Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Make all deaths auto rez at last bind, you die you port there, full gear. You get a 10 minute debuff that puts you at half fighting capacity, ie, the penalty for death. You can pay your level times some random number of currency that fits the economy and the game type to remove the debuff early. There, no retarded durability and it is only a penalty to those in a time intensive situation or those who don"t have a lot of time to play. It hits everyone but the patient easygoing souls, who we can all pretend play games like these and are a majority. You don"t have to find a shrine or anything silly in town you can do it wherever. There is no more immersion with the post wow games coming out, so any mechanics based on being some retarded "lolz you can only repair at weapon vendors and blacksmythes, verily noob" type reasoning can go out the window. Having to find the one vendor who repairs shit at a given outpost is almost as silly as durability loss in the first place.

There"s midgets living in your world that dig up buried coins, no matter where they are, and it"s considered good luck. Living in this world means you believe that"s true, so unless you bury some coin, you feel downhearted till it happens, or at least till you"ve paid your dues in time. There, RP"d my way through it.

Why does every MMORPG have to be immersive? Why can"t we just have fun and kill stuff?

Well, there"s that little RP in the mmorpg deal. And I wasn"t saying it had to be immersive, I was saying that since WoW has made the fast food mmo deal popular, there"s no point in pretending to be immersive with game mechanics rules.

I was actually knocking on the attempts at immersion presented by Blizzard with having to repair only at certain vendors.

WoW is fairly immersive itself if you realize that realism != immersion. It immerses you in the world of Warcraft, Azeroth.. not Earth circa 1200, with magic.

Rezz said:

I was actually knocking on the attempts at immersion presented by Blizzard with having to repair only at certain vendors.

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Ok playing the immersion card, is it immersive allowing innkeepers to repair your stuff as well as a than a blacksmith or whatever? I don"t really get what you"re saying.

Immersion is not the same thing to all people.

Incoming semantics argument. Immersion is the feeling of being inside the game world. It"s that simple. Anything that reminds you that you have a mortgage or a 2 year old son ruins immersion and therefore is bad in an RPG.

Or atleast that"s what some people would argue.

Cybsled said:

I -HATE- mindless grind. I fucking hate it. I want it to die. That was EQ"s mechanic, and in the end, I said "fuck it, why the fuck am I playing this stupid shit? I don"t even like it".

Any penalty system that involves mindless grind = can go fuck itself.

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And WoW relieves you of grinding as a penalty how? Because you can buy gold from rang rang to pay for repairs? I am not making excuses for EQ because they too solve death with grinding, but don"t make out like WoW saves you from it, unless of course you don"t mind paying the "hassle free" cost in real dollars.

Anarchy Online > * for the death mechanic.

The act of immersion in a game world is the idea that the player is drawn into the world by being believable in terms of the world being presented and that the rules/mechanics and well, everything makes sense as far as that game world goes.

The fact you can"t repair at every vendor in WoW has absolutely no basis in mechanics but in the fact that some guy thought it would make the game seem more "immersive" or some shit to make it blacksmiths and shit only for the most part. There is no valid gameplay reason why you can"t repair at every vendor you run across, but there"s a "lore" type reason why you can"t. Unless blizzard has stated that they can only have so many repair enabled vendors per zone because of some hardware or money constraints in that department.

In actuality little Draegan, I was agreeing with you.

And that was all a tiny, insignificant footnote to the death penalty concept in the post.

Rezz said:

Make all deaths auto rez at last bind, you die you port there, full gear.

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AO insurance/reclaim system. Upon death, you are rematerialized at the Reclaim terminal nearest to the last Insurance terminal you used, or in the case of Shadowlands, the last garden/sanctuary you saved at. You have all your worn gear on, and your inventory is in the Reclaim terminal. No corpse to loot.

Rezz said:

You get a 10 minute debuff that puts you at half fighting capacity, ie, the penalty for death.

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AO reclaim effects. Cannot be dispelled, lasts 10 minutes. It reduces all your stats and skills, so your gear is largely useless until it wears off. All buffs must be recast as well.

Rezz said:

You can pay your level times some random number of currency that fits the economy and the game type to remove the debuff early.

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Given the 10 minute timer, and that it would typically take about that long to get back to where you were fighting anyway, this is sort of moot. Funny that you use the 10x level thing though, because insurance booth saves in AO on the planet of Rubi Ka cost 10x your level in credits.

Rezz said:

There, no retarded durability and it is only a penalty to those in a time intensive situation or those who don"t have a lot of time to play. It hits everyone but the patient easygoing souls, who we can all pretend play games like these and are a majority. You don"t have to find a shrine or anything silly in town you can do it wherever.

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Now if only there was a game that had this......hmmmmm

I have never played AO /shrug. It sounds like a good system then!

Rezz said:

I have never played AO /shrug. It sounds like a good system then!

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You and most of the MMO player population. Dealing with the lagfest downsides to AO, along with the learning cliff that game has made 99.9% of the MMO world largely ignore it. But they have a great death mechanic, and plenty of other ideas people think were invented by Blizzard but actually were FunCom firsts in 2001.

I just post about it here because too often people think that there"s two ways to do things:

EQ1 or WoW.

