One of the nicer qualities of MUD, small-scale LARPs, and other non-massive but bigger-than-just-friends multiplayer games is that you CAN weed out undesirable players. Far too few GMs in these small games have the balls to just ban the douchebags, and fewer still have the kind of leadership and charisma to actively foster a community of people genuinely interested in playing together (even in "versus mode") instead of against each other.

It's really hard. It's not even a skill you can learn if you don't have the right personality, but it is a skill you have to work to learn even if you do have the right personality. Out of all the small game communities I've seen, I can only think of two that ever truly managed to pull it off… and those were two of the best experiences of my life. One was a LARP and the other was a very MUD-like graphical MMO. Sadly they both shut down after their prime GMs quit due to "real life," their replacements weren't up to the task, and things fell apart. Sadness.

That said, perma-death in its purest sense is a role-playing mechanic, not a game mechanic. This is because the concept of a "character" is purely a role-playing concept. A MUD that isn't really about role-playing primarily has no use for perma-death. It might have use for very intense consequences for "losing," and then only to make "winning" feel like a bigger accomplishment, but true perma-death actually makes the game less fun when the players are actively thinking of their character as a personal avatar rather than as a distinct personality that has its own life span. A MUD that doesn't focus on role-playing over everything else should not add perma-death. And a MUD that focuses on RP and actually works to attract quality role-players has no need for mechanics-enforced permadeath, because good role-players will choose to kill their characters when it makes sense – when it increases the quality of the story for everyone. Yes, I have seen such games, and yes, I have seen people choose to kill off characters they've played for many years (15 years, in one case). Sometimes they just are tired of a personality, have been playing another one at times, found out they like the other one far more than their original, and decide to kill off the original character in a way that everyone else can have "fun" with. Sometimes the player just can't play anymore for various reasons (family, job, whatever) and decides to have a "sending off" event in-game that includes the character's death. That character of fifteen years I mentioned was last seen in a grand funeral, which was one of the most moving RP events i've ever been a part of… and I didn't even know the player nor did my character know his character at all other than from the stories told by the other characters. THAT is what role-playing should be. … I digress.

All real games are about winning or losing. A game that has no win condition isn't a great game. Which is part of why the vast majority of MUDs and MMOs are more like big chat rooms with some goofy game attached to them rather than the other way around. There's no end condition, no "I did it!" moment, no "I lost!" moment, and so it's just a place to hang out and talk and waste time. Some MUDs have the remort idea to make the win condition actually exist and actually do something. Enforced "ascension" to remorting at max level is something worth considering. Some players will be upset that their character is lost as max level with no way to avoid it other than playing, but those players are almost invariably the ones who are more interested in asserting their mechanical advantages over other players rather than enjoying the game, much less contributing to it, so trying to please those players makes little sense.

There are many other ways to have real win conditions, though. Ranking systems that actually require a player to work to keep his ranking are a great thing to do, and that's pretty much how pure-PK MUDs (or shooter games and the like) get by without having an end game scenario. In a cooperative, PvE environment, you can have a number of events or plots where the first clan/guild/player to defeat them gets plastered on the in-game bulletin boards, website news page, and in-game town criers as the "hero who defeated foobar" or what have you.

Once you add win conditions, you can have far less severe lose conditions and still make things fun and challenging. A lot of MUDs and MMOs need perma-death or super-severe death consequences in order to avoid the problem where everyone given enough time hits max level and best equipment, nobody is ever special compared to anyone else, and the high level players soon outnumber the low level players. When you refocus your game design on events and notoriety instead of numerical advancement, then numerical loss from death becomes far less important. In terms of a pure game approach, of course. Adding role-playing in changes the target from "game" to "focused social experience" and the entire set of criteria used for evaluating what makes a good game from a bad one changes. ;)

Why do anything but ban people who act like assholes because they're bored and just feel like it? I'm not really seeing a distinction between people who do X because they're bored and people who do X because they like it. Perhaps the only distinction is that you can give the first group a shiny bauble to play with to prevent them from being bored for a short while.


Do you have any empirical evidence that players can effectively self-police themselves when the consequence of losing a single fight is losing every ability to enforce that you have?

It sounds to me like you're making ideological claims here, not pragmatic ones.

It's simply not healthy for a game's growth to freely allow people to be assholes, and it's not even terribly smart, either, to hinge the success or failure of your entire creation on what happens to be the balance of power between assholes and normal players.

