Interesting ideas, but you all forget: our avatars are non-human. They''re not even humanoid, which limits the applicability of many of these suggestions to our specific situation. They''re more like... snakes. Or lizards.

If these were intended for the general case rather than my specific quandry, then I apologize for my assumption. Carry on, all.

do they lay eggs?

That could be great! so when two powerful characters mate you get multiple offspring to choose from.

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

My idea was a separate idea; my own take on the death/aging theme. Not an extension of yours. So I was thinking of humanoids.

~CGameProgrammer( );

SYMPHONIC wrote:

quote: do they lay eggs?
That could be great! so when two powerful characters mate you get multiple offspring to choose from.

Yes, that''s the general idea.
It would be great if players are able to play one and the same avatar for a long time, but in reality, it''s more likely that they will start the game with one, lay one (or more) egg(s) and then have the option to play with the avatar that hatches from that egg whenever they want to.

Just like human babies, the new avatar will have part of the father''s DNA and part of the mother''s DNA, creating a unique new being.

Players can and will bond with their avatar''s, but they have to take into account that they could lose that avatar at any time due to permanent death. They have to make sure to lay an egg at the appropriate moment (for example, just after gaining a new level) so that the new avatar will be just as much fun to play as the old avatar, be it a little different.

In common RPG terms...

Imagine playing a male warrior. You reach level 10 and decide to find an attractive female to mate with. You go on another adventure, but alas, you find yourself outnumbered and you die a horrible death. Oh, no! My male warrior is permanently dead! This game sucks! Oh, wait... I have this baby here, see. Why, it looks a lot like my dead male warrior. Same eyes, same hair. But, as it''s growing up into a teenager, I notice that the child isn''t quite as muscular as its father. Ah, I get it, the mother was a thief, so the child must have taken some of her agile features, sacrificing some of the father''s strength features. Hey, this kid is a lot of fun to play! This game doesn''t suck after all! It''s actually a lot of fun. I''m going to make sure to keep this new avatar alive a little longer, so I can become stronger before creating a new baby.

Is permanent death doable?

Yes.

Is permanent death fun?

That’s a matter of opinion

Is permanent death something that most people want?

No. If you look at Blizzard''s Diablo II they created a system where players could choose to play with a permanent death account (Hell Mode) or a respawning account. Now although there were quite a few players who choose the Hell Mode account the number was dwarfed by the number of players who choose regular accounts.

If you want to create a successful MMO game today then you need to cater to both the hard core players and the regular players. However the regular players have higher priority over the hard core players. I''m not suggesting that everybody start making the Sims on line but in order to compete in the sea of MMO games coming out in the next while your going to have to capture a large audience.

Furthermore, what benefit does this really add to game play? If a snake dies and then has to play a lower lever snake hatched from an egg then essentially all you have done is strip the player of the experience difference between the your snake and the old snake. If its to add an element to the story where the player will want to take vengeance on another player it would work perhaps in a single player game but not a MMO game. The last time I got PKed I never saw the guy again. It would have to be one heck of an incentive for a player to scour the game world looking for a character which was powerful enough to kill his main guy and then attempt to fight him with his new guy.

I really like the aging thing but this is not the right way to go about it. I personally can''t see what the best way to implement aging in a MMO game would be.

Diablo II''s Hardcore Mode was fun for me, and is the sole inspiration for my longing for permadeath. But in Diablo II, Player-Killers and laggy servers very often caused hardcore characters to die - PKing will be severely restricted in an MMORPG (of my design at least) and MMORPGs can afford quality servers. Also my idea solves the problem of losing all your hard-won items when you die, since they are returned to your house. The worst part about losing a hardcore character, to me, is losing the items, since I may have had to do a lot of trades to get that item.

Also, Diablo II was simply designed for softcore play - Hardcore and Softcore modes were exactly the same, except that Hardcore characters don''t respawn. But a game designed with permadeath in mind will obviously make it easier for people to not die, and it will lessen the penalty for dying - this thread has been about ideas to give the player another chance even after dying. Though it''s true the egg idea basically means there is no death.