Lots of good ideas rolling around in MMO land, and SOE/Blizzard aren"t the only ones who have them.

All in all AO was a pretty poor game but they had some of the best systems ever and is probably the msot copied game ever but people don"t realize it.

They created most every system in wide use today including instancing wow style (missions) and EQ2 style (temple of 3 winds).

Plus tons of minor shit like loot linking and such, The list is a long one.

They had great original ideas but poor implementation.

Well if you want to go deep those ideas were in place a long time ago in thousands of different MUDs.

Bongk said:

All in all AO was a pretty poor game but they had some of the best systems ever and is probably the msot copied game ever but people don"t realize it.

They created most every system in wide use today including instancing wow style (missions) and EQ style (temple of 3 winds).

Plus tons of minor shit like loot linking and such, The list is a long one.

They had great original ideas but poor implementation.

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/set agreement on size 100

WoW has so much of AO in it that if they added some sort of implant system, they could change the name of the game to AO-Azeroth, give FC 5% for licensing content and call it a day.

Basically, Blizzard took the working and good idea stuff of AO and made all the suck parts of AO better. Instances, flying mounts, everyone can solo, easier death mechanic. I mean, the whole Outland versus Azeroth is the fantasy version of Shadowlands versus Rubi Ka thing. =)

Draegan said:

Well if you want to go deep those ideas were in place a long time ago in thousands of different MUDs.

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Which FunCom adopted, just with a poorly implemented graphics engine and absurdly pathetic servers.

Draegan said:

Well if you want to go deep those ideas were in place a long time ago in thousands of different MUDs.

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muds had instancing and loot linking? that is really stretching it thin...

Yes MUDs had loot linking and instancing. I even played ones with battlegrounds and arenas.

Draegan said:

You"re not choosing level of risk, you"re dealing with the risk of dieing AGAIN based on what you have around you. You"re being forced into a situation. You also have to rely on other people.

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I can choose to fight along the zone wall of DL or in the far corners of HS. I can choose to do either with or without a resser, evacer, or rogue. Are you saying there"s no difference in the risk involved? If so, I don"t really know where else to go with this.

Draegan said:

Successful game these days will have every portion of the basic game accessible no matter how many people you have with you.

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That hinges on how you define the "basic game." So long as your definition of is reasonable, then i agree, and I don"t see how that is at odds with anything I"ve said.

Draegan said:

Whether you hate or love WOW, I don"t see how anyone can think that WOW is more tedious or more grindy that EQ. You may want to expound on this because I"m at a loss.

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For me, "grind" is more about how something feels while you"re doing it and less about how long it takes. In EQ, the fastest means of progression, at least in my opinion (grouping in difficult areas, really pushing the edge,) was also the most fun and rewarding, and thus the least "grindy." WoW was the opposite where the fastest way to progress was, in my opinion (mindlessly soloing easy mobs), the most boring way to play and thus much more "grindy" than EQ. Don"t forget that having to continually grind for repair money is another issue that people constantly mention which i never had to deal with in EQ.

People complained about AA"s, but I enjoyed having them. It was a small, but gradually effective way to improve your character. Another thing that made WoW feel like a grind was that once you were 60, you were really just playing for loot, and any effort you put in that didn"t result in more loot was just wasted.

Draegan said:

Also, on loss of xp and gear in EQ. As you state, thats only in the top end game and not at the beginning. It also depends on people you know. What about the early part of the game when you know no one? The first 10 minutes of game play has to be perfect. The first 5 hours of gameplay will set the tone for the rest of their time with the game.

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Sure, I mentioned that. It was really an odd situation that EQ got the death penalty curve backwards. It should be easy at the beginning to be accessible and harder at the end, but that"s not at all how it worked out. I think it was largely because of the differing management styles during the various expansions along with a heathly dose of not planning ahead. I think this is why EQ has such a harsh reputation even though I think much of it is undeserved.


And also, once again for everyone that thinks WoW or AO invented instancing, The Realm had it (not to mention who knows how many MUDs).

Ngruk said:

Bottom line is death "allows" you to take away from players, which is something most players don"t and won"t like. The puzzle to solve is how much and what can you take to make it worth risking again, and make it believable and fun.

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How about you don"t penalize players for dying, but rather reward them for not dying?

One would think the psychological effect on players would be the same as when rested XP was changed in WoW, instead of being penalized for playing too much, you get rewarded for logging off. Another similar mechanic - though not quite the same - is Tabula Rasas XP multiplier, if you grind fast enough you get more and more XP, if you stop killing stuff or die, your XP rate gets back to normal. Thus you"re not actually losing anything permanent.

From a developers point of view, you should be able to achieve the same game mechanics you want both with penalizing death, or rewarding staying alive. But from a players point of view the difference is huge!

Edit:
Just thought of an example of a way to reward people for staying alive; Say you give players a slight movement bonus after killing a certain amount (or something else you obviously couldn"t do afk ) I personally would dread dying way more if I could lose something like that, albeit temporary, than a mere 10% durability loss, which basically just is a pain. And I would be motivated to start doing whatever I were doing originally to get back my movement boost as soon as possible.