Originally posted by Oberholzer I have some good, funny memories of corpse runs but i don't think I miss it. I'm not anti death penalty in game or anything and if a game had corpse runs it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me if the game was good but I can't say I miss it.
^This describes my feelings regarding the matter pretty well (though I tend to dislike harsh penalties in any form - this one not necessarily the worst among them).
Corpse runs make for funny stories sometimes, other times it feels like the game griefing you (when you just can't reach your corpse).
Im assuming you arent talking about any bugs or glitches, but about not being able to get help, being unable to fight the monsters with back up gear and your recently aquired lower level, or simply being unable to keep playing because you have to go to work, bed, or on vacation.
And Im assuming that we are talking about losing all your stuff because the corpse rots.
Yes, that might be the biggest problem with corpse runs. And if we ever see another game with it, there should be alternatives. Maybe something that could be sold in a cash shop, since every game seems to get one. Or trading in game money or xp for a corpse teleport with or without a waiting period. But I always prefer leaving it to the players to figure out an option, atleast if there is a sandbox focus (and those are the games I prefer). Like a guild or player setting them selves up as corpse retrivers for hire. Same goes for wizard travel agencies, Heals on Wheels, or Rezzing for Pay.
How is enacting corpse runs elaborate? And why would it be in focus?
What happens when you die in a game, is a decission that has to be made at some point. It has a great impact on how you experience and play the game. so it is an important thing to figure out.
How can you say that corpse runs are a waste of time?
If you dont get your corpse back, you lose your gear and some xp. It is rare that you can farm the gear and XP back faster. Or did you mean time sink? Well that they are and MMOs need time sinks in my oppinion.
You may want games with instant, non-stop, bite-sized action with constant rewards and little penalty. But there are quite a few that have little interest in that and who want slower progression, with the possibility of a setback if we screw up, with less action but with more player interaction. So they can truly experience every level of the game, not just blitz through 90% of it.
It's elaborate compared with the typical solution of simply resetting the fight. Not sure what you're asking regarding focus.
At the moment you die in a game, all the decisions have already been made. All decision-making occurs before death -- and if you make enough poor decisions, you die and suffer a penalty which (if it involves decisions at all) involves fewer and shallower decisions than the core game.
So because the best-case scenario for a corpse run is "play this shallower game for a while", it's a waste of time. You could be playing the deeper core game, but instead you're forced to play a shallower game.
The extremist way you portray it isn't quite accurate:
It's not about "instant". It is about good pacing. Which implies that any feature which doesn't justify its time usage for a clear reason is purposeless, and should be removed.
It's not about "non-stop". It is about player freedom. You choose when to stop. If you choose not to stop, you should be able to engage in non-stop gameplay. Virtually nobody will choose to play non-stop forever, so the actual play experience will include stopping points -- but they'll be driven by players.
It isabout being bite-sized, since games are supposed to fit into players' lives (not the other way around.)
It's not about action. It is about gameplay. It could very well be the least actiony type of game possible (turn-based strategy) and players are still going to want the game to be about the gameplay (nobody ever said, "Man I wish computer players took longer turns in Civilization so I could spend more time not playing the game.")
It's not about "constant rewards", but a good game is certainly going to reward you if you beat the challenge.
It is about little penalty, since the smallest penalty (a fight reset) is usually the right answer so players can immediately get back to playing the game. I'm not sure I can think of a single non-PVP example where penalty needs to be more than an instant reset.
It's not about fast progression. It is about spending your time progressing (playing the game, not playing the penalty system.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I miss consequences with impact in contemporary gaming. It's not necessarily the corpse run that I miss, but what it represents. It's the same reason I disdain queuing for game content (ie: dungeons) with random strangers. There should be a need to communicate with others, and there should be danger in the game. What lies over the next dune should not be certain. It could be empty sand, a fight you could win, or your demise. Verant had this in mind with EverQuest, but that was long ago.
Originally posted by evilastro Yes surprisingly. Not because it was fun, but because it made you think about what you were doing and it was a real consequence. You would think twice before trying to solo your way into a dungeon or sneak into a hostile city.
It (death) also made your achievements greater.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
One does not require the other, I don't think that the new generation is ready for any real death penalties, though.
Let me have a small chance to lose a piece of gear, stolen by the mob that killed me only to be regained by killing it. If another player beats me to it, he gets the loot instead!
Just because every car has similar features doesn't mean that Ferraris are copies of Model Ts. Progress requires failure and refining.
