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The War Z allows cash shop items to be lost forever
Imagine that you're playing the hot new zombie MMO, and you decide to splurge a few bucks on that shiny weapon you've been eying. You get your grubby mitts on it and go to town on a few living undead, only to find yourself over your head and quickly killed. When you wake up, your gun -- and the rest of your stuff -- is gone. Forever. And the devs are totally OK with that. This is about to become reality for players of the upcoming The War Z, as even cash shop-purchased items are not safe from being lost due to death. In a recent interview with Gaming Blend, Hammerpoint Marketing Director Alex Josef was unapologetic about that point: "You'll lose what you have in your backpack when you die in both in normal and hardcore modes. And yes, if you bought something using real money, you'll lose that item as well. This is a price you'll have to pay." According to Josef, this level of item loss was a deliberate decision by the team to cause player to treat the game more seriously. "We've discussed that a lot," he said, "and at the end decided that this will provide a pretty good incentive for players to either be extra cautious while playing or just not spend too much money in the game and instead try to procure all items by finding them in the game world."
Behind the Curtain: Gone for good?
I've been thinking recently about loss. Having been incredibly lucky with my own brush with the possibility of losing my World of Warcraft characters, I got to thinking. Not only about what I would have done if things hadn't worked out for me, but about how loss works in MMOs today.Last week, Gabriel wrote a fantastic column about item decay in games past, present and future. I've been playing Diablo 2 again lately, for obvious reasons, and I had found myself thinking on the similarities and differences between the durability system in Diablo and WoW. I've said before that my MMO career started with Star Wars Galaxies, so I don't have the long-term experience many of the other writers here at Massively do. I've never had to worry about making corpse runs in Everquest, or had to concern myself with losing my items in Ultima Online. While Galaxies did have item decay, it wasn't set to a punishing degree – items did wear out eventually, but at a reasonable rate. When an item eventually gave out, you crafted yourself a replacement, or you picked one up from another player. By doing so, you knew you were contributing to the economy, so if you tried hard you could convince yourself that you were actually helping the game.
