alternative to death penalty in mmo

You're missing the most obvious way around it - adjust the gameplay so that death isn't on the line; players just aren't in a position where they are likely to die.

For example: you could follow the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh type path and have your players wander the world collecting and battling with pets, cards or some other device.

Edit: or are you more interested in what the player loses when they lose a battle? I don't think it need be too severe. If you the contest route, you could make it near anything; lose some money, lose a playing piece/card/whatever, etc.

What I dislike the most when it comes to punishments for dying in online games is that not all deaths comes from something the player can influence such as lag or disconnects.

As an example of this you can imagine the player grinding some mobs for one reason or the other. In comparison the player may be much more powerful than one of these mobs and can kill them easily enough but if the player disconnects in the middle of the battle he might get killed anyway just because his character isn't fighting back.

So as I see it there should definitely be some disincentive to dying but nothing too severe. What it is depends on the game and what there is to be lost etc.

When someone sits down to play a game, they want to play it. Putting obstacles in front of them that prevent them from playing the game does not improve their play experience.

In Everquest, when your character died, you had sometimes a very long run back, naked. Sometimes this was nearly impossible and you might lose hours of real time begging others for help. This frustrates the player and bothers others. In addition, you lost experience, which was even more time lost.

One of the reasons that World of Warcraft, a direct inheritor of EQ, is so successful is that they have dispensed with the severity of the penalty while retaining some of it. That is, you must still run back, but you are no longer forced to do so in a vulnerable position and you do not suffer losses beyond a minor in game monetary expense (less of a time penalty than experience loss).

To me, this suggests that people prefer lesser penalties. In addition to the problems mentioned above about character death from technical problems, one of the most aggravating forms of character death is mistakes of other players. The primary feature of an MMO is being online simultaneously with others, so designers naturally try to enforce that feature on gameplay by requiring you to be with others (role definition, frex). But as the saying goes "Hell is other people." - in any group, are there more people you'll want to spend time with or more people you'd rather not? Still, this is a core feature of the genre.

Perhaps another way to re-interpret the death penalty in MMORPG games then would be to make death less painful in situations where you work together. This follows the guideline of reducing death penalties without eliminating them and encourages cooperative play passively. To put it in WoW terms, perhaps dying in a full group gives no repair penalty to equipment, for example.

The only resource you have with an MMO to date is time. You can only penalize the player by taking away time spent by them or making them pay a time debt. You could try making the player spend money (not the character, the player) to recover their losses, but I think that might be met with some resistance by players.

I'll keep this short, but as one who tends towards hardcore games and gaming styles, I'd say that games without death penalties are less fun than games with extreme death penalties. I measure fun by difficulty and what I've overcome. If I have overcome nothing, or rather I have only overcome that which I was guaranteed to overcome, I find no interest whatsoever. Defeating a monster that can deprive you of everything you've ever done is far more rewarding to me than defeating that same monster if it cannot deprive me of anything but a few minutes of gameplay.

WoW is a joke in my eyes, EvE is fantastic.

The point I'm making is that your initial premise is faulty - death penalties are fun for certain audiences. Keep your audience in mind when making this kind of decision. If I got a cookie for dying in Eve, rather than loosing all my gear, I'd go play something else. Immediately.

EVE has a population of 150k to 300k. WoW has a population of 9M to 11M. It seems pretty clear that the WoW model is more appealing than EVE. And a part of that model is ease of game play (which includes death penalties).

When a person sits down to play a game, they want to engage in the main action of that game. For a fantasy adventure game, that is fighting monsters (or other players) for magical treasures. If you put something in the way of that experience, you will alienate people who play that game. For example, if I have to fill out a form every time I want to kill monsters, I will quickly decide it is not fun. And death penalties do just that; prevent you from playing the game.

The art of the penalty in these games is to provide something annoying without being too annoying. WoW has clearly hit a better balance in this regard as far as reception in the marketplace is concerned.

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Original post by Telluric EVE has a population of 150k to 300k. WoW has a population of 9M to 11M. It seems pretty clear that the WoW model is more appealing than EVE. And a part of that model is ease of game play (which includes death penalties).