How is enacting corpse runs elaborate? And why would it be in focus?
What happens when you die in a game, is a decission that has to be made at some point. It has a great impact on how you experience and play the game. so it is an important thing to figure out.
How can you say that corpse runs are a waste of time?
If you dont get your corpse back, you lose your gear and some xp. It is rare that you can farm the gear and XP back faster. Or did you mean time sink? Well that they are and MMOs need time sinks in my oppinion.
You may want games with instant, non-stop, bite-sized action with constant rewards and little penalty. But there are quite a few that have little interest in that and who want slower progression, with the possibility of a setback if we screw up, with less action but with more player interaction. So they can truly experience every level of the game, not just blitz through 90% of it.
It's elaborate compared with the typical solution of simply resetting the fight. Not sure what you're asking regarding focus.
At the moment you die in a game, all the decisions have already been made. All decision-making occurs before death -- and if you make enough poor decisions, you die and suffer a penalty which (if it involves decisions at all) involves fewer and shallower decisions than the core game.
So because the best-case scenario for a corpse run is "play this shallower game for a while", it's a waste of time. You could be playing the deeper core game, but instead you're forced to play a shallower game.
The extremist way you portray it isn't quite accurate:
It's not about "instant". It is about good pacing. Which implies that any feature which doesn't justify its time usage for a clear reason is purposeless, and should be removed.
It is definatly about pacing though on that we agree 100%, although we may disaggree on the merits of actually having to travel in the world over teleporting everywhere.
It's not about "non-stop". It is about player freedom. You choose when to stop. If you choose not to stop, you should be able to engage in non-stop gameplay. Virtually nobody will choose to play non-stop forever, so the actual play experience will include stopping points -- but they'll be driven by players.
On this I was actually talking about pacing and how much player input was needed at any given time. And how much of the game was actually about combat. In that I personally prefer a slower pace in MMORPGs with a focus on planning, socializing, and world shaping. As to your point I simply have a different preference.
It isabout being bite-sized, since games are supposed to fit into players' lives (not the other way around.)
It is just that there are so many options for short burst of entertainment and I enjoy when I can spend hours or even days on a task of epic proporsions. Again Im playing MMORPGs for planning, socializing, and world shaping. And quite a bit of fighting too and sometimes its nice to be able hop in for 15 to 30 minutes to check up on things or have a bit of action. Im not denying that.
It's not about action. It is about gameplay. It could very well be the least actiony type of game possible (turn-based strategy) and players are still going to want the game to be about the gameplay (nobody ever said, "Man I wish computer players took longer turns in Civilization so I could spend more time not playing the game.")
I dont really see the relevance here, so: No comment
It's not about "constant rewards", but a good game is certainly going to reward you if you beat the challenge.
It is about little penalty, since the smallest penalty (a fight reset) is usually the right answer so players can immediately get back to playing the game. I'm not sure I can think of a single non-PVP example where penalty needs to be more than an instant reset.
Everything in an MMO should be considered to be PvP or at the least PwithP even in PvE only games, they should be focused on the interaction with other players.
It's not about fast progression. It is about spending your time progressing (playing the game, not playing the penalty system.)
As to the final 3 points combined: To me it is about the pacing and the world. And about having ups and downs and unexpected turns and complications or challenges thrown my way so my experience can be unique and I get to really explore and enjoy every single area I pass through. It is about having to take a long and dangerous journeys through strange lands to get to fabled cities or to carve out an empire with my guild or whatever.. Might even be to be the best damn blacksmith you ever saw. But it is not about breezing through 90% of a game and then breeze through the last 10% and then doing the last 10% over and over again on hardmode. And while it certainly is about progressing in some way or another, I do like it when can take my time enjoying a particular low or mid level area in stead of wasting time by staying in the area that I really enjoy. I just feel like Im being rushed by the fast progression in recent games. I want to be devising strategies at all levels. Not just in the end game.
I will admit I was baiting you to respond by being deliberatly simplistic and perhaps extreme when I asked how you saw things.
Anyway, about focus and what happens when you die. Well I wanted to know what you meant by focus.. Is it like: "The Hardcore MMO™ - The game with EXITING Corpse Runs and some other stuff", or did you mean the developers shouldnt spend any thought on what happens to your characters when they die in their game.. I mean come on.. its been an important part of games forever. What happens when a knight takes a pawn or when the ghost catch pacman.
It is definatly about pacing though on that we agree 100%, although we may disaggree on the merits of actually having to travel in the world over teleporting everywhere.