Firstly, I don't consider "I felt like it" a legitimate excuse to be an asshole, particularly from an RP mud perspective, so I would just ban them. And the important difference between those groups of people is not how you respond to them, but how you plan for them. Giving non-"griefers" who do "griefer" activity plenty of things to do may reduce or completely eliminate that unwanted behavior. If it doesn't, and you think they're bored, you could ask them how you could improve the game. You could also just ban them, what do I care?


I think the phrase "I believe" is pretty straightforward. Also, I'm very curious as to where you find any empirical evidence on anything regarding muds, I'd quite like to see some. Suffice to say that while I would give players the ability to deal with such issues, I would not make it their sole responsibility. I'd also have a flag system in place for mobs to enforce laws, as I believe I mentioned earlier. And if the troublesome individuals in question didn't bother to roleplay, I'd also just ban them.


As far as I'm concerned, there are only assholes, it's just a question of type.

I did not mention any of this in an attempt to justify "griefer" behavior, or any behavior I have just admitted to. I believe I made a point of saying that such behavior is not ideal. I am simply advising other game developers, as a potential problem player, of what actions I believe will help to eliminate unwanted behavior from me and people who share my tendencies.

Nor am I suggesting you be reluctant to ban "griefers". Do you really think they would be reluctant to ban you?

Contrariwise, I do not believe that, for example, an "evil" temperament is in any way inappropriate to a fantasy game, or any other type of game. If mobs can steal, why can't players? If mobs can kill, why can't players? If DTs exist in the game, and are part of the game, why can't players shove other players into them? That said, the way people think of "evil" is generally retarded. Evil does not mean the wanton destruction of everything you encounter. No one thinks like that. Or at least they don't think like that for very long, because they quickly end up dead.

For example, I played a Chaotic Evil Necromancer on an RP/PK mud. I decided that my Necromancer should always be friendly. No point in making enemies if I didn't have to, and people who didn't oppose me were of no particular harm to me. As long as I could continue harvesting souls and making zombies, why should I care if there are good paladins around as long as they aren't bothering me?

Anyway, I hope this clears up my position, I don't really look forward to continuing this branch of the conversation.

Bonus pithy quote:

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people.
You're wrong of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."
– Pratchett (Vetinari speaking)

The players will learn what works, then repeat (and refine) it. Personally I'd consider that a desirable outcome anyway, as it promotes player skill.


Two problems: (1) Pretty much every activity can become boring if you repeat it enough times, and (2) "fun" is subjective - no matter what features you add, some players will find them (and indeed your entire game) boring.

That's not to say you shouldn't have repeatable activities - but you need to accept that they will become boring after a while. Providing people with a range of different options at least allows them to vary their activities, and one-shot quests also allow you to give particularly large rewards (because you don't have to worry about people doing them over and over).


That's exactly what I wanted to avoid, as it discourages players from experimenting with different character concepts; they're more likely to stick with what they know, because they're less likely to die again.


I didn't view it as "carryover" exp, but as player exp. Individual characters were transient, and I saw no point in punishing a player simply because their latest character wasn't an optimised killing machine.


In the system I implemented on Last City? As I said, you had 100% retention of the first 100 exp you'd earned, 90% retention of the next 100, 80% of the next 100, and so on. Thus if you'd earned 300 exp, and you died, you'd restart with 270 exp. If you'd earned another 50 exp before dying again, your total exp will be 350 and thus you'd restart with 305 exp.


There are definitely "griefers", but they exist among all four of Bartle's player types, and to be honest I'd rather deal with a Killer griefer than an Explorer or Socialiser griefer.


In Travian (a browser-based strategy game), killing those helpless newbies is definitely more strategically viable than befriending them (unless you're 100% certain that they won't backstab you later on - and even then it's sometimes better to get rid of the competition).

As for other games, it would depend on the specifics. But without permadeath you can't actually get rid of your rivals, and killing them will just turn them into enemies, so you don't actually have the incentive to eliminate them early on (because you can't).

Never played Travian, but have played Tribalwars, a lot, and it's definitely the case there as well. Ido not ally with anyone in my area they, they are all farms or noble targets, and I'm just about always ranked top 5 players on their servers (a server typically has 50,000 or so players).

Ah, that's a good point. Also a troublesome one. I suppose encouraging diversity is more important than punishing stupidity.


I apologize, I read this correctly early on, but I didn't remember it properly, I was thinking you meant 100% XP for the death of the first character, 90% for the second, etc. I like your actual system better, it's more forgiving at the low ranges.