You totally missed my point. Of course WoW is more appealing to a casual audience. And, it's true that the casual audience is much larger than the hardcore audience. WoW has, however, very few hardcore players and is considered something of a joke in other games. "Go play WoW you carebear" does not suggest a universal appeal.

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death penalties do just that; prevent you from playing the game.

You've overlooked something here. Not all gamers play just to receive treasure - I certainly don't feel any reward for having getting tossed a cookie that's exactly the same as everyone else's. Casual games are typically about simple rewards such as this. Hardcore games usually focus on something else, something that often requires a death penalty for it to have any meaning. The existence of the death penalty makes it worth playing, quite the opposite of what you're suggesting.

I mention hardcore and casual/softcore games so frequently because of an issue that's quite prevalent in game design (namely these forums) but often gets totally ignored. A lot of people come up with a premise that is far more suited to and could only be made to work by hardcore players, but then layer on a lot of softcore things that would chase those same players away. That, and the fact that audience analysis is what's most important, not appealing to the most people. The odds of an independent developer "killing" WoW (or any other major game) are very, very slim. Making a game that targets the same, broad audience but does not deliver as well (how could it, if you are competing with a multi-million dollar design team?) doesn't make sense. You wont get those millions of players suddenly diving into your game, when they can have WoW just as easily.

Instead, game designers should target a specific audience and give them something that other games don't or can't. Make the perfect game for a specific audience, and you will have a loyal, dedicated fanbase who aren't likely to abandon you for the next trinket that comes along. Target a broad audience with gimmicks and cookies, and you will have a lot of content WoW players... playing WoW.

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The art of the penalty in these games is to provide something annoying without being too annoying. WoW has clearly hit a better balance in this regard as far as reception in the marketplace is concerned.

WoW targeted the casual audience. EvE targeted a hardcore niche audience. I'd say that EvE has attracted a larger percent of it's target audience than WoW has, to be honest. The numbers only seem skewed the other way because there are more casual players than hardcore wones.

In my game, which has an audience of 0% of WoW or Eve, I don't let the player die. It was a design decision that has yet to play out (so to speak).

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Original post by Zouflain I'll keep this short, but as one who tends towards hardcore games and gaming styles, I'd say that games without death penalties are less fun than games with extreme death penalties. I measure fun by difficulty and what I've overcome. If I have overcome nothing, or rather I have only overcome that which I was guaranteed to overcome, I find no interest whatsoever. Defeating a monster that can deprive you of everything you've ever done is far more rewarding to me than defeating that same monster if it cannot deprive me of anything but a few minutes of gameplay. WoW is a joke in my eyes, EvE is fantastic. The point I'm making is that your initial premise is faulty - death penalties are fun for certain audiences. Keep your audience in mind when making this kind of decision. If I got a cookie for dying in Eve, rather than loosing all my gear, I'd go play something else. Immediately.

I remember in UO that having to get back to recover your stuff (after racing to get to a 'healer' to be reconstituted (resurrected)) often became an adventure in itself. It was interesting and involving -- added to the game where players often had little enough after a while to keep them from dying of boredom.

Losing your stuff gave a reason to maintain spare equiptment and gave the crafters a real reason to exist. The possibility of loss also kept people from only using their best (hardest to get or most $$$) equiptment all the time.
That presented the ongoing problem of what to equip (again giving the players something to ponder).


When death has a real penalty, then the players are forced to moderate their actions and seek alternatives instead of the chronic 'who cares if I die'
attitude that causes players to more quickly get bored and quit.

You've probably put it in a better way than I did, but that's almost exactly what I meant. And a lot of game designers don't take the consumption (or lack of consumption) of resources into consideration. So many games want crafting systems for instance, but because everyone who wants something can get it and keep it indefinitely, there really isn't a point to being a crafter. It's "WTS>Sword of Ubber Rare" "No thx already have".

Make mine another vote for "harsh death penalties". The penalty itself isn't fun, but it makes the rest of the game more fun, providing death is avoidable with enough skill or care. Not every feature has to justify itself in isolation, just as part of the whole.

