MMO Gaming

Yeah, I’m calling this one number two. I know you may be thinking that it would be more appropriate to name it number four, but the other three articles were part of a series all covering the same thing so I’m sticking with my number.

This topic could cover any number of MMOs, so to mention a specific one would be unfair, but I will take the systems from two different MMOs and compare them, bringing out the good and bad points, and then talk about how a penalty for dying should be implemented.

Let’s start by taking our two games to compare, World of Warcraft and City of Heroes/Villains and describing what the penalty in those games is.

In World of Warcraft there is a multi-part penalty every time you die. The first part being you suffer a durability loss on your equipment, and when you repair the equipment it costs more money the more durability that has been lost. The death penalty drops the durability by 10% which is usually not bank-breaking, but still can increase repairs by a tidy sum. The other part of the penalty is you are forced to run back to where your body fell to resurrect yourself (there is also the option of resurrecting yourself at the graveyard, but this comes at an extra price, and we won’t touch on that as it is optional, and not the standard way in which the death penalty is applied). Running to get your body may not seem like a big deal to people that haven’t played the game, but anyone who has died at the northern or southern end of the Barrens knows what a long trip that can be.

In CoH/CoV the penalty comes in the form of experience debt. What this means is that you earn only a portion of the experience from killing mobs that you normally would until the debt you owe is paid back. This also stacks, so if you die several times quickly, without working off the debt, it can be an especially arduous task to grind it back. There is a further part to the penalty that could be added, in that characters are resurrected at the hospital, so they must run back to where they were playing before they died, which can also be an annoyance.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. Some of those may even switch back and forth depending on the circumstances. It is a real hassle to run back to your corpse in WoW and have to resurrect when there are a lot of mobs around, and at times like those it might seem it would be better to be resurrected at some given point like in CoH/V. Of course, when there are no mobs directly in your way recovering your corpse at the point you died and continuing from there can be a much less troubling experience.

That covers the two different systems we will look at, and they relate fairly well to many other games, though each game seems to put its own spin on things.

How do you make death less of a hassle though? Or, should it rightfully be an annoying experience?

Those questions come down to the basic philosophy you have when you are making the game, and they are an important thing to ask. There are in fact several basic questions to consider when you want to design a death penalty.

Whose fault was the death? Was it brought about by the player or by the game? If it was through the fault of the game, should the player be punished for that?

Is in-game death an expected result of playing over a period of time, or is death a freak occurrence that can be avoided?

Should the in-game death be an annoyance, or should it be an extension of the character’s play time, instead of an interruption?

Answering those questions is important because it sets up just how masochistic you are as a developer. In my mind, the proper death penalty is built off the ideal that death should not occur if the player uses all the skills at their disposal, but, if it does happen, it should be at worst an inconvenience, and shouldn’t feel like an interruption of the time you get to play the game.

To satisfy the “too long, didn’t read” audience I’m going to cut the article off at this point, and we will finish the discussion of how to implement a death system in the second part of the article.

Repairing Gears, death penalty, experience debt, corpse run, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, City of Villains, MMO death