your GM to re-introduce you. But in a typical tabletop D&D game, for example, you might have 2-4 fights over the course of an evening’s play. Now, in four hours of online play, you might have 20-40 fights, easily, with twice as many opponents. Mathematically, you are going to die….a lot more often. If a game wants to simulate “death” more accurately with strong penalties or perma-death, I think it would work better if the rest of the game also simulated reality a little more accurately, with a game system that did not have level-base disparities in play like WoW or EQ2 (or almost all other games on the market) where just wandering over the wrong hill or through the wrong portal could mean instant and inescapable death from unkillable baddies.

Just some thoughts….great article, btw!

You can get insurance for your ship that gives you the base price of the ship when it is destroyed. You have to pay some money for insurance, and tech 2 ships (advanced versions of base ships) normally sell for far more than base price. However, for a standard ship, insurance will turn a massive loss into a small one.

Now, when your ship is destroyed, you are still alive. Your “pod” – basically an escape pod that contains you – will survive the ship being destroyed. NPCs will not harm your pod. However, other players will usually try to destroy your pod. If your pod is destroyed, your clone is activated, and you need to get a new one. There are different grades of clones. Higher level ones can store more skill points (the measure of how many skills a player has), and are more expensive. If you have more skill points than your clone can handle, when you are podded, you lose some skills. Most players have their clone at a station with a medical bay, so they can get a new clone before they reenter space.

Really, losing a ship is the big penalty, not actually dying. I am notorious for using cheap ships to scout and not caring when I get killed.