vitae-penalty
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The Daily Grind: What's the ideal death penalty for an MMO?
If your first MMO was a modern themepark MMO, you might not realize that a corpse run and a small repair bill are fairly light penalties for death. In Ultima Online, if you couldn't make it back to your body in time, a devious player (or mob) might come along and relieve your corpse of its loot. If you were a murderer, you'd even lose stats! Your gear was safer in EverQuest, but you'd lose experience, and you'd still have to run from your bind spot back to your body, assuming it wasn't in such a dangerous place that you needed a Necromancer to summon it. And games like Asheron's Call and City of Heroes once had experience penalties so harsh that it was possible to cripple a character so much that you might as well just reroll. MMOs are torn between wanting to make death feel meaningful enough that people are careful but not so punitive that players would rather log out than recover. What do you think is the ideal death penalty for an MMO? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What outdated game mechanic should be retired from MMOs?
Returning to an old game is like hopping in a time machine and surveying the horrible mistakes made by MMO studios a decade ago. Forget those five guys who still murmur the word "permadeath" wistfully; we're talking corpse runs, vitae penalty, corpse looting, tank mages, experience loss, holy trinities, zone walls, hybrid class level penalties, and tree-top cities without railings, all as a matter of course for the games of the day. Nowadays, these mechanics are abandoned in a field somewhere by all but the most retro game studios. I have to wonder what we'll look back on in another 10 years with the same feeling of "wow, I can't believe anyone thought that was a good idea." Cash shops? Flying mounts? Faction-grinds? Classes? Skill bars? Questing? Tree-top cities without railings? (Seriously guys -- stop making those.) What game mechanic is so outdated and so abhorred that it should be retired from MMOs right now? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