What are those types like? I assume Socializers just use communication to make people miserable, but I have trouble seeing how this really works. Explorers though? How do Explorers cause grief?


I wonder if this is a problem issue. Seems to me in order to apply the concept to "kill all newbies so they don't become threats", you'd have to kill off massive amounts of people, and if they've befriended more powerful characters, you now have more enemies. Also if there are "laws" protecting cities, newbies could hide in there. Typically this would involve an inability to advance, but I'd use a gold-based system for gaining skills (with cooldowns, so being rich doesn't mean instantly skillful), so advancement could still occur in such situations. I'll have to think about this a bit more.

It means you are stating something you believe, yes, but not whether you believe it for ideological or practical reasons.


Experience from actually running a MUD is a good place to start. It moves one away from the ideological side and closer to the practical side of the spectrum, at least.


That's not really what you sounded like earlier, and this is a position I find far more palatable. It was in particular one of your opening statements that made it sound like administration should be out of the picture, and players should be self-policing:

"There is also another argument I'd add in favor of permadeath: The ability of players to deal with their own problems. Players who annoy enough other players will find themselves dead. I don't really care for administration, so this is a perfect solution to the problem for me."

I still don't believe that player self-policing works in the first place in a perma-death environment, but that's another story.


In the interest of productive communication, I think it was pretty clear what was meant, and there's no need to reduce to triviality. :wink:


I'm not sure if too much "punishing" should be high on the list in any case for a game, right?

Truth be told, I despise administration. That doesn't make administration "unnecessary", however. As far as Ideology verses Pragmatism, I am a Pragmatic Idealist, I believe it will work, if I implement it carefully and intelligently.


What I meant by stupidity here deals with things like the "griefer" objections mentioned earlier, I believe these people will be the most likely to have short lifespans, and hence was intending to punish such short lifespans.

Also, I give up, I cannot keep up with your posts. I keep trying to reply to elanthis' post, but you're just too damn fast for me :(

I surrender :(

Well, just reply to his post then, and feel free to reply to mine later or ignore it entirely. :wink:
(My preference being the former, of course, but……)

I'd argue that it's the other way around - you can't stop everyone from being bored, but you can stop them from destroying the game for others.


Banning people because they don't play the mud the way you want them to play it is the start of a very slippery slope. It's also a rather meaningless gesture anyway, because you can't stop the player from coming back (through a proxy), nor will banning them stop others from following in their footsteps.


By deliberately finding and exploiting bugs, abusing flaws in the game design, writing complex bots that dominate the game and drive away real players, that sort of thing. The milder Explorer griefers might just publically post the solutions to all your quests - the nastier ones will try to bring the mud to its knees just for the challenge.

Socialiser griefers would include pedophiles and stalkers, as well as the sort of manipulators who can destroy the friendly atmosphere of a mud, driving off other players and sometimes even turning the staff against each other. At their worst they could kill your playerbase and perhaps even get you into legal trouble.

I agree. Without RP, the concept of permadeath is completely meaningless.


Here we disagree very strongly. I played a mud that had mk/pk/rp pretty much completely divided. We roleplayed through emotes, and actual game mechanics had nothing to do with anything. This was all well and good, if nauseatingly slow, until an individual was introduced into our midsts with whom the "established group" (we were admittedly non-prolific RPers because of scheduling and other such nonsense) did not get along with. Our disagreements were not limited to OOC issues, our characters were wholly incompatible. He was playing a lawful good paladiny sort of character, and I played a lawful evil lunatic vampire, for example. Every other character in the "group" was either neutral or evil. IC-wise, this is fine. Conflict is good. I thought it would be a great deal of fun. Ultimately it was not. Since we did not get along very well OOC either, and he was technically "in charge", we could not really settle any disagreements at all, and I began to get headaches in the scenes I played with him due to the massive amount of brainpower I was putting toward coming up with reasons why my character had not slit his throat and thrown him out of a window.

I ultimately quit roleplaying altogether, as did almost everyone else in the group (the individual with whom we had our disagreements ended up quitting the game altogether with the stated reason that we were all bastards, etc.) Since then I have held "cooperative RP" in very poor regard. Rules are good, rules allow things to happen other than what you might like to happen. For example, I played an RP/PK mud, and when someone refused to use "remove curse" on me because I was "evil", I decided that I'd take offense to this and try to kill him. Which I did (try, anyway, eventually we dueled and I won). I certainly don't want any of my characters to die, I'm rather fond of them all. Most other people tend to feel the same, if the rules don't enforce such deaths, no one dies. This to me is such a jarring problem that it brings me out of character. I have trouble roleplaying in such an environment.

