Death Penalties

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zeraz wrote:

What about giving an option for players?

What I came up with is something along the lines of choosing whether you want to respawn in town and have no penalty, or on the start of the field and receive about some durability and experience loss.

What he said, it is perfect. Having a choice with both pro/cons is good. Respawn at town at no loss but having to walk back or respawn at the instance entrance and lose XP.

If I think for a bit, I recall some people said they used a little trick with portals, where they open it and when they die they use it from town back in the instance. That's a thing to look at when trying this approach of Death penalty.

With the pages in the 100s forgive me if this has been said before.

Since leagues can have variable rules, I suggest having as standard a harsh death league and a newbie death league.

I favor harsh penalties for death. It's meant to be bad.

Survivor bonuses (better loot the longer ur alive etc) are good but there needs to be another penalty to prevent repeat dying at the same point when the survivor bonus is already low.

XP losses are good but they need to be able to reduce your level, otherwise there's no disincentive if you have an empty XP bar.

My preferred option would be to just break 1 random piece of equipment (permanently). Perhaps if the item has quality it could be reduced instead, allowing you to protect certain important items by burning currency items.

Whatever the case though, there needs to be a (non hardcore) league where death is much harsher than it is now.

I don't think game deaths should every result in something like an item you own dropping. This kind of mechanic ruins a game where loot and equipment is so important. People can die in these types of games for many reasons, some of them not being of their fault. If they were punished this drastically for something that was potentially out of their control, it would really turn a lot of people off. It just reward other players who don't get killed, and I could see many people allowing others to die just to get their items. It's too extreme and too easily abused.

As stated earlier, with so many replies thus far, please forgive me if this has already been posited.

What if upon death you have to fight off an enemy spirit or creature who is attempting to either feed off of or take your soul from your corpse? It would be in a "spirit world" and for every time you die in the real world you get a debuff that attracts more and more "spirit carrion" to your body. If you fight them off of your body you come back where you died with 3/4 or half health and a debuff that attracts more spirit carrion each time. If you do wind up eventually losing to the spirit carrion then you respawn at an NPC in town who has some kind of minor charge.

Also it might make joining teams more interesting if the spirit carrion debuff is shared by all team members in an instance. So if member X dies and fights off the carrion then upon revival member X,Y, and Z all have a single stack of the spirit carrion debuff. That might promote more tactical approaches to team fights.

My opinion is the experience loss when you die is the best kind of death penalty. It worked perfectly in Diablo 2 it will work here.

I think experience loss has a good balance between punishment for death and motivation to get lost experience back.

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Chris wrote:

Do you guys have any ideas for how we can handle this in an interesting way?

-> The monster that kills you becomes an elite mob and/or gets a pack of small minions

-> If you die you get a small debuf to heath and stats that lasts 10 min, if you die again doubles statcks 3 times max, refreshing the cooldown if you die again

-> Small loss of exp without lowering level

-> or maybe all of the above?

How about a buff to crafting for staying alive? Every X experience gained since your last death gives you y more chance to get an extra mod/socket/link per roll.

I like the idea of being rewarded per area for not dying(maybe exp+ modifiers for next area as reward) this losing experience is not fun some creatures are just over powered and will always kill you. If a penalty is needed though be it at NOT least due to unbalanced game mechanics(getting very little experience, then dying and losing a even huger amount, lest we forget D2s mechanics):P

I've always liked the idea (listed in this thread already) of item quality diminishing with death.

Maybe one of your items becomes "cursed" with a neg attribute when you die. You could then have to find a random drop that removes curses from items. No repair bill, but you have to find a curse remover (currency item?)



Example:
You die.

Your bow becomes cursed with "Party Back-stab" meaning that when you score a hit, it drains life from a random co-op party member.

This curse remains until you cleanse the weapon with a rare cleansing currency item.

I think that the "exhaust" effect would be best suited as a death penalty, ultimately meaning character is weaker than usual after death for an X amount of time. But thats just my opinion without consideration of all other important game factors!