Luckily doing a search on AC2 lead me to your site and I would be interested in testing anything that I could provide help and insight on. As I said earlier, I think AC2 was the best MMO that I have played warts and all. The reason is that it found the balance that I think is missing from most of the games that are out today. It was kind of a hardcore game but also was very accesable and fun to play. Very tough to find that balance between fun and challenging.

Best of luck on this project and hope to hear back, Travis

So imagine this scenario: you get a group together, and finally fight your way to the big bad. It’s a close fight, but he wipes the group. Now you have to run back to the dungeon, hope that it hasn’t repopulated, and tackle the same boss, but this time you’re weaker. And the whole party has to agree to do this. Or just one of them could quit, leaving you in an untenable position. Now you HAVE to find the alternate cure, or find another group that’s willing to take someone who isn’t 100% and risk getting cursed themselves.

I just don’t see how this is a good thing.

I don’t know if your Pre-Alpha will be open or not, but if it is, I will join that in a heartbeat. Your posts over the past few weeks have been very exciting. =]

Err… what? “Experiment” implies failure, as in trying different things and failing until you come to a correct solution. Harsh penalties discourage risky behavior and experimentation. Your argument is essentially that Diablo-esque Hardcore Mode (death is permanent) encourages more experimentation than any other difficulty mode. That is simply absurd.

Green Armadillo has it correct, as do the AAA publishers. The player is already being punished time-wise and pride-wise by dying; all fancy death penalties accomplish is increase the magnitude of the time loss. Not only did you lose the Chess match, you got kicked in the shins and can’t play another match for 10 minutes. Roguelikes and similar games can use death penalties to influence player behavior, sure, but that behavior is incongruent with the thrust of MMORPGs. Do you really want your players to not care about the accumulation of items and stats and levels in your game?

How do you recover your lost resources (up to and including all of your gear if someone went that route)? Time. How do you get back to the place where you want to resume playing? Time. Even the curse of permanent polymorph:bee can be expressed as a time penalty (either to find someone willing to invite a useless bee and kill the boss for you to remove the curse, or to re-roll the character from scratch).

That said, I think you’re onto something with the bee thing. It is time, but it also an experience in addition to a penalty. If implemented well, I could see something like that being fun, or at least generating respect for the world that makes the rest of the gameplay fun. The implementation is the catch – the first time you die due to a bug and spend a week trying to remove the curse of bee may be vaguely amusing, but I would almost certainly quit a game where this happened on a routine basis.

(Alternately, you may have guilds of people who have intentionally turned into bees, and a cottage player economy in escorting would-be bees to the boss so they can obtain the curse.)

Star Trek Online does this exact thing. Everything is instanced, and you choose the difficulty before you enter the instance. On standard difficulty, the mobs are a pushover to kill and the only penalty for death is time: you have a short countdown before you’re allowed to respawn (10-15 seconds, I think) and you’re returned to your respawn point. You can unlock more respawn points as you progress through an area, so it’s more like a “don’t respawn me in the middle of the fight” than a penalty of making you walk back to the fight. A couple of times, the fight was happening right on top of my spawn point, so there was almost no downtime.

However, if you set the difficulty higher, the mobs get very difficult, but the rewards are much higher. If you die, you have a chance to get a permanent injury that reduces your stats. There are three levels of rare-drop items you can use to remove these injuries back at a starbase, based on the severity of the injury. So basically, the game has no death penalties by default, and you can enable them if you want.