~CGameProgrammer( );

As far as MMO games go you can not really screw players over when they die because of the external factors involved. Let’s say I get a guy up to level 5 and then die without having an egg. So now I have to totally start over but this time I''m going to be more careful. I level my guy up to level 6 and I''m out hunting in the forest when I lose my connection to the game. The last thing I see before I disconnect is a level 30 monster spawning on top of me. How many times is the average player willing to start from scratch?

Another thing to consider here is that the lower the characters level is the lower the things in which he can interact are. These can be monsters or quests etc. So if I''m fighting some big demon and get killed, you’re going to make me go back and fight imps with my new character? I don''t think so. Although there are people that want to play this way for most players all you’re going to be doing is frustrating them.

The fact of the matter is that in a MMO game you need to minimize the effect of dying on the player or you need to make it very difficult for the player to get killed. Otherwise you’re going to end up with the small portion of the players who love permanent death and with the glut of MMO games coming out these days there’s just not enough of these players to go around.

MORGANE wrote:

quote: Let’s say I get a guy up to level 5 and then die without having an egg.

Laying an egg will be a simple process, so you should never venture out into the wild without doing so.

quote: As far as MMO games go you can not really screw players over when they die because of the external factors involved.

You can''t really take external factors into consideration too much. You simply HAVE to do something. If you say ''no penalty upon death, because 10% of all deaths are caused by external factors'' then your letting your design be influenced too much by the minority. That doesn''t mean you shouldn''t figure out a way to best solve the problem. A crash/disconnect is always bad. When I played Diablo 2, I tried playing hardcore mode (permanent death) but with dial-up that''s just not really an option. Now, if Diablo 2 had given me the option to set a certain auto-command for my character to follow when I get disconnected, it would''ve been different. ''Upon disconnect run to safety'' would''ve worked miracles. Or ''use power X and fight until health Y is reached, then run''. The player should be able to pretty much set up this auto-command so that the avatar will act on its own almost identical to the way it would when it was still under player control. Besides, Diablo 2 is not the best reference for permanent death, because if you design your game to use permanent death you really have to make it a core element of the game: you can''t just tack it on.

I think that in our design (yes, this is Oluseyi''s co-conspirator) there is a good reason for at least some form of permanent death, but it has to work perfectly in order to create the result I envision.

quote: The fact of the matter is that in a MMO game you need to minimize the effect of dying on the player or you need to make it very difficult for the player to get killed.

I think the second point is more important than the first. Just give the player tons of options to avoid dying, but make the penalty of death severe. To take Everquest as an example, if I know that there is a certain risk involved in going to a certain location, I''m going to try to lower that risk by finding some other characters to travel with. I CHOOSE to go to that location, so I have every means of avoiding the risk (by simply not going).

CGAMEPROGRAMMER wrote:

quote: PKing will be severely restricted in an MMORPG

I personally prefer the complete opposite: make PKing an integral part of the game. By doing so, you can control it better. Just like alcohol prohibition didn''t really work, trying to prevent PKing will either result in chaos (PKers finding loopholes that allow them to do just that which you are trying to prevent) or it will result in your design being affected in such a way that its soul is sucked out of it. With PvP comes PK. Without PK you will not really have PvP, and I think that even though it isn''t a requirement for a good online game, it is one of the things that make online gaming stand out from non-online gaming.

MORGANE wrote:

quote: Furthermore, what benefit does this really add to game play? If a snake dies and then has to play a lower lever snake hatched from an egg then essentially all you have done is strip the player of the experience difference between the your snake and the old snake.

Not quite.
1) It has penalized the player for dying, teaching him to be more careful with his next avatar.
2) It gives the player a new avatar that is like the dead avatar, but also different.
You are correct that the new avatar has less experience than the old one, but that system is already widely used by MMORPGs by using an experience penalty upon death.

quote: If its to add an element to the story where the player will want to take vengeance on another player it would work perhaps in a single player game but not a MMO game.

I actually think the vengeance motive should not apply. The new avatar shouldn''t really know who killed its parent.

quote: The last time I got PKed I never saw the guy again.

