Death Penalty Opinions

[Kvator]

just regarding this:

Without death recovery assistance, you would have been somewhat violent.
You have made no measurable progress since you logged in today.

I've got penalty after leaving guild (death was turned on?) but that's not big deal,
log was taken after killing few mobs - still no progress noticed (althoug my guild title jumped a bit) - this is kind of bug or something?

regards,

Kvatie

[Kvator]

ok, looks fine after relog!

[Kiara]

just regarding this:

Without death recovery assistance, you would have been somewhat violent.
You have made no measurable progress since you logged in today.

I've got penalty after leaving guild (death was turned on?) but that's not big deal,
log was taken after killing few mobs - still no progress noticed (althoug my guild title jumped a bit) - this is kind of bug or something?

regards,

Kvatie

Thats how it works I think! Gorboth explained it to me when I had similar worries in the past. If I remember correctly, when you die you get like negative one gazillion XP, so you simply wont see any progress in a LONG time, since no matter how much XP you gain you'll still have a negative number for that login. You'll get the XP of course, just not see it. When you quit it resets to zero!

[Zar]

Thats how it works I think! Gorboth explained it to me when I had similar worries in the past. If I remember correctly, when you die you get like negative one gazillion XP, so you simply wont see any progress in a LONG time, since no matter how much XP you gain you'll still have a negative number for that login. You'll get the XP of course, just not see it. When you quit it resets to zero!

I think "stats reset" will work too

[Kvator]

thanks for explanation

[Amorana]

The best solution IMO

Even out the difference of the benefit from recovery no matter if you are a hardcore RP or powergamer that only play once a week/month or plays 24/7

How to do that?

"recovery over time" a topic we have seen before.... What happened with an excellent idea like that?
It will make you autorecover over time even if not logged on. Though combined with the existing recovery of some sort, so that you have the oppotunity to recover faster if you are active.

Regarding the difference for big players in recovery earlier mentioned.
I would be sad if I as a myth lost the oppotunity to recover back to full size like everyone else. But I think it should require more for me to recover than smaller players.
Big players could get less brutehelp on recovery or/and autorecover over time could be removed for myths?

What do you say?

There are things about this that I do like, and I even began coding it at one point. But I am not entirely sure how it should work to encourage the sort of culture we want. Some important questions:

• Does the week of recovery happen bit-by-bit or all-at-the-end?
• If bit-by-bit, what would that look like?
• What happens if a player goes after hardcore exp while the bit-by-bit is taking place?
• What happens if a player goes after hardcore exp if it is supposed to happen all-at-the-end?
• If you can get everything you need simply by logging out and waiting, would people be more likely to stay away, or remain in the game?

These questions are very important, in my estimation. I would not want to create a system where we lose players during the recovery period, and reward inaction above (or even equal to) action.

G.

Recover over time = ROT
1. I think it would be the best to make the ROT bit by bit if anybody are afraid people leaving the game totally for a while until they are recovered. This way you also reward the effort players make to recover faster than the ROT by playing along with it.
2. You say "bit by bit, what would that look like?" What kind of examples do you want? like the timespan, how much bruteassistance or???
3. Yes, you will recover faster if you go out and kill while you are in your recovery period.
4. Not an issue "since happen all in the end" is not the best option IMO
5. I can only speak for myself at question number five. I would play along with the ROT. What should make people leave while on ROT? Its just as fun playing a little smaller as it is fully recovered. No difference IMO?! I would know.. Died alot

Please comment

Cas

I'm not sure if this is what Cas is getting at above, but I think the ROT could work pretty easy with killing...

Say the total amount of experience you need to earn recover is 100, and that the ROT time is 1 week. Then, you could have it that every 24 hours, you earn 100/7 xp back, just over time.

While killing, you also work towards that 100 xp. Let's say that the first day you kill nothing. At the beginning of day 2, you are at 1 * (100/7). On day two, you kill 100/7 xp worth of mobs. That means, at the beginning of day three you would alread have 2 * (100/7) xp and would get 1 * (100/7) xp. That would put you almost halfway through the recovery, as you shortened your recover time by a day killing a day's worth of mobs.

[gorboth]

So, I've worked with some people's suggestions, and have devised a potential scheme for a new death system. This explanation involves some wizardly gibber-jabber about the way the information is stored and handled, but it doesn't have any wiz-info that I feel needs to be kept secret. Rather, it just clearly explains what I thought might work.

Please discuss and comment on if you think this would be a good idea, and what you predict might result from such a situation in terms of pvp and player dynamics.

Thanks!
G.

