New Death Penalty

[Irongron]

Lovely post by Grumpy, as usual.

In many ways this is a direct response to changes Septire and made to death 18 months ago, which was at the time equally divisive. My own feelings were (and still are) that death doesn't require harsh penalties. That it is part of the Fantasy Roleplay experience and that by not making it punishing conflict gets positioned as something to be roleplayed, first and foremost. PVP becomes a less desirable way to solve conflict and battles, when they do happen, are something that can simply be enjoyed. 'PvP builds' also became less crucial.

But despite being one of my favourite changes it is also the one I encountered the most criticism of. There are many who felt, perhaps rightly, that there became no real way to settle conflicts in a meaningful way, and that the setting became stale as a result. I am glad this doesn't extend to PvE as that experience matters a lot more to me, but the pendulum has swung the other way now - something that is clearly welcomed by some members of our community.

It's worth remembering that different players want different things out of this game, and that we are dealing with here is a matter of opinion - not simply a right or wrong approach. We can see now how this affects our game, and who knows? Perhaps we shall see a more enjoyable and meaningful environment develop. If not? Well, Arelith will always be a work in progress and the pendulum may yet swing again.

[Nightglory]

I'd like to say I am happy about the change. But now you are instead locked out of playing the game for upwards to 32 hours? Still slightly better, but...

[Viceroy]

From: Dunshine
To: Viceroy

4 times the above. So for a level 30, the online expiration would be 20 ingame hours, and the offline will be 80 ingame hours. This is with pvp counter 1. With pvp counter 4, it will be 80 ingame online, and 320 ingame offline.

This is a slap in the face to a legitimate concern. Its heavy handed and obnoxious. Especially to players who prefer not to be forced onto alts because they decide to take part in some kind of conflict, god forbid.

[Irongron]

Please keep a respectful tone when addressing members of my staff. Right or wrong they work, hard and unpaid, to improve the game for everyone. That Dunshine is making these announcements does also not necessarily mean they are solely of his making. As an admin he speaks for a larger group who have no doubt been discussing this at length.

[If Valor Were Inches]

1): Dying 4 times in less than a week's breathe is quite a lot, when you think about it for PvP. (Nothing necessarily wrong with PvPing a lot, mind). This actually has the potential to add to the war system, as injured combatants can't just go fight a different army right away, and need rest. I'm actually excited to see if this update and the war system will interact well because of it.

2): You're not necessarily "forced" onto an alt. You can RP for the day as crippled. If you don't want to, you can still do what you did before, just will need that much more caution.
3): It only curtails to normal respawns, not raises.

Down the road it would be neat if an addition to the herb/cooking crafting allowed you to craft a medicine you could use once per game day to reduce the time of recovery by an hour or some such every game day.

[DaddysLE]

Regardless of who is making the announcements, or on who's behalf, a 4x multiplier looks an awful lot like negating the positive change of allowing the counter to tick down offline.

The problem that a given character is taken out of commission for RL days still exists, but now it's with a token compromise that asks the player to choose between: "Do I idle in game for hours, or do I just not log in on this character for a couple days?" For players like myself who only really play one character at a time (I work a 40 hour week. I can't manage that much game time), this becomes the choice of "Do I idle ingame for a few hours, or do I just not log in at all for a couple days?"

This tweak still punishes the player for situations where they're not raised after death, and the choice between what manner of having playtime reduced really is kind of a faceslap of a compromise.

Also, as Bawkses noted a few pages back - Is this really something that addresses a widespread problem? Was there community angst about the way the previous death penalties worked? Complaints? Lots of reports? At least from my perspective this seems like a huge, inconvenience adding change that few were calling for.

[Invader_Nym]

Death was so trivial before that it was virtually a non-issue. The truth is that there will never be a satisfying solution to this dilemma because we're discussing the proper way to dole out punishment, and punishment by its very nature is unpleasant, so people will always resist it.

What I am meaning to suggest is that there is no mysterious perfect solution hiding around the corner awaiting discovery. In my view an increase to the consequences of death is very warranted.

[viper92225]

I would like to point out that this is a return to bashing corpses as a punishment. If you bash someone's corpse you know they can look forward to hours of not being able to play their character in a method of their choice (they can still play obviously).

