The death penalty and you
No no no, we're not talking about that death penalty. We're talking about the MMO death penalties that seem to cause people to outright quit games. It's a tedious line between what's a good death penalty and what's a bad one; and no one seems to have found the perfect fit just yet.
Snipehunter at Dopass.com has the opinion that Age of Conan's tombstone debuff death penalty is too punishing. His argument is that applying a debuff to a player just means that their chances of successfully removing the tombstone from where they died (and subsequently removing the debuff) are now worse. If they couldn't kill the monster the first time round, how can they kill it with the debuff in place?
On the other side of the fence are those who believe that death penalties don't go far enough. The common concept here is that weak death penalties make death meaningless. If you just keep resurrecting and keep throwing yourself at an enemy, it's eventually going to die. The challenge of beating it before you perish has now been removed.
Snipehunter, a designer who worked on the fallen Auto Assault, looks at light death penalties differently. Sure, there are no direct penalties, but he asserts that the death itself is a penalty. Driving back to where you were from the INC repair stations in Auto Assault took time, and the repair stations healed the car over time as well.
Either way, his article highlights one very important point -- no one's found that happy medium yet. Looks like the creation and implementation of a death penalty will be an argument that game designers will have to continually wrangle with each game they create.
