Killing Death
by Christopher Linton 
Jan 28th 2006 at 2:11PM
One of the hardest things to get right
in an MMO is the death system. Developers need to balance it so it includes the recreational players and the hardcore
players without making one group feel slighted. I feel as though WoW has done a good job with that balance, while
leaning slightly to the recreational side. Death is an annoyance at most until you start grinding high-end instances,
where the repair bills really start to add up. Before WoW, I played Dark Age of Camelot, which I feel really nailed the
death system. Death was more of an event in DAoC, because there was experience loss involved, too. You could always run
back to your gravestone to /pray, at which point you regained some of that lost experience, but sometimes that wasn't
feasible. The loss was considerable, and it made you far more cautious while playing, as a general rule. Still, I never
felt as though a death was a huge, game-ending setback, I just felt that I had made a stupid mistake that I needed to
learn from. The loss of item durability and sometimes resurrection sickness is a little soft, in my opinion. I understand that if the penalties were made more severe that WoW might lose some of it's fans, but I hope it wouldn't. I would hope that, with the sting of death being a little enhanced, it would encourage players to be a little more cautious.
All that being said, I really am fine with the current death system. It is only slightly annoying, and it opens up the game to a wide range of people, which is the main draw of the game in the first place. I have seen forum posts calling for "hardcore" realms, with perma-death and full looting of player corpses, and that doesn't seem fun either. I play this game as much for the variety of people that I meet as for the next BWL run with my guild, and I'm glad that the current system is generally attractive to everyone.
If you could tweak the death system, how would you change it, or is it perfect the way it is?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Max Feb 20th 2006 12:49PM
I think Blizzard has it right. I mean can you imagine the xp loss you might get from doing BG, just think all that honour you could build up and never go up a lvl in fact you could go down lvls.
One more thing I have against xp loss is ganking. I think it would start going up, because some 1 will think it's funny that some 1 10+ lvls below them is getting lower.
AareDub Jan 29th 2006 7:29PM
Losing experience for death wouldn't be a bad idea in a non-pvp environment, but I wouldn't be comfortable losing hard earned exp just because some lvl ?? player feels like corpse camping.
Cort Jan 29th 2006 7:40PM
I played DAoC for about six months after its release; one night ending up lower in XP than I actually started the night with. The very next day I cancelled my subscription. A game is meant to be fun; I had spent three hours to gain a single bubble of experience. A couple of unlucky battles and I was out all of that work.
Personally, I don't like death penalties in MMOs. I think WoW has it right, causing minor annoyance for dying but without having any lasting effects from the death. Party wipes are annoying, and having to make the run back to the instance are frustrating, but temporary in their pain. As the previous comment stated also, it wouldn't make sense to penalize a player for getting killed by a high level player on a PvP server. Overall, I think they got it right. Some pain caused, but nothing to cause someone to shut their computer off in disgust.
Crooth Jan 29th 2006 7:45PM
WoW caters to the more casual gamer in a way no other game has (hence its success) and big part of that success is the death system. Given the lost time for recovering my corpse (or the 10min downtime if I don't) I consider the death situation quite enough a sting, thank you very much. You find it easy because 10min of lost time doesn't mean anything to you, the player who will put in 4 hours a game session without difficulty. For me, 10min of downtime is huge - I might get an hour per night, and it's a huge inconvenience when I lose 17% of that.
I say - go play EQ2 with its XP debt or worse, EQ1 (with massive XP loss) if you want to enjoy that style of gaming.
SWG had a great death system for a while - no penalty at all save the run (or ride) back to your initially location from the cloning center. They've added item decay as well (well, at least they used to - not sure today with the most recent complete game change.)
Quicksilver Jan 29th 2006 8:11PM
I can see it being a bit more severe. I played FFXI for about a year. I hate losing exp for death. If wow was to do it i woul dcancel my subscribtion. I do like in FFXI how they have their respawn system. That makes death sometimes good and bad. YO uhave to battle for the graveyards in particular areas by controlling the area. I really like that.
Leshrac Jan 29th 2006 8:47PM
Honestly, if the death penalty were any worse, it would substantially change the way the game could be played. Right now the game is structured so that you can kind of venture out on your own for a few quests, or just to get from point a to point b, but for the more difficult areas you need to group up. If death had a penalty, you would need escorts every time you went into contested territory, which would be a major pain in the ass.
Honestly, I think the death system is just about perfect, although I really wish that every class had the ability to Rez. I liked the way Guild Wars employed rezzing, where every class could take a rez signet that would only work once per time outside of a town. Why couldn't WoW give an item to characters that could be used only once or twice an hour?
-Leshrac
kG Jan 29th 2006 9:30PM
When I first started playing WoW a month ago, I did a lot of online research. I swear I read somewhere that resurrecting at the graveyard (via the angel) did result in loss of experience. Then again, I read a lot of things about WoW which have turned out to be completely false, such as "names in green are honored" instead of PvP as is truly the case. It's on the Internet, so it must be true!
While reading this story, however, a thought occurred: When you die, you learn how not to do something. That's experience! So losing experience points seems wrong somehow. As other comments point out, it would deter players who don't have time to earn the points back.
So, what if experience points are indeed lost after death, but death extends your rest state, as an incentive to earn them back? Or death could even put you into a "quick restore" 4x rest state for even more encouragement, as long as you don't change areas (to prevent abuse).