When I'm watching TV sometimes, which I don't make a habit of anymore, I look out for events that would "make the story better for everyone." It's a skill I sometimes refer to as detect_plot_point. "Ah," I say, "someone can die here. It's a plot point." Then when they die, I roll my eyes and find something else to do. I absolutely hate being able to predict what can occur. On the other hand, I'm a fan of the BattleTech universe novels. Michael Stackpole is (or was, I think it's defunct now) one of the authors. I mean the folllowing in the nicest way possible: Stackpole is a bastard. He will kill off the most lovable characters with no warning whatsoever, and leave me with the most horrible feeling of crushing shock and despair. This is good. This is unpredictable. Rules-driven permadeath does this. Yes, it's horrible, yes, it's unpleasant, it's supposed to be.


I disagree with this entire line of thinking. I play games for the story. Take Final Fantasy games for example. Winning, to me, is a prerequisite for following the story. Only if a task is interesting do I get any particular joy from winning. This is what I think muds should be: An environment wherein smaller tasks occur, some of which could be considered "winnable". I see no purpose at all for a winnable end-game to a mud. I play Final Fantasy games through to the end only because that's where they stop, if they kept going, so would I.


I do think muds need more of these conditions, where we disagree is the concept of an end-game. These winnable conditions should be the winnable conditions of the game, not an end-game itself.


These are fair points, but they diverge from my actual goal, which is to make facing "certain death" be an issue of facing "certain death". I have for example become disgusted with the genre of High Fantasy, because I find nothing heroic about defeating hordes and hordes of enemies with no real likelihood of destruction. There is a boardgame I have taken an excessive liking to based off of the Cthulhu Mythos called Arkham Horror. I love that game. I start each game with the certain knowledge that I will lose if I do not play intelligently and skillfully, and even if I do, I might lose anyway. If we were to move such concepts to a mud, that would be more of my idea of heroism. Frankly, though, I like the game because it's hard, and because if I'm facing terrible doom, I'd like for it to have teeth, otherwise it's all just hype.

Unless we are using the English language rather differently, it rather seems to me that you have just expressed that "rules-driven permadeath" is something that one does not want at all, in any form.

"Yes, game-play feature X is tedious and boring, yes, it's unpleasant, it's supposed to be, let's go implement it, yay!"

Your statement as a defense of permadeath makes about as much sense to me as the one I just made regarding feature X. I guess I don't get it.

Anyhow, the novel analogy is flawed for several reasons, one of them being that it's not necessarily really a crushing experience to see a character die. Readers, or at least most readers, haven't invested a large amount of time building that character; they are spectators. This is really quite different from watching actual work fly out the window, especially if done "unpredictably" (read: potentially quite arbitrarily).

I agree with Tonitrus that the only way to stop a bored asshole on a rampage is the ban button, and just price yourself lucky if you only have to deal with minor griefers, or incapable griefers. Getting bored players to build for you is an option as well, if you let a player invest in your game it's less likely that they'll destroy it due to, what it ultimately boils down to, indifference. I kind of disagree with the term griefer, I guess you got the odd psychopath who gets joy out of making other people miserable, but ultimately it's boredom and indifference that seems to be the driving force behind destructive behavior.


If you like it or not, people are sheep, enjoy the rule of law, and seeing naughty people punished. Some research might be interesting, one could put up two identical muds, one stating 'there are no rules' and the other stating 'read the rules, violators will be nuked'. It's my biggest issue with these discussions, there's no solid research.


Explorers are probably the toughest to deal with when they go rogue, even then, a killer can do serious damage when he goes on a newbie killing spree, though it's not beyond a bored explorer to spell up the newbie mobs.

Banning people that are a literal detriment to the game is something you must do, or just take your marbles and go home. We arrest people and put them in jail in real life when they fuck around with the laws and cause serious levels of grief… defending such people in a virtual world while they slowly drive away everyone else is just stupid.

There's a huge difference between "not playing the way you want" and "not playing the game the way it needs to be played to be fun for everybody." If you can't separate the difference, then I'm glad I'm not a God Wars II player.