Which is a good thing, right? The only times I got annoyed at being PKed, is when the PKer would stick around to kill me over and over again. PKing is not a bad thing, until it gets annoying. Getting angry at being attacked by another player in a PvP environment makes as much sense as getting mad at someone tackling you in a football game (unless the method in which you are tackled is not according to the rules).

quote: It would have to be one heck of an incentive for a player to scour the game world looking for a character which was powerful enough to kill his main guy and then attempt to fight him with his new guy.

That''s why I don''t think players will do that. One of the elements in our game is that players are encouraged to attack other players. Players should not think that those they kill will spend their next few days hunting them down with their new avatar.

I think the problem is that players are too focused on what current MMORPGs look like and how they function. Personally, I think they are all alike. Sure, each one has one or two new elements, but they all feel like they come from one parent MMORPG... and the new ones are not far enough removed in generations from the original parent too really be different. The fact that they are all so much alike makes it hard for people to think about the genre in a different way. Permanent death has not really been explored too much up to this point. I really hope that that will change in the near future, because I think it has a lot of pros (and because I think non-permanent death systems have too many cons).

I think you guys are missing the forest for the trees. I''m not saying that there are not people out there who don’t like permanent death and PKing. What I am saying is that if you want your game to be player by more then the 10% (just a guess) of the population who like this type of game then you need to cater to the other 90%.

Just as an example to support my 10% figure. Asheron’s call has 6-7 servers. One, only one, of the servers is for PK''s and if you log on it has considerably less players then any of the other servers.

So the question is what are you really going for? Are you trying to create a game where you and your friends to hang out or are you trying to create a game where thousands of people play?

Bottom line: You can not make a game which thousands of people will want to play based on the type of game you would want to play if your in the minority. And lets face it, as hardcore game players, were in the minority.

I may be unclear about exactly what would change between the snake and the egg. The one thing that MMO games do well is let players customize their characters. This is a good thing as then players will associate with that character. I like brown hair and brown eyes and like to use magic so I make a brown haired, brown eyed guy with lots of intelligence. Now when I get killed I''m playing my off spring who is blonde haired, blue eyed and really strong? You would have just killed the connection between the player and his character if you do that.

Now if you don’t change anything on him and you still have a brown haired smart guy who is a little lower in the level scale then all you did was take a level away. While I''m on my rant about character changes, players would expect their names to remain the same. It would be a pain in the butt to try and find your friends every time you logged on if their names kept changing.

Next up the external factors. I''m not saying there shouldn''t be any penalty for dying but you can not royally screw players over when they die. Let’s look at the two extremes of what you could do when a player dies. On the negative end you could disable a player’s account and force them to by another copy of the game every time they die. Or on the easy side you could just pop back to life right where you died and continue fighting like nothing had ever happened. Now if you had to choose between one of these two options which would you choose? Or perhaps more importantly which would a normal player choose? The point here is you need to be on the good side of the scale not the bad side.

You both seem to think that the reason that permanent death does not occur more in MMO games is because players don’t know what they are missing. This unfortunately is over looking another serious problem in MMO games. How is an average player who plays say 5 hours a week supposed to compete with some 13 year old kid who is level 50 two weeks after the game comes out? I tell you what. You put someone who just picked up your game because it looked cool and he gets his character to level 5 and then gets killed by some "leet haxxor" kid, you just lost your self a player. The real reason that permanent death isn''t used more is that most people don’t have the time to spend making their character invincible to all but the most difficult of opponents. Most people want to hope on for a short time and get together with a few friends and kill a few monsters.

Final point for this post. You mentioned you wanted it to be an integral part of the game where players hunted other players. The only way this type of plan can work is if all players are always equal. As soon as you start allowing players to become more powerful then other players you create a problem where the only people who can play your games are the ones who are willing to quite there day jobs so they can play all day on the level treadmill. Think of a game like quake or war craft where the entire point of the game is playing other players. What if every time you killed someone your gun became more powerful or your units became stronger? Once you get to level 50 you are so powerful that the game is no fun any more because you can kill most people in one blow. And the game is no fun for new people because they are getting killed in one blow. So you create a situation where you lose your top players when failing to recruit new players.