Pay to Slay?

[gorboth]

Hi all,

Of the various things people point to as big problems with the current game design, one issue that comes up again and again is the harshness of the death penalty (1/5 of your non-quest experience lost.) For advanced players (especially those with myth++ stats), PvP is frequently not considered to be worth the risk of needing to spend weeks or even months (depending on your level of activity) to recover. This leads to a dominant culture of people in the game who choose to almost always avoid fighting one another, even when roleplay or guild interaction would be better served by the opposite.

With this in mind, I thought I'd share a bit of a brainstorm I had today to get some reactions and discussion on how such a change might effect the game.

What would it be like if a feature were introduced that allowed players to use money to purchase something that would provide an instant full-recovery of all deaths? I am imagining a scale such as this:

Code: Select all

Platinum Cost:   Player Level:
=================================
             1   novice
             2   greenhorne
             3   beginner
             5   apprentice
            10   wanderer
            20   adventurer
            50   adept
           100   great adventurer
           200   veteran
           500   expert
         1,000   rising hero
         2,000   hero
         5,000   titan
        10,000   champion
        15,000   legend
        20,000   myth

Implications that I could potentially see from such a system include:

• Money becomes profoundly meaningful.
• The sliding scale works for both the wealthy myth and the adventurer of small means.
• Players who have collected enough money could become quite daring, leading to wonderful PvP interactions.
• Gearing up for war might also mean building up bank accounts.
• If you end up killing a player you wish you hadn't, money can fix the situation - easily so if the player was small (the sliding scale.)
• Killing a player still hurts them, but now that could either mean their stats or their bank account, depending on their situation.
• Low-level players who are given vast sums of money could die with reckless abandon.
• Guilds could begin to use money as a part of their regular operations, pooling funds to bankroll recovery for any members who die, further building value into the support and membership of a well-managed and active guild.

This would be very easy to code. What does the community think?
G.

[Laurel]

Where's the Like button?
The numbers could use some tweaking and you could just as well add another value - some rare object to be destroyed with the money, so the recovery spell is working?
For AA (or club users) - the bloody-skull club, for Neidar/glads (axe users) - the crystal axe, etc.? Or some similar object that would require work to get and hurt to be destroyed. Or maybe even a combination of those. Like - the weapon that killed you + some object pointing at the killer? Blackened-steel band + crystal clear ring if you were killed by a MM?
Could spark either some interaction between guilds or spawn another wave or seconds to join various guilds to support the mains.

Or ... some form of a randomized quest involved? You need to pay to enter the location, where you will be given a quest to solve/deliver? Just paying cash and have done with it sounds like too easy to me, but that's my personal opinion.

Gues this will however not solve the issue some people here have with Irk or Phantom ;p

[gorboth]

Where's the Like button?

It's right there at the top, where you get to vote.

The numbers could use some tweaking ...

By all means - I'd love to see revisions and suggestions for a better stratification of the levels and platinum costs.

G.

[Arcon]

I think the problem with death is that the penalty is xp and with the death recovery(big mistake) you see people taking several deaths when they change guild and like that they end up having more guild xp then members that has been years there.

Death should be a penalty on your stats and skills. If possible specially on the part of the body the killing blow landed. Lower movement speed if on the legs, not useable arm, reduced combat speed on the body etc. With these wounds having to pay for healing and I like the idea of having to collect some random items, from high level weapons/armours to random drinks to creat the potion. Harder to find the better.

But just paying to recover would be really horrible for some, I personally have never had a bigger bank account then 4k so I would just never recover while others that have botted gont and has 100k or 200k wouldn't even notice it.

I think death(I would prefer it to be wounds) should be 100% time based recovery. You die and it would take you 2 weeks to fully recover. You don't loose xp or bute. You don't gain anything on it like now.

[Amberlee]

Funny enough.. I am profoundly against this idea.
Consider now how big bank accounts characters like Irk has.
And now think about how crazy things would get if he could get away with his botting just with paying a smal fee of 20,000 plat.
tbh the death penalties arent that bad as it is.

