Guess I'll elaborate…my comment was meant to be humorous as I suspect you meant to say in your original post "many people believe death is not an end, but rather…"

No, the 'not' is not supposed to be there.

"Many believe death is an end, but rather, it is the beginning of another journey."

Paraphrased: many people believe that death is an end, but this belief is not correct, because it is the beginning of another journey.

In other words, Dean's version opposes many people's belief with an intended correction, whereas your version is making a statement about what people who believe the corrected version also believe. If that makes sense. (In a hurry…)

Oh fine, be that way :tongue: Just 'cause the sentence works both ways, Turan isn't allowed to be funny…I see how it is, fine, go ahead, stuff my pillowcase with cuttlefish.

I had pondered whether or not you were taking the 'miccy' out of me, being humorous or actually serious. I went with the latter, even though I had initially intended to make that post with that line I first posted. But when you've had all of 2 hours sleep in the last four days, you tend to refrain from such posts. :lol:

tangent/



Yeah, mine usually only goes down if we're putting in new areas or code, although occasionally someone finds a glitch for me to fix heh. But I do really dig that approach. 'off the beaten path' gets people really out and exploring. I put in quite a few incentives to 'group up' as well, +10% exp bonus per PC in the group (up to 200% max). I just figure that at least in my game, the running around together is a huge fun factor, it also gets people to 'bring buddies' on sometimes.

Random treasure on mobs (with increased chances depending on certain qualities of the mob) also helps get people out looking around, not always busting back to 'it repops here'.

/tangent

Just throwing this idea out there. As a permadeath compromise, what if players who die have to be brought back through the actions of other players?

The difficulty involved could vary depending on how harsh of a system you want. Maybe it requires a rare item so only a certain percentage of those who die can come back. Maybe players have to collectively sacrifice enough xp to reach the level of the dead character to bring them back. This would make it easier for newbies, but harder as the game goes on. Or it could be relatively easy, but require the cooperation of many characters. The dead player would have to be well-liked enough for it to happen. I'm kind of reminded of the myth of Baldr's death.

One of the advantages of permadeath given in Bartle's book is it encourages people to try new characters. People will do that in this system while they try to arrange their resurrection. Even if resurrection is extremely difficult, the emotional loss of a character will be diminished because players will feel there's still hope that they can bring their old characters back.

As far as the loss of accomplishment, that can vary depending on how much effort it takes to bring a dead character back.

I'm conflicted about permadeath personally. I can see the merits in terms of drama and avoiding stagnation, but the cost seems too high. The more you reduce the costs, the less what you have is permadeath. It's complicated by the fact that it's so much easier to die in many games than it is in real life. Not even in the most war-torn countries of the world does the average person have a hundred fights-to-the-death with hordes of monsters every day before breakfast.

Interestingly enough, I've heard some Native American myths where this same debate took place among the gods.

Isn't that not perma death? :P

The only way to really make permadeath bearable, is making it not such a big deal. As in, advancement being easily attainable.

What if we replace the words "easily" with something like "not tiresome(ly)", or "interesting(ly)", would you still agree with that statement? Supposing that advancement didn't take that much time to do, but required a bit of cooldown for the buying of skills. Then achiever types could continue to amass gold for equipment and later skill training, and other people could just do other things that interest them until the cooldown wears off and they can train more, provided that they had enough gold for the next amount of training. And since doing things that interest you tends to lead to gold anyway (except in the case of socializers, I guess), it seems like this would work pretty well as a non-intrusive, non-tiresome XP system.

It has another bonus of not gimping people who can't be online 39 hours a day grinding away XP, as the cooldown would last for a set amount of time, and would lapse whether the person was online or not. (more accurately, it would lapse when they login)

It may also contain any number of practical flaws.

One possible downside I can see is that gold could become the new grinding point, and people might just try to amass equipment instead of waiting for the cooldown. I'm not sure this is necessarily a problem, provided that equipment isn't disproportionately powerful. You can also acquire gold through a larger variety of means, though, so I'm not entirely sure it would end up as a grinding point unless people chose to do it that way.

Well, I did say it was a compromise. :wink:

Besides, it depends. If resurrection requires an item that only spawns once per four deaths, then 3/4 deaths are permanent. If it requires cooperation and sacrifice from a significant number of people, it's permanent for the players everyone hates. It all depends on what it takes to resurrect a character.

I'm not sure how I can put this is clearer English, KaVir. There is a difference between "you annoy me" and "you are actually a fucking problem that is driving away players and making admin life a living hell." Banning one is horrifically bad GM-manship, and the other is a necessity.

It's the difference between just ignoring that guy at work you don't like because he's obnoxious and calling the cops on your neighbor for beating his kids.



So the people just put themselves in jail?

The admins serve the roles of police, judge, jury, and "executioner." That of course means actually playing out all of those roles: noting evidence of bad behavior, comparing evidence against the actual rules and their effects on the game community, deciding if that bad is honestly worthy of punishment, and then taking appropriate action (which could very well be no action at all if it's decided it's not a real problem).