I hope the red text isnt too hard to reed.. didnt feel green was distinct enough with you using turqoise though.
One does not require the other, I don't think that the new generation is ready for any real death penalties, though.
Let me have a small chance to lose a piece of gear, stolen by the mob that killed me only to be regained by killing it. If another player beats me to it, he gets the loot instead!
Musn't forget other factors though. Like how easy it is to replace gear. I mean it would really suck losing a unique one time only drop that cannot be reaquired by any means. Although for some games it is quite alright to have this happen.. like in EvE.
I mean if having good gear is basicly just a matter of how much gold you have and you can easily replace most of your gear It is quite alright if you can lose it all.. Even if you have to farm for a couple of days or even weeks to reaquire the finances to replace the legendary center piece of your kit.
I would prefer item decay like in DAoC, though. So you would have to pay a fee for repair of normal wear and gear would take a bigger hit if you died and and even bigger hit if you didnt get a rezz or went to reclaim you corpse but chose to spawn with your gear. (reclaiming your corpse wasnt an option in DAoC, you always spawned with your gear) And eventually the gear would need to be replaced completly..
I really do miss corpse runs. They were one of the best things for communities ever in a MMO. Plus they added fear and risk and reward.
I remember many nights grouping in lower guk until very late at night. Once I found a replacement for myself for the group (one would never leave a grp without finding a replacement or giving the grp a few hrs notice to find someone else) I would then have to leave the dungeons. Which meant training my way out to the zone wall and then training all the way to the entrance while spamming my train macro so some innocent did not get hit. But because of corpse runs I remember the fear running out by myself. It would make the hairs on my arms standup as I knew if I died it would mean possibly hours trying to get my corpse back. It was very much a beautiful thing.
But the best part of corpse runs was helping others. Having others trust you not to steal their items to give you permission to drag their corpse to safety. So many cool features in EQ1 which made the community such a fine place. One of the greta things about EQ1 was reputation mattered. If you were a unreliable, a poor player, a ninja or just a jerk you would not be able to get groups and essentially you would have to reroll. If you treated people well and were a good player you could always get the best groups.
Bring back corpse runs and for that matter bring back losing your lvl upon death.
I recall once in EQ1 early on in the 1st year I was playing a lvl 15 or so alt and I ran into players who were level 15. I grouped with them a bit and talked with them. They told me they both had been level 15 for 2-3 months and could not get any higher as they kept losing lvls from dying. I quickly found out why. They would charge into a group of mobs blindly and pull everything. I tried to help them but did not have the heart to abandon them. I wish more games had lvl progression where some players would not be able to progress further without better play like those 2 people.
Such a great game. Modern players have no idea what they missed.
I really do miss corpse runs. They were one of the best things for communities ever in a MMO. Plus they added fear and risk and reward.
I remember many nights grouping in lower guk until very late at night. Once I found a replacement for myself for the group (one would never leave a grp without finding a replacement or giving the grp a few hrs notice to find someone else) I would then have to leave the dungeons. Which meant training my way out to the zone wall and then training all the way to the entrance while spamming my train macro so some innocent did not get hit. But because of corpse runs I remember the fear running out by myself. It would make the hairs on my arms standup as I knew if I died it would mean possibly hours trying to get my corpse back. It was very much a beautiful thing.
But the best part of corpse runs was helping others. Having others trust you not to steal their items to give you permission to drag their corpse to safety. So many cool features in EQ1 which made the community such a fine place. One of the greta things about EQ1 was reputation mattered. If you were a unreliable, a poor player, a ninja or just a jerk you would not be able to get groups and essentially you would have to reroll. If you treated people well and were a good player you could always get the best groups.
Bring back corpse runs and for that matter bring back losing your lvl upon death.
I recall once in EQ1 early on in the 1st year I was playing a lvl 15 or so alt and I ran into players who were level 15. I grouped with them a bit and talked with them. They told me they both had been level 15 for 2-3 months and could not get any higher as they kept losing lvls from dying. I quickly found out why. They would charge into a group of mobs blindly and pull everything. I tried to help them but did not have the heart to abandon them. I wish more games had lvl progression where some players would not be able to progress further without better play like those 2 people.
Such a great game. Modern players have no idea what they missed.
This^ .. & so much more.
Many Guilds were formed & re-formed during what took place on corpse runs. U didn't dive in blindly.. and didn't go anywhere where you could not retrieve your corpse. (Less you had a rare in your bank ($$) for a coffin.)