Code: Select all

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW DEATH PENALTY SYSTEM IN GENESIS

When you die:

    - A snapshot is taken of your existing stats, stripped of all modifications
      by imbuements or other items other than racial benefits (which stay.) 
      Variable name: "snapshot" (int array)

    - A variable will be initialized to zero to keep track of the amount of
      time the player has paid (measured in minutes) in total toward serving
      their sentence.
      Variable name: "paid_total" (int)

    - A variable will be intialized to zero to keep track of the amount of time
      the player has paid (measured in minutes) on a given date toward serving
      their sentence.
      Variable name: "paid_today" (int)

    - The current date is defined as a string ("dd/mm/yyyy")
      Variable name: "date" (string)

    - A stat penalty of 25% (to begin with) is defined.
      Variable name: "penalty" (int)

    - The values of snapshot, date, paid_total, paid_today, and penalty are
      all written to a datafile death.o with the player's name being the index
      of a mapping defined thusly:

          ([ "playername" : ({ shapshot }),
                               date, 
                               paid_total,
                               paid_today,
                               penalty ])

    - Some controlling object will add a shadow to the player to control the
      death penalty. It will either be an autoloading invisible object or some
      central object that listens for player logins, etc.

    - The shadow will cap the player's stats at the "snapshot" reduced by the
      "penalty." This cap will be firm, meaning that players cannot benefit
      from imbuements or other stat-increasing items, spells, or effects
      while the shadow remains active.

    - Each minute, the shadow will increase both the value of paid_total
      and paid_today by 1, until paid_today reaches a value of 120 (two
      hours.) Once two hours have been reached on a given date, the
      player cannot increase their sentence-served time until the next
      day. If, during this check, the value of paid_total reaches
      1200 (20 hours) then the "playername" index is removed from the
      mapping, and the shadow and all penalties are removed from the
      player, restoring them to their natural level of stats.

    - If "date" does not equal today's date, paid_today is initialized
      to 0, and "date" is set to today's date.

    - The shadow will remain active until the value of paid_total has
      been increased to 1200 (20 hours.) Given that this can only be
      increased by 2 hours each day, it can be done, at the very fastest
      in 10 days of real-time.

    - If the player should die while the shadow is active, the value
      of "penalty" will be increased by 2 unless it has reached
      98, at which point it is capped.

    - Rammifications of all of the above, in layman's terms:

        * Players no longer lose exp at death, but instead suffer a
          penalty-cap to their statistics which begins at 75% of
          actual (25% reduction.)

        * This penalty will remain with the player for a minimum of
          ten days. To remove it, they must spend actual time in the
          game, serving a "death sentence." The maximum time they can
          work off each day is 2 hours worth of time. This encourages
          players to spend time in the game, rather than take time
          off when they die.

        * During "death sentence" players can continue to gain exp,
          but will not feel the effects of the gains during the active
          phase of the penalty due to their stats being capped at the
          shapshot taken when they died, further reduced by their level
          of penalty. However, if they do work to gain exp, when their
          sentence is served, they will actually be *more* powerful
          than when they died, feeling a morale-boosting instant
          recovery plus more. This will (perhaps) encourage players to
          do something other than simply idle for two hours each day
          and log-off.

        * Each time a player dies while serving their sentence, their
          stat penalty is increased by 2%. Thus, if they died 39 times,
          their penalty would be 98%, where we would cap it to prevent
          players from dying due to having 0 hitpoints. This system will
          prevent players from feeling like they live in a consequence-
          free environment while in death-recovery. However, making it a
          relatively small increment gives players the freedom to die
          quite a few times if they really want to go nuts in PvP, and
          might give them a certain sense of wanton freedom that could
          lead to some fun results. Especially as they enter the last
          few hours of serving their sentence, they will have less and
          less to fear, knowing they can go nuts, and die, and not
          care too much because they know they will recover fully
          in that same session.

[Irk]

sounds good, maybe not for smaller players, where recovery is faster now, but for myths is much better than now is

[Ydred]

Just ugh to me. I like none of it and dislike the imbuement aspect the most.

[Amorana]

Just ugh to me. I like none of it and dislike the imbuement aspect the most.

25% is far too high. At myth, sure, that might drop you to what... Titan? And that's only if you're a fresh myth. If you're at an insane size and grind for years on end with 200 scripts while you watch netflix like Irk, you probably don't even drop your stats below myth level.

On the other hand, a death at titan, your stats become like a veteran? Which means you can do next to nothing in the game again. Anything I can kill at veteran is not going to give so much xp that I feel a "morale boost" at having done so when I finally get my stats back. This means when I die, I log in and idle for 2 hours for 10 days. Which does exactly what you want it not to do.

Further, this idea just furthers the gap between the large and the small. Death at least served as a stupid-check for people who grow so large they forget that they still can die. When you can die and not have to make any xp back at all, you can easily stay years of growth ahead of those who are behind.

I'm not sure why there's the need to make death penalty so complicated... Easy solutions have been proposed.

You want to give people the feeling they're not dropping a level? The easy solution is to not drop mortal title because of death.
You want death to be less harsh? You make it recover over time as well as through fighting.
You want death to still let pvp be intriguing? Let the xp loss stack, but still let it recover over time, so that when someone spouts diarrhea of the mouth, they get knocked down a couple pegs, but they don't quit the game.

I agree with Ydred. There's almost nothing I like about the proposal. Sorry to sound so negative... I'm really trying to find anything... But I just can't.