And another vote for DP.

Lord of the Annoyance Online is a good example of how not to do it. They give you very little (practically none at all) death penalty, and to "balance" for that, they added ridiculous amounts of aggro. They don't even call it "death", but "defeat".

Your death penalty is a few coins for item repairs and some dread, which is really meaningless.
Half of the NPCs and even some areas give you dread, some of them more than dying 3-4 times. On the other hand, you can barely walk 10 meters without being attacked by something. Even deer will attack you.

Each time you are killed by a bunch of stupid insignificant things, which honestly adds zero to your game experience, you ask yourself "Why the f... do you darn lamers have to annoy me on purpose???!!". The only thing death really does is force you to start from the next spawn point, and eventually it makes you cancel your subscription.
Removing that annoying "death noise" and making deaths a more severe (and meaningful) thing instead would make the game a lot more attractive. There is no point in avoiding death if it happens all the time anyway, and if there is no penalty. But then, there's no fun in the game either.

I've suggested this before in a single player RPG context, but how about taking with one hand and giving back with the other?

You can exact a harsh death penalty on a player; strip them of everything they're carrying and a huge dollop of XP, but give them something back that they can't get any other way. As examples, perhaps they might pick up a scar that gives them some kind of intimidating fear ability. Or perhaps they develop closer ties with the spirit world, which unlocks a unique set of magical abilities. Maybe they develop a grudge against the racial group that killed them, unlocking race specific beserk/rage abilities. The strength of the ability might depend on how long since you last died; so suiciding yourself repeatedly to gain these abilities might offer diminishing returns.

The advantage of something like this is that while death is still undesirable due to the high penalty, giving something back like that will be less discouraging and will also work towards making their character unique; otherwise identical builds might have died different numbers of times, and picked up different random death abilities.

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Original post by Zouflain Not all gamers play just to receive treasure - I certainly don't feel any reward for having getting tossed a cookie that's exactly the same as everyone else's. Casual games are typically about simple rewards such as this. Hardcore games usually focus on something else, something that often requires a death penalty for it to have any meaning. The existence of the death penalty makes it worth playing, quite the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Last time I checked, EVE is all about acquiring bigger and better spaceships.

These games very much are about getting treasures. They don't contain enough story to really get much from that and almost all have forced static worlds to provide managable play experiences. You can make the road to treasures long and hard or short and easy, but that's what the central aspect of game play is here - growing your character through the acquisition of power, usually through a combination of skills and items.

Everyone should already be familiar with the classic EQ design idea that "harder is better". I return again to my example - the lesson of WoW is apparently that it is not better. Not if what you want to do is sell your game to millions of people and make a boatload of money. While there might be a minority of players who enjoy a challenge, we can see that building to that market is at best a niche, as you suggested, and you run the risk of failing the more you narrow your target.

The best design is something that gives both options to players. WoW has perhaps too lenient a system, EVE perhaps much too hard. An example that moderates between these two is Diablo II, which provided a casual mode and (literally) Hardcore mode - die once and you are done forever. Still, it seems pretty obvious that the market would prefer a modest penalty, something you'll work to avoid without losing weeks of play time should it accidentally occur.

It occurs to me on re-reading the thread that I haven't really addressed the OP's questions more directly.

If you want to penalize someone in an rpg setting, you usually do it by removing some element of acquired power. Characters often acquire additional power in terms of wealth (items or gold, frex) or skills (levels or skill points, frex). So a typical penalty sets them back in these areas - gear is broken and must be repaired, levels are lost, etc. The game of an rpg is character growth, so the penalty goes directly to that growth in some way.

Now, you could attempt to penalize the player by reducing their rate of acquiring new wealth or skills, such as spending time running back to a corpse, instead of directly subtracting from their bottom line. This softens the blow. Gear can be repaired, so time must be spent acquiring resources to repair it, another example. In the end, this type of maintenance penalty can be perceived as a grind - an unpleasant experience the player has to suffer through to enjoy something good.