That placed importance on everything, even the terrain.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
Hell no. Lineage didn't even have the luxury of corpse runs. You rez'd and hoped to hell you could find your gear before someone else or a slime picked it up. Gear loss and weeks or more of xp loss... I don't miss that at all.
Even getting rez'd was a risk because the person rezzing you might just kill you again, or if your party is trying to rez you might all be too weakened to recover and die again with another full xp loss and more gear dropping.
It never made the challenge better, only the threat of tedious re-leveling was motivation to avoid death. It was a risk-taking deterrent and a bad mechanic that I'm glad has gone the way of the dodo in current design.
Not as much a risk-taking deterrent as it was the risk itself.
While Lineage took it to a extreme, and eq1's corpse run mechanics wernt perfect, the lack of risk in mmo's today is worse then the high risks in the older mmos.
You never rly need to think twice about your actions anymore in mmos, just go for it and if you die no harm no foul, that in my opinion is a bad mechanic.
all these new fangled post eq 1 games dont have real corpse runs or even potential losses from death.
in eq 1 you could delevel from dieing (you lost xp each time you died) and the best res only gave back 96%, and odds are 90% was the only res you might find, corpses res timers also eroded over time and expired within 24 hours of being logged in if i recall right.
if you started in freeport, and traversed the great plains of karana, and braved the vast deserts and crossed the great wastes (or found a druid or wizard to teleport you) and eventually made the ship crossing to the elvish lands to hunt clan crushbone orcs (my human shadow knight and iksar monk both did this back in the day) you had to find someone to bind you so that you literally didnt come back to live, and have to make that entire journey, again, naked, and it took 4-6 hours to run that guantlet.
and you had to get a bind out of range of the kill on sight high level gaurds, until you killed enough orcs that they would tolerate you at least.
you can make jokes that you cut yourself instead or whatever, but gaming back in the day in the first real 3d world, with consequences for poor choices, built online character into your characters. yould join up with strangers just to teach each other to talk the same languages, even if you were born blood enemies, then you could at least trade insults in a proper civilized fashion.
all these new fangled post eq 1 games dont have real corpse runs or even potential losses from death.
in eq 1 you could delevel from dieing (you lost xp each time you died) and the best res only gave back 96%, and odds are 90% was the only res you might find, corpses res timers also eroded over time and expired within 24 hours of being logged in if i recall right.
if you started in freeport, and traversed the great plains of karana, and braved the vast deserts and crossed the great wastes (or found a druid or wizard to teleport you) and eventually made the ship crossing to the elvish lands to hunt clan crushbone orcs (my human shadow knight and iksar monk both did this back in the day) you had to find someone to bind you so that you literally didnt come back to live, and have to make that entire journey, again, naked, and it took 4-6 hours to run that guantlet.
and you had to get a bind out of range of the kill on sight high level gaurds, until you killed enough orcs that they would tolerate you at least.
you can make jokes that you cut yourself instead or whatever, but gaming back in the day in the first real 3d world, with consequences for poor choices, built online character into your characters. yould join up with strangers just to teach each other to talk the same languages, even if you were born blood enemies, then you could at least trade insults in a proper civilized fashion.
When you're a subscription game, you create a lot of arbitrary ways for players to be forced to subscribe longer. The intent of those features isn't to make the game deeper or more fun, but to take longer.
If I'd been a designer on early MMORPGs, I would get a big laugh about how players a decade later are steadfastly defending design decisions made not because they were in players' best interests, but in order to make more money from them.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I also miss corpse runs. Sure, they were time consuming, annoying, and sometimes outright frustrating but so were my kids and I like them just the same.
As for the idea of them being just some mechanism to cause the player to subscribe to the game longer, well.....isn't that what the entire game is? I mean really, the spin put on certain kinds of logic here amaze me.
Corpse runs were out and out entertainment. They caused players to think and work together in ways that just don't happen that much anymore, and sure, that's great if you are of the mind to just get in there and prove how much better you are at the game than the next guy, but if you got in there to actually prove how much better you are than the game, corpse runs helped facilitate exactly that.
Remember having to sit out a healer in order to rez the raid in case of a wipe?
What about having to have a bard invis the entire group in order to run them back to their corpses in case the healer who was left behind got killed?
And for the real old timers, what about that loot timer that you had to beat or all of your stuff would go POOF! That was vicious!
But at the end of the day all of these things, and more that had to do with corpse runs, were story generating mechanisms of what was a very good time in MMO's. And by story I mean PERSONAL story, not server provided beef patties with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.
