We haven't talked about it on a long time. Would it be acceptable to the masses (or some chunk of the masses) if only certain mobs, located in certain areas were capable of killing your character for good? The mob could be labelled as a permadeath mob and permadeath wouldn't be assured.

I am thinking of the purple worm from D&D. If it swallows you, your party has 30 seconds (a lifetime in am MMOG) to kill it to save you.

Monsters with permadeath abilites would accumulate the loot of their victims as treasure - all of it.

Sounds like a cool idea, but you'd need to put multiple warnings up about going to an area that had these creatures like "Permadeath creatures ahead, are you sure?" "no, really, are you sure you're sure?" "really, really?" ... etc...

Otherwise you're going to get the goob who just follows his party off to this crazy area and gets eaten by said monster and is like "OMGWTFHAX!!111" and then /bugs you 1000 times to get his character back.

maybe a monster that eats all of their belongings and keeps them, OR better: A monster that kills a character for a week or two.

Put that creature in the game, and watch as absolutely nobody fights it. Ever. That, of course, is provided to don't make it unavoidable at some point.

If you make it unavoidable, or necessary to beat in order to get something essential, watch as your players bitch and moan endlessly about how you're forcing them to put their characters at risk, knowing full well that it will permanently destroy some.

As long as these games have the treadmills, and a cumulative character model, don't expect this to be popular. In a game where advancement is fairly quick, and based enough on player skill that a veteran player can make rebuilding near-trivial, it might work.....but for any other kind of MMOG, it's just too much for most players to risk.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

Ok, I don't blame people for not remembering my previous posts here, but all my ideas are in the context of a UO-style, rapid advancement skill system. i.e nearly maxing a character in 60 hours of play or so.

These permadeath monsters would have the best loot in the game, probably in the form of a tradeskill component unavailable anywhere else.

I like Permadeath as a Super game mode.
Normal character builds a tower becoming an Archwizard.
The Archwizard is permadeath and ridiculously powerful (like MOM). Extreme risk requires extreme reward.

Why?

I certainly wouldn't find such an encounter entertaining or challenging or even interesting, except maybe to see how many people get permakilled and bitch about it.

If you're going to make a game with permadeath, then it should be consensual. Having said that I don't think I'd want to do the encounter unless I felt it was worth it, and I can't think of any item I'd risk for permadeath. Maybe if it's on a character I'm already tired of playing but instead of just deleting it I decide to do a permadeath enounter so that my character will live on in the history of the game world in some way (eg monuments, npc bards telling the character's story, etc).

Permadeath can work in online RPGs, but only if it's properly integrated. Adding a single area or mob with the OH NOES YOU GOT FUXORED ability means that nobody will ever go there for any reason.

Now, we have to set up criteria for permadeath. Is it one and done? If so, you're looking basically at Hardcore Diablo 2, which was fun. Then again, it's Diablo 2, with the loot whoring and the quick character development. It's also completely tangental to the rest of the game, which is why it was acceptable. If you're going for a single life, you also have to design combat around that fact if you're expecting any sort of player retention rate - if a mob above your level can one shot you, or if a 30 second cable modem hiccup can mean the end of your character, people will just burn out too fast.

Now, if it's not one life per character, you can still add permadeath and make it satisfying, but you need to design accordingly.

I play Dragonrealms, which has the possibility of permadeath. You can take precautions against it, and there are characters that have been around 8 years and never Walked the Starry Road (perma-died). That being said, a handful of characters do Walk every day. Rough overview of the system.

1) Newbies get 5 free deaths or they hit second level, whichever happens first. Then they're fair game.
2) You have to obtain favors from the gods in order to not Walk when you die. You find an appropriate altar, solve a puzzle or make the appropriate offering, and get an empty orb. You fill the orb with some of your raw experience, then put it on the altar - you get one favor that way. The more favors you currently have, the more exp to fill it, so you have to balance time constraints with security.
3) When you die and depart to a nearby altar (assuming you can't find a cleric to ressurect your ass, which is often more trouble than it's worth on both your parts), you use up one favor. If you had none, there's a very good chance you're boned.

There's a bit more nuance than that, but that's the general picture.

