Kyokai wrote:I agree that we shouldn't promote negligence toward familiars, but come on, if I accidentally stumble into a high level monster who chops my familiar up in one hit, there goes a 5 hour+ quest? Nobody likes those kind of restrictions. Perhaps if we allow the familiar to respawn every 30 minutes or so, and give the player a weakness to all magic damage during that time, we could better enforce it. A player can understand being punished awhile for his irresponsibility, but he will quickly lose patience and go do something else if he loses more than 15 minutes worth of work permanently.
Basically: Losing progress sucks. Never make players do the same thing twice. Never create a penalty they can't recover from. Let's try to think within these guidelines for our familiar system. Otherwise it just won't be that much fun.
Aacheron wrote:For once, Kyokai, I'd have to say I don't agree with anything in your last post. Penalties have a reason for being there; if familiars respawn, players won't care as much. Losing progress is not something that's supposed to happen to you, it's a punishment for being reckless - or just for having bad luck. Games are like that; bad luck can hurt, and good luck can really bless.
I'd really like to keep a certain "negative" feeling to some things (really making the player feel like he lost something), in order to keep the relative difference between the "grave sink" points and the "peak" points big enough. People will in the end get bored with getting the +7 vorpal greatsword of turbonium dragon slaying, but if there are things like permanent penalties and really damaging losses, they'll be on their toes and actually appreciate their super-zany sword of bloody slaughter, even when they're level too-high-to-count...
I would have to say this Guild Wars sounds like the most boring game I have heard of in a little while, actually. Where is the sense of actually playing a role? It seems like Diablo II in MMORPG form to me... Hack, slash and warping around killing enemies. No sense of actually being in a dangerous world where distances are huge and finding your way from one town to the next is a big and harrowing part of the adventure; where even returning to town when wounded from a fight presents an adrenaline rush in itself. What if a sneaky monster notices you? You could die from even a weaker-level monster due to being wounded and out of energy and what not. You have to sneakily stalk around, and use your wits to play the game all the way home.Kyokai wrote:I don't know if you keep up with MMORPGs much, but I recently tried the beta to a new one called Guild Wars. (http://www.guildwars.com) If you're not familiar with this game, it's basically WoW with all the boring stuff taken out. You respawn with a minimum death penalty, which going into any town erases immediately, if you want to travel, you can travel instantly to any town you have been to from the field without walking, etc.
Anyway, all that to say that Guild Wars is the most fun MMORPG I have ever played, because it's continuous action and team play with all the tedious and unhappy parts taken out (even finding party members is incredibly easy).
Perhaps it is more realistic to punish people more for making mistakes, and perhaps it adds some extra prestige to those that do have things (at least for the moment). For me and the majority of gamers out there though, when we hit a "grave sink" more than once, we don't feel like trying again, we feel like throwing our computers out the window and going to play some better-designed game.
Anyhow, I know I suggested that we follow principles like not take away things permanently from the player because of a mistake or a loss, but what I really meant was that in any design department that I am in charge of (which is TMW's) we are going to follow those principles, because it's just good game design. I'll repeat them again for those reading:
* Never make players do the same thing twice.
* Never create a penalty they can't recover from.
If you really don't agree with this, Aacheron, we can start a game design theory thread in general talk and discuss it, but if you really think about it, you'll see how much sense it makes to have restrictions like this on our game.
I would really have to condense my approach to MMORPGs (and games in general, except for Theme- and Sim- games): adrenaline! People might not solely play games for this, and TMW should not be some rush-filled fragheap, but - and this is a big but - it should have moments of tension where the difference between defeat and victory can be Kraken-sized (read: huge)... Where is the sense of adventure when you courageously brave vile monsters in order to complete a quest of great magnitude, when all that "death" brings is a respawn and a rerun? Speaking of which, how do you plan on handling death? I mean, you've imposed ridiculous restrictions to dying with those two rules of yours; not having the player traipse all the way back to wherever s/he died will lead either to really macabre results, or to some insta-wakeup after so-and-so long a time delay... But I digress.
If you want TMW to be a sandbox for people to prance around in, I see why you advocate the approach you do. But if you want to entwine some action and adrenaline amidst your drama and daring heroism (not to mention the sense of satisfaction from huge rewards actually worth something...), please reconsider your approach. I would really not want to be involved in a game whose purpose is to be playable for all ages and take no skill or risk at all...
This post has been against the general approach of not allowing for permanent punishment. I really don't like making players respawn-and-repeat that much (i.e. doing the same thing over and over and over and... etc, but punishing players for carelessness (or just plain bad luck) does lead to tension of some sort. Yes, throwing the player back too far in progress can make him/her lose interest in the game altogether, but we need to find a golden middle path between nothing and everything, nicht wahr?
-- Henrik "Aacheron"