Death penaltyFollow

I'm feeling brave so here's a thread about death penalty!

What do you think about the level of punishment inflicted on you for dying in XIV as opposed to XI? Personally I tend to think that monetary loss and spacial displacement is not enough to make me fear death and therefore hinders immersion. On the other hand, I have never experienced a delevel to 74 and am probably just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.

Do you think that one should fear death to strengthen immersion and attachment to your character, or is this a thing of the past? Would you play on a server where the rules are different if you had a choice?

Absolutely fine how it is. FFXI's death penalty discouraged exploration and experimentation and resulted in endless frustration. That crap is a relic of the past, let it stay that way. There is no need to create separate servers with special rules, not worth the effort.

It had been bubbling for a while for me, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me in FFXI was when my BST went from 23 to 21 in one night after like 6 hours of playing. I never touched FFXI since then.

If a game isn't designed towards some sort of permadeath (Diablo hardcore, Minecraft in a way) then it's hard to build a death pentalty system that doesn't end up punishing the player for playing the game. I'm fine with having small monetary hits (like gear repair in WoW) as that is more a money sink and less a punishment. I think that the only real meaningful death penalty is time. De-leveling someone is, IMO, cruel and unusual, whereas making someone run back to their corpse is something that doesn't cost the player much more than time and effort.

So on one hand I think FF11 (and IIRC FF14 now) has a good system where death in the open world is meaningful as you could have a long run back to where you were. On the other hand FF11's XP hit was far too much and I hope to never see such a system again.

But yes, there should always be a fear of death in an MMO, otherwise you encourage zerg tactics (like old Everquest world bosses) instead of collaboration and strategy. Either way the player should always know *why* they died, and it should always be the player's fault. Then you have a meaningful death penalty that encourages gameplay, learning, and fun.

The death penalty was definitely the bane to BSTs everywhere. I swear every time I would get close to leveling, my character's accuracy would plummet. Nothing was worse than missing five or six attacks in a row then dying–especially when you only needed one attack to kill it. Anyway, I agree with staying away from exp loss. As princessary said, a lot of times your death was caused by the incompetence of others.

I didn't. That's why I quit, didn't ask the game to change itself. Moved on to games that are more friendly to my immense ineptitude.

I think FF11's death penalty was extreme, at least the way it worked back when i played.

For certain jobs sure, it didn't matter because you could easily join a merit party to get back all your lost exp.

However, this also discouraged people from trying new things lest they die and lose 1/10th of their progress (such as soloing). This was also a problem for jobs which never got invited to parties and had to find the next best thing to get their exp back (as a SMN, i had to do campaign if ever i died. Since i know how boring AND time consuming it was to recover lost exp this way i have the utmost respect for BLM since doing pudding must have been equally boring or even more so).

In my opinion there is no reason that the death penalty needs to be so extreme that i get pissed off that i died. Sure death should carry a weight i suppose, but having to walk all the way back to where you were and some money loss seems perfectly fine to me. I want to have some fun when i'm out adventuring instead of setting myself back 10 times because no one will help me get through the tough area and i end up having to solo or whatever.

There is also the weakness aspect to the death penalty as well (thats still in the game right?). You have to wait a few minutes until your ready to fight again, so being raised doesn't instantly put you back into the fight. If people continue to die then you will lose the fight regardless if you got raised. And speaking of being raised, nothing in 11 was more infuriating than getting raised a million times because of a bad dynamis pull, or a random AoE killing you while weak causing you to lose A LOT of exp.

As long as my exp isn't being touched, at all, I will be happy with whatever they do with the death penalty as long as it doesn't discourage people from trying to do things.

I'm pretty sure BST learned Leave at 35ish. Then again, it's been more than a few years since I last played.

Yeah FFXI, at least to me, became a game of sit in Jeuno for hours except when you get a party. And even when you do, run along a specific path to the camp you are targeting. I remember wanting to explore all these new zones I was going to but I barely did anywhere simply cause I didn't want to die and lose exp.

FFXI was a really great game that was plagued by a few really bad game design choices the development team made. I think its ok to call FFXI good in spite of these flaws.

With that said, I think its ok to discuss the fact that the death penalty in FFXI was too extreme and should never be repeated. It encouraged a kind of terrible community of elitists with attitudes similar to what we see from lolgaxe. While there will always be these kinds of people in online communities, the penalty specifically catered to the min/max/no fun allowed crowd that is cancer to a game's community as a whole.

I hope producers in the future see terrible mechanics and the damage they cause to the brand and never repeat them.

I agree with this part to. It just made exploration a tad more exciting and kept you on your toes. I got a sense of ingame pride knowing how to maneuver and dodge agro in places people didn't usually go. And in turn it gave me a sense of community helping other folks up to these places.

FFXIV isn't bad at all though. I am still enjoying my death runs to the higher lvl areas.

I agree. I remember my first trip to Jeuno was like this. I was so excited when zoning into Jeuno and hearing that "victory" song (I loved Jeuno's music).

Personally, I think EXP loss wasn't that bad (I believe this made players more carefull in their strategies and coordination). However, I do think leveling down sucked, specially if you had reached the level in which you could start using certain gear/weapon/skill.

Perhaps it should be done according to the task. For instance, some places/instances/missions could have EXP loss while regular gameplay could have money/time punishment for dying. Dunno, maybe I just miss the adrenaline hehehe.

I definitely do support higher death penalties, and it made things more tense in XI - but I never liked leveling down, to be honest. Just bringing you down to 0% EXP would be enough.

Agreed. Having to ask a random stanger / NPC to repair my underwear (while it's still on) is a bit too harsh a penalty.