Now, since favors and Walking are built into the game, everyone's on equal footing. Each person decides how many favors they want to cart around, keeping in mind the more paranoid they get, the longer it'll take to obtain each one. There's no special critter that'll permakill you. You can die, and it's damned inconvenient, and there's a possibility that you can Walk given stupidity/stubbornness/a rash of bad luck, but the average gamer who does a small bit of planning and preparation doesn't even have to worry about it.

There's a special global message when someone Walks, so you know that it happened. Generally speaking, when established characters Walk (as opposed to alts rolled up to be annoying pests, they get whacked fairly often) they're either 1) Quitting and want to drama queen it up 2) Careless and/or stupid. There's a certain set of informal rules that have cropped up thanks to the implementation of Permadeath - when you move to a new section of the world, ask around to find out where the favor altars are; always have 5 favors at minimum; stock up on more favors if you're questing or there's a war, etc.

So, there's permadeath, though if you're not a risktaker or stupid, the chances of it happening are negligible. Still, it does add flavor to the gameworld, and because it's been a part of the design from the start, it's accepted. It still accomodates a range of playing styles - I'm a cautious hunter and have only 13 deaths in about a year of play on this character, whereas there's people out there who die multiple times per day.

Permadeath can work. I don't think it can work with typical EQ style group/raid encounters, and I don't think an actual MMOG with one-shot permadeath can work unless you can realistically top out a character in a few hours - in which case you're turning it more into a fantasy action game than anything else.

It's out there, though, and if done right can add some nice flavor to your game.

That sounds cool. I check out Trials of Ascension every once in awhile, and they plan on having approx. 100 "life counters" (free deaths you could say) before you pd. Players will have the ability to extend that slightly with favors, like in the example you described.

hello all.

the biggest obstacle you'll always have with permadeath is a lot of folks grow attached to their possessions, skills and avatars in MMORPGs. in some cases this attachment could go as far as high level characters dying, getting sent back to the land of nothingness and quitting the game as a result.

i'm sure a lot of folks can relate. take those level 60 characters you've spent months working on and try to imagine logging in and having to start all over? take that to a case like SWG - you grind for months to get a jedi. grind that jedi for months to get him to the point you can finally have fun. he dies. you lose all that. you might as well have the "Cancel Subscription" page come up right after.

some kind of inbetween might be able to work, however, if the reward was worth the risk at the penalty. perhaps even some kind of system where you "bank" xp you can't go below, but if you die you fall back to that level until you can reach the next bank level. think of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire but in an MMORPG. you hit level 40 and you bank to that mark. if you get to 45 and die, you're back to 40. if you get to 49 and die, you're back to 40. but if you reach 50 you bank again and start over.

I honestly think perma death mmog's are the next generation (ok, maybe a few generations out) of games that convey a new meaning of exhiliration and at the same time completely frustrated players. It's an entirely different ball game. I have a character development model already in my head designed for it, of course.

Imagine the frustration created by network latency issues.. and if your server messes up, it's pretty much a guaranteed server revert, leaving some players utterly frustrated but those who died would rejoice. (ultima online rings a bell). Improvement in network infrastructure and connectivy are greatly needed - which would probably cause me to erect the server in a highly populated city and only accept customers from that city.

If I ever get to the point where I'm able to put some of my ideas into a mmog, a perma-death PvP server will be one of them. An experiement.. perhaps even a pilot server. It would be like learning the game all over again, the risks that you take in normal mmogs would be cast away, and a new sense of excitement/frustration/insanity would be cultured.

The part the sickens me the most about a game like this, though, would be some of the people that play it.. and enjoy the ultimate form of griefing.

Many people say this sort of thing could never be pulled off, but I say that people shouldn't think of death in such one dimensional terms. I know of a way to make this work. It requires a world design that conforms very much to a simulated dynamic world/environment with existing societal structures. A sense of Law must be present.

-Boroc

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/design/features/mgp2/



The only time I ever heard of perma-death being fun was the Deathmatch Arena in NWN-AOL, and that was enforced by players. But that didn't sound like much fun for the loser, and I wouldn't expect the model to work in MMOGs with populations several orders of magnitude larger than NWN's.

If it's not fun, don't do it. No one's ever given me a reason to believe permanent erasure of a character can be made to be fun in and of itself.

I just have to ask, why does this topic keep comming up? Every year or so, someone says "Hey, why not add perma-death". It should be blindingly obvious *why* this idea will NEVER work in a pay for play MMOG.

