Right now I'm trying to decide what kind of death system I should implement. So I'm going to take a poll to see which people prefer. Remember, don't vote blindly. Read the descriptions for each kind of death below, and think about which you would like the most, and which would benefit the playerworld in the long run. Okay, now that I'm done talking, on to the descriptions!
Minor death penalties - When you get killed, you barely lose anything, such as items, gold, or stats.
Medium death penalties - When you get killed, you lose a fair amount of something, not too much that you'd want to quit playing over it though.
Perma death - When you die, it's game over, lights out, restart.
Semi-Perma death - When you die, you must be revived. You are only allowed a certain amount of revives when you start, but you can earn more revives as you play. This is much like "lives" in offline games, where you have 3 lives or so before it's game over. (I like this idea the most
)
Death needs to have a penalty, or else dying would be pointless, and people would just kill themselves for fun. (ie Classic) Besides a "playerkill/playerdeath" ratio being affected, you barely lose anything of value. But if the death penalty is too great, people will become pissed that they lost their character.
Now, before you make your final decision, I want to try to win you over on my semi-perma death idea. Why would this work the best? I think because if a player can REALLY lose their character, they will be more careful about doing stupid things, and life would have more value. For example, if this system was in place, you wouldn't run into some unknown area without asking around about it, or you wouldn't go fight some way too strong boss knowing you'd probably lose.
The second beneficial factor, is the "no super players" factor. With a semi-perma death system, it's inevitable that sooner or later you're probably going to die. Meaning no player will ever become super godly level 100 leet with maxed out stats. Now you might be saying "wait a second, what is the point of fighting monsters all day trying to raise my stats, if I'm just going to lose them?". Well, it should make you rethink why you're playing in the first place. My playerworld won't be about blindly leveling up until you're a demi-god. Everything won't revolve around fighting, so this will be unlike anything you've played on Graal to date.
The third beneficial factor, is the "lower playerkiller count" factor. At first you might think that playerkillers would just be even more annoying, now that you could actually lose your character from being killed, but if you think it through, it would work out nicely. See, a person who thrusts themselves into constant battles (ie. a playerkiller) will not have a very long lifespan. Meaning people that just mindlessly kill players, will never achieve a high enough level to do any serious damage. Heck, they might not even achieve a level high enough to kill anyone. By the time they get strong enough to kill, they would reconsider risking their newly gained strength, just to kill some players.
So what do you think? Now it's not impossible to stay alive, but I think it would be way more challenging to play like this, than to just be some immortal who does nothing but grow stronger. Once players get super strong, balance of the game would slip. Stronger monsters would be made, prices would be raised, stronger weapons will be made, until none of the old weapons or monsters are worth a damn. (much like Kingdoms) It's just a neverending downward spiral of chaos.
Anyway, I will let you decide, and hopefully, people will agree with me that the semi-perma death method would be an interesting and fun alternative, to the boring old immortality superfreak servers.
08-21-2003, 03:38 PM
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