Perhaps an innovative angle then on the basic system of rewards and punishments can instead be based on the community aspect of the game instead of the classic rpg model. That is, if other players see your deaths, then you have the social pressure incentive of playing well to keep you working to stay alive. Perhaps characters can earn positive and negative labels that mark them as successful players - thus a penalty could be an easily available "time since last death" or "number of times killed this session". This can even be generalized to an entire ladder system of performance in many different areas... as Napoleon once noted, "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."

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Original post by Telluric Last time I checked, EVE is all about acquiring bigger and better spaceships.

Only so much as poker is all about getting good cards. Without derailing the topic too far, I'll just point out that my objective was never to have a big and impressive ship. Nor was that the objective of any of my fellow corp mates, or alliance members so far as I knew. And it was a large alliance. The only ship I desired was one that was rarely used (certainly untrue of big ships), one that suited my preferred "style" and finally one that was effective. I never would have bought a capitol class ship, and it was a very small minority that did. I never actually wanted anything above cruiser (which is one of the most common ship types, certainly not the largest).

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These games very much are about getting treasures. They don't contain enough story

Again this wasn't true to EvE, or many more hardcore games. Often times hardcore games allow for far more story than the generic stat pump ever could. Think about all the stories you've read or heard and took interest in throughout your life. How many of them were about happy days with trivial troubles (think: no risk of death, no loss of wealth/status/power/family/creed/anything)? How many of them focused almost exclusively on all the setbacks the characters faced and overcame? Stories, sad as it may seem, come from suffering, not from shinnies or cookies.

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the central aspect of game play is... growing your character... through a combination of skills and items.

I hate butchering a quote, but I hope I haven't changed the content. Anyway, that's one form of game. Not all games are this way. This is just the common setup for MMO games, and most of those games fail.

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the lesson of WoW is apparently that it is not better. Not if what you want to do is sell your game to millions of people and make a boatload of money.

And here inlies the problem. That is an unrealistic objective for an independent designer. The odds of someone being able to compete with WoW (and honestly, mostly everyone who's likely to play MMO games is playing some MMO at the moment, and your own statistics suggest that WoW has consumed the lions share) are extremely low and it is a poor design decision to try to do it. There aren't "millions of people" just waiting for a new game to start up their MMO experience. Most of those who will play MMO's have many games and are playing them. And you wont steal them all by using the same tricks the game they are playing does. Why would they flock to you anyway? Your game offers nothing they aren't already getting, and they trust WoW far more than some new upstart. And if they do join your game, why would they stay, when a new shiney game is guaranteed to come out with newer graphics, or whatever other gimmick your game used.

No, you're far better of targeting an audience that will flock to you because you meet their needs. And they wont leave, because no other game will target them specifically.

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WoW has perhaps too lenient a system, EVE perhaps much too hard.

EvE's system is actually sited as being too easy at times. Check out the Crime and Punishment forum if you don't believe it. Insurance for losses incurred due to aggressive action was an issue of very hot debate a few years back (and these things cycle), as was the "ease of piracy" though I assure you it was HARD to make a living that way.

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Still, it seems pretty obvious that the market would prefer a modest penalty

The CASUAL market certainly would. I've said this many times. The hardcore market wouldn't. There is no "market." There is a "market for cheeseburgers" or "market for hamburgers" but no "market." Thus, when you say "the market would prefer" what you are saying is "the market for people who prefer this product would prefer this product" and that's redundant. Now I've said already that the market for casual games (I phrased it audience for casual games) is larger than that of hardcore games. So yes, you are likely to attract more if you make a showstopper. But one, you wont get the same percent of your target audience if you had a game that catered to a core base rather than a broad psuedo-all inclusive market and two, trying to make a showstopper WoW kilelr is unrealistic for an independent developer - they typically just don't have the resources.

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Original post by Zouflain That is an unrealistic objective for an independent designer.

MMOs are an unrealistic objective for independent designers.

If you are going to secure funding to develop your idea, you are going to have to present a compelling case for how your game will secure a revenue stream for investors. And you will need investors if you seriously expect to pull off an MMO.

