corpse-run
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Pantheon brings back the fun of a corpse run
Is it slightly disturbing that the MMO community has integrated and accepted the phrase "corpse run" without batting an eye at this point? Corpse runs are very much on the mind of Brad McQuaid, who says that Pantheon will be bringing them back as a "consequence of death" in the game world. When a player dies in Pantheon, he or she will have the option to wait for a resurrection or to be reborn without all of that character's gear and weapons. In either event, getting back to one's corpse is of utmost importance because it will not only restore lost gear, but some of the experience lost on death as well. Oh yes, Pantheon will have XP loss on death. Other players can help out with resurrection or retrieval spells, or players may beseech their deity for help at a cost. In non-morbid news, Pantheon posted information and lore on the Sunken Sanctum, a marshland ruins that will be a formidable dungeon. [Thanks to Boinya for the tip!]
Ditching the Death Penalty
About ten days ago, Blizzard Community Manager Taepsilum posted in the EU forums on a thread about removing the death penalty. While this may sound like a political hot potato that WoW Insider would do best to avoid, Taepsilum was actually responding to a post calling for the removal of resurrection sickness from the game. The original poster asserted that it was outdated, no longer necessary, and flatly inconvenient. That it detracted from the game's experience. Taepsilum's post was as follows. Taepsilum The death of a character should be something important, the death penalty is there to make sure players don't disregard it, in my opinion it's actually already too easy and too fast to resurrect. It's because of the penalty and the lost time when doing a corpse run, that players will be more cautious about their character. If you decide to resurrect at the spirit healer, it's because either your character died in a very weird place (and you should be more careful), or you just don't want to corpse run. I think we should all be glad that there's no experience loss as death penalty, that would probably be a bit too harsh, but I do think we need something to keep death from being meaningless. We're always open to good and new ideas of what that might be; as long as it's not "removal of the death penalty", feel free to chip in ;) source
Lost Pages of Taborea: Improvements on MMO standards
After having a couple of conversations on the topic over the last month, I decided to make a list of more reasons I am so attracted to Runes of Magic. Runewaker may not have created the next evolutionary step in MMOs, but it did do some new and innovative things. It created what I consider to be the first hybrid traditional free-to-play MMO. RoM predominantly uses western game mechanics and a quest-driven leveling system with a cash shop. As far as actual gameplay is concerned, RoM features many standards -- very nice improvements on those standards. In this article, I list six refinements that I think add to the increasing uniqueness of an MMO that constantly shows it's more than a generic clone. Jump past the break to see if you agree with me or share your favorite MMO standards that you think RoM improves upon.
"An armed society is a polite society."
Or so wrote Robert Heinlein in Beyond the Horizon. The general idea was that, in a country where there were serious (and officially sanctioned) consequences to misbehavior from quarters other than the police, you'd wind up with a place where people really thought hard about whether it was worth pissing someone off just for the fun of it.Whenever I'm reading about PvP, that quote always springs to mind. People who have played MMORPG's with more "hardcore" PvP systems have mentioned that the amount of random ganking you see in WoW just doesn't seem to occur on the same scale elsewhere. WoW's PvP is pretty consequence-free. Corpse runs are annoying, sure, and being camped is nobody's idea of fun. But you don't take durability or experience loss after a PvP death, and you don't lose money or items to the attacker. Nor does the attacker gain anything from killing you (unless it's honor if you weren't a gray target).
Of corpse running and you
I'm sure we've all done it from time to time -- trying to get somewhere new, you've encountered heavy resistance from the locals and died a terrible death. Refusing to give up, you've run back to your corpse and continued on, until you're caught and killed again. Perhaps you thought you'd be smart and run to the spirit healer in your destination zone, far off from where you died, only to tragically see that you've been sent back to the location of the spirit healer closest to your corpse. This does make traveling through areas high above your level quite the challenge -- as I'm sure they were intended to be. Die, run back, rez a bit further down the road -- then simply wash, rinse, and repeat until you've reached your final destination. However, over at Mania's Arcana, Mania provides us with two tricks that will allow you to do the majority of your traveling as a ghost. The trick? If you die on one continent and then spirit rez in the other (yes, you can ride boats and zepplins as a ghost!), you'll be allowed to rez right where you want to. And, perhaps more conveniently, if you run as a ghost to wherever you wish, disconnect, reconnect, and then try to spirit rez, you'll be allowed to.Now, both of these little tricks smack of overlooked bugs, as the intended behavior of the game client is clear. But at present it is a working strategy in-game that can be used to more quickly move you from point A to point B.
Breakfast topic: Worst corpse run
WoW has a pretty lenient death penalty compared to other games. Ten percent durability lost and a ghost run to your body is peanuts compared to, say, forcing your naked self to run back to your corpse while that jerk who killed you loots all your items. Still, there are some pretty annoying corpse runs in WoW, whether due to inconvenient graveyards, bugged-out death spawns, or simple geography. According to this thread, the top 5 worst corpse runs are (in ascending order of annoyance, since the blog software won't let me do a Letterman-style countdown):