You can't just create a random grab bag of characters and expect them to work together. I'm surprised I have to explain that. Even if you allow characters to kill each other, all it will do in a situation like yours is cause the player of the killed character to get pissed off and come back for revenge. The best bet is to agree that all characters are good, and to make being evil one of those clear and conscious decisions to get killed off by the law. (Or equally that all characters are evil, etc.)

I have never, ever seen an environment that offers deadly combat in a character-vs-character manner that does not eventually turn into player-vs-player strife. Competition and versus play are one thing, but as soon as you can start screwing each other over, people get pissed at each other. That's one of the reasons why opt-in-to-death is a good idea in a pure RP environment – it removes the "just kill him" quick fix to getting rid of someone you don't like.

In general, I don't believe player characters should be allowed to be evil. I get that some people like to work out personal aggressions or fantasies in their games, but honestly, if that's what you want, go play a single player game. If you want to play a social experience with other people, your character concept should be one that actually has sensible and clear reasons to socially interact with other people in a mutually constructive way. Playing a crazy evil vampire is the absolute opposite of playing a character that fits in to most role-playing games. If the entire game world is nothing but evil people, _maybe_ it works, but generally evil characters are the ones willing to screw over their "friends" for advancement, so I don't really buy the argument that evil groups are viable long-term role-playing mixups. With the exact right people with the exact right scenarios it can work out for a while, but that's the kind of thing you luck into, not something you can realistically hope to foster.

When you have non-pure RP games it's a different story, of course.



Only if you value realism over the narrative. Problem is, in a game, it doesn't owrk like that. When an author or a script writer kills off a character with no warning, it has a real impact on a story. When a permadeath game character accidentally wanders into a dragon's den, he dies forever, and it has little impact on the world besides his friends going "oh woe Jimbob bit it!"

Unless you make the dying fun – and make getting back into the game easy, and make it so that dying doesn't result in winning insanely difficult – then random deaths are nothing short of absolutely infuriating. They aren't fun. They don't make the player want to keep playing. They make him get pissed and quit.

That's the difference between permadeath-friendly games and those where permadeath in non-tenable. Games that take months to acquire levels and equipment and rank are not the kind of thing that anybody but a small handful of elitist hardcore players are going to want to play if there's permadeth. Short games or games where achieving rank takes a short time are very permadeath friendly.

That's why true RP games are better for permadeath. The goal of such games is to simply enjoy role-playing with other people, not acquiring points and big numbers, so dying at worst means that you have to come up with a new persona to sink in to.

Opt-in death is better still because coming up with a new persona is a very, very involved process to be done right. It's something you want to think about. Play with a bit before committing to it. If you have to come up with a new persona every 10 minutes, it would get tiring. Furthermore, it's hard to build real in-game relationships if you can't guarantee that you're alive long enough.



Thus you play to win.

If you didn't care either way about winning or losing, you'd be watching movies, not playing games. You want to have the challenge of the combat and the accomplishment of defeating those challenges, which is opening up story. You could've gotten your story fix without the game if you wanted to.

Or perhaps you're one of the people who fires up Final Fantasy and gets really bored and irritated during battles and exploration areas. I'd wonder why you bother at all (Final Fantasy stories are not intriguing enough to be worth the effort if you don't actually like playing the game). I'm fairly sure though that you do enjoy playing the game, and thus I'm pretty damn sure you enjoy winning more than losing, and I'm pretty damn sure you try to win because you enjoy the reward.

Some games are played _just_ to win. Like Solitaire. Some games are played for rank. Some games are played for the challenge Some games are played for money or prizes. Some are played to see what comes next in the story. In all cases, though, a game is played in the attempt to acquire or bring about some specific condition, e.g. the win condition, e.g. winning.

Your Final Fantasy games clearly have an end condition: the end of the story. That's critical. Without an end to the story, you would get bored, the plot would drag on forever (I'm not sure it wold even qualify as a real plot if it had no ending), and the games would not be appealing to you. There MUST be a win condition that ends the game. Likewise, without a lose condition, it's not truly interactive. If there was no lose condition, then you could play Final Fantasy by just hitting the A button over and over until the next bit of story comes along. Doesn't work that way, though. You can die in battles in Final Fantasy, and you lose. It's not a movie. It's interactive, and it requires you to make choices in a series of game rules scenarios in order to advance, and making the wrong choices lead to a lose condition.