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The odds of someone being able to compete with WoW (and honestly, mostly everyone who's likely to play MMO games is playing some MMO at the moment, and your own statistics suggest that WoW has consumed the lions share) are extremely low and it is a poor design decision to try to do it.

Tell that to Mythic and Warhammer Online.

The challenge in taking on WoW is in delivering a game experience that is superior. This is exactly what they did to supersede Everquest; took a look at their competition and built a game with features that greatly improved on it. How would you improve on WoW? Because if you don't have a good angle on that question, it probably isn't worth even considering trying to do an MMO. Can it be done? Certainly - these games and this genre are still pretty limited and simplistic. But I agree that the task is very daunting.

If you want to specialize as a way to secure a player base, you add the challenge of limiting your appeal in the first place to the great difficulty of making it to market at all. Can specializing help you get a niche market? Sure. Can you convince investors that your niche exists and will pay? A tough call.

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And this discussion is far afield from the topic the OP wanted to discuss. We aren't talking about death penalties and innovative ways to interpret them. All this discussion between you and I has accomplish is to highlight that some people (you) think very severe death penalties are good and some people (me) think that it is a careful balancing act. What are your ideas then on simply punishing the player by subtracting time spent in game through item or skill loss?

[Edited by - Telluric on October 9, 2008 10:43:43 AM]

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Original post by Telluric MMOs are an unrealistic objective for independent designers.

No, not really actually. Eternal lands started with two people, and was operational long before it went open source and imported coders (and it had absolutely 0 investors from the start). Infinity is one of the most eagerly awaited upcomming games. These are just two off the top of my head. Obviously two people aren't going to make a WoW killer, but I've said that this objective is unrealistic time and time again. A game doesn't need millions of fans to be an MMO.

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And you will need investors if you seriously expect to pull off an MMO.

Only if you want a WoW killer.

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Tell that to Mythic and Warhammer Online.

I think I made it pretty clear that "someone" was a reference to the average someone; this isn't a forum for massive commercial game design teams with millions of dollars at their disposal. I think the vast majority of designers here are independent.

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This is exactly what they did to supersede Everquest; took a look at their competition and built a game with features that greatly improved on it.

Actually they used a lot of psychology. WoW is, essentially a balm. Easy gameplay, low degree of setbacks, low requirements for gamers - it's designed as a "feel good" rather than a "accomplish something" game, because honestly, there's nothing to accomplish that wasn't already accomplished two weeks after the game came out. Not every gamer just wants nothing more than a repetitive series of shinnies or cookies. Note that the niche games either weren't hurt by WoW or had very little change in population.

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How would you improve on WoW? Because if you don't have a good angle on that question, it probably isn't worth even considering trying to do an MMO.

Redesign it from the ground up. I can't think of any aspect I liked about it, from background story (a betrayal of the excellent Warcraft 1~3 back story) to mechanics. If I want a stat grind, I've got plenty of games (probably Korean) to play for that which don't require me to pay for them. There are plenty enough who agree with me (discussion forums, friends), so I certainly have a market that shares these values.

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Can specializing help you get a niche market? Sure. Can you convince investors that your niche exists and will pay? A tough call.

Again with the investors. It doesn't take millions or even thousands of dollars to get a game up and running. It will cost you to run a server, and if you are a commercial designer obviously your staff will want to be paid, but this is just one model for MMO development not the only model. Certainly you can take that route, but it isn't the only route. Not every game has to try to be a WoW killer!

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some people (you) think very severe death penalties are good and some people (me) think that it is a careful balancing act.

Yes, in other words everyone has unique wants and likes. Trying to appeal to everyone doesn't work - I've said that. Thinking that if you make your game a carebear paradise, it's going to magically be more successful is a recipe for disaster. Read the post mortems, read the design doccuments from professional designers. Successful games don't usually try to appease everyone, they appease their base and then add a few things to attract other audiences without alienating that base. In addition, they have a design that suits their mechanics. Read what was said about Crafting Systems, for instance.

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What are your ideas then on simply punishing the player by subtracting time spent in game through item or skill loss?