Now what story do you have to tell? How you cast a spell on the same mob that everyone on the server cast the same spell on from the right instead of the left? Oh wait, at least half the server can tell that same story too because there is no differentiation in running from quest to quest all doing the same string of tasks in pretty much the same order with little or no consequence attached.
Corpse runs happened wherever you screwed up. Corpse retrievals were personal events every single time.
Sure, quite a few people can probably tell you about losing their corpse inside that gnoll cave outside of Qeynos back in the beginning days of Everquest, but the percentages are way lower than how many people can tell you that they beat or were beaten by Lord Zash in Star Wars The Old Republic (even though that is a fun game) because plain and simple, that game, for all the things it does right, does not have as much character as its predecessors. On top of this, even if you are one of the several people who may have lost their corpse in this way the differentiation still comes in whether you managed to get your stuff back, if it poofed, who helped you, and how they helped you.
All of these things were singular events that were taken away with the removal of one game mechanic. I don't know, I just think that it is extremely short-sighted to just say "Yeah I hated it" without really thinking about all that you lost and how little you actually gained when it went away.
The biggest thing that I don't understand is; Why should a gamer not be penalized for fucking up? Nine times out of ten, death is the result of player error. The player did something incorrectly. The result of that was death. I understand that it's a game, but why -shouldn't- the penalty of screwing up be harsh? Especially at the later levels, where a player should know better.
It's like today's society with the ridiculous "Everyone wins", "No child left behind" crap. This doesn't teach anything. It makes everyone feel all fuzzy inside, but the end result of that is... Nothing. You don't learn from your mistakes. You don't learn that what you did may have been incorrect or the wrong way to handle the current problem. You simply learn that, if you slam your face against whatever content is thrown at you hard enough, you just might be able to slam your face through to the other side, eventually.
Now, I would be absolutely, one hundred percent for having no penalties whatsoever, as long as the gaming communities continued to become more intelligent in their actions. After all, why penalize someone for an accident that was completely unintentional? I'd be all for that. Except that's not what's occurring. Gamers are far more incompetent than they once were. You throw an oldschool game at them, and they're either going to ragequit out, or look up a guide. Most gamers now are incapable of using their brain to get through puzzles flung at them. And if they can't use their brains to solve something in front of them, then they're in the wrong hobby.
A little bit of a rant, but the subtraction of each and every penalty that allowed a player to realize that they were playing in a poor manner certainly won't lead to smarter and/or better players. It's going to lead to more and more of what is currently rearing it's ugly head; catering to the least common denominator.
Hell no. Lineage didn't even have the luxury of corpse runs. You rez'd and hoped to hell you could find your gear before someone else or a slime picked it up. Gear loss and weeks or more of xp loss... I don't miss that at all.
Even getting rez'd was a risk because the person rezzing you might just kill you again, or if your party is trying to rez you might all be too weakened to recover and die again with another full xp loss and more gear dropping.
It never made the challenge better, only the threat of tedious re-leveling was motivation to avoid death. It was a risk-taking deterrent and a bad mechanic that I'm glad has gone the way of the dodo in current design.
Not as much a risk-taking deterrent as it was the risk itself.
While Lineage took it to a extreme, and eq1's corpse run mechanics wernt perfect, the lack of risk in mmo's today is worse then the high risks in the older mmos.
You never rly need to think twice about your actions anymore in mmos, just go for it and if you die no harm no foul, that in my opinion is a bad mechanic.
Failure is a good enough risk already. If you fail, you lose, and you waste your time and that of others. That's the proper amount of risk because it's intrinsic to the game, and isn't further penalizing you for something that is essentially inevidable.
There's a reason why rage quitting still exists after wipes
Nope, I'd rather see a mechanic where you stay dead until another player carries your corpse to a shrine or uses a spell/item to rez you. Semi permadeath would add much more fear than any corpse run.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
The biggest thing that I don't understand is; Why should a gamer not be penalized for fucking up? Nine times out of ten, death is the result of player error. The player did something incorrectly. The result of that was death. I understand that it's a game, but why -shouldn't- the penalty of screwing up be harsh? Especially at the later levels, where a player should know better.
It's like today's society with the ridiculous "Everyone wins", "No child left behind" crap. This doesn't teach anything. It makes everyone feel all fuzzy inside, but the end result of that is... Nothing. You don't learn from your mistakes. You don't learn that what you did may have been incorrect or the wrong way to handle the current problem. You simply learn that, if you slam your face against whatever content is thrown at you hard enough, you just might be able to slam your face through to the other side, eventually.