[Invader_Nym]

I would like to point out that this is a return to bashing corpses as a punishment. If you bash someone's corpse you know they can look forward to hours of not being able to play their character in a method of their choice (they can still play obviously).

You're missing the key point. This is a return to taking counter-measures to avoid getting corpse-bashed. That's the point.

[ArcanaFTW]

Wouldn't a more intuitive change be to give the character a large XP hit when they use the soul gate, but the more time they spend offline/online in the fugue after the base respawn timer the less that XP hit becomes. That, including a huge overhaul of the fugue and giving people incentive to want to stay in the fugue via unique dungeons that send you back to the start when you die with unique items at the end - and other things.

Make death fun, make death something you want to play around with.

[JediMindTrix]

That's actually a pretty solid idea.

[DaddysLE]

I second this. Good thinking, Arcana.

[Ork]

Wouldn't a more intuitive change be to give the character a large XP hit when they use the soul gate, but the more time they spend offline/online in the fugue after the base respawn timer the less that XP hit becomes. That, including a huge overhaul of the fugue and giving people incentive to want to stay in the fugue via unique dungeons that send you back to the start when you die with unique items at the end - and other things.

Make death fun, make death something you want to play around with.

Dude... 100% down with this.

[Cerk Evermoore]

I can probably count off the top of my head 3-5 characters and players that would just kill my character at every first sight opportunity they had and would repeatedly do it every day, after day after day and laugh the whole time.

On the bright side you can give these people the respawn penalty and reapply it to them every six IRL days.


*Edit* Usually it wouldn't matter but I am an Underdarker so it's not like we can go anywhere except Anduinor for guaranteed RP interactions.

[Nitro]

Wouldn't a more intuitive change be to give the character a large XP hit when they use the soul gate, but the more time they spend offline/online in the fugue after the base respawn timer the less that XP hit becomes. That, including a huge overhaul of the fugue and giving people incentive to want to stay in the fugue via unique dungeons that send you back to the start when you die with unique items at the end - and other things.

Make death fun, make death something you want to play around with.

Arcana once more applies his gnomish wisdom. I'd be 100% behind an idea like this.

[Meliboeus]

ArcanaFTW has the solution.

[Viceroy]

Its only a solution if its managed properly. If its just one where they force you to wait in the fugue for 8 hours or risk taking like 3 levels loss, then its not worth implementing unless done intelligently

[Oshido]

As a casual player this really does hurt. I work 12 hr shifts, two kids, wife, dogs. I cherish my hour I get to play. Perhaps Arelith isnt for the casual player. Unfortunately nwn is a dying game that doesn't give many or any other options for servers. Plus Arelith is awesome. I trust the team during great update upheavals like we have went through recently. Even though most of my toons got hit pretty hard. I figure its in the best interest of the server an ill play within its boundaries. This though, feels just wrong. Thanks for all the hard work guys,,,but wow.jilted.

[Quoth]

About recent changes.

First look great I don't have to be online for this then second look and realise if I don't want to be online for this it will tick down 4 times as slowly as before. So if you're unlucky or PvP happy it's now a 32 hour offline wait for it to clear up as a worse case.

That wasn't so much as listening to feedback as it was. "Fine we'll make it offline but we're punishing you even harder for that as well." It was like the dev team was forced to change something they didn't want because of the backlash but threw in a kidney punch just to get back at the playerbase for disagreeing with them. That's at least how it comes off.

[ArcanaFTW]

Its only a solution if its managed properly. If its just one where they force you to wait in the fugue for 8 hours or risk taking like 3 levels loss, then its not worth implementing unless done intelligently

When I say large, I mean as it was before the fugue update ages ago, nothing that would strip away more than 60% of level progression, and maybe even that is a bit overkill.

I would also suggest implementing secret, incredibly difficult ways in which to "cheat" death and an alternate currency much like skull coins for monsters used to buy cool goodies.

And perhaps this one is a little more 'out there', but redesigning the fugue to represent the dead people within it to possess the shadow model could add that little bit of extra mysticism aside from suddenly appearing next to all your kitted-out party members who were just TPKed, and saying "lol we ded".

If the dev team is adamant on the new change to death penalties, I'd at least really recommend on completely designing the fugue to essentially be a playable mini-module all on its own.