Somebody has to make those decisions though. They don't just get magically made for you while you're off in la-la land pretending everybody loves each other very very much.



There is no way to plug holes in behavioural problems without some form of enforced consequence. Being a detriment to a community does not require breaking the rules of the game design. It has absolutely nothing at all in any way to do with the game design. Not even a little. Even if your game had mechanics that made it literally impossible to be an asshole to other players (which is impossible), players can cause problems in out-of-game ways, such as on a game's member forum.

Either people play nice or they're active forces of assholery, and there's no magic bullet you can pull out of your butt to the make the latter type of person suddenly fit in. If he doesn't want to play nice, make him go play somewhere else.



Which is no different than anything I've said. I never said "ban early and ban often," only that you have to have the balls to ban someone that needs banning.

You really just like to argue about nothing at all, don't you? ;)



:)

As much as I like this idea (And I really do) it only works if you have a good sized playerbase. It would be infinitely annoying to die at a time when you were one of the few, if not only player currently online. I can see that it might get to the point where players take 0 risks at low playing times or maybe just not play at all. Which would be a problem.

There is also the issue of newbies. If a level 15 newbie dies, he will spam all the other players with requests to resurrect him. There would need to be some way to stop this, or allow characters below a certain level to be resurrected automatically with a penalty.

However there are also many shades of grey in between the two. Where are you going to draw the line?


As I said before, banning isn't going to stop the player connecting - they can use proxies to come back whenever they like. Laying the smack down on people who irritate you might give some short term satisfaction, but it's not necessarily going solve the actual problem.


Well god certainly doesn't put them there.


Perhaps. It depends on the specifics of your game.


It depends what sort of problems you're talking about, but depending on the style of mud you're running it's certainly possible to curb most (or even all) of the problems through code.


I don't think causing problems out-of-game is really relevant to the subject of dealing with in-game problems. But as I said already, depending on the specifics of your game (and how you defines "undesirable behaviour"), it's certainly possible to deal with such problems without the need for banning.

That's a good point. I think one thing that would be essential in making a harsher-than-usual death system work is reducing the frequency of death. I feel an experienced player should be able to play the game without seriously risking death.

It seems that people want permadeath to add risk to the game, and then spend a great deal of time thinking about how to avoid that risk in the first place. Surely, there are other ways to motivate players toward or against certain behaviors than creating features that you then work to nullify?

I think the bottom line is these people want permanent death for one reason or another, and then want to make it work after the fact. Perhaps that one reason is because of realism. There are certainly better mechanisms for risk based on death in my opinion that doesn't involve purging characters.

Also perhaps the problems it creates is an acceptable price to doing business to some designers.

I noticed that too. Avoiding any implementation of permadeath that's… well really permadeath.

I have seen that phenomenon too, but I don't think that's what's going on here. I think there's some middle ground between "lose the entire account at death" permadeath and the more typical "respawn with minor penalties at worst", and some systems could be said to be closer to the former than the latter, and therefore carry some of the advantages that are associated with permadeath systems.

I guess it depends on how narrow a definition you have of permadeath.

And for the record, I never said my idea was permadeath.

Frankly, I think Tyche's observation in the microtransactions thread would be a good way to get pseudo-permadeath coupled with a business model: have the player enter more "quarters" (heck, why not even just charge a few quarters?) to respawn the character. This gives you true risk – real-world financial penalty, even if small – while giving you a way out of very unfortunate accidents (which means that you can occasionally go be silly and only suffer less than a candy bar's worth of money).

Yes, but now we're talking about a death tax. Not actually permadeath.

If you charged them a quarter every time they gained a level it wouldn't be a levelless mud. :P

You could still implement Tyche's suggestion as something like: 25 cents to start a game + permadeath

I think that'd provide too strong of an exit point for a game though.

I can't remember the actual term, so I'm just going to call it an "exit point" when a situation in a game makes it easy for a player to quit.

One of the problems with permadeath is that it does provide a very strong point for a player to simply quit the game. This is probably one of the main reasons it's not terribly popular as a feature. The trouble is, though, that any sort of negative situation can provide an exit point for a game. For example, on my first mud, I apparently was very achievement-oriented, and upon reaching the maximum level, I got bored and quit the game. I don't think I would have ever come back to it if another friend hadn't lured me back in with tales of how different things were on the pk side of things. (I was bored because I couldn't gain any new skills or anything of that nature. Equipment? Bah.)

This is why I personally like the idea of a permadeath system that is a bit more forgiving. "Yeah, I just lost my character, but now I have x amount of XP available to make an entirely new character from scratch" is a lot more forgiving than "Oh, I just lost everything I've ever done."

Whether or not that qualifies as "true" permadeath or whatever is of no particular interest to me. I don't care much for what terms people use.

I also don't see how a permadeath system is particularly different from, say, a Smaug mud, where you level to X and then don't get any new skills or anything, and if you want new skills you're forced to level a different character. People don't seem to get as upset about that version, for some reason.