I wish I would never see this topic brought up again, but that is utter futility.

They used to have perma-death in Gemstone, which was a good thing and a bad thing.

It was bad, because people would use it as a means to be drama queens, and for people who got hacked (read: gave their passwords to someone) and then lost their characters.

It was good, because it recycled characters eventually. I say eventually because it wasn't really hard to avoid permadeath, just took some forthought, time, and money.

You'd buy deeds, (with gold, gems, or wands) and depending on the nature of your death, you'd lose 1 or 2 deeds. The majority of people walked around with 10-20 deeds at any given time. Some people, like myself ran around with 100+ deeds.

They removed permadeath in favor of statloss. Long term, this means characters and items will never ever go away, unless the player remove themselves from the game. That of course doesn't happen too often, since the value of high level gemstone characters are incredibly high, and some of the items these players can have can go for 50 to 500 dollars.

Personally, I prefer permadeath systems. I like finite systems. I like knowing eventually, so and so will be gone. I like knowing if I'm lazy, stupid, or just careless, I COULD die the final death. It just keeps you on your toes.

Then again, I've given up on all forms of online games for the past 6 months, so what the hell do I know.

If the amount of the game's scope (i.e. POI to visit, abilities that can be used, etc) available to the player's avatar is a function of /played for that avatar then permadeath is just a bad idea.

I started an alt in WoW last week and I'm finding I have very little motivation to play him compared to my main. My main can go almost anywhere in the game, has about 3 toolbar's worth of spells to use, can do instances with the guild and stuff, while my alt does about 6dps, looks crap and has to hit stuff in the newbie zone for quite some time before he'll be able to do anything cool. If making a mistake with my main meant I had to level a noob again I would be pissed.

On the other hand, if your game was set up so that the length of time required to set up your character satisfactorily was about an hour, perma-death would not be an issue.

Here's a few questions -- if you went from 1-60 in WoW in an hour, only playing in Durotar/Mulgore/Silverpine/Elywynn etc and everywhere else was aimed at lvl 60s, but you had permadeath, would it still be fun? (For the sake of argument say you'd still need to farm instances to get quality gear.) Would PvP be more or less worthwhile?

Permadeath in the current games with the current technology is a very bad idea. My level 38 warlock died to lag the other day in WoW, the lag hit just as I fired my first spell at the monster, when the lag cleared up I was dead. Similar things have happened in other games. If the game had permadeath I'd have cancelled right then and never played again.



That would be a good way to run a game with permadeath. I think it would be amusing for PvP but you would have the shitheels that would do nothing but kill newbs before they hit 60 so they would have to start over.

My general thoughts on permadeath are here. About the original idea:



The primary problem with this idea in particular is that players learn how to kill unique challenges by doing. Somebody's gonna have to go in and attack it and figure out what it's attack patterns are, how to counter it, what party makeup is important, etc, etc, etc. Even if there's lore describing how to do it, nothing teaches like doing. And if doing is possibly permafatal, you'll have a real hard time finding guinea pigs.

As an example, compare how hard a WoW instance is if no one in your party has done it before -- and how easy it is if you've all done it once or twice.

That is the best case against it I have seen articulated, Ubiq. The content would be wasted since no one would attempt it so why spend time and effort designing it?

It all comes down to how much time a player would lose to a permanent death, I guess.

Make 1rst Lvl disposable character to scout the mob. N00b character dies. Oh well. Use main once you find any patterns, what party makeup you's need, etc. Only way that point would be valid is if you were limited to one character in the entire game.

Players have many tastes. I think some of the newer mmogs could pilot a PD server, but it's not something I'd anchor my business on.. it would be something vets could try after they get bored (as it mentioned in so many ways above) with normal game play.

Lets face it, there are only so many times that I can look at one particular character development model or another before puking.

One of the most exciting experiences in mmog's for me was playing a statloss PK in Ultima Online, it was a huge amount of risk and forced me to be more resourceful. It made me use skills in the game that I might not normally use, and essentially - my character's survival was at stake. Sure it wasn't PD, but it was closer than anything I've seen in the more popular mmogs - especially for me, someone who loathed making characters in that game, out of pure laziness and contempt.

There has to be something more. I can make a PD server work, I've designed a character development model that supports this.