Now, I would be absolutely, one hundred percent for having no penalties whatsoever, as long as the gaming communities continued to become more intelligent in their actions. After all, why penalize someone for an accident that was completely unintentional? I'd be all for that. Except that's not what's occurring. Gamers are far more incompetent than they once were. You throw an oldschool game at them, and they're either going to ragequit out, or look up a guide. Most gamers now are incapable of using their brain to get through puzzles flung at them. And if they can't use their brains to solve something in front of them, then they're in the wrong hobby.
A little bit of a rant, but the subtraction of each and every penalty that allowed a player to realize that they were playing in a poor manner certainly won't lead to smarter and/or better players. It's going to lead to more and more of what is currently rearing it's ugly head; catering to the least common denominator.
The thing is a corpse run is not a penalty but a repetitive chore. Hell I would prefer to drop an item from my inventory over a corpse run.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Hmmm, missing them is too much. But the OP has many good points I agree with, especially resurrecting other dead players.
I also think that games like WoW could have improved the corpse run thing a lot. Like, give people special abilities while they are ghosts, andhave some sort of spirits hunt them or whatever The only thing I ever saw in WoW like that was a quest giver that was only visible to dead people.
Originally posted by Shadowguy64 No. I just cut myself instead. The pain is more realistic and the fear of bleeding to death has more meaning.
Volunteering for root canals works, until you run out of fresh teeth.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Comments
Im assuming you arent talking about any bugs or glitches, but about not being able to get help, being unable to fight the monsters with back up gear and your recently aquired lower level, or simply being unable to keep playing because you have to go to work, bed, or on vacation.
And Im assuming that we are talking about losing all your stuff because the corpse rots.
Yes, that might be the biggest problem with corpse runs. And if we ever see another game with it, there should be alternatives. Maybe something that could be sold in a cash shop, since every game seems to get one. Or trading in game money or xp for a corpse teleport with or without a waiting period. But I always prefer leaving it to the players to figure out an option, atleast if there is a sandbox focus (and those are the games I prefer). Like a guild or player setting them selves up as corpse retrivers for hire. Same goes for wizard travel agencies, Heals on Wheels, or Rezzing for Pay.
Yes I miss corpseruns, they made me care about dieing, and they made me aswell as everyone else think twice about what they did.
Death penalties have gotten lamer and lamer ever since wow, these days I am suprised if your gear even takes dmg when dieing.
If something dosnt happen soon, I wouldnt be suprised if we started seeing mmo's with a infinite healthbar.. *Sigh*.
It's elaborate compared with the typical solution of simply resetting the fight. Not sure what you're asking regarding focus.
At the moment you die in a game, all the decisions have already been made. All decision-making occurs before death -- and if you make enough poor decisions, you die and suffer a penalty which (if it involves decisions at all) involves fewer and shallower decisions than the core game.
So because the best-case scenario for a corpse run is "play this shallower game for a while", it's a waste of time. You could be playing the deeper core game, but instead you're forced to play a shallower game.
The extremist way you portray it isn't quite accurate:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
^^ hehe exactly.
I don't miss dying over and over and losing xp or having mobs chase me to the next zone or losing xp when someone in my party dies either.
No bitchers.
I'd go with having a 1 in 3 chance of having to do a corpse run after death.
That would keep the risk, but limit the grief-ability.
Yes...
Because death no longer means anything in role-playing games. There is zero penalty, zero cost..
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
It (death) also made your achievements greater.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Corpse runs? No
Meaningful death penalty? Yes
One does not require the other, I don't think that the new generation is ready for any real death penalties, though.
Let me have a small chance to lose a piece of gear, stolen by the mob that killed me only to be regained by killing it. If another player beats me to it, he gets the loot instead!
Just because every car has similar features doesn't mean that Ferraris are copies of Model Ts. Progress requires failure and refining.
I will admit I was baiting you to respond by being deliberatly simplistic and perhaps extreme when I asked how you saw things.
Anyway, about focus and what happens when you die. Well I wanted to know what you meant by focus.. Is it like: "The Hardcore MMO™ - The game with EXITING Corpse Runs and some other stuff", or did you mean the developers shouldnt spend any thought on what happens to your characters when they die in their game.. I mean come on.. its been an important part of games forever. What happens when a knight takes a pawn or when the ghost catch pacman.