[Zhar]

I think death(I would prefer it to be wounds) should be 100% time based recovery. You die and it would take you 2 weeks to fully recover. You don't loose xp or bute. You don't gain anything on it like now.

I think that would actually deter people even more. With the current system people know they're gimped, but they go out killing and actively work for it to go away at the pace of their choosing, if they get gimped and there's no way for them to actively take care of the problem I'm not sure if anyone would like it (I wouldn't, I got used to death penalty and I can live with it). Getting guildstat at faster pace IS a big issue however and should be addressed.

I like the idea of "pay to recover" that Gorboth proposed. If you want you can recover instantly, you can do it the old-fashioned way or, if you are too poor, you can go and kill easy stuff for money rather than xp. More options is always nice and more ways to spend your money is nice too.

Edit: Actually, the wound idea wouldn't be this bad if you tied it up with Gorboth's idea and paid for healing in Sparkle church or something.

[Eowul]

Actually, Arcon's idea has pointed me into a different line of thought ..

If we start with the assumption that the dealth penalty is what's limiting players in their interactions (for pve it means not taking on dangerous NPCs in fear of death, for roleplay/pvp it means not attacking that other player in fear of death), and combine that with the fact that death still needs to have some sort of penalty for it to actually mean anything ..

How about we convince death (the entity) to not take the experience you owe him directly, but rather allow you to pay it back while you play. You would get "frozen" at the level (all stats, also guild ones) you were where you died, and have to repay a certain amount back to him until you start growing again (think something like this in your stats overview: You still owe death a [vast, huge, large, moderate, fair, wee bit] of experience before you feel you will grow again), and put a certain limit on the amount you owe him (so after some point, dieing again won't increase your debt).

Ofcourse the limit, and the amount of debt you would get for each death would need to be tuned to allow it to be recovered in a reasonable time frame, and it could even be combined with Gorboth's idea where people with too much money on their hands could pay (a part of) it off with money. But, I think it will lower the impact of death and allow for more risk taking on both the powerplayer and the roleplayer/pvp side.

[Kas]

The current deathpenalty is the elephant in the glasshouse, so I voted yes + some work. Some iteration of this idea could be a fine thing for the game.

[Laurel]

Actually, Arcon's idea has pointed me into a different line of thought ..

If we start with the assumption that the dealth penalty is what's limiting players in their interactions (for pve it means not taking on dangerous NPCs in fear of death, for roleplay/pvp it means not attacking that other player in fear of death), and combine that with the fact that death still needs to have some sort of penalty for it to actually mean anything ..

How about we convince death (the entity) to not take the experience you owe him directly, but rather allow you to pay it back while you play. You would get "frozen" at the level (all stats, also guild ones) you were where you died, and have to repay a certain amount back to him until you start growing again (think something like this in your stats overview: You still owe death a [vast, huge, large, moderate, fair, wee bit] of experience before you feel you will grow again), and put a certain limit on the amount you owe him (so after some point, dieing again won't increase your debt).

Ofcourse the limit, and the amount of debt you would get for each death would need to be tuned to allow it to be recovered in a reasonable time frame, and it could even be combined with Gorboth's idea where people with too much money on their hands could pay (a part of) it off with money. But, I think it will lower the impact of death and allow for more risk taking on both the powerplayer and the roleplayer/pvp side.

In other words - no fallback to lower stats/size whatsoever? Means growth-only?
I don't know ... how could I then set my stats differently if I wanted to switch from gobbo fighter to elf caster? This would need to be set to "evenly" for the whole population?

I'm not against this, but such an idea would require a lot more tweaking AND agreement from the community, with the whole concept (it's pros, cons, implications, etc.) on the table for everyone to judge. Such implications I can see plenty already.

[Creed]

So, with this idea I would be able to kill myself totally down to extremely pacifistic, join a new guild, pay X thousand platinum and instantly be back to whatever size and have an enormous amount of gxp?

Sounds a bit too easy, doesn't it?

In regard to PvP and so on.. I don't really think it will have an effect.