Science
By Christopher Linton
One of the hardest things to get right
in an MMO is the death system. Developers need to balance it so it includes the recreational players and the hardcore
players without making one group feel slighted. I feel as though WoW has done a good job with that balance, while
leaning slightly to the recreational side. Death is an annoyance at most until you start grinding high-end instances,
where the repair bills really start to add up. Before WoW, I played Dark Age of Camelot, which I feel really nailed the
death system. Death was more of an event in DAoC, because there was experience loss involved, too. You could always run
back to your gravestone to /pray, at which point you regained some of that lost experience, but sometimes that wasn't
feasible. The loss was considerable, and it made you far more cautious while playing, as a general rule. Still, I never
felt as though a death was a huge, game-ending setback, I just felt that I had made a stupid mistake that I needed to
learn from. The loss of item durability and sometimes resurrection sickness is a little soft, in my
opinion. I understand that if the penalties were made more severe that WoW might lose some of it's fans, but I hope it
wouldn't. I would hope that, with the sting of death being a little enhanced, it would encourage players to be a little
more cautious.All that being said, I really am fine with the current death system. It is only slightly
annoying, and it opens up the game to a wide range of people, which is the main draw of the game in the first place. I
have seen forum posts calling for "hardcore" realms, with perma-death and full looting of player corpses, and
that doesn't seem fun either. I play this game as much for the variety of people that I meet as for the next BWL run
with my guild, and I'm glad that the current system is generally attractive to everyone.If you could tweak
the death system, how would you change it, or is it perfect the way it is?
By Christopher Linton
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