It is definatly about pacing though on that we agree 100%, although we may disaggree on the merits of actually having to travel in the world over teleporting everywhere.
I hope the red text isnt too hard to reed.. didnt feel green was distinct enough with you using turqoise though.
Musn't forget other factors though. Like how easy it is to replace gear. I mean it would really suck losing a unique one time only drop that cannot be reaquired by any means. Although for some games it is quite alright to have this happen.. like in EvE.
I mean if having good gear is basicly just a matter of how much gold you have and you can easily replace most of your gear It is quite alright if you can lose it all.. Even if you have to farm for a couple of days or even weeks to reaquire the finances to replace the legendary center piece of your kit.
I would prefer item decay like in DAoC, though. So you would have to pay a fee for repair of normal wear and gear would take a bigger hit if you died and and even bigger hit if you didnt get a rezz or went to reclaim you corpse but chose to spawn with your gear. (reclaiming your corpse wasnt an option in DAoC, you always spawned with your gear) And eventually the gear would need to be replaced completly..
I really do miss corpse runs. They were one of the best things for communities ever in a MMO. Plus they added fear and risk and reward.
I remember many nights grouping in lower guk until very late at night. Once I found a replacement for myself for the group (one would never leave a grp without finding a replacement or giving the grp a few hrs notice to find someone else) I would then have to leave the dungeons. Which meant training my way out to the zone wall and then training all the way to the entrance while spamming my train macro so some innocent did not get hit. But because of corpse runs I remember the fear running out by myself. It would make the hairs on my arms standup as I knew if I died it would mean possibly hours trying to get my corpse back. It was very much a beautiful thing.
But the best part of corpse runs was helping others. Having others trust you not to steal their items to give you permission to drag their corpse to safety. So many cool features in EQ1 which made the community such a fine place. One of the greta things about EQ1 was reputation mattered. If you were a unreliable, a poor player, a ninja or just a jerk you would not be able to get groups and essentially you would have to reroll. If you treated people well and were a good player you could always get the best groups.
Bring back corpse runs and for that matter bring back losing your lvl upon death.
I recall once in EQ1 early on in the 1st year I was playing a lvl 15 or so alt and I ran into players who were level 15. I grouped with them a bit and talked with them. They told me they both had been level 15 for 2-3 months and could not get any higher as they kept losing lvls from dying. I quickly found out why. They would charge into a group of mobs blindly and pull everything. I tried to help them but did not have the heart to abandon them. I wish more games had lvl progression where some players would not be able to progress further without better play like those 2 people.
Such a great game. Modern players have no idea what they missed.
This^ .. & so much more.
Many Guilds were formed & re-formed during what took place on corpse runs. U didn't dive in blindly.. and didn't go anywhere where you could not retrieve your corpse. (Less you had a rare in your bank ($$) for a coffin.)
That placed importance on everything, even the terrain.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Not as much a risk-taking deterrent as it was the risk itself.
While Lineage took it to a extreme, and eq1's corpse run mechanics wernt perfect, the lack of risk in mmo's today is worse then the high risks in the older mmos.
You never rly need to think twice about your actions anymore in mmos, just go for it and if you die no harm no foul, that in my opinion is a bad mechanic.
all these new fangled post eq 1 games dont have real corpse runs or even potential losses from death.
in eq 1 you could delevel from dieing (you lost xp each time you died) and the best res only gave back 96%, and odds are 90% was the only res you might find, corpses res timers also eroded over time and expired within 24 hours of being logged in if i recall right.
if you started in freeport, and traversed the great plains of karana, and braved the vast deserts and crossed the great wastes (or found a druid or wizard to teleport you) and eventually made the ship crossing to the elvish lands to hunt clan crushbone orcs (my human shadow knight and iksar monk both did this back in the day) you had to find someone to bind you so that you literally didnt come back to live, and have to make that entire journey, again, naked, and it took 4-6 hours to run that guantlet.
and you had to get a bind out of range of the kill on sight high level gaurds, until you killed enough orcs that they would tolerate you at least.
you can make jokes that you cut yourself instead or whatever, but gaming back in the day in the first real 3d world, with consequences for poor choices, built online character into your characters. yould join up with strangers just to teach each other to talk the same languages, even if you were born blood enemies, then you could at least trade insults in a proper civilized fashion.
When you're a subscription game, you create a lot of arbitrary ways for players to be forced to subscribe longer. The intent of those features isn't to make the game deeper or more fun, but to take longer.