[Lady of Memes]

Death penalties don't mean you can't RP? I don't see how it makes a massive problem for people on an RP server.

They're talking about the long respawn time. - 20 minutes.

[Iceborn]

I have mixed feelings about that part.
In one hand, I think that forcing the characters to stay off the scene for some time, and thus keep the player on hold in that meantime (force them to stay long enough to at least respawn so that the crippling time starts counting), is poor design in general.

And in the other hand, giving players a cool off timer to reconsider the situation and cut any fresh bitterness after a death is healthy, even if strictly subjective.

I still believe that dictating other's play times through death is not cool at all and it is not something that should be able to be enforced mechanically by other players, though.

[Astral]

Well, I still think this new system wont change all that much since the problem is within the mentality of the players who get really pissed off when something doesn't 100% contribute to their character's story and playing time as "it doesn't provoke RP" so the new system will simply do the same thing the old system did but just punish the loser of the pvp in a different way. This will only change when people stop investing themselves emotionally and open a fking alt, and at that point there wont even need to be a death penalty because there will be no way to abuse the death aspect without looking like a total jack-arse who really plays to win and that's gonna mark you as a selfish not-so-fun player. That's how it looks to me right now.

I liked it back few years back (and I heard a similar opinion from several long time players who returned from breaks) when yes, you lost exp when you died, and a lot of it, and yes there would be ooc tension between the immature and whining part of the playerbase, but death actually meant something and it hasn't been the case ever since server became a temple of sune. Don't get me wrong, I still like it now, mostly because I just pretend death is permanent on an IC lvl most of the time but I wouldn't expect anyone else to play exactly like me because it would be a boring world. I guess I'd like to see more flexibility from the player-side when it comes to losing RL time for this game you're playing for fun and 'fun' means losing all your hp and having to start a dungeon again from the start, for example. All games in the world have the aspect of 'losing' in order to keep the player motivated. here, the emphasis is on story telling and I respect that BUT you cant eat the whole cake friends, I really recommend making an alt. a stupid goblin alt or some kind of side-character just to blend in the living world. Also think about this... back when you lost 4-5k exp for dying how long would it take you to farm that back? probably less than the time you spend waiting for penalties to go away.

In this pace, soon we'll start hearing complaints like "It's no fair that I get to lvl slower than someone who has more playing time than me, while in game, our characters actually only adventure together and live together etc etc" and I guess you can see where I'm going with it.

[The GrumpyCat]

It's true, in the worst case scenario, if you get pvped and remain unraised four times within 16 days (Presuming a spread wherein one is killed in pvp once per four days,. worst case scenario here) You could end up with 8 rl hours time for all your stats to return to normal.

But... outside of situations of griefing, how often does this actually happen?

I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but I can't imagine it's very common. And if it is very common - I am curious what sort of level thirty character one might play, that a) enters pvp that often b) looses pvp that often c) is disliked enough by their enemies that a raise isn't considered?

[CragOrion]

Devs...you've lost your perspective.
You need to look at what you're really trying to accomplish here and ask yourself is this what Arelith is really supposed to be about.

Since Mithreas stepped down, I've really felt like the the updates have been struck by schizophrenia. The updates seem unfocused, as if some dev elements are trying to take things in one direction which is constructive, addresses legitimate player concerns, and makes things more fun, while other elements are trying to make changes based on satisfying toxic player attitudes, disgruntlement, and a general "ur doin it wrong" attitude.

I've tried to give you guys the benefit of the doubt up until now, but I feel its time I spoke up.

This whole thing surrounding the death update, and your version of "listening to our input" shows us once again that you care more about saying "Do it my way! What? Well how do ya like them apples!" than you do about actually making things fun. The fact that you would put out such a change to force us to roleplay something a certain way is a symptom of the larger problem. Your solution to our complaints is also not very encouraging. It still feels like you're trying to force a certain type of rp on us and making it way more complicated than it has to be at the same time.

So many of the updates have felt shortsighted to me. It doesn't feel like you're as focused on making Arelith a fun place to come and play at. It feels like you're using the game development to force people to play how you think they should play because they can't really go anywhere else. and It's either Arelith or Sinfar. To be frank, I don't really feel comfortable playing on a server with those particular issues.

I sincerely hope you don't see this and feel like you need to get defensive. Sometimes people just need a wake-up call.