Not that I'm complaining. I pretty much like WoW how it is, and was happy to discover I could rez at a graveyard with minimal penalty the first time a friend and I followed two level 42 farmers into Deadmines at level 16, but lost them at the instance threshold. Heh.
goochoz Jan 29th 2006 11:45PM
You must play on a pve server lol. I think something that drawn out would bore casual players.
Gnolly! Jan 29th 2006 11:49PM
I've tried WoW, City of Heroes and Asheron's Call, and to me, the CoH method was the most fair -- you don't really lose anything, but you're at 50% XP gain for a while. AC was just too painful to die, losing items, and having to run back to your body. I spent far too many early mornings running to recover my body after "just one more battle".
Having said that, I agree with one of the above posters. Death from PVP needs to be treated differently from death from PVE. Corpse camping is bad enough, but if said corpse camper meant I was losing XP or items, it would be grounds for hunting him down in RL. (/joke)
Fabian Jan 30th 2006 9:14AM
Just yesterday we started a little war in BootyBay. We went there at night and discovered that all the Bruisers were drunk and asleep - so we started to fight with all the allys we could find (even though most were above our level, we were more numerous). I think it was an even fight, but the alliance lost most of the time, so they called for backup...
...then our backup arrived and we waged war in BB for 1-2 hours. One side pushing the other back, then vice versa. Regrouping, new attack wave - you name it. It was quite fun - and I think the death system is very good the way it is. Maybe some don't know that yet, but if you die numerous times in a short amount of time, you get a penalty - after the first couple of death's you get a 1 minute penalty before you can revive or be rezze'd. In the end I was at 5 minutes - I sure died a lot last night. However inconvient the death and the penalty (and sometimes having your body in now-enemy-occupied territory) was - I was still able to play and have a lot of fun.
I think it's a pretty good system :-)
PodMonkeys Jan 30th 2006 9:36AM
Compared to when UO first started with full on corpse looting and having to run halfway across the globe to find a healer or shrine, then running all the way back, i really much prefer the WoW method. I think the increasing rez timer is fine enough for me, and some maps are bad enough with how far you have to run to get back to the corpse. And then theres the whole resurrecting while surrounded by enemy. Thats punishment enough.
Tom Jan 30th 2006 10:17AM
I liked City of Heroes' XP debt as opposed to XP loss. I probably wouldn't be too upset if WoW had that, but I certainly ain't going to campaign for it.
Haryon Jan 30th 2006 4:29PM
I too am on PVP with WoW and it's already too much of a pain to be Player-Killed (as opposed to PVP) and Body-Camped and to have to walk your way back to your corpse because of a moron can't fight his own level, or need to take me when I got few monsters on the back and only few hitpoints left to get his victory. So please no exp death for death when I lost one single hitpoint to the opposite pvp faction during the previous minute or two.
I liked CoH debt too, somehow it's some xp loss, but you don't have the feeling to go back in your work, only that be slown down later. But what I like most about it (beside the fact I don't have to seek our a repair shop to fix eq at some point, grrr) is that some tasks (Mentorship) can reduce your debt !
Somehow it would be interesting if you could CHOOSE the way you repay for your resurrection :
- spend time (walking to your body)
- calm down (go shoping, read mails, while suffering rez sickness)
- repay xp (xp debt)
- pay (eq repair or sell items to reduce xp debt, or to cure rez sickness)
You could also consider hardcore level bar, where the player choose the level of risk he takes (like +nice% xp gain, but high xp loss on death, or lower xp gain but low death penalty).
Anyway the problem will always be Player Killing and Player Annoyment.
winter Jan 30th 2006 7:21PM
I played DAoC too and I too experienced the logging off with less xp than you started. It sucked, and I quit soon after.
I've played CoH and really, it is pretty much the same thing, they just change your perception of it. If I die and gain 50k xp debt, how is that different to dying and losing 50k xp? It isn't, except for my perception of it. After I gain 100k xp I am in the same place in terms of xp in both scenarios. That and Statesman is a complete idiot.
WoW has it right in my opnion. It is a pain in the arse when I die, I have to run all the way back to my body, I cant use my mount to do it and if I am in an instance some of the mobs may have respawned. If I'm not in an instance, it is almost guaranteed that mobs have respawned, so if I was working at slowly picking off the mobs around a quest location, I've now gotta start again.
M0le Jan 30th 2006 7:40PM
I just think that if you get killed in a PVP server by the other faction your items shouldnt lose durability because being on the receiving end of corpse camping can really put a hole in your wallet
boneyard Jan 31st 2006 5:25AM
i never really minded the ac corpse run system, sure it could be annoying when it was in a bad place but it made you be a little more realisticly careful. the wow system isn't too bad, perhaps a little too easy.
xp loss i never liked as a penalty, never played a mmorpg that had that either.
Liz Jan 31st 2006 6:53AM
IIRC, the manual does say you lose XP for rezzing at the graveyard, and for months I never spirit rezzed because I thought I'd lose XP. Then a friend who played since the start told me they'd taken that out early on. D'oh.
I think the low penalties for death are consistent with WoW's status as an RPG whice is easy to pick up. I don't die that often now, but when I was first levelling a priest I died a lot, and harsher penalties would probably have discouraged me from continuing.
My main is on PvP, and I feel the death penalty is just about right on that server. I don't want to spend all my play time running back to my corpse after ganking only to lose XP as well. If they ever did introduce it I hope they'd do the same as for durability loss and have it apply to mob deaths only. Still doesn't solve the problem of high level players ganking you and leaving the mob to finish you off so you get durability loss, though...