I'm totally with you on this. Just realize that this is a very different design than your average MUD. Arkham Horror is a board game. Dying just means you've lost a few hours of game play achievement. In a MUD where you might play a character for months or years, death can be WAY more serious. You're losing far, far, far more.

Yeah, a lot of games are too easy. That's where I get into the "not really a game because you're guaranteed to win if you have the skill to keep breathing" line of reasoning with WoW and the like. It'd be nice to have harder games. Just realize that "hard" does not have to mean "frustrating" and that things like Arkham Horror are not at all like conventional MUDs.

I myself like to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and lately Warhammer Dark Heresy. In those games, death is also a very real and likely consequence, and even pretty random with a bad run of luck. Being full RPGs, characters can be built up over months and months if not years. Very much unlike a MUD or other computerized game, though, there's a GM constantly involved who can turn over "bullshit chance" that gets a character killed just because the player kept running 90+ and the bad guy kept getting Ulric's Fury every attack. Sure, it's realistic, but it's not fun when a pair of dice completely destroy all that intelligent planning and care. Some randomness is generally accepted, but too much turns any game into a "flip a coin and die if you get tails," which isn't a game most people really want to play. If they have a risk of losing and losing hard, they want to know that losing is going to come about only because they messed up, not because the stars weren't aligned properly.

If winning or losing is entirely (or just mostly) up to chance, it goes from the kind of game we're talking about to gambling. People who want to gamble play poker, they don't play MUDs. (Sometimes they gamble IN the MUD of course, of course. ;) )

If you implemented feature X (and assuming it had no other redeeming qualities), people would do their best to avoid it, agreed?

Well, that's the idea of permadeath as well. By being an unpleasant feature, it becomes one that people want to avoid. I doubt there are many people who enjoy permanently losing their characters, but there are those who get a buzz from the high stakes.

I suppose you could compare it to gambling. Few people actually enjoy losing their money, but they still enjoy gambling, and find games like poker boring if there's no money involved.


Many muds take this route, banning people for "powergaming", or for bad roleplaying, or for questioning design decisions, or for disagreeing with the admin, or for playing other muds, etc, etc. Banning people is the easy option (and it gets easier the more you do it), but it's certainly not the only one, nor will it necessarily solve the actual problem.


Exactly. We do perfectly fine without some omnipotent god figure banning those who don't live the way they're "supposed" to.


Yes it is, ignoring the holes in your design is even worse than using the 'ban' command to stop people exploiting them. But I don't like either option. I would rather plugs the holes.


And your game design should take that into account. Banning people should be your last resort, for situations your design simply can't deal with.


Well at least you wouldn't have to worry about being banned for disagreeing with me ;)

Perhaps. However, if you have specific rules in place i.e. "If you do X you get punished with Y" and it's a "good rule" in that it's clear and consistent then it's a good solution to punish people appropriately who break your rules. In fact, it's cheating if such rules are broken and they benefit said character. Not power gaming. Of course if there's no "good rule" and you choose to purge people who break possible vague laws then it's a poor solution all around.

We can debate if the rule should have been in place–But there's no doubt that it's fair to enforce if it's clearly a rule being broken.

Something to consider: 'Many believe death is an end, but rather, it is the beginning of another journey.'

The…the failure level is over nine thousand?!?! :surprised:

Well, yes: they'd go play other games instead! :wink:


But gambling is not horrible, or unpleasant, nor is it supposed to be, at least to people who enjoy it. Same for permadeath. For those who enjoy the high stakes, by definition the whole thing is not horrible and unpleasant to them. Unless, of course, we're all using the English language rather differently. It just strikes me as exceedingly odd to say that something horrible and unpleasant is desirable.

Only if they were forced to use the feature. If it was optional, they would simply avoid it. Thus the parallels with permadeath - after losing their characters (by being killed) some players will indeed go and play other games instead. But until that point, they'll most likely just try and avoid dying.


Exactly - many people enjoy gambling, but there are few people who actually enjoy losing their money. However their enjoyment of the former is generally tied to the risk of the latter, and if there's no money involved you'll find a lot of people don't enjoy gambling at all.

IMO it's the same with permadeath. There are definitely people who enjoy permadeath games, and will even refuse to play muds which don't have it - but how many of those players actually enjoy losing their characters?


It's not the activity itself that's unpleasant, but the price of failure, and it's not really that unusual. Many people enjoy gambling/permadeath/buildering/etc, but they usually find it unpleasant to lose their money/characters/life/etc. However without that risk of loss, their enjoyment would be reduced.