My idea was expressed earlier - if you don't have punishment, if there is no risk, then the entire game is nothing more than a cookie hand-out. The magnitude of what you overcome, really, tells you merit what you've done has. If you never overcome anything, no accomplishment you ever make means a thing and it's almost certain that everyone around you has already been there and done that. You are nothing, everyone around you is nothing, and the entire world is nothing. What's interesting about nothing? Really, what would any story be if the heroes aren't ever at risk of defeat? That's like LOTR with no orcs (or anything they ever did), or The Matrix with no Agents (or anything like them). And it is not defeat if it doesn't actually defeat you. Death is only defeat because you are set back by it (in reality, it's the ultimate setback) not because you died.

So it is the punishments, the skill losses, the risks you must take to succeed that make succeeding even worth trying. Would you feel good about beating a horde of two year olds in a marathon? There is no possibility of defeat there! So it should be fun, right? How about we put a station every couple of miles that gives you a cookie. That's the ticket, and that will make it worth spending all the time it takes to run the marathon right?

What's the point of playing if you are guaranteed to win? Not every punishment takes away from gameplay, and not everything has to be a cookie. If the only thing that would have happened in death is that you look different, or change a little, you're still guaranteed to win and that's the same as racing two year olds, or destroying the One Ring through nothing more than taking a stroll through the hills and tossing a ring on a fire.

And by the way, I focus on this specifically because of this:

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a death penalty isnt FUN and therefore shouldnt be part of the game design

Which is a false premise, but the basis for the whole discussion. You don't need to eliminate the bad sides of a death penalty, or even soften them. They are what make the game worth playing, because they give your accomplishments meaning. Unless your game is designed for people who only want to play for a few minutes at a time, you're going to have to give those players who stick around a good sense that they aren't wasting their time. You do this by giving them something to accomplish, but no one cares about accomplishments that don't matter.

Having played online games starting with MUD's for almost a decade now, and at a competitive level for about half that the argument of a death penalty was said best by the individual in the above post that stated that it should be decided against by what type of audience you're trying to attract.

The WoW arguments show that many game designers overlook at why World of Warcraft was so successful. It's apparent in the gaming industry that more and more people are playing games in the world, from 5 year old "Tommy" to 50 year old "Aunt Elle". Development companies have seen this, and being one of the biggest markets in the industry so have the MMO Developers.

World of Warcraft was the first MMO to try and envelope everyone. They took what they thought was good from other MMO's and changed the "hardcore" playstyle. The reason WoW attracts so many people is because a 5 year old kid can log on, play the game, and it's simple enough for them to understand. There's relatively no difficult quests, no bogged down storyline, and hardly any accomplishment that can be made in the game that's even close to other "Hardcore" MMO's.

Having lead MANY Hardcore guilds in my time that have achieved both Server and World firsts on an individual and group basis when a new recruit tries to apply for the guild...if all they have is WoW experience their application is closed, thrown out, and never looked at again. This is what WoW has created, an MMO that doesn't develop real MMO quality players. Take someone who's played MUD's, UO, EQ, DAoC, Lineage I/II, Shadowbane...these are the players we look for.

Why is that? Because it's two different audiences. If you take the death penalty out of a game it will be one more design that will leave a bad taste in your hardcore fanbase. It will also attract more casual players, so which player base do you want?

Hardcore players are your player base that will stick with the game from pre-release to closing of the servers. This is a smaller market but a market that will pay for your game much longer then a casual player might. While casual players tend to move from game to game...why wouldn't they? They have no "real" attachment to the game other then logging on for a bit, playing, then logging out. This is a large market for MMO's but a market that will pay far far less time wise.

It just depends on what the goal of your game is supposed to be. If you want to focus on imparting some sense of immersion based on realism or survival to the player, then having a moderate to severe death penalty would do that, like what Ultima Online did. If you want to focus on the unobstructed exploration of content (to your level of course) like what World of Warcraft is designed after, then you would implement a very light or even no death penalty. When a player plays a game with a harsh death penalty, this simply means more focus is placed on conservative even domestic play and on assessing risks than on liberal play, continuous exploration, and (mostly) fighting.