DeathPenalty
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EVE Evolved: Is EVE Online's death penalty really that harsh?
Everyone knows that the death penalty in EVE Online is harsh but is it really as bad as we make it out to be? Is losing a ship really a devastating blow or does the emotional factor of losing something we've put care and attention into make us exaggerate the loss? Since EVE's gameplay is focused entirely on piloting ships rather than walking around with your character, we can get very attached to our ships and feel a great sense of loss at their destruction. It can be hard to keep in mind that our ships in EVE are just tools, which can make their loss feel a lot harsher than it should be. Is this the fault of the player for getting attached to their ship or of the game design for not encouraging us to form attachments with our characters instead?In this brief article, I discuss some of the golden rules of EVE used to minimise the death penalty and ask whether our perceptions of EVE Online's death penalty are really that accurate.
EVE Evolved: The cost of failure
The harsh death penalty in EVE Online is something that's talked about a lot. I even touched on the issue myself when I compared EVE Online's style of PvP to Age of Conan and when I investigated the phenomenon of suicide ganking. In EVE, your ship being destroyed means millions of your hard-earned isk is flushed down the drain. If you're unlucky enough not to get away in your escape pod, you'll be killed and recloned, costing yet more isk and destroying any expensive implants in your head. The brutal death penalty associated with PvP in EVE is responsible for putting a lot of players off playing the game but is the taste of death really as bitter as people make it out to be?In this article, I examine the cost of defeat in PvP and how to minimise these costs without ruining your PvP performance.
EVE Evolved: The cost of failure, part 2
As before, this doesn't hold true in EVE Online, where the quality of equipment is a relatively small factor in the outcome of PvP. The main factor in the outcome of PvP is skill, and not the type on your character sheet. Joining a good player corporation that specialises in PvP and learning from them will provide a bigger boost to your effectiveness in PvP than equipment ever could.
Should you lose experience when you die?, revisited
Yesterday we talked about the death mechanic in World of Warcraft and how gameplay might be changed by making death mean more to your character. Today, as a point of comparison, we're going to take a look at death in the MMO Vanguard -- and how it's about to be changed.Currently, death in Vanguard involves loss of experience (15%, and if you have no experience, you could go into debt -- i.e. you would need to gain 15% of the experience towards your next level before you could actually gain any experience again) and your body (tombstone) would remain where you died -- along with all of your soulbound items. Options upon death were to (1) be resurrected by another player, which causes minor experience loss and minor item damage, (2) to recover your body from where you died, which causes minor experience loss and minor item damage, or (3) summon your body, which causes the 15% experience loss and major durability damage. Though it sounds quite a bit harsher, this isn't that different from World of Warcraft's current system of "run back to your body and all is well" -- it has just added experience loss to the equation.However, on their test server, the death system is changing. First off, you no longer leave a corpse behind when you die -- you leave an "essence." No items are left on the essence, so retrieval is less important. However, if you retrieve your essence, you regain a large portion of your lost experience. And to top it all off, experience loss has been decreased. So while casual-friendly World of Warcraft players wonder if the death penalty isn't harsh enough, hardcore Vanguard reduces its death penalty to one not terribly harsher than World of Warcraft's.Forum poster prencher makes the obvious connection, "...we're back to 'wowified' raiding, where you just keep chain wiping until you get it right."Note to Vanguard players in the audience: I do not presently play Vanguard, so my information has come from IGN's Vanguard Vault and VanguardSphere's forums. I've done my best to understand how the death mechanic works in Vangaurd, but as I have no first-hand experience, I could be wrong -- so if you see any inaccuracies, I welcome corrections.
Should you lose experience when you die?
In the World of Warcraft, the cost of dying is really pretty minimal. Yes, there's the trouble of running from the graveyard to your corpse and yes you take 10% durability damage to all of your equipped gear (the cost goes up to 25% if you need to spirit rez). So you lose a minute or two of time running back to your corpse eating/drinking/bandaging, and rebuffing yourself before getting right back to where you left off. In terms of gameplay, you're not really set back at all -- you don't lose experience or levels from death. And sometimes death can even be beneficial to your character: say, by killing one of a pack of three monsters (dying in the process), and then coming back to take out the second and the third. You've just managed to kill a group of monsters larger than you could have killed alone -- all by benefit of the death system!But the penalty for death is so light that there's not really much reason to avoid it. Oh, I know the time spent in corpse runs adds up and the cost of repairing gear only gets higher and higher. But it's not the end of the world if you die -- and it's hardly even the end of your online character. And so there are some players who think the death penalty needs to be harsher. If death mattered, we'd all be playing more cautiously -- in fact, the difference in playstyle would make it a whole new game. But it would make the most difference in the raiding game -- I can't say I've ever learned an encounter without a few deaths. Losing experience or levels for wiping in a raid situation?"Sorry everyone, I just leveled down to 69 from that wipe, have to go grind."Ouch!