If I'd been a designer on early MMORPGs, I would get a big laugh about how players a decade later are steadfastly defending design decisions made not because they were in players' best interests, but in order to make more money from them.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I also miss corpse runs. Sure, they were time consuming, annoying, and sometimes outright frustrating but so were my kids and I like them just the same.
As for the idea of them being just some mechanism to cause the player to subscribe to the game longer, well.....isn't that what the entire game is? I mean really, the spin put on certain kinds of logic here amaze me.
Corpse runs were out and out entertainment. They caused players to think and work together in ways that just don't happen that much anymore, and sure, that's great if you are of the mind to just get in there and prove how much better you are at the game than the next guy, but if you got in there to actually prove how much better you are than the game, corpse runs helped facilitate exactly that.
Remember having to sit out a healer in order to rez the raid in case of a wipe?
What about having to have a bard invis the entire group in order to run them back to their corpses in case the healer who was left behind got killed?
And for the real old timers, what about that loot timer that you had to beat or all of your stuff would go POOF! That was vicious!
But at the end of the day all of these things, and more that had to do with corpse runs, were story generating mechanisms of what was a very good time in MMO's. And by story I mean PERSONAL story, not server provided beef patties with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.
Now what story do you have to tell? How you cast a spell on the same mob that everyone on the server cast the same spell on from the right instead of the left? Oh wait, at least half the server can tell that same story too because there is no differentiation in running from quest to quest all doing the same string of tasks in pretty much the same order with little or no consequence attached.
Corpse runs happened wherever you screwed up. Corpse retrievals were personal events every single time.
Sure, quite a few people can probably tell you about losing their corpse inside that gnoll cave outside of Qeynos back in the beginning days of Everquest, but the percentages are way lower than how many people can tell you that they beat or were beaten by Lord Zash in Star Wars The Old Republic (even though that is a fun game) because plain and simple, that game, for all the things it does right, does not have as much character as its predecessors. On top of this, even if you are one of the several people who may have lost their corpse in this way the differentiation still comes in whether you managed to get your stuff back, if it poofed, who helped you, and how they helped you.
All of these things were singular events that were taken away with the removal of one game mechanic. I don't know, I just think that it is extremely short-sighted to just say "Yeah I hated it" without really thinking about all that you lost and how little you actually gained when it went away.
The biggest thing that I don't understand is; Why should a gamer not be penalized for fucking up? Nine times out of ten, death is the result of player error. The player did something incorrectly. The result of that was death. I understand that it's a game, but why -shouldn't- the penalty of screwing up be harsh? Especially at the later levels, where a player should know better.
It's like today's society with the ridiculous "Everyone wins", "No child left behind" crap. This doesn't teach anything. It makes everyone feel all fuzzy inside, but the end result of that is... Nothing. You don't learn from your mistakes. You don't learn that what you did may have been incorrect or the wrong way to handle the current problem. You simply learn that, if you slam your face against whatever content is thrown at you hard enough, you just might be able to slam your face through to the other side, eventually.
Now, I would be absolutely, one hundred percent for having no penalties whatsoever, as long as the gaming communities continued to become more intelligent in their actions. After all, why penalize someone for an accident that was completely unintentional? I'd be all for that. Except that's not what's occurring. Gamers are far more incompetent than they once were. You throw an oldschool game at them, and they're either going to ragequit out, or look up a guide. Most gamers now are incapable of using their brain to get through puzzles flung at them. And if they can't use their brains to solve something in front of them, then they're in the wrong hobby.
A little bit of a rant, but the subtraction of each and every penalty that allowed a player to realize that they were playing in a poor manner certainly won't lead to smarter and/or better players. It's going to lead to more and more of what is currently rearing it's ugly head; catering to the least common denominator.
Failure is a good enough risk already. If you fail, you lose, and you waste your time and that of others. That's the proper amount of risk because it's intrinsic to the game, and isn't further penalizing you for something that is essentially inevidable.
There's a reason why rage quitting still exists after wipes
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
The thing is a corpse run is not a penalty but a repetitive chore. Hell I would prefer to drop an item from my inventory over a corpse run.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Hmmm, missing them is too much. But the OP has many good points I agree with, especially resurrecting other dead players.
I also think that games like WoW could have improved the corpse run thing a lot. Like, give people special abilities while they are ghosts, andhave some sort of spirits hunt them or whatever The only thing I ever saw in WoW like that was a quest giver that was only visible to dead people.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Volunteering for root canals works, until you run out